And the mods encourage it -- they/should/ be getting marked offtopic, but that never seems to happen anymore.
Of course, the meta-mods wouldn't bother to see the context of the thread (or only look at the few posts immediately around it, which could be well related), and not appreciate that it's an offtopic reply to a first post that could be several screenfuls above them. Then, the offtopic mods would get marked unfair.
Agreed. But if they had 150,000 copies, and 150,000 people ready to purchase, and one makes that digital copy, now they can only sell 149,999 -- they are left with one copy.
No, from the start they didn't have "150,000" copies. They had one master copy, and a potentially infinite number of digital copies to sell. The cost of producing the master copy has nothing to do with the number of copies sold. So, who decided that the "number of people willing to buy" was 150,000?
The missing piece is this: price. They had, say, 50,000 willing to buy at $1, another 50,000 willing to buy at $0.50, and another willing to buy for $0 (that is, willing to download and listen to the song - not the same as someone who just doesn't like the song, or movie or whatever).
Although it might seem like that last group adds no benefit to the recording industry, that's not the case. Those people might tell others about the song ($billions are spent on advertising every year - so you can't just ignore the value of this), or the might go to concerts, or they might by other merchandise which is not digitally reproducible (you can't download a Metallica t-shirt, at least not without investing some time and equipment in printing your own).
So - no problem if everyone buys at the price they're willing to pay. This is an example of "differentiated pricing", which is taught about in an introductory economics course as a good thing, something industries strive for (examples cited in your textbook will be "child tickets" for movies and events). The only problem is if the people willing to pay $1 get the song for free instead. (Back to the original point - this is the only source of "lost revenue" due to piracy in the equation).
This problem is easily addressed as follows: those people who are willing to pay more place a value on their own time. To them, the opportunity cost of spending 20 minutes to look for a torrent is more than paying $1. Thus, they would rather spend 2 minutes and pay $1 to get the song than spend 20 minutes and get it for free. It might seem hard to believe such people exist if you're not one of them, but believe me they do. These people pay $3 for a bottle of spring water at the service station instead of walking to the supermarket next door and buying the same thing for $1.50 (and there's nothing wrong with that - just pointing out the non-digital analogy in this logic).
To a rational person it would then seem the solution is to provide an option that allows them to do this. The more business minded people of the world (eg. Apple) have already done this, with great success. If I can explain this in 5 minutes, it can't be difficult to understand. So why is the RIAA still not putting their efforts into this wholesale? Well, I guess you all know the answer to that question.
As for a site going down as 'collateral' for being hosted at the same datacenter as some illegal site, this is definitely grounds to sue for compensation. An online business that relies on its website as a primary sales channel loses all the sales they would have made that day if the site is taken down - this is the reason that SLAs even exist. To take the car analogy up again: let's say you bought a (completely legit) Corvette from a dealer. Later (or earlier), unbeknownst to you, the dealer (had) sold a stolen Corvette to someone else. As a result, your Corvette is siezed by police. Reasonable? I think not.
Anime is the best example of this. Fansub groups have been pirating Anime for a couple of decades, more so in the past 5 years as VCD/DVD and digital subtitles became practical. Most fansub groups pirate material until such time it becomes licensed in their country, which they feel they contributed to creating a market for material that otherwise did not exist. 100% justified. Whether it's right or wrong is up to the respective copyright holders, who in the past have shown tolerance to anime fan-sub groups. You can't say it's wrong, holding the copyright alone gives you the moral and legal authority to what you want. I can say, without a doubt, my spending on import material has increased as a result of these anime pirates.
To add to this, Madman Entertainment, the (pretty much) sole distributer and licensee of Anime works in Australia, decides what to license and distribute next by collecting feedback from fans & customers and examining the rate of fansub downloads. When 100,000 people a week are downloading the next episode of series Y, it's hard to argue a case that they shouldn't put it out there on DVD ASAP.
Furthermore, they are usually very nice to small groups wanting to use their content - if you're a small club and you want to show something licensed by Madman at a members' screening, all you normally need to do is write them a polite email asking for permission, and it will be granted (on the 'condition' that you give out some promotional posters, which they will provide, at the screening, or something equally benign - in fact when I was organising such things we had people offer to pay for the posters when they missed out).
Madman has been expanding at an enormous rate since its foundation and it would be absolutely blind for anyone to say they are not profitable. Of course, they are a monopoly distributor to a niche market - but at the same time having their intellectual property "pirated" in this way hasn't hurt them one bit, because they've embraced it and found a way to use it to its full potential. And what better way to do your market research than to let your customers do it for you... for free?/pP
HSBC in Australia and SE Asia (and, it seems, with a bit of Googling, elsewhere in the world) issue with online banking accounts a device that sits on your keyring that generates a 6 digit number when the button on it is pressed, and displays that on a small screen. The number is different every time.
When you log in or do any transaction, you are required to enter this number (along with any other credentials which are appropriate). The bank records the serial number of the dongle they gave you, and I would assume that there is some secret mathematical algorithm that allows them, knowing the serial number and the time, to calculate what number your device will display.
If you make 3 mistakes in a row with the 6 digit code, your internet banking account is automatically locked down, and you have to contact them to unlock it.
Now, that's a very simple trick and I can't see how a hacker / phisher would get around it. Sure they can sniff the code when I log in, but 30 seconds later it will be useless. Short of mugging me for the device on my keys (after having phished my regular login/password), they can't get in to my account. Even if I leave a session logged in and walk away, and someone else sits down at the terminal, they can look at my balance and transaction history, but can't make any transactions.
Having used the device for a year I have to say it is remarkably convenient, and it seems immune to most of the attacks described here, and doesn't have the convenience drawbacks of one-time PIN cards. Why is HSBC still the only bank doing this?
Sigh. If I were to ask you how to do some technical task, without telling you how I am doing it, and you were to tell me my method, then it would be fair to say that it is obvious.. simple != obvious.
Unfortunately it's a prisoners' dilemma, because once I've told you the method, it's easy for you to claim that was what you were going to do anyway, and I have no way of proving otherwise.
Similarly, if you tell me your method first then it's easy for me to claim _that_ as what I was going to tell you. Whoever volunteers the information first risks having their idea claimed by the other person.
So this test would never happen in practice (about anything you might seriously want to patent anyway), and thus we need different measures of obviousness (new word?)...
Although I agree that a lot of things that are not obvious can be described in one sentence, once you know what they are. Gravity is a good example - it took thousands of years for someone to write down a theory, but that theory is one sentence long.
Adding a 128mb DIMM? Well, then Bill Gates is gonna have to recompile the user interface. Want to move the mouse across the screen? Bill will have to manually edit the binary codes in your kernel.
So that's why it makes me reboot each time I move the mouse....
Excellent point that is very true. While this is another tool for the clueful, the clueless will happily believe derivatives, and as you mentioned they will be fully "authenticated". paypa1.com anyone?
Furthermore, the "authenticated" tick of approval will lull the clueless into a false sense of security. "What do you mean it was a fake - it said it was authenticated!"... there's a great danger in telling that someone who doesn't have a full understanding of what it means and how the system works (and people won't).
This makes it not very useful IMHO since clueless users are the ones who need most protection. None of the users for whom the sentence "You just check the signature against the key in the DNS system" makes instant sense are likely fall for a phish from a false domain anyway.
Fool! Haven't you ever played C&C Generals?! It is how many hackers you have, especially when the enemy take out your supply trucks. And if you put them in an Internet Center, that's even better.
What if I live in Australia - is it possible to message a US short code like an international number? (ie. if I SMS +146645? something tells me that wouldn't work...)
Admittedly, it would be much less useful without the business and address searches... but the definitions and calculator would still be handy...it would be nice if they'd provide a way for international users to play too;p
What's 4gb? A day of downloading on ADSL? Assuming you're going to need _all_ of those again... but chances are you won't need 90% of them since by the time you need to install that software again new versions will be out which you'd have downloaded again anyway...
1. Suppose your download directory isn't dedicated to just downloads. Any files in that directory are vulnerable.
What else would it be dedicated to? Come on, let's be reasonable and face the facts - there's close to zero probability that there'd be anything in there you couldn't just download again. Of course, I'm not saying they _shouldn't_ have patched it, but it's hardly a vulnerability worth getting all excited about.
The only comment I would make on the Gmail account is that it's hard to list the size of emails and attachments.
Fair call - why not report it as a bug? I've reported a few things that since got fixed or at least added to the to-do list, so they really do listen;p
am i the only one that notices that 744 maps to rwx--r--r ? all rights to the owner, read-rights for everyone...
It should be rwxr--r--, and anyway, the only right the RIAA really wants is x, the right to execute everyone downloading their music.
when they're old enough they can take it out themselves.
You do realise the tags are being put in their schoolbags, on their clothes, nametags, etc? It's not like they're being injected under the skin. How old would you child have to be to take apart the lining of their bag and rip the tag out, or to leave the nametag somewhere, if they really wanted?
he was talking about the whole *taskbar* all together.
Aaah, my bad. (But hey... reading the comment before replying - what next, reading the article?;p). I agree. Hiding the taskbar is stupid. Then, whenever you move to the bottom of a maximised window (I can't think of why you'd do this offhand, but I found I did, a lot, when I tried out the whole taskbar hiding thing), it brings up the taskbar... stupid.
You are aware you can customize the hiding - ie. force some icons to always be visible, and others to always be hidden. So just set the ones you frequently use to be always visible. You can't tell me you need _all_ of the icons in that tray, like Intellipoint (or Logitech equivalent), your video card drivers' resolution selector, Apache monitor, etc. more often than once in a blue moon?
Being able to hide the icons in that tray that you don't frequently use is the best thing since sliced bread.
I use Hotmail, a friend of mine uses gmail. I've not had any problems getting his mails
Actually - it happened in this order. Test email sent to Hotmail, did not arrive. Story submitted to Slashdot. Email arrived in Hotmail account several hours later (after other emails I sent from my other accounts _after_ the one from gmail - which arrived almost instantly). I've read several reports of Hotmail both bouncing and vanishing Gmail email - I'm sure if you hunt around you can find even more. It may be that they are changing their behaviour as they realise it'd going to do them more harm then good.
As for the Yahoo one, that is definitely true.
Re:I did it before, and I'll do it again
on
Gmail in the News
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· Score: 1
What I noticed was that as soon as Yahoo announced they were upping their email limit, Gmail started letting me invite about 5 people a day.
Indeed, and I also noticed that when I sent someone on a yahoo account a gmail invite, it was automatically put in their "Bulk Mail" folder;p
Slashdot Mirror
And the mods encourage it -- they /should/ be getting marked offtopic, but that never seems to happen anymore.
Of course, the meta-mods wouldn't bother to see the context of the thread (or only look at the few posts immediately around it, which could be well related), and not appreciate that it's an offtopic reply to a first post that could be several screenfuls above them. Then, the offtopic mods would get marked unfair.
Agreed. But if they had 150,000 copies, and 150,000 people ready to purchase, and one makes that digital copy, now they can only sell 149,999 -- they are left with one copy.
No, from the start they didn't have "150,000" copies. They had one master copy, and a potentially infinite number of digital copies to sell. The cost of producing the master copy has nothing to do with the number of copies sold. So, who decided that the "number of people willing to buy" was 150,000?
The missing piece is this: price. They had, say, 50,000 willing to buy at $1, another 50,000 willing to buy at $0.50, and another willing to buy for $0 (that is, willing to download and listen to the song - not the same as someone who just doesn't like the song, or movie or whatever).
Although it might seem like that last group adds no benefit to the recording industry, that's not the case. Those people might tell others about the song ($billions are spent on advertising every year - so you can't just ignore the value of this), or the might go to concerts, or they might by other merchandise which is not digitally reproducible (you can't download a Metallica t-shirt, at least not without investing some time and equipment in printing your own).
So - no problem if everyone buys at the price they're willing to pay. This is an example of "differentiated pricing", which is taught about in an introductory economics course as a good thing, something industries strive for (examples cited in your textbook will be "child tickets" for movies and events). The only problem is if the people willing to pay $1 get the song for free instead. (Back to the original point - this is the only source of "lost revenue" due to piracy in the equation).
This problem is easily addressed as follows: those people who are willing to pay more place a value on their own time. To them, the opportunity cost of spending 20 minutes to look for a torrent is more than paying $1. Thus, they would rather spend 2 minutes and pay $1 to get the song than spend 20 minutes and get it for free. It might seem hard to believe such people exist if you're not one of them, but believe me they do. These people pay $3 for a bottle of spring water at the service station instead of walking to the supermarket next door and buying the same thing for $1.50 (and there's nothing wrong with that - just pointing out the non-digital analogy in this logic).
To a rational person it would then seem the solution is to provide an option that allows them to do this. The more business minded people of the world (eg. Apple) have already done this, with great success. If I can explain this in 5 minutes, it can't be difficult to understand. So why is the RIAA still not putting their efforts into this wholesale? Well, I guess you all know the answer to that question.
As for a site going down as 'collateral' for being hosted at the same datacenter as some illegal site, this is definitely grounds to sue for compensation. An online business that relies on its website as a primary sales channel loses all the sales they would have made that day if the site is taken down - this is the reason that SLAs even exist. To take the car analogy up again: let's say you bought a (completely legit) Corvette from a dealer. Later (or earlier), unbeknownst to you, the dealer (had) sold a stolen Corvette to someone else. As a result, your Corvette is siezed by police. Reasonable? I think not.
To add to this, Madman Entertainment, the (pretty much) sole distributer and licensee of Anime works in Australia, decides what to license and distribute next by collecting feedback from fans & customers and examining the rate of fansub downloads. When 100,000 people a week are downloading the next episode of series Y, it's hard to argue a case that they shouldn't put it out there on DVD ASAP.
Furthermore, they are usually very nice to small groups wanting to use their content - if you're a small club and you want to show something licensed by Madman at a members' screening, all you normally need to do is write them a polite email asking for permission, and it will be granted (on the 'condition' that you give out some promotional posters, which they will provide, at the screening, or something equally benign - in fact when I was organising such things we had people offer to pay for the posters when they missed out).
Madman has been expanding at an enormous rate since its foundation and it would be absolutely blind for anyone to say they are not profitable. Of course, they are a monopoly distributor to a niche market - but at the same time having their intellectual property "pirated" in this way hasn't hurt them one bit, because they've embraced it and found a way to use it to its full potential. And what better way to do your market research than to let your customers do it for you ... for free?/pP
What if my email provider is outside the US, and therefore the jurisdiction of this law?
Point is, they can't catch em all - it's like trying to plug every hole in a sieve one by one.
HSBC in Australia and SE Asia (and, it seems, with a bit of Googling, elsewhere in the world) issue with online banking accounts a device that sits on your keyring that generates a 6 digit number when the button on it is pressed, and displays that on a small screen. The number is different every time.
When you log in or do any transaction, you are required to enter this number (along with any other credentials which are appropriate). The bank records the serial number of the dongle they gave you, and I would assume that there is some secret mathematical algorithm that allows them, knowing the serial number and the time, to calculate what number your device will display.
If you make 3 mistakes in a row with the 6 digit code, your internet banking account is automatically locked down, and you have to contact them to unlock it.
Now, that's a very simple trick and I can't see how a hacker / phisher would get around it. Sure they can sniff the code when I log in, but 30 seconds later it will be useless. Short of mugging me for the device on my keys (after having phished my regular login/password), they can't get in to my account. Even if I leave a session logged in and walk away, and someone else sits down at the terminal, they can look at my balance and transaction history, but can't make any transactions.
Having used the device for a year I have to say it is remarkably convenient, and it seems immune to most of the attacks described here, and doesn't have the convenience drawbacks of one-time PIN cards. Why is HSBC still the only bank doing this?
More info on the device: http://om.hsbc.com.au/osd/
Unfortunately it's a prisoners' dilemma, because once I've told you the method, it's easy for you to claim that was what you were going to do anyway, and I have no way of proving otherwise.
Similarly, if you tell me your method first then it's easy for me to claim _that_ as what I was going to tell you. Whoever volunteers the information first risks having their idea claimed by the other person.
So this test would never happen in practice (about anything you might seriously want to patent anyway), and thus we need different measures of obviousness (new word?)...
Although I agree that a lot of things that are not obvious can be described in one sentence, once you know what they are. Gravity is a good example - it took thousands of years for someone to write down a theory, but that theory is one sentence long.
It's a sailboat.
Bullshit.
Convincing.
So that's why it makes me reboot each time I move the mouse ....
Furthermore, the "authenticated" tick of approval will lull the clueless into a false sense of security. "What do you mean it was a fake - it said it was authenticated!" ... there's a great danger in telling that someone who doesn't have a full understanding of what it means and how the system works (and people won't).
This makes it not very useful IMHO since clueless users are the ones who need most protection. None of the users for whom the sentence "You just check the signature against the key in the DNS system" makes instant sense are likely fall for a phish from a false domain anyway.
Fool! Haven't you ever played C&C Generals?! It is how many hackers you have, especially when the enemy take out your supply trucks. And if you put them in an Internet Center, that's even better.
What if I live in Australia - is it possible to message a US short code like an international number? (ie. if I SMS +146645? something tells me that wouldn't work...)
Admittedly, it would be much less useful without the business and address searches ... but the definitions and calculator would still be handy...it would be nice if they'd provide a way for international users to play too ;p
What's 4gb? A day of downloading on ADSL? Assuming you're going to need _all_ of those again... but chances are you won't need 90% of them since by the time you need to install that software again new versions will be out which you'd have downloaded again anyway...
You couldn't resist, could you...
What else would it be dedicated to? Come on, let's be reasonable and face the facts - there's close to zero probability that there'd be anything in there you couldn't just download again. Of course, I'm not saying they _shouldn't_ have patched it, but it's hardly a vulnerability worth getting all excited about.
Fair call - why not report it as a bug? I've reported a few things that since got fixed or at least added to the to-do list, so they really do listen ;p
am i the only one that notices that 744 maps to rwx--r--r ? all rights to the owner, read-rights for everyone... It should be rwxr--r--, and anyway, the only right the RIAA really wants is x, the right to execute everyone downloading their music.
Cary ... is that you?
You do realise the tags are being put in their schoolbags, on their clothes, nametags, etc? It's not like they're being injected under the skin. How old would you child have to be to take apart the lining of their bag and rip the tag out, or to leave the nametag somewhere, if they really wanted?
No, the i is to make the protocol more marketable and appealing to Mac users ;p
*ducks*
Aaah, my bad. (But hey... reading the comment before replying - what next, reading the article? ;p). I agree. Hiding the taskbar is stupid. Then, whenever you move to the bottom of a maximised window (I can't think of why you'd do this offhand, but I found I did, a lot, when I tried out the whole taskbar hiding thing), it brings up the taskbar ... stupid.
You are aware you can customize the hiding - ie. force some icons to always be visible, and others to always be hidden. So just set the ones you frequently use to be always visible. You can't tell me you need _all_ of the icons in that tray, like Intellipoint (or Logitech equivalent), your video card drivers' resolution selector, Apache monitor, etc. more often than once in a blue moon?
Being able to hide the icons in that tray that you don't frequently use is the best thing since sliced bread.
This is unlikely to be a problem for most of the readers here....
Actually - it happened in this order. Test email sent to Hotmail, did not arrive. Story submitted to Slashdot. Email arrived in Hotmail account several hours later (after other emails I sent from my other accounts _after_ the one from gmail - which arrived almost instantly). I've read several reports of Hotmail both bouncing and vanishing Gmail email - I'm sure if you hunt around you can find even more. It may be that they are changing their behaviour as they realise it'd going to do them more harm then good.
As for the Yahoo one, that is definitely true.
Indeed, and I also noticed that when I sent someone on a yahoo account a gmail invite, it was automatically put in their "Bulk Mail" folder ;p