To my knowledge, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. Since there is no way to ever prove WHO clicked or opened the so called agreement, how can such an "agreement" or "contract" be enforced by law? Just tell your 12 year old kid or neighbor's kid "please click here".
It seems all such "contracts" are null and void. To have a valid contract, even between adults, is it not neccessary to clearly and unabiguously identify the participants? Do they not have to certify that they were not coerced, but entered into the agreement freely and knowingly? Is this not traditionally done by a written signature by BOTH of the agreeing parties? Is it not common to even require many contracts to be NOTARIZED?
I think that all such "contracts" or "agreements" are not worth the bits they are encoded in. How can a court ever enforce such a thing if it cannot be ascertertained who the parties are who are supposedly agreeing to all the legal mumbo jumbo in these so called EULA's?
Some systems do not allow any more tries at logging in after a few unsuccessful attempts. After an hour or so, the systems resets and gives the user another chance to try to get in. If that also fails, the user must call the system admin. This process goes a long way toward thwarting multiple access atempts.
None of this helps of course if the user's system is breached and some sort of keyboard sniffer is active.
XP is more fickle when it comes to hardware it seems. After about 6 months the system that I bought new with XP pro installed crashed with a BSOD and would never boot again, no matter what I tried. I figured at first that the hardware had gone sour, but it was not so. I reformatted the HD using a DOS boot floppy specially made for such service and then installed Win2K with SP4. The machine has been running fine for almost a year, although it does lock up now and then, but I have never had a BSOD with it. Win2K appears to be a pretty good system for my business apps.
I also have a Mac Titanium laptop and a 4 year old iMac running OSX and neither of them has has ever had to have a forced re-boot, although I do shut them down when I don't use them for a day or two. The Ti Mac is a great machine for photos and video; much better than the Win2k box. The old iMac has been upgraded with a 120G HD and an added 250M of RAM and is connected to the stereo as our music server.
In order for Apple or any other online music service to make a better profit margin, they'd have to negotiate a much more favorable deal with the greedy recording companies who are used to charging outrageous prices for their mostly mediocre wares. Right now, no legal online music service is making all that much moolah, but it is mostly going to the RIAA crowd and their lawyers and to buy legislators.
Perhaps in the long run, when the majority of the music is sold online and by independent artists, iTunes and the other online music services will become more profitable. For the foreseeable future, it appears to me that Apple would be bettter off getting as many iPods as possible into the hands of consumers and making a handsome profit from each one. This would also establish the iPod as the consumer standard for portable music players.
For any platform, whether music player or computer, the more software there is to choose from, the more that platform will be used.
Yes, but how much of that $10300 is profit after the record companies get the lion's share and Apple pays for all the ongoing and development expenses?
iPod profits are much higher, after all they just dropped the price a whole $100 for it. I am sure even so they're not selling iPods at cost in order to make more money from iTunes. My iPod contains about 15G of music, but only about 650Meg are from the iTunes store. The rest are mp3 files from my CD collection, many of them encoded before iTunes was released.
If it really is only about "moolah" then Apple should be glad over what Real did. The more music there is available that plays on their iPod, the more of them the'll sell. I understand that their profit margin on iPods is huge, whereas the music companies get the lion's share of the money Apple collects from iTunes sales and Apple doesn't really make all that much on the iTunes service.
So with Apple being upset over the Harmony thing, there must be other issues they are worried about.
Click licenses are pure BS and NOT enforceable in any court of law.The simple reason is that a minor child can click a mouse and contracts are not enforceable on a minor. So if you want to get around such a stupid click agreemet, have your 8 year old click the mouse.
... as long as you don't take any of it too seriously...
I think you missed that part of the article.
However, I think that Mac users DO like their computers more than their PC counterparts, if for no other reason than that Macs have no viruses, worms and/or spy/adware to incessantly plague them, nor do they have to spend much time on patching or periodically re-installing the entire OS. This allows Mac users to get more of the work done they got the computer for rather than spending a lot of time keeping the machine working properly.
If however you LIKE computers and enjoy poking around in their innards by installing various hardware and software, then a PC box is much more fun than a Mac.
The security of a computer is not only dependent on the OS itself, but also to a large extent to the way the user accounts are set up and managed.
Every OSX computer I set up gets at least three accounts -- one the "Master" user with full access, 2)the normal standard user with NO admin privs and 3)a limited (no password) user named "visitor" who is only allowed to use e-mail, the web and text edit.
This in addition to an external firewall/NAT box makes it a quite secure system, certainly much better than any flavor of Windows. Normal users cannot mess with the system deliberately or by downloading malware. At worst, they can trash their own accounts.
All current flavors of Windows are INHERENTLY less secure than *NIX flavored systems, not matter what the statistics may indicate. If MS would like to make their OS as safe as the *NIX based computers are in actual practice, they could do so, but only at the expense of breaking most programs currently in use. The need of the registry in Windows is one source of much insecurity and instability for example.
I basically agree with you except I'm not sure what your definition of "obsolete" is. It seems that each medium has strengths and weaknesses. "Obsolete" to me has the idea of no longer being useful, and in that definition, none of the older media really fit. There are times when I want to read a book, but there also times when I listen to a recording of someone reading that book. There are times when I will want to listen to an old time radio drama and there are times when I want to see the newest video with all the fancy effects and action.
Most stuff on the shelves of Walmart doesn't interest me and neither does most of the stuff on the media, but I do like the fact that that there is such a wide variety that COULD be had if I wanted it.
When TV first came on the scene, it was predicted that radio would go away. When the VCR was invented some thought that cinemas would vanish. Neither has happened. Even oldfashioned books, magazines and newspapers are still very much alive.
Just because a new way of distributing information and entertainment appears, doesn't mean the total demise of the previous technologies.
The Internet is just another addition to the distribution methods than lends itself for certain unique purposes and the needs of certain people. The Internet and the underlying technologies of computers allows individuals and groups of limited means to express themselves and make their message heard by a large audience.
This ability of the smallest voice to be heard may be the thing that worries those who want to control the distribution of information. It's that small voice, that may have the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes on, that the powers that be would like to silence.
What about the iPod owner who downloaded a lot of music from the iTunes store and would like to continue doing this? Will the Dell unit play that music? Will the user first have to burn all the stuff from iTunes to CDs and then re-import them to the Dell player? I suspect that not too many iPod owners who already have iTunes music will go to all that trouble for a clearly inferior device such as the Dell DJ.
I guess your main point about encryption is that everyone should routinely use it so that it becomes more difficult for the government to outlaw all encrypted communication or force someone suspected of crime to give the police the password. In the UK I believe a suspect must give the keyword or face contempt of court punishment.
When it comes to freedom robbing legislation, there is not neccessarily safety in numbers. Look at what Congress has done with copyright for example. However, universal encryption would certainly impede wide net fishing expeditions by the law enforcement folks, and that in itself is a good thing.
If the encryption software were as transparent at least as the HTPPS web communications, then more encryption would likely happen. Any secure and easy to use encryption system would still not be used by as many poeple as you might like however. After all, postcards are still a very poular form of paper mail.
I can't understand why anyone should get upset by someone who states "I've got nothing to hide". Why should aunt Emily care if someone reads the cheesecake recipe she just sent to her niece? If I DID have a deep dark secret that I wanted to communicate to some specific person, I'd send them an encrypted file as an attachment. For most people, most of the time, encryption is an extra step usually not warranted by the contents of the message.
I wonder if MS even COULD make any of their Windows flavors - new or old - secure. To begin with, It seems that in order to do that they would have to set up a permissions system on the registry which is accessed by most programs and also disallow installing of any file containing executeable code in any location, unless the user is an administrator. However, if they did this, much, if not most already installed sofware may no longer run. That would be a quick way for MS to ensure the loss of many users and thus big $$$ loss.
I got a program once on a CD for my Mac, which was obviously a quick and dirty PC port. This program would not even start up if it was run under an ordinary user account on my OSX Mac. It always wanted to have admin priv. which I did not give. I have no idea to what forbidden part of my system it wanted access. I have NEVER been able to install *any* software on my Mac without supplying an admin password unless I installed it into my own private applications folder. If the software STILL asks for an admin password even though I tried to install it into my OWN home folder, then I did not install it at all.
Sometimes I do wish to surf to unknown places and I set up a special restricted account for just that. Then, if something nasty DID get through the normal protections, it could not access any other parts of my computer and transmit personal info. since that account contains nothing I care about. The worst that could happen is for the malware to hose that account.
Most of my browsing is now done with Safari, but I still use the old MSIE occasionally and I did get to some site once where a request for an admin password came up unexpectedly -- which I did not give it.
The bottom line is that the OS should disallow any installation or running of code from an unauthorized location unless the user is asked for permission and has the ability to give such permissions.
It seems that anyone who'd have to walk around to 2000 or more PC would have them behind firewall(s)/gateway(s) and would only need to change the addresses on those.
Every program *I* have ever installed on OSX DID require a password because I do not run under admin priv. I am not an expert on OSX and it might be conceivable that a program could be installed without user input. OSX lets each user choose what should take place when a CD or DVD is inserted. I have mine set to "Ask me each time what to do". So if a CD purporting to be an audio CD is inserted I would tell it to open iTunes. If iTunes then could not deal with it I'd eject it and add it to my pile of "coasters". AAW
If there us a useless EULA to be approved, there has to be an installer to display that and ask whether I agree to it or nor. Every installer I have ever used, requires a password. If the program could be installed by simply copying to the users space on the HD, that can only happen if the user chooses to copy it. In any case, it is not easy, if not impossible for a reasonably astute user to let anything get onto the HD without some user action.
If you do not have admin privileges on an OSX Mac, then no software can install, whether classic or otherwise. Also, when an audio CD is inserted the user can be prompted whether to allow an install. That install STILL will not happen if the user is not admin. So, all Mac users should make a non-admin account for day today use and another admin account for installing software and other admin tasks. AAW
I don't give a darn whether or not my iPod can play WMA files. A single click and $0.99 is all it takes to get the music I and millions of others want to listen to. No copy protection or laws have ever worked to keep people from getting what they want. Using the shift key to prevent the anti-copy software from starting up violates the DMCA.
If content providers want to prevent illegal copying, the best approach is to make it MUCH easier and not too expensive to obtain their wares.
Since hard drives are quite cheap these days, I keep an external drive updated with a clean bootable OS and all the normal apps I use all the time. The users folders get archived in optical discs for each user. If the system gets messed up by an error or a hack, I can wipe the internal HD and copy back the clean OS with little trouble. After that the user data gets put back also. AAW
If they could get away with this, not only could you not sell or give your music to anyone, but only one person, whose fingerprint is registered could play it. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would buy such a device. Of course they could first buy a sufficient number of polititians that would make it unlawful to manufacture any player device without this faboulous "security feature" AAW
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To my knowledge, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. Since there is no way to ever prove WHO clicked or opened the so called agreement, how can such an "agreement" or "contract" be enforced by law? Just tell your 12 year old kid or neighbor's kid "please click here".
It seems all such "contracts" are null and void. To have a valid contract, even between adults, is it not neccessary to clearly and unabiguously identify the participants? Do they not have to certify that they were not coerced, but entered into the agreement freely and knowingly? Is this not traditionally done by a written signature by BOTH of the agreeing parties? Is it not common to even require many contracts to be NOTARIZED?
I think that all such "contracts" or "agreements" are not worth the bits they are encoded in. How can a court ever enforce such a thing if it cannot be ascertertained who the parties are who are supposedly agreeing to all the legal mumbo jumbo in these so called EULA's?
Some systems do not allow any more tries at logging in after a few unsuccessful attempts. After an hour or so, the systems resets and gives the user another chance to try to get in. If that also fails, the user must call the system admin. This process goes a long way toward thwarting multiple access atempts.
None of this helps of course if the user's system is breached and some sort of keyboard sniffer is active.
XP is more fickle when it comes to hardware it seems. After about 6 months the system that I bought new with XP pro installed crashed with a BSOD and would never boot again, no matter what I tried. I figured at first that the hardware had gone sour, but it was not so. I reformatted the HD using a DOS boot floppy specially made for such service and then installed Win2K with SP4. The machine has been running fine for almost a year, although it does lock up now and then, but I have never had a BSOD with it. Win2K appears to be a pretty good system for my business apps.
I also have a Mac Titanium laptop and a 4 year old iMac running OSX and neither of them has has ever had to have a forced re-boot, although I do shut them down when I don't use them for a day or two. The Ti Mac is a great machine for photos and video; much better than the Win2k box. The old iMac has been upgraded with a 120G HD and an added 250M of RAM and is connected to the stereo as our music server.
many dogs are the death of any fox and many lawyers are the death of any business.
In order for Apple or any other online music service to make a better profit margin, they'd have to negotiate a much more favorable deal with the greedy recording companies who are used to charging outrageous prices for their mostly mediocre wares. Right now, no legal online music service is making all that much moolah, but it is mostly going to the RIAA crowd and their lawyers and to buy legislators.
Perhaps in the long run, when the majority of the music is sold online and by independent artists, iTunes and the other online music services will become more profitable. For the foreseeable future, it appears to me that Apple would be bettter off getting as many iPods as possible into the hands of consumers and making a handsome profit from each one. This would also establish the iPod as the consumer standard for portable music players.
For any platform, whether music player or computer, the more software there is to choose from, the more that platform will be used.
Yes, but how much of that $10300 is profit after the record companies get the lion's share and Apple pays for all the ongoing and development expenses?
iPod profits are much higher, after all they just dropped the price a whole $100 for it. I am sure even so they're not selling iPods at cost in order to make more money from iTunes. My iPod contains about 15G of music, but only about 650Meg are from the iTunes store. The rest are mp3 files from my CD collection, many of them encoded before iTunes was released.
If it really is only about "moolah" then Apple should be glad over what Real did. The more music there is available that plays on their iPod, the more of them the'll sell. I understand that their profit margin on iPods is huge, whereas the music companies get the lion's share of the money Apple collects from iTunes sales and Apple doesn't really make all that much on the iTunes service.
So with Apple being upset over the Harmony thing, there must be other issues they are worried about.
Click licenses are pure BS and NOT enforceable in any court of law.The simple reason is that a minor child can click a mouse and contracts are not enforceable on a minor. So if you want to get around such a stupid click agreemet, have your 8 year old click the mouse.
... as long as you don't take any of it too seriously...
I think you missed that part of the article.
However, I think that Mac users DO like their computers more than their PC counterparts, if for no other reason than that Macs have no viruses, worms and/or spy/adware to incessantly plague them, nor do they have to spend much time on patching or periodically re-installing the entire OS. This allows Mac users to get more of the work done they got the computer for rather than spending a lot of time keeping the machine working properly.
If however you LIKE computers and enjoy poking around in their innards by installing various hardware and software, then a PC box is much more fun than a Mac.
The security of a computer is not only dependent on the OS itself, but also to a large extent to the way the user accounts are set up and managed.
Every OSX computer I set up gets at least three accounts -- one the "Master" user with full access, 2)the normal standard user with NO admin privs and 3)a limited (no password) user named "visitor" who is only allowed to use e-mail, the web and text edit.
This in addition to an external firewall/NAT box makes it a quite secure system, certainly much better than any flavor of Windows. Normal users cannot mess with the system deliberately or by downloading malware. At worst, they can trash their own accounts.
All current flavors of Windows are INHERENTLY less secure than *NIX flavored systems, not matter what the statistics may indicate. If MS would like to make their OS as safe as the *NIX based computers are in actual practice, they could do so, but only at the expense of breaking most programs currently in use. The need of the registry in Windows is one source of much insecurity and instability for example.
I basically agree with you except I'm not sure what your definition of "obsolete" is. It seems that each medium has strengths and weaknesses. "Obsolete" to me has the idea of no longer being useful, and in that definition, none of the older media really fit. There are times when I want to read a book, but there also times when I listen to a recording of someone reading that book. There are times when I will want to listen to an old time radio drama and there are times when I want to see the newest video with all the fancy effects and action.
Most stuff on the shelves of Walmart doesn't interest me and neither does most of the stuff on the media, but I do like the fact that that there is such a wide variety that COULD be had if I wanted it.
When TV first came on the scene, it was predicted that radio would go away. When the VCR was invented some thought that cinemas would vanish. Neither has happened. Even oldfashioned books, magazines and newspapers are still very much alive.
Just because a new way of distributing information and entertainment appears, doesn't mean the total demise of the previous technologies.
The Internet is just another addition to the distribution methods than lends itself for certain unique purposes and the needs of certain people. The Internet and the underlying technologies of computers allows individuals and groups of limited means to express themselves and make their message heard by a large audience.
This ability of the smallest voice to be heard may be the thing that worries those who want to control the distribution of information. It's that small voice, that may have the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes on, that the powers that be would like to silence.
What about the iPod owner who downloaded a lot of music from the iTunes store and would like to continue doing this? Will the Dell unit play that music? Will the user first have to burn all the stuff from iTunes to CDs and then re-import them to the Dell player? I suspect that not too many iPod owners who already have iTunes music will go to all that trouble for a clearly inferior device such as the Dell DJ.
I guess your main point about encryption is that everyone should routinely use it so that it becomes more difficult for the government to outlaw all encrypted communication or force someone suspected of crime to give the police the password. In the UK I believe a suspect must give the keyword or face contempt of court punishment.
When it comes to freedom robbing legislation, there is not neccessarily safety in numbers. Look at what Congress has done with copyright for example. However, universal encryption would certainly impede wide net fishing expeditions by the law enforcement folks, and that in itself is a good thing.
If the encryption software were as transparent at least as the HTPPS web communications, then more encryption would likely happen. Any secure and easy to use encryption system would still not be used by as many poeple as you might like however. After all, postcards are still a very poular form of paper mail.
I can't understand why anyone should get upset by someone who states "I've got nothing to hide". Why should aunt Emily care if someone reads the cheesecake recipe she just sent to her niece?
If I DID have a deep dark secret that I wanted to communicate to some specific person, I'd send them an encrypted file as an attachment. For most people, most of the time, encryption is an extra step usually not warranted by the contents of the message.
I wonder if MS even COULD make any of their Windows flavors - new or old - secure. To begin with, It seems that in order to do that they would have to set up a permissions system on the registry which is accessed by most programs and also disallow installing of any file containing executeable code in any location, unless the user is an administrator. However, if they did this, much, if not most already installed sofware may no longer run. That would be a quick way for MS to ensure the loss of many users and thus big $$$ loss.
I got a program once on a CD for my Mac, which was obviously a quick and dirty PC port. This program would not even start up if it was run under an ordinary user account on my OSX Mac. It always wanted to have admin priv. which I did not give. I have no idea to what forbidden part of my system it wanted access. I have NEVER been able to install *any* software on my Mac without supplying an admin password unless I installed it into my own private applications folder. If the software STILL asks for an admin password even though I tried to install it into my OWN home folder, then I did not install it at all.
Sometimes I do wish to surf to unknown places and I set up a special restricted account for just that. Then, if something nasty DID get through the normal protections, it could not access any other parts of my computer and transmit personal info. since that account contains nothing I care about. The worst that could happen is for the malware to hose that account.
Most of my browsing is now done with Safari, but I still use the old MSIE occasionally and I did get to some site once where a request for an admin password came up unexpectedly -- which I did not give it.
The bottom line is that the OS should disallow any installation or running of code from an unauthorized location unless the user is asked for permission and has the ability to give such permissions.
It seems that anyone who'd have to walk around to 2000 or more PC would have them behind firewall(s)/gateway(s) and would only need to change the addresses on those.
Every program *I* have ever installed on OSX DID require a password because I do not run under admin priv. I am not an expert on OSX and it might be conceivable that a program could be installed without user input. OSX lets each user choose what should take place when a CD or DVD is inserted. I have mine set to "Ask me each time what to do". So if a CD purporting to be an audio CD is inserted I would tell it to open iTunes. If iTunes then could not deal with it I'd eject it and add it to my pile of "coasters".
AAW
If there us a useless EULA to be approved, there has to be an installer to display that and ask whether I agree to it or nor. Every installer I have ever used, requires a password. If the program could be installed by simply copying to the users space on the HD, that can only happen if the user chooses to copy it. In any case, it is not easy, if not impossible for a reasonably astute user to let anything get onto the HD without some user action.
If you do not have admin privileges on an OSX Mac, then no software can install, whether classic or otherwise. Also, when an audio CD is inserted the user can be prompted whether to allow an install. That install STILL will not happen if the user is not admin. So, all Mac users should make a non-admin account for day today use and another admin account for installing software and other admin tasks.
AAW
Hollywood stuffs huge quantities of $$$ into the pockets of Democrats, who then pass laws like the DMCA
Actually, the shift key on a Windows box is also a DMCA violator!
I don't give a darn whether or not my iPod can play WMA files. A single click and $0.99 is all it takes to get the music I and millions of others want to listen to. No copy protection or laws have ever worked to keep people from getting what they want. Using the shift key to prevent the anti-copy software from starting up violates the DMCA.
If content providers want to prevent illegal copying, the best approach is to make it MUCH easier and not too expensive to obtain their wares.
Since hard drives are quite cheap these days, I keep an external drive updated with a clean bootable OS and all the normal apps I use all the time. The users folders get archived in optical discs for each user.
If the system gets messed up by an error or a hack, I can wipe the internal HD and copy back the clean OS with little trouble. After that the user data gets put back also.
AAW
If they could get away with this, not only could you not sell or give your music to anyone, but only one person, whose fingerprint is registered could play it. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would buy such a device. Of course they could first buy a sufficient number of polititians that would make it unlawful to manufacture any player device without this faboulous "security feature"
AAW