Whether it's email spam or loudspeaker trucks, it's the same problem.
Yes, indeed. However, you've got to pay for fuel, drivers, trucks, + taxes for all of them, operating the loudspeaker trucks. The spam zombies on the other hand are free as in beer, and the IRS doesn't get its lion's share either.
The people downloading illegally never wanted to be legit in the first place..otherwise they would have gone to a store....
There used to be very successful stores with acceptable pricing like AllOfMp3. The "legal" stores a la iTunes are just way too pricey. Had they adapted their prices to, say, 10ct per non-DRMed song @192kbps, they could have made a stand against freeloaders... and with increased sales, they would have made up much of the lower price in profits. With 99ct/song or $10 to $20 per physical CD, forget it: that's for suckers who have way too much money to burn (or credit cards to max out despite the crunch). Everyone else needs something much more realistic. Again, AllOfMp3 had it just about right, price-wise.
Computing all digits of 42 took a lot longer than that. Just imagine how long the reverse question would take: "What was the question whose answer is 3.141562...?"
Anyone but me get the Willies seeing "Microsoft" and "BitTorrent" used together in such a fashion?
Perhaps Microsoft are planning for the future or just feeling the recession: since their OS + patches keep getting bigger and bigger all the time, they may consider distributing them via BitTorrent to save bandwidth?
A propos diffs: it's interesting to note that PayPal also blocked the Wayback Machine via robots.txt, so it's not possible to go back and do a diff on their TOS, to see how they evolved over time.
Not in my case. I constantly (as in "every 70 seconds") download any newly arrived mail from my ISP to my own machine and then delete the copy on the server as soon as I have a local one.
IMHO, you're putting an unnecessary strain on the IMAP server of your ISP (70 seconds polling is really aggressive)... and it doesn't buy you any more confidentiality either. A "deleted" file on the IMAP server is merely unlinked, i.e. it is still present in the free blocks of said server, and can be reconstructed. Depending on the load of that server, deleted mails can remain readable many days, of not weeks and months after you've thought you deleted them.
Run your own mail server at home: it provides you with a lot more control and not just w.r.t. confidentiality. You can also fine-tune the anti-spam settings to your heart's desires. You may want to get your own domain and a static IP address though, but it's worth every penny.
I think an education-minded billionaire would be very helpful in providing some free textbook and other materials to go along with this fantastic trend of free online education.
Since Amazon doesn't want to sell the Kindle in the EU (e.g. unavailable in Germany), publishing ONLY on Kindle would unnecessarily restrict the exposure of your book.
People keep saying 'illegal downloading'
Please, someone show me where it says that downloading is illegal.
IANAL, but if it is not illegal to download copyrighted material without the rights holder's consent in your country, it soon will be... just like in many other jurisdictions in the EU. It is as if a master plan is being implemented in national laws all over the world (ACTA anyone?). Give or take a few years, and it will be nearly universally illegal.
The original concept of the internet was based on a flawed model that the network could be trusted to deliver packets from point A to point B using the same logic throughout; It was assumed that the network would be managed by a central authority.
As a WAN admin with 20+ years of experience in NOCs, I beg to disagree. The Internet design is based on the assumption that network pipes and routers (and whole Autonomous Systems (AS)) will fail, and that traffic will route automatically around disruptions. As such, it is extremely robust and resilient. Of course, that applies to backbones, which are usually meshed. There is NO central authority controlling the Internet, there are only peering ASes that route traffic back and forth.
The problem you're referring to has nothing to do with the Internet itself, but with telco monopolies owning the last mile to your home. Of course, this can be annoying, but that's not the Internet's fault. As long as you have only one uplink, you'll be at the mercy of your upstream provider. This has to do with you being at the edge of the network. It would be the same for an AS that would be foolish enough to peer with only one AS: no AS in their right mind does this. Acquire more links (e.g. to other upstream providers), and you'll realize that there is no central authority controlling the Net, only peers talking to each others. There's no need to change the design of the Internet protocols as they stand.
Yes, I am aware of the open-source arguments, and yes, I have contributed to OS projects. But I have also taken time off work to try to create something new. I had to forego three months' salary, to do it. I simply could not afford to give it away for free, because, strangely enough, I couldn't find a landlord who'd give me her house for free, or a supermarket that would donate food to the cause.
That's indeed a very good argument. As a published book author, I know how much time it takes to write, review and polish the final version, time you -- of course -- don't get paid for. My personal preference would be for copyright to exist for a reasonable period of time, like, say, 5 or 10 years at most. After that, the copyrighted works have already been out of print, forgotten, or, if you're very lucky, have become part of the public culture: in all cases, they should enter the public domain by then.
However, granting copyright for N years would mean repeating history. N will start low, but will be extended again and again, until it reached perpetuity. That's why as content creator, I'd still reluctantly prefer that copyright be abolished altogether, or as a compromise, only exist to deter competing commercial entrepreneurs from leeching. Some law in the spirit of CC-BY-NC (or CC-BY-NC-ND) would seem fair. Harshly punishing the little file sharer as if she were a dishonest competitor hell-bent on destroying your only way of income, seems way out of proportion. There has to be a better way.
You're kidding me, 10-14% is a good royalty rate for an author?! That's disgusting.
No, that's fairly typical for the publishing industry. At Addison-Wesley where I published two books within 10 years, the royalties were consistently 12% up to 2000 sold books, 13% for 2000-3000 and 14% for 3000+ and above.
Of course the argument applies that the adversary develops it, too. Yet what'll happen is that Russians steal it like Soviets did with the atomic spies, and others such as China copy it otherwise, and Britain and France will simply purchase it.
And what if the Russians or Chinese developed their own missile shields, and the US didn't? Me thinks it would give them first strike capability too. Of course, the US could then steal that tech from them just as well, but that's not the point.
You can't escape the never ending competition between shield and sword. You can always refuse to compete for some time, but your adversaries won't, and that would give them a strategic advantage, therefore mitigating the equilibrium, and probably even inducing new strategic wars.
Perfectly natural activities (like file copying) are only illegal, because some guys in a building called Parliament have decided that it should be that way. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is the copyright law that criminalizes a large portion of the Internet population? How about reforming that law, or at least adapting it to the 21st century? Like, you know, legalizing private non-commercial copying, as the various Pirate Parties in other countries are already asking for?
If you know the police are on to you stopping illegal activities and destroying anything incriminating is the only option. Any other option results in jail time.
Quite true... in theory. In real life, extremely competent IT experts are a scarce resource within police forces worldwide, and only used against a couple of high-value targets, if at all. In most cases, you'd face regular investigators, not very tech-savvy, who are usually no match against your average security-aware nerd. No match at least in the IT-Tech sector, that is, since nerds make other fatal mistakes in the social realm that those non-IT investigators know all too well. So it's always a calculated risk in this cat-and-mouse game.
if the police got lucky and provided the right key, they could theoretically convert that random data into child porn...
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but are you really sure? IMHO, it is theoretically only possible for a single block of data that is no longer than a key (i.e. not longer than 128 or 256 bits that are common in symmetric crypto algorithms). In this case, police could craft a key that would decode that random block to a chunk of child porn they have on their machines. But 128 or even 256 bits of CP isn't very convincing.
For everything longer than key length, I don't see how it could be possible, at least not with a fixed set of well-known symmetric crypto algorithms. Or is it?
Only partially true. In a block dump of the HDD, the hidden volume appears as (not necessarily contiguous) blocks of data with perfect entropy. They may not know what's in them, but it's by no means invisible.
Let individual countries have control over what domains are allowable.
And what about multinational companies? International treaty organizations? Free software projects (should it be linux.org, or linux.org.us, or linux.org.fi?) or other web sites that have no desire to be associated with any particular country, but consider themselves Citizens of the Net? IMHO, true gTLDs are just as legitimate as ccTLDs.
For what it's worth, Brunei, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Western Sahara, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Gambia, Djibouti, Lebanon, Kosovo.
Western Sahara is not an independent country and as such doesn't have an own internet connection. It is being administered (or owned, depending on the perspective) by Morocco, which does provide the only internet connection through their national telecom IAM. And yes, Morocco does implement internet censorship sporadically, ironically mostly to block a couple of pro POLISARIO sites... though not every effectively. Should you visit Laayoune, feel free to test the (rather slow) connection there.
Russia doesn't censor what you write, it just censors the people who write. After the fact. With a gun.
The real joke went like this (back to Soviet Russia times). A Russian and an American meet at an international conference in Switzerland. The Russian boasts: "In the Soviet Union, we have freedom of expression." The American replies: "In the West, we have freedom after we've expressed ourselves."
Well... how long we'll enjoy that kind of freedom in the West with increasingly draconian copyright, libel/slander etc... laws, I prefer not to elaborate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, indeed. However, you've got to pay for fuel, drivers, trucks, + taxes for all of them, operating the loudspeaker trucks. The spam zombies on the other hand are free as in beer, and the IRS doesn't get its lion's share either.
TPB is up and running perfectly here (Germany).
There used to be very successful stores with acceptable pricing like AllOfMp3. The "legal" stores a la iTunes are just way too pricey. Had they adapted their prices to, say, 10ct per non-DRMed song @192kbps, they could have made a stand against freeloaders... and with increased sales, they would have made up much of the lower price in profits. With 99ct/song or $10 to $20 per physical CD, forget it: that's for suckers who have way too much money to burn (or credit cards to max out despite the crunch). Everyone else needs something much more realistic. Again, AllOfMp3 had it just about right, price-wise.
Computing all digits of 42 took a lot longer than that. Just imagine how long the reverse question would take: "What was the question whose answer is 3.141562...?"
Perhaps Microsoft are planning for the future or just feeling the recession: since their OS + patches keep getting bigger and bigger all the time, they may consider distributing them via BitTorrent to save bandwidth?
A propos diffs: it's interesting to note that PayPal also blocked the Wayback Machine via robots.txt, so it's not possible to go back and do a diff on their TOS, to see how they evolved over time.
Yes, PayPal sucks big time, but Google Checkout is not available for merchants in many parts of the world. That's why.
IMHO, you're putting an unnecessary strain on the IMAP server of your ISP (70 seconds polling is really aggressive)... and it doesn't buy you any more confidentiality either. A "deleted" file on the IMAP server is merely unlinked, i.e. it is still present in the free blocks of said server, and can be reconstructed. Depending on the load of that server, deleted mails can remain readable many days, of not weeks and months after you've thought you deleted them.
Run your own mail server at home: it provides you with a lot more control and not just w.r.t. confidentiality. You can also fine-tune the anti-spam settings to your heart's desires. You may want to get your own domain and a static IP address though, but it's worth every penny.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts: Bill Gates would only offer free online education in Silverlight format.
Since Amazon doesn't want to sell the Kindle in the EU (e.g. unavailable in Germany), publishing ONLY on Kindle would unnecessarily restrict the exposure of your book.
IANAL, but if it is not illegal to download copyrighted material without the rights holder's consent in your country, it soon will be... just like in many other jurisdictions in the EU. It is as if a master plan is being implemented in national laws all over the world (ACTA anyone?). Give or take a few years, and it will be nearly universally illegal.
As a WAN admin with 20+ years of experience in NOCs, I beg to disagree. The Internet design is based on the assumption that network pipes and routers (and whole Autonomous Systems (AS)) will fail, and that traffic will route automatically around disruptions. As such, it is extremely robust and resilient. Of course, that applies to backbones, which are usually meshed. There is NO central authority controlling the Internet, there are only peering ASes that route traffic back and forth.
The problem you're referring to has nothing to do with the Internet itself, but with telco monopolies owning the last mile to your home. Of course, this can be annoying, but that's not the Internet's fault. As long as you have only one uplink, you'll be at the mercy of your upstream provider. This has to do with you being at the edge of the network. It would be the same for an AS that would be foolish enough to peer with only one AS: no AS in their right mind does this. Acquire more links (e.g. to other upstream providers), and you'll realize that there is no central authority controlling the Net, only peers talking to each others. There's no need to change the design of the Internet protocols as they stand.
That's indeed a very good argument. As a published book author, I know how much time it takes to write, review and polish the final version, time you -- of course -- don't get paid for. My personal preference would be for copyright to exist for a reasonable period of time, like, say, 5 or 10 years at most. After that, the copyrighted works have already been out of print, forgotten, or, if you're very lucky, have become part of the public culture: in all cases, they should enter the public domain by then.
However, granting copyright for N years would mean repeating history. N will start low, but will be extended again and again, until it reached perpetuity. That's why as content creator, I'd still reluctantly prefer that copyright be abolished altogether, or as a compromise, only exist to deter competing commercial entrepreneurs from leeching. Some law in the spirit of CC-BY-NC (or CC-BY-NC-ND) would seem fair. Harshly punishing the little file sharer as if she were a dishonest competitor hell-bent on destroying your only way of income, seems way out of proportion. There has to be a better way.
No, that's fairly typical for the publishing industry. At Addison-Wesley where I published two books within 10 years, the royalties were consistently 12% up to 2000 sold books, 13% for 2000-3000 and 14% for 3000+ and above.
And what if the Russians or Chinese developed their own missile shields, and the US didn't? Me thinks it would give them first strike capability too. Of course, the US could then steal that tech from them just as well, but that's not the point.
You can't escape the never ending competition between shield and sword. You can always refuse to compete for some time, but your adversaries won't, and that would give them a strategic advantage, therefore mitigating the equilibrium, and probably even inducing new strategic wars.
and even when it does it doesn't understand them. There, fixed for you.
There's a precedent already: the US government used its leverage in the WTO to strongarm Russia to ban AllOfMp3.
Perfectly natural activities (like file copying) are only illegal, because some guys in a building called Parliament have decided that it should be that way. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is the copyright law that criminalizes a large portion of the Internet population? How about reforming that law, or at least adapting it to the 21st century? Like, you know, legalizing private non-commercial copying, as the various Pirate Parties in other countries are already asking for?
Quite true... in theory. In real life, extremely competent IT experts are a scarce resource within police forces worldwide, and only used against a couple of high-value targets, if at all. In most cases, you'd face regular investigators, not very tech-savvy, who are usually no match against your average security-aware nerd. No match at least in the IT-Tech sector, that is, since nerds make other fatal mistakes in the social realm that those non-IT investigators know all too well. So it's always a calculated risk in this cat-and-mouse game.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but are you really sure? IMHO, it is theoretically only possible for a single block of data that is no longer than a key (i.e. not longer than 128 or 256 bits that are common in symmetric crypto algorithms). In this case, police could craft a key that would decode that random block to a chunk of child porn they have on their machines. But 128 or even 256 bits of CP isn't very convincing.
For everything longer than key length, I don't see how it could be possible, at least not with a fixed set of well-known symmetric crypto algorithms. Or is it?
Only partially true. In a block dump of the HDD, the hidden volume appears as (not necessarily contiguous) blocks of data with perfect entropy. They may not know what's in them, but it's by no means invisible.
And what about multinational companies? International treaty organizations? Free software projects (should it be linux.org, or linux.org.us, or linux.org.fi?) or other web sites that have no desire to be associated with any particular country, but consider themselves Citizens of the Net? IMHO, true gTLDs are just as legitimate as ccTLDs.
Western Sahara is not an independent country and as such doesn't have an own internet connection. It is being administered (or owned, depending on the perspective) by Morocco, which does provide the only internet connection through their national telecom IAM. And yes, Morocco does implement internet censorship sporadically, ironically mostly to block a couple of pro POLISARIO sites... though not every effectively. Should you visit Laayoune, feel free to test the (rather slow) connection there.
Porn is supposed to be more fun when it is forbidden... Why do you think some cultures oppose it so vehemently?
The real joke went like this (back to Soviet Russia times). A Russian and an American meet at an international conference in Switzerland. The Russian boasts: "In the Soviet Union, we have freedom of expression." The American replies: "In the West, we have freedom after we've expressed ourselves."
Well... how long we'll enjoy that kind of freedom in the West with increasingly draconian copyright, libel/slander etc... laws, I prefer not to elaborate.