According to quote.yahoo.com, MPPP has a market cap of half a *billion* (yes, b-as-in-Bugatti) dollars, and the cited per-share cash value is nothing to sneeze at, either, given the number of shares.
But Java ain't the end-all, be-all. There's nothing wrong with trying to develop a language that takes what they like, and discards whatever features/misfeatures irritate them.
Even Sun does this, deprecating / adding / altering... Java is an imperfect language in flux, and even Sun knows this as demonstrated by the rate of change. I have no problem with MS also recognizing this and deciding that they'd make slightly different design decisions, which apparently they do.
In addition, something that most reporters of that sort of story tend to neglect was that in that period, overhead allocation was often straightforward -- assign overhead expenses equally to everything, rather than calculate on a per-item basis. I believe that they may have changed their accounting rules in the early 90's, 'tho, or sometime 'round then.
Perhaps even more amusing, I'm pretty sure that years ago they politely requested that phone companies not switch to fiber optics quite so quickly, as it's more difficult to tap them undetectably... Request refused, heh.
I seem to recall MS stating that the Win95 -> Win98 upgrade fixed 3,000 or so bugs...
What Moody also does not note is that BugTraq focuses almost entirely on security-related issues, usually involving multi-user issues like bad SUID stuff or network services. Something like 9X is going to be minimally represented here, and NT still normally doesn't provide quite that many services, nor of *different* implementations for each service.
MS, for instance, admits that Win95 -> Win98 fixes something like 3000 bugs IIRC. Most aren't going to be counted by BugTraq because they're irrelevant to security in a single-user system... but they're relevant to users.
One bit's traffic analysis. If, say, you happen to be a known member of the Osama bin Ladin Official Fan Club, they're going to be at least mildly interested in *who* you're talking to and when, particularly if your other activities make them curious.
The other is that many criminals aren't that paranoid all the time. Do you think that many Mafia folks aren't aware of the fact that police tap their phones... and that, despite this, this is still a major source of evidence vs organized crime?
Yep. The law stipulates a maximum response time, and the article says the FBI's 10 days expired Friday.
They weren't obligated to fully *comply* with the request, but if they weren't going to comply they at least need to respond why as specified by the bill (most probably citing the exemptions intended at protecting law enforcement methods and investigations). Apparently, they haven't done even that.
'archie' has been around for searching FTP sites, although it's been a while since I've used it. Check the.pdf -- somebody like a general search engine could probably get away with it if it indexed, say, legit FTP sites primarily, as there's reference to substantial legitimate use.
Napster's in legal trouble because the court doesn't seem too receptive to the idea that Napster does, in fact, have any substantial legal use.
Some do -- selling them to manufacturers of products like Ultracade. Activision still sells its old Intellivision games. Capcom, if memory serves, sells CDs of its classics to bundle with some arcade gear and so forth.
The property ain't dead yet, and companies are often still profiting from them...
One reason might be cost compared to demand; perhaps they figured there's not much of a market for anonymous package receiving (unless it's tied to anonymous paying for the package, what's the lure?).
Another is that it makes certain kinds of evil easier.
a) UNABOMer-wannabes no longer need to know the real address of their victim; they just need to learn the forwarding address. If these are systematically derived from information that's poorly guarded (name, SSNs, birthdates, etc), then there are potentially real problems here.
Maybe appending a *random* alphanumberic tag would help. Either that, or let users choose 'em (collision avoidance! aigh!).
Something like
"Ghidrah's Third Head -- 3124tYX"
would be incredibly hard to guess by random, or to associate with any particular person (well, eccentric Godjira fans, but...), but it'd also be a bear for senders to remember or record correctly.
b) Stalking. If have a rough idea of where your victim is, you might be able to follow the parcel to its destination -- say, if you put some kind of tracking signal in it...
If memory serves, they have a legally-granted monopoly on letter delivery (to the point where, say, it's illegal to parcel your mail and then use FedEx or UPS). Thus, they're guaranteed a fairly reliable amount of income via stamps.
That's one bit of revenue FedEx can't touch.
However, e-mail cuts 'em out of the loop. If they ignore it, they could lose out on quite a bit of the action once things like digital signature crypto become more common... they just want a piece of the action.
a) I believe that there are actually subtle means of opening a non-sealed (as in ink/sticker, not as in glue) envelope. Even seals can be forged. So don't consider paper correspondence immune...
b) Not all terrorists are swift, shall we say. I'm reminded of the WTC bomber who went to demand a refund on the rented Ryder truck he used. Oops.
c) E-mail is a bit easier since there are usually archival backups and such. It can be difficult for, say, the White Hou^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrandom people to be sure they've completely eradicated all traces of communications, such as tape backups and not-yet-erased files at intermediate sites and so forth.
Plus, networks go down, servers get confused... there's no real-time guarantee of fast service (I've personally had mail delayed for days, and very strange weirdness involving third parties.), so the occasional mail could even be intercepted, delayed, investigated, and THEN forwarded without necessarily arousing that much suspicion.
Military attack might be out. But how 'bout bribery? Or, for that matter, blackmail or extortion?
That is, how crucial is the human element -- would it be sufficient to 'turn' a few who had access to misconfigure or otherwise sabotage systems, or are the systems more resilient that that?
Not to mention that you're hosed if you don't *have* the decrypted keys. Remember the prior story on the letter (w/ encrypted text attached) sent to Mr. Straw himself, pointing this out?
Guess he figures it won't be used against 'im, eh?
Tricky. But there will always be a market among the artists for publicity, of the sort that comes from tours and advertising; given the scope of the 'net and the pull model (many users often search for specific genres/artists/works rather than randomly wandering and sampling unknown artists; the hit-count distribution might even be Zipf)...
An underlying question is -- does it take the equivalent of a Stephen King or Limp Bizkit to get published online? Or will the RIAA morph to the degree where it still has its traditional promotional role, but embraces electronic distribution? And, given that (non-spam, *shudder*) promotional services most likely aren't free, will they be able to actually make money?
Difference between Xerox machines: Xerox machines don't distribute by themselves. And Xerox isn't trying to run a business based on searching Xeroxed materials. Napster's software and service is free. Given that the software can be distributed easily, their only hope of being a business is that search engine. The search engine is only going to be useful if people actually provide what gets searched for frequently...
If everybody just exported free-as-in-speech music, then Napster wouldn't have a nearly as significant a customer base, and they know it. They NEED that large segment of people who really don't care about finding music from bands that haven't reached popularity and large-scale recognition yet, but simply want the latest music from the TopNN bands/albums.
As per these uses:
Napster will have a hard time checking the first one unless they've strong forms of identity checking, and it's rather implausible in certain cases (e.g. Metallica is known to NOT be a fan of Napster. So their songs being shared on the service are with extremely high probability NOT coming from Lars and friends).
The middle two also don't apply to a great deal of the music traffic there, as well; and in particular, a number of bands and other copyright holders are on record as opposing the use of Napster to distribute their recordings. Yet, Napster apparently still allows people to blatantly search for and export them. And, if all they do is boot the account... there are reports of people simply signing up again.
The last one does not even come close to applying. There are methods for distributing to a class that do NOT make the material searchable to the entire world, like setting up a class FTP site or web page with authentication, or AFS and/or SMB where available. These actually allow for limiting access...
That sounds a bit chancy... what, so Fanning and friends skim the VC in terms of salary/misc compensation, the company declares bankruptcy, and everybody walks away? Hrrmmmm. But why do the VCs join? They probably saw the risk of being sued, so they must have seen a profit possibility to compensate...
Perhaps they're hoping to reverse the latter half of your step 5: license the technology to the RIAA, so that the RIAA gets the new distribution media to use as they see fit, although they'd almost certainly want to change the software quite a bit. Hrmph. Wonder what the RIAA would do with such a thing. Or it could be sold to another company that's interested in searchable general-purpose file sharing...
...and, somehow, stop the folks from obtaining another account.
That's the odd bit if you take this route. I know of spammers who've gone through multiple accounts at the *same* ISP and *same* web hoster within a month, and they'll probably still come back under different names. Given that Napster doesn't charge it's users, what can they come up with? A credit card check (which probably costs Napster) including billing address?
Or if they mailed a unique identifier to a non-PO box... hrm. Gut feeling is that the search engine is the important aspect to control here, since simply making it harder to search for contraband would cut down transfers drastically.
But most of the searches they serve are, almost certainly, for nothing BUT copyrighted material.
They control the engine. They opened the gates. If you want to search for "N'Sync", they'll let you, if you want to subject yourself to that for some odd reason. If you want to search for "Witchy Woman" or "Son of a Preacher Man" -- is it plausible that these searches are NOT for the Eagles and Dusty Springfield pieces?
Backup actually isn't that bad of a use for CD-RWs (incremental backups, anyway) for systems that don't have a lot of rw data. CD-RW discs themselves can last quite some time, compared to relatively fragile tapes and tape drives (tape drives I've seen usually can become misaligned and useless after even a minor bump from a vacuum cleaner. I've lost more tape drives than fixed disks (1, a WDC dead due to mechanical failure) and CD/DVD drives (0) combined.). It's also less effective for mass distribution for most folks because it's a physical medium that needs to be mailed/handed over itself.
Napster, OTOH, is designed to allow ALL of its users to be essentially publishers with searchable catalogues, not just a few. Plus, it's a search engine they control. They could have designed a system where searches get blocked -- e.g. a search for "Metallica" by itself cannot plausibly be explained away as anything but a search for Metallica songs, and if somebody searches for titles from the latest Spears (sp?) songs, again that would seem to be questionable...
Nope. Not unless, say, there are so many blithely renamed songs that people searching for "Metallica" or "U2" or whoever the heck is popular these days gets non-copyrighted foo.
This is not the case.
People are querying for copyrighted material. People are serving these songs to everybody, without license to do so. Napster is very deliberately making this possible, when in fact it could actually make an effort to block many searches entirely. For instance, if the system were designed so that people who served MP3s had to supply artist and title and required exact matches in both, they could have implemented blacklists...
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According to quote.yahoo.com, MPPP has a market cap of half a *billion* (yes, b-as-in-Bugatti) dollars, and the cited per-share cash value is nothing to sneeze at, either, given the number of shares.
But Java ain't the end-all, be-all. There's nothing wrong with trying to develop a language that takes what they like, and discards whatever features/misfeatures irritate them.
Even Sun does this, deprecating / adding / altering... Java is an imperfect language in flux, and even Sun knows this as demonstrated by the rate of change. I have no problem with MS also recognizing this and deciding that they'd make slightly different design decisions, which apparently they do.
In addition, something that most reporters of that sort of story tend to neglect was that in that period, overhead allocation was often straightforward -- assign overhead expenses equally to everything, rather than calculate on a per-item basis. I believe that they may have changed their accounting rules in the early 90's, 'tho, or sometime 'round then.
Perhaps even more amusing, I'm pretty sure that years ago they politely requested that phone companies not switch to fiber optics quite so quickly, as it's more difficult to tap them undetectably... Request refused, heh.
I seem to recall MS stating that the Win95 -> Win98 upgrade fixed 3,000 or so bugs...
What Moody also does not note is that BugTraq focuses almost entirely on security-related issues, usually involving multi-user issues like bad SUID stuff or network services. Something like 9X is going to be minimally represented here, and NT still normally doesn't provide quite that many services, nor of *different* implementations for each service.
MS, for instance, admits that Win95 -> Win98 fixes something like 3000 bugs IIRC. Most aren't going to be counted by BugTraq because they're irrelevant to security in a single-user system... but they're relevant to users.
One bit's traffic analysis. If, say, you happen to be a known member of the Osama bin Ladin Official Fan Club, they're going to be at least mildly interested in *who* you're talking to and when, particularly if your other activities make them curious.
The other is that many criminals aren't that paranoid all the time. Do you think that many Mafia folks aren't aware of the fact that police tap their phones... and that, despite this, this is still a major source of evidence vs organized crime?
Yep. The law stipulates a maximum response time, and the article says the FBI's 10 days expired Friday.
They weren't obligated to fully *comply* with the request, but if they weren't going to comply they at least need to respond why as specified by the bill (most probably citing the exemptions intended at protecting law enforcement methods and investigations). Apparently, they haven't done even that.
'archie' has been around for searching FTP sites, although it's been a while since I've used it. Check the .pdf -- somebody like a general search engine could probably get away with it if it indexed, say, legit FTP sites primarily, as there's reference to substantial legitimate use.
Napster's in legal trouble because the court doesn't seem too receptive to the idea that Napster does, in fact, have any substantial legal use.
I wonder how painful it felt to use their own prior legal defeat in THAT case to bolster THIS one. It's interesting that they bring it up...
Some do -- selling them to manufacturers of products like Ultracade. Activision still sells its old Intellivision games. Capcom, if memory serves, sells CDs of its classics to bundle with some arcade gear and so forth.
The property ain't dead yet, and companies are often still profiting from them...
Hrrrmmm. That would explain why Q put the whole human race on trial...
But then, how will we evolve our mutant powers?
Really, now. You wouldn't mind a little radiation if it turned you into a telepath, would you?
;-)
One reason might be cost compared to demand; perhaps they figured there's not much of a market for anonymous package receiving (unless it's tied to anonymous paying for the package, what's the lure?).
Another is that it makes certain kinds of evil easier.
a) UNABOMer-wannabes no longer need to know the real address of their victim; they just need to learn the forwarding address. If these are systematically derived from information that's poorly guarded (name, SSNs, birthdates, etc), then there are potentially real problems here.
Maybe appending a *random* alphanumberic tag would help. Either that, or let users choose 'em (collision avoidance! aigh!).
Something like
"Ghidrah's Third Head -- 3124tYX"
would be incredibly hard to guess by random, or to associate with any particular person (well, eccentric Godjira fans, but...), but it'd also be a bear for senders to remember or record correctly.
b) Stalking. If have a rough idea of where your victim is, you might be able to follow the parcel to its destination -- say, if you put some kind of tracking signal in it...
Ah, we could all use our SSN's or Taxpayer Identification Numbers! ;-)
(One hopes they wouldn't dare... not to mention that SSNs are NOT supposed to be used for identification outside the SSA system...)
If memory serves, they have a legally-granted monopoly on letter delivery (to the point where, say, it's illegal to parcel your mail and then use FedEx or UPS). Thus, they're guaranteed a fairly reliable amount of income via stamps.
That's one bit of revenue FedEx can't touch.
However, e-mail cuts 'em out of the loop. If they ignore it, they could lose out on quite a bit of the action once things like digital signature crypto become more common... they just want a piece of the action.
Couple o' minor points.
a) I believe that there are actually subtle means of opening a non-sealed (as in ink/sticker, not as in glue) envelope. Even seals can be forged. So don't consider paper correspondence immune...
b) Not all terrorists are swift, shall we say. I'm reminded of the WTC bomber who went to demand a refund on the rented Ryder truck he used. Oops.
c) E-mail is a bit easier since there are usually archival backups and such. It can be difficult for, say, the White Hou^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrandom people to be sure they've completely eradicated all traces of communications, such as tape backups and not-yet-erased files at intermediate sites and so forth.
Plus, networks go down, servers get confused... there's no real-time guarantee of fast service (I've personally had mail delayed for days, and very strange weirdness involving third parties.), so the occasional mail could even be intercepted, delayed, investigated, and THEN forwarded without necessarily arousing that much suspicion.
Military attack might be out. But how 'bout bribery? Or, for that matter, blackmail or extortion?
That is, how crucial is the human element -- would it be sufficient to 'turn' a few who had access to misconfigure or otherwise sabotage systems, or are the systems more resilient that that?
Not to mention that you're hosed if you don't *have* the decrypted keys. Remember the prior story on the letter (w/ encrypted text attached) sent to Mr. Straw himself, pointing this out?
Guess he figures it won't be used against 'im, eh?
Tricky. But there will always be a market among the artists for publicity, of the sort that comes from tours and advertising; given the scope of the 'net and the pull model (many users often search for specific genres/artists/works rather than randomly wandering and sampling unknown artists; the hit-count distribution might even be Zipf)...
An underlying question is -- does it take the equivalent of a Stephen King or Limp Bizkit to get published online? Or will the RIAA morph to the degree where it still has its traditional promotional role, but embraces electronic distribution? And, given that (non-spam, *shudder*) promotional services most likely aren't free, will they be able to actually make money?
Difference between Xerox machines: Xerox machines don't distribute by themselves. And Xerox isn't trying to run a business based on searching Xeroxed materials. Napster's software and service is free. Given that the software can be distributed easily, their only hope of being a business is that search engine. The search engine is only going to be useful if people actually provide what gets searched for frequently...
If everybody just exported free-as-in-speech music, then Napster wouldn't have a nearly as significant a customer base, and they know it. They NEED that large segment of people who really don't care about finding music from bands that haven't reached popularity and large-scale recognition yet, but simply want the latest music from the TopNN bands/albums.
As per these uses:
Napster will have a hard time checking the first one unless they've strong forms of identity checking, and it's rather implausible in certain cases (e.g. Metallica is known to NOT be a fan of Napster. So their songs being shared on the service are with extremely high probability NOT coming from Lars and friends).
The middle two also don't apply to a great deal of the music traffic there, as well; and in particular, a number of bands and other copyright holders are on record as opposing the use of Napster to distribute their recordings. Yet, Napster apparently still allows people to blatantly search for and export them. And, if all they do is boot the account... there are reports of people simply signing up again.
The last one does not even come close to applying. There are methods for distributing to a class that do NOT make the material searchable to the entire world, like setting up a class FTP site or web page with authentication, or AFS and/or SMB where available. These actually allow for limiting access...
That sounds a bit chancy... what, so Fanning and friends skim the VC in terms of salary/misc compensation, the company declares bankruptcy, and everybody walks away? Hrrmmmm. But why do the VCs join? They probably saw the risk of being sued, so they must have seen a profit possibility to compensate...
Perhaps they're hoping to reverse the latter half of your step 5: license the technology to the RIAA, so that the RIAA gets the new distribution media to use as they see fit, although they'd almost certainly want to change the software quite a bit. Hrmph. Wonder what the RIAA would do with such a thing. Or it could be sold to another company that's interested in searchable general-purpose file sharing...
...and, somehow, stop the folks from obtaining another account.
That's the odd bit if you take this route. I know of spammers who've gone through multiple accounts at the *same* ISP and *same* web hoster within a month, and they'll probably still come back under different names. Given that Napster doesn't charge it's users, what can they come up with? A credit card check (which probably costs Napster) including billing address?
Or if they mailed a unique identifier to a non-PO box... hrm. Gut feeling is that the search engine is the important aspect to control here, since simply making it harder to search for contraband would cut down transfers drastically.
But most of the searches they serve are, almost certainly, for nothing BUT copyrighted material.
They control the engine. They opened the gates. If you want to search for "N'Sync", they'll let you, if you want to subject yourself to that for some odd reason. If you want to search for "Witchy Woman" or "Son of a Preacher Man" -- is it plausible that these searches are NOT for the Eagles and Dusty Springfield pieces?
Not really.
Go ask 'em what their most popular searches are.
Backup actually isn't that bad of a use for CD-RWs (incremental backups, anyway) for systems that don't have a lot of rw data. CD-RW discs themselves can last quite some time, compared to relatively fragile tapes and tape drives (tape drives I've seen usually can become misaligned and useless after even a minor bump from a vacuum cleaner. I've lost more tape drives than fixed disks (1, a WDC dead due to mechanical failure) and CD/DVD drives (0) combined.). It's also less effective for mass distribution for most folks because it's a physical medium that needs to be mailed/handed over itself.
Napster, OTOH, is designed to allow ALL of its users to be essentially publishers with searchable catalogues, not just a few. Plus, it's a search engine they control. They could have designed a system where searches get blocked -- e.g. a search for "Metallica" by itself cannot plausibly be explained away as anything but a search for Metallica songs, and if somebody searches for titles from the latest Spears (sp?) songs, again that would seem to be questionable...
Nope. Not unless, say, there are so many blithely renamed songs that people searching for "Metallica" or "U2" or whoever the heck is popular these days gets non-copyrighted foo.
This is not the case.
People are querying for copyrighted material. People are serving these songs to everybody, without license to do so. Napster is very deliberately making this possible, when in fact it could actually make an effort to block many searches entirely. For instance, if the system were designed so that people who served MP3s had to supply artist and title and required exact matches in both, they could have implemented blacklists...