Re:sabotage through the internet is similar to
on
Byte Wars
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· Score: 2
Theoretically, internet sabotage could be more subtle. It's also less prominent in the minds of most civillians, I'd think, than the various sorts of non-subtle kamikaze attacks, much the same way "Gee, if I were a murderous suicidal microbiologist, I might be able to genetically engineer or choose a virulent airborne contagion with a decent incubation period, infect myself with it, and mingle in public places" is probably an unusual thought. 9/11 raised awareness of conventional kamikazes, but I wouldn't bet on that awareness having translated to other areas.
Raising awareness of the possibility is probably a reasonable thing to do, as long as it's a realistic view -- for instance, it would be preposterous to suggest that a systems cracker could directly launch from the US nuclear arsenal, given the air gaps and other precautions built into the system, nor are hostile programmer likely to be able to send satellites crashing down on the White House without access while designing the systems.
You're probably referring to Brian Bull's "Day of the Barney" trilogy of stories, that used to be hosted on his "Purple Abyss" site. Unfortunately, the Lyons Entertainment lawyers got to him, so you might have to use a USENET archive (search alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die or something like that) to find 'em.
If you're going to do that, I'd recommend bundling aspirin and Prozac, because there'd be a LOT of unhappy people.
You wouldn't demand that car dealers sell cars without engines, would you? Or if you did, you'd expect mucho pain. Expecting everybody to become a computer guru is not realistic because, frankly, for most people it's not a priority, much like most people don't know enough chemistry to produce their own pharmaceuticals and most haven't studied enough engineering or architecture to design their own homes.
Plus, any breakup probably would have at least some of the clauses of the original now-dead proposal, which included a fairly large number of prohibitions on different types of favoritism and collaboration between the parts.
Argh, replying to myself. But one more important point:
It's Baen putting online only books that are published by Baen. They'd be well within their rights to complain if somebody else did it to their books, even if it benefits Baen, because it's Baen's right to do so assuming the authors transferred full rights as would normally happen.
Baen might complain if all their books were downloadable. In case you didn't notice, they normally made available only put the first one or two books in each series, and since the books have dependencies -- for instance, readers who want a long, coherent story line pretty much have to read a series in order, rather than out of order or jumping betweeen series -- it generates more sales for them.
The same model doesn't translate well to music, at least when albums usually aren't dependent on each other and when much of the content is conveniently already digitized and online for free instead of just a little to whet your appetite.
If you believe the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, roughly 40-58M people in the United States have ever purchased something online.
As for Amazon, hrm. In the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2001, they had 1.1B in revenue (totall, not just books). Not that long ago, the UK site alone claimed 5M customers -- apparently one-sixth of all UK e-commerce in 2/02. From a 2001 Form 10-K, filed 24-Jan-02, the "U.S. Books, Music and DVD/video segment" had net sales of $1.69B in 2001.
Hm. I can't find a breakdown that only includes books sold over Amazon.com (those figures include income from partnerships, such as running www.borders.com, in addition to music and video), but it's probably safe to say that it's probably quite huge. They're big enough that if there ARE a decent number of used books(*) for sale on AMZN, it might have a substantial impact.
(*) But there might not be. These used books are mostly person-to-person sales, not Amazon-to-person sales, and thus will probably be sold in far lower quantities than what Amazon normally sells(**). I didn't see a revenue breakdown for new/used, either.
(**) Except for drivel that customers decide to immediately resell, in droves, of course. But then, it's probably easier to sell it to a colleague or nearby bookstore, or donate to a local library, unless it's something obscure.
The current situation on Amazon is that for even a recent Book X's individual page, there is likely to be a very high-profile link saying "Buy this Book X used for a lower price!". This is...
...VERY prominently placed ...not delayed (e.g. if somebody buys the book the day it comes out, decides that it's not worth finishing within an hour, and offers it for sale on Amazon, it'll show up quite soon) ...competing with the new book (the prices are usually lower)
So the Author's Guild asked that its members remove their affiliate links to Amazon. It did NOT call for the banning of used book sales; instead, I got the impression that they would be mollified if Amazon delayed the 'used book' links for some months, or if the links were less obvious...
Well, they may have thought so, and it's quite reasonable for them to be unhappy -- but unless Sony and partners were somehow legally obligated to NOT alter the scenery in such a way, then what leg would they have to stand on? There's no obligation to be kind...
Now, they COULD have had such an agreement, depending on what deal NYC has with them. It's conceivable that any contract that granted filming rights would also insist that the film portray NYC "accurately" -- as much as could be done while having Spidey and company run around -- NYC might not welcome filming which portrays all its citizens as homicidal meth-addled maniacs, for instance. I'm merely speculating that NYC might impose such restrictions in the name of good PR for NYC. If there is such a clause, then it may possibly be vague enough that the plaintiffs feel they have a chance...
The other bit is that really, is Sony under any non-contractual obligation to show a truthful representation of NYC in a work of fiction. It's not exactly as if this were a news broadcast, in which it would be distasteful for the broadcaster to apply editing (although, if memory serves, it does happen; don't certain sports events have digitally imposed "virtual" advertising?). They're not making claims about NYC, or the building's owners, or at least that's what Sony could argue.
Different treatment of handguns versus long guns isn't exactly unusual; it happens in the States, as well. As far as I can tell, the two main rationales are that a) handguns are more readily concealed -- thus, it's easier for a criminal to move around armed without alarming his potential victims, and b) long guns are considered more justifiable as hunting weapons.
Quite a few US gun-control advocates seemingly prefer to pretend that the Second Amendment is about hunting, and not about providing a means of last resort versus dictatorship.
Hm? I'm not sure about broadcast radio, but you can certainly publish books on explosives, or on vandalism, or how to operate a meth lab, or so forth. Heck, there was a company (Paladin Press, if memory serves) that even published books that were guidebooks for, say, how to be a hitman. You can publish quite nasty stuff and still be covered by the First, as long as it's not obscene and you're not stomping on any other laws like breaking an NDA you signed.
Of course, you realize that yourargument also applies to fraud, robbery and rape, right? Neither of the three is that uncommon in your average major metropolitan area...
Of course, then we have to ask: how does one get considered part of the profession in the first place?
Certification? Being an employee of a certified company? (Either of which I'm sure would be a good solution -- from Symantec's point of view)? Simply declaring oneself a virus researcher, which may be difficult if you don't have the background because you didn't have access before?
The "Oops, we didn't MEAN to do that" defense is not particularly strong in product liability cases if you're being accused of negligence. It may mean that the penalty is less than that of deliberate malfeasance (e.g. a potentially lethal safety defect in a car will probably result in a far greater penalty if the manufacturer decided that it was cheaper to settle lawsuits than to fix it), but it won't absolve you.
Trivial coding for a programmer isn't trivial coding for a nonprogrammer.
It would be simple, for instance, for a programmer to modify a game like XEvil so that when the player loses his last life, it erases the hard disk. That's easy. However, for somebody who is not a programmer -- and this includes many, many people who have computers -- it would probably be very hard.
Writing a trojan like that and distributing it on the web, for instance, would thus be making it very easy for even non-programmer brats to play a malicious "joke" on their friends or so forth. Ditto, of course, for propagating viruses, with the additional provision that it may affect others besides the intended victims.
Hm? You're using the term 'viral' pretty broadly there, since propagation is a major part of the defintion...
OTOH, it would be interesting if somebody managed to go after spyware on the basis that the user didn't explicitly authorize such behavior. However, that's a huge can of worms, because computer programs are so incredibly complicated that one could split hairs ad infinitum (e.g. "Please authorize the program to write saved game files. Please authorize it to read the disk to load files. Please authorize this registry key. Please authorize me to receive keystrokes." et al), much akin to the nastiness between MSFT and the gov't regarding what exactly constitutes a core part of an operating system -- that is, where the boundaries are.
Perhaps specific legislation regarding the not-explicitly-authorized monitoring of a user's behavior outside of the program would help -- recording keystrokes clearly fed to the program would be fine, but poking around what the user does with other programs wouldn't be. That would be an incomplete approach, but it might be better than what the present situation is.
We're conditioned to think of Holsteins (as opposed to, say, Jerseys) as funny, for some strange reason. Of course, we're also conditioned to eat them...
I think it'd be fair to say that the RIAA and Disney aren't exactly looking out for the interests of the non-commercial artists. If they can reduce the supply of music by, say, pushing DRM to the point that DRM-enabled machines can only run DRM-enabled players which only play DRM-enabled music, then there'll be less competition for them.
Treat it as a precaution -- basically, you're being advised to check your statements carefully, looking for activity that isn't yours. It would not surprise me if a lot of people did NOT examine their credit card bills completely, considering that people have also been ripped off down by phone companies adding incorrect charges to their bills.
It's along the same lines of saying that assume that somebody might consider stealing your car every time you park it in a public lot -- meaning that you should lock the doors, secure any valuables out of sight, and so forth.
Still no comparison. In case you didn't notice, the article isn't calling for banning of IRC, or labelling IRC as all bad. It's merely stating that, for the purposes of identity theft and related frauds, IRC is a common choice of medium -- which it is, depending on which channels you frequent. And it's far better for that than the phone system, for reasons which are clear to anybody who stops to think.
Now, unless you can show that IRC is NOT providing a forum for such activities, your post is, for all practical purposes, useless.
Right. But notice that it's the posts that make knee-jerk responses about the article that get moderated up, not the ones that analyze the article and consider its factual basis. Go fig.
And yes, it's a real concern for those that aren't aware of identity theft, don't fully examine their bills, and so forth. It may be a surprise to people that their CC#s, once revealed -- which they do every time they use them -- might be posted somewhere and used 'round the globe until the issuer's fraud-detection algorithms flag the number, or the limit is hit. And some may not be aware that the Feds aren't completely oblivious to the situation...
And yet another poster who needs to be beaten with a cluestick -- badly.
Here's an analogy that you may, possibly, be able to understand.
Phone system::IRC talk::Napster.
Phones only help you when you know who exactly to call. IRC provides more of a forum, which will help when you don't precisely know who to contact -- and when you'd prefer that those who you contact won't know exactly who YOU are.
So, frankly, your post is a bunch of hogwash in its "slippery slope" implications.
Slashdot Mirror
Theoretically, internet sabotage could be more subtle. It's also less prominent in the minds of most civillians, I'd think, than the various sorts of non-subtle kamikaze attacks, much the same way "Gee, if I were a murderous suicidal microbiologist, I might be able to genetically engineer or choose a virulent airborne contagion with a decent incubation period, infect myself with it, and mingle in public places" is probably an unusual thought. 9/11 raised awareness of conventional kamikazes, but I wouldn't bet on that awareness having translated to other areas.
Raising awareness of the possibility is probably a reasonable thing to do, as long as it's a realistic view -- for instance, it would be preposterous to suggest that a systems cracker could directly launch from the US nuclear arsenal, given the air gaps and other precautions built into the system, nor are hostile programmer likely to be able to send satellites crashing down on the White House without access while designing the systems.
You're probably referring to Brian Bull's "Day of the Barney" trilogy of stories, that used to be hosted on his "Purple Abyss" site. Unfortunately, the Lyons Entertainment lawyers got to him, so you might have to use a USENET archive (search alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die or something like that) to find 'em.
If you're going to do that, I'd recommend bundling aspirin and Prozac, because there'd be a LOT of unhappy people.
You wouldn't demand that car dealers sell cars without engines, would you? Or if you did, you'd expect mucho pain. Expecting everybody to become a computer guru is not realistic because, frankly, for most people it's not a priority, much like most people don't know enough chemistry to produce their own pharmaceuticals and most haven't studied enough engineering or architecture to design their own homes.
Plus, any breakup probably would have at least some of the clauses of the original now-dead proposal, which included a fairly large number of prohibitions on different types of favoritism and collaboration between the parts.
Argh, replying to myself. But one more important point:
It's Baen putting online only books that are published by Baen. They'd be well within their rights to complain if somebody else did it to their books, even if it benefits Baen, because it's Baen's right to do so assuming the authors transferred full rights as would normally happen.
Baen might complain if all their books were downloadable. In case you didn't notice, they normally made available only put the first one or two books in each series, and since the books have dependencies -- for instance, readers who want a long, coherent story line pretty much have to read a series in order, rather than out of order or jumping betweeen series -- it generates more sales for them.
The same model doesn't translate well to music, at least when albums usually aren't dependent on each other and when much of the content is conveniently already digitized and online for free instead of just a little to whet your appetite.
If you believe the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, roughly 40-58M people in the United States have ever purchased something online.
As for Amazon, hrm. In the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2001, they had 1.1B in revenue (totall, not just books). Not that long ago, the UK site alone claimed 5M customers -- apparently one-sixth of all UK e-commerce in 2/02. From a 2001 Form 10-K, filed 24-Jan-02, the "U.S. Books, Music and DVD/video segment" had net sales of $1.69B in 2001.
Hm. I can't find a breakdown that only includes books sold over Amazon.com (those figures include income from partnerships, such as running www.borders.com, in addition to music and video), but it's probably safe to say that it's probably quite huge. They're big enough that if there ARE a decent number of used books(*) for sale on AMZN, it might have a substantial impact.
(*) But there might not be. These used books are mostly person-to-person sales, not Amazon-to-person sales, and thus will probably be sold in far lower quantities than what Amazon normally sells(**). I didn't see a revenue breakdown for new/used, either.
(**) Except for drivel that customers decide to immediately resell, in droves, of course. But then, it's probably easier to sell it to a colleague or nearby bookstore, or donate to a local library, unless it's something obscure.
The current situation on Amazon is that for even a recent Book X's individual page, there is likely to be a very high-profile link saying "Buy this Book X used for a lower price!". This is...
...VERY prominently placed
...not delayed (e.g. if somebody buys the book the day it comes out, decides that it's not worth finishing within an hour, and offers it for sale on Amazon, it'll show up quite soon)
...competing with the new book (the prices are usually lower)
So the Author's Guild asked that its members remove their affiliate links to Amazon. It did NOT call for the banning of used book sales; instead, I got the impression that they would be mollified if Amazon delayed the 'used book' links for some months, or if the links were less obvious...
Well, they may have thought so, and it's quite reasonable for them to be unhappy -- but unless Sony and partners were somehow legally obligated to NOT alter the scenery in such a way, then what leg would they have to stand on? There's no obligation to be kind...
Now, they COULD have had such an agreement, depending on what deal NYC has with them. It's conceivable that any contract that granted filming rights would also insist that the film portray NYC "accurately" -- as much as could be done while having Spidey and company run around -- NYC might not welcome filming which portrays all its citizens as homicidal meth-addled maniacs, for instance. I'm merely speculating that NYC might impose such restrictions in the name of good PR for NYC. If there is such a clause, then it may possibly be vague enough that the plaintiffs feel they have a chance...
The other bit is that really, is Sony under any non-contractual obligation to show a truthful representation of NYC in a work of fiction. It's not exactly as if this were a news broadcast, in which it would be distasteful for the broadcaster to apply editing (although, if memory serves, it does happen; don't certain sports events have digitally imposed "virtual" advertising?). They're not making claims about NYC, or the building's owners, or at least that's what Sony could argue.
Different treatment of handguns versus long guns isn't exactly unusual; it happens in the States, as well. As far as I can tell, the two main rationales are that a) handguns are more readily concealed -- thus, it's easier for a criminal to move around armed without alarming his potential victims, and b) long guns are considered more justifiable as hunting weapons.
Quite a few US gun-control advocates seemingly prefer to pretend that the Second Amendment is about hunting, and not about providing a means of last resort versus dictatorship.
Commented out? If you leave that in, you leave a loophole a mile wide:
e.g. if it's C source,
/*----cut----*
virus code here
*----cut----*/
or, better, use "#if 0" or "if (0) {}", which, technically, disable the code.
Hm? I'm not sure about broadcast radio, but you can certainly publish books on explosives, or on vandalism, or how to operate a meth lab, or so forth. Heck, there was a company (Paladin Press, if memory serves) that even published books that were guidebooks for, say, how to be a hitman. You can publish quite nasty stuff and still be covered by the First, as long as it's not obscene and you're not stomping on any other laws like breaking an NDA you signed.
Well, as long as you realize that you're criticizing Linux as well...
(Bliss, Ramen, et al...)
Of course, you realize that yourargument also applies to fraud, robbery and rape, right? Neither of the three is that uncommon in your average major metropolitan area...
Of course, then we have to ask: how does one get considered part of the profession in the first place?
Certification? Being an employee of a certified company? (Either of which I'm sure would be a good solution -- from Symantec's point of view)? Simply declaring oneself a virus researcher, which may be difficult if you don't have the background because you didn't have access before?
The "Oops, we didn't MEAN to do that" defense is not particularly strong in product liability cases if you're being accused of negligence. It may mean that the penalty is less than that of deliberate malfeasance (e.g. a potentially lethal safety defect in a car will probably result in a far greater penalty if the manufacturer decided that it was cheaper to settle lawsuits than to fix it), but it won't absolve you.
Trivial coding for a programmer isn't trivial coding for a nonprogrammer.
It would be simple, for instance, for a programmer to modify a game like XEvil so that when the player loses his last life, it erases the hard disk. That's easy. However, for somebody who is not a programmer -- and this includes many, many people who have computers -- it would probably be very hard.
Writing a trojan like that and distributing it on the web, for instance, would thus be making it very easy for even non-programmer brats to play a malicious "joke" on their friends or so forth. Ditto, of course, for propagating viruses, with the additional provision that it may affect others besides the intended victims.
Hm? You're using the term 'viral' pretty broadly there, since propagation is a major part of the defintion...
OTOH, it would be interesting if somebody managed to go after spyware on the basis that the user didn't explicitly authorize such behavior. However, that's a huge can of worms, because computer programs are so incredibly complicated that one could split hairs ad infinitum (e.g. "Please authorize the program to write saved game files. Please authorize it to read the disk to load files. Please authorize this registry key. Please authorize me to receive keystrokes." et al), much akin to the nastiness between MSFT and the gov't regarding what exactly constitutes a core part of an operating system -- that is, where the boundaries are.
Perhaps specific legislation regarding the not-explicitly-authorized monitoring of a user's behavior outside of the program would help -- recording keystrokes clearly fed to the program would be fine, but poking around what the user does with other programs wouldn't be. That would be an incomplete approach, but it might be better than what the present situation is.
We're conditioned to think of Holsteins (as opposed to, say, Jerseys) as funny, for some strange reason. Of course, we're also conditioned to eat them...
I think it'd be fair to say that the RIAA and Disney aren't exactly looking out for the interests of the non-commercial artists. If they can reduce the supply of music by, say, pushing DRM to the point that DRM-enabled machines can only run DRM-enabled players which only play DRM-enabled music, then there'll be less competition for them.
That's an interesting claim you're making since the letters in "terror" don't appear in the article even once.
Treat it as a precaution -- basically, you're being advised to check your statements carefully, looking for activity that isn't yours. It would not surprise me if a lot of people did NOT examine their credit card bills completely, considering that people have also been ripped off down by phone companies adding incorrect charges to their bills.
It's along the same lines of saying that assume that somebody might consider stealing your car every time you park it in a public lot -- meaning that you should lock the doors, secure any valuables out of sight, and so forth.
Still no comparison. In case you didn't notice, the article isn't calling for banning of IRC, or labelling IRC as all bad. It's merely stating that, for the purposes of identity theft and related frauds, IRC is a common choice of medium -- which it is, depending on which channels you frequent. And it's far better for that than the phone system, for reasons which are clear to anybody who stops to think.
Now, unless you can show that IRC is NOT providing a forum for such activities, your post is, for all practical purposes, useless.
Right. But notice that it's the posts that make knee-jerk responses about the article that get moderated up, not the ones that analyze the article and consider its factual basis. Go fig.
And yes, it's a real concern for those that aren't aware of identity theft, don't fully examine their bills, and so forth. It may be a surprise to people that their CC#s, once revealed -- which they do every time they use them -- might be posted somewhere and used 'round the globe until the issuer's fraud-detection algorithms flag the number, or the limit is hit. And some may not be aware that the Feds aren't completely oblivious to the situation...
And yet another poster who needs to be beaten with a cluestick -- badly.
Here's an analogy that you may, possibly, be able to understand.
Phone system::IRC talk::Napster.
Phones only help you when you know who exactly to call. IRC provides more of a forum, which will help when you don't precisely know who to contact -- and when you'd prefer that those who you contact won't know exactly who YOU are.
So, frankly, your post is a bunch of hogwash in its "slippery slope" implications.