A lawsuit in and of itself really doesn't mean anything when anyone in the United States who fills out the forms and pays the filing fees can be scheduled to be heard in court.
Absolutely true. But lawsuits (frivolous or not) are not the only possible intimidation tactic that such a powerful distribution cartel like RIAA could use to silence opponents. IMHO, someone who's seriously raised those cartel's ire should be really weary every time they start their car or cross the road. Considering that those people have no scruples whatsoever to ruin a child or a granny's whole life for downloading a few silly files, what would they want to do to those who really upset them and tried to politically and legally threaten their ruthless business model? We're not living in Al Capone's time anymore, but old habits die hard, don't they?
Good luck Ray and please take care! As long as the Evil Empire uses only legal tactics, they've certainly picked the wrong opponent.
The USA, however, have the "disadvantage" that they never had a dictatorship that was universally regarded as completely evil in hindsight. As a consequence, you guys over there have never learned these things the hard way and are (on average) way too trusting towards your government.
Interesting. But are you sure that collective memory w.r.t. past dictatorships still protects from repeating the same mistakes? Just talk to young Germans of the MTV generation (say teens and twens) about the current surveillance laws, and remind them of what Gestapo and Stasi did. Would you get them to take it to the streets and protest? Or would you mostly collect blank glances -- you know: the kind of face you get when someone tells you non-verbally "what the f*ck are your talking about???"
I'm afraid that collective memory is like a vaccine: if it's not refreshed every now and then, it loses its preventive effects, and history tends to repeat itself.
I am sure that the NSA has forensics tools for Linux but I bet the local police sure don't.
As a matter of fact, the german LKAs (which are approximately the equivalent of the FBI, but limited to the local states -- Laender) do have some (very professional) Linux geeks in their computer forensics units...
But the funny thing is: even if they didn't have any in-house Linux expertise and if they couldn't contract some freelancing specialists, it wouldn't matter: as long as the file systems are not encrypted, a sector-by-sector analysis of the hard disks would still reveal the name of informants or any other sensible data just as easily. And if they were encrypted, it's a matter of cryptanalysis and cracking the key management; and that's a task that's immensely more complicated than dealing with an unfamiliar file system layout.
Since we don't fully know what the software does, nor do they allow us to know, isn't it safe to assume it's malicious?
Every binary blob can be potentially malicious, including the games themselves and not only some obscure add-on layer of DRM. And not only in the Windows eco-systeme either (think of proprietary binary drivers for graphic chipsets on Linux, BSD etc...).
Fortunately, reverse-engineering DRM software is still possible (though time consuming), thanks to emulators and virtual machines. What runs on the (virtual) processor can be intercepted, logged, and disassembled. It even works if the software phones home to fetch a decryption key for code-segments.
Actually, a fully disassembled listing of SecuROM and other rootkits may already exist in some circles. Analyzing that for usable vulnerabilities, esp. remote vulnerabilities may also have already been done and may be available to white, gray and black hats alike. You just gotta know where to look.
Imagine a custom font that displays an 'a' as an 'n', a 'b' as an 'o' etc... (rot13). Then, generate a human-readable page that will still look like total gibberish to search engines.
While it may seem silly to do this for whole pages, it could be quite useful for small fragments of a page that should not be (easily) understood by spiders. Encoding email addresses in a spam harvester-resistant way comes to mind as one possible application. Or the same with names of audio and video files...
Yes, indeed. But killing backward compat could also easily kill a language, unless it is being done in a very careful manner (read: with gradual deprecations etc over many years).
For ex., what about the dreaded Python 2.X -> 3.X transition? First of all, SWIG needs to be updated (there's a GSoC project for that) for a lot of C-based modules, then nearly all modules in PyPI and elsewhere would need attention here and there. For a long time to come, two versions of each module would need to be maintained in parallel (one for the 2.X and one for the upcoming 3.X version). If things go wrong here, and they're probably bound to go wrong, Python may well end up worse than Perl in the long run... not because of the language, but because of breaking backward compatibility.
What's wrong with the Cheese Shop PyPI? Even if it doesn't contain as many modules as Perl, let's not forget that a lot of modules are already part of the Python Standard Library. Additionally, many modules in the CPAN are either obsolete or orphaned. So more or less, support for Perl and Python in terms of modules is roughly equivalent (with Perl being still slightly at an advantage).
And regarding DBI::DBDs, what's wrong with Python's DB-API 2.0? Or with object-relational mappers a la SQLObject, if you prefer that?
It's more likely a nice little Python script interacting with the prosecutor's office over XML-RPC, querying the DHCP/RADIUS logs, sending the data back to the prosecutor's PC and printing a (PDF) standard invoice over 17 EUR. Call it B2P (business-to-prosecutor interface, or rather bulk-to-prosecutor interface).
Of course you can buy a DRMed file: you just spent money on a bunch of bits, nothing more, nothing less. That the technology to make sense of those bits may not work in the future is not the seller's problem.
Suppose you bought a film on VHS 10 years ago. Even if you can't play it back a few years from now when they stop making VHS players all along, you still bought the VHS cassette, and can't go back to the store and say: hey, the cassette I bought 10 years ago is useless: I want a refund.
You bought the container, and relied on the fact, that technology would be around long enough for you to enjoy what's in the container.
It's not really about $$ but about $$$$. Just look at the list price of Borland products or a GPL-free license for Qt. Who would ever want to shell out so much?
I'm using FreeBSD 7 on Soekris (net4801) devices as PPPoE router here. Of course with pf, ntpd, named, postfix, cyrus-imapd and lighttpd. You may want to try this: it saves more power than mini-ITX boxes (using mini-ITXs as "always-on" desktops as well, again with RELENG_7).
Try to view Flash-only sites on FreeBSD and other non-supported OS by Adobe, and you'll come to a very different conclusion. And Flash is very bad and extremely inaccessible for the blind who use text-to-speech programs.
Actually, all this is already taking place. If as a european, you sign up with an EU-based bank, you will often find in the small print a warning that all international transactions are being processed by the SWIFT network with two data centers, one of them in the EU and the other one in the US... and that US agencies are routinely monitoring all international inter-bank transactions for anti-terrorism purposes.
Well, since the US already knows all international money flows into and out of the EU (not just for individuals, but for all companies as well), they may as well know how many times a day each EU citizens goes to the restroom. There ain't no data privacy anymore. Anyone (esp. in Europe) living under the illusion of their data being "protected", wake up: it's "1984" in all its glory. This latest piece of news is nothing really innovative or new.
But it DOES have some cool technologies like Dtrace and ZFS. So what best SUN can do is to integrate these technologies with Linux and try to get maximum hardware sale and service contract on Linux platform.
Meanwhile, this is exactly what FreeBSD developers are doing w.r.t. ZFS and Dtrace...
On the one hand, as a long-time FreeBSD user (since 2.0) I'm glad to see this happen, yet on the other hand, as an even longer time SunOS/Solaris admin (since SunOS 4, way before Solaris), I'm kind of sad to see Sun's gems being canibalized this way, even though Solaris would definitely deserve more exposure.
And don't get me started w.r.t. Java on officially non-supported platforms: the hoops we FreeBSD admins had to jump through to get Java support were just... well, totally insane. Thankfully, things have improved a little bit now, and let's hope Sun sees the light, though it may already be too late for them.
Indeed. A dime for a song @128kbps would be about right. Allofmp3.com used to charge $0.03 per megabyte downloaded (they started with $0.01, but cranked-up the price later), and they made quite a lot of money, judging by their popularity. If prices were in this range, I'd buy digital music again: everything above that is way too high, IMHO.
He has some suggestions for naming this thing, basically variations around the word "Islamist", "Militant Islam", "Militant Islamism" etc., but I don't think any of those sound right. "Islamofascism" might not be accurate, but I guess we'll have to stick to it for se simple lack of a better alternative.
Well, on one hand, in Europe and in most muslim countries, there's a very clear distinction between "islamist" and "islamic": someone is islamist, if he aims to mix religion to politics; while he is merely islamic (or muslim) if he doesn't strive to impose charia law on society. In muslim countries, the term "islamist" or "islamism" is generally referred to as a problem and islamists are perceived as a danger to society.
On the other hand, in Europe and in muslim countries, the term "islamofascism" is considered a very bad pejorative Bushism intended to cast a bad light and hatred on all muslims (be they islamists -- in which case it is justified, or non-islamists alike, in which case it is deeply offending to them). Perhaps it's different in the US, where people are more used to that term... but should you visit Europe or muslim countries, it may be wise to stick to the technically correct term "islamism" and avoid "islamofascism". "Islamism" is strong enough, and everyone knows whom you'd be referring to.
Have you ever attached an Emacs generated "M-x spook" signature to outgoing e-mails to intentionally raise some red flags at NSA and wake up a human operator from his slumber, just for the fun of it? There's surely a more modern version of this prank in virtual worlds. Though you'll never know if the alerted Agent that will have to take care of you is real... or virtual, depending on whether the real world is virtual or the virtual one is real. We're all part of the Matrix after all, and we're all imaginary, thus complex.
Why can't amazon sell everything in multiple formats, are they hard up for disk space? Let us choose between 256k MP3 and 256K AAC, and perhaps even 128k of both, all ripped individually from lossless sources.
This is more or less what allofmp3.com used to provide... to a much more competitive and realistic price tag. The day amazon's service and pricing reaches that level, I'd gladly buy online music once again... a lot of online music by the way!
But... aren't they already part or associates of that corporate government they paid for? Can't they already raid private houses and companies just like government can? Government wouldn't investigate against itself. Just imagine fbi investigating against cia or nsa investigating against the white house!
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A lawsuit in and of itself really doesn't mean anything when anyone in the United States who fills out the forms and pays the filing fees can be scheduled to be heard in court.
Absolutely true. But lawsuits (frivolous or not) are not the only possible intimidation tactic that such a powerful distribution cartel like RIAA could use to silence opponents. IMHO, someone who's seriously raised those cartel's ire should be really weary every time they start their car or cross the road. Considering that those people have no scruples whatsoever to ruin a child or a granny's whole life for downloading a few silly files, what would they want to do to those who really upset them and tried to politically and legally threaten their ruthless business model? We're not living in Al Capone's time anymore, but old habits die hard, don't they?
Good luck Ray and please take care! As long as the Evil Empire uses only legal tactics, they've certainly picked the wrong opponent.
The USA, however, have the "disadvantage" that they never had a dictatorship that was universally regarded as completely evil in hindsight. As a consequence, you guys over there have never learned these things the hard way and are (on average) way too trusting towards your government.
Interesting. But are you sure that collective memory w.r.t. past dictatorships still protects from repeating the same mistakes? Just talk to young Germans of the MTV generation (say teens and twens) about the current surveillance laws, and remind them of what Gestapo and Stasi did. Would you get them to take it to the streets and protest? Or would you mostly collect blank glances -- you know: the kind of face you get when someone tells you non-verbally "what the f*ck are your talking about???"
I'm afraid that collective memory is like a vaccine: if it's not refreshed every now and then, it loses its preventive effects, and history tends to repeat itself.
I am sure that the NSA has forensics tools for Linux but I bet the local police sure don't.
As a matter of fact, the german LKAs (which are approximately the equivalent of the FBI, but limited to the local states -- Laender) do have some (very professional) Linux geeks in their computer forensics units...
But the funny thing is: even if they didn't have any in-house Linux expertise and if they couldn't contract some freelancing specialists, it wouldn't matter: as long as the file systems are not encrypted, a sector-by-sector analysis of the hard disks would still reveal the name of informants or any other sensible data just as easily. And if they were encrypted, it's a matter of cryptanalysis and cracking the key management; and that's a task that's immensely more complicated than dealing with an unfamiliar file system layout.
Since we don't fully know what the software does, nor do they allow us to know, isn't it safe to assume it's malicious?
Every binary blob can be potentially malicious, including the games themselves and not only some obscure add-on layer of DRM. And not only in the Windows eco-systeme either (think of proprietary binary drivers for graphic chipsets on Linux, BSD etc...).
Fortunately, reverse-engineering DRM software is still possible (though time consuming), thanks to emulators and virtual machines. What runs on the (virtual) processor can be intercepted, logged, and disassembled. It even works if the software phones home to fetch a decryption key for code-segments.
Actually, a fully disassembled listing of SecuROM and other rootkits may already exist in some circles. Analyzing that for usable vulnerabilities, esp. remote vulnerabilities may also have already been done and may be available to white, gray and black hats alike. You just gotta know where to look.
Perhaps the NSA is jealous of NASA (Hint: NASA has more 'A')?
Imagine a custom font that displays an 'a' as an 'n', a 'b' as an 'o' etc... (rot13). Then, generate a human-readable page that will still look like total gibberish to search engines. While it may seem silly to do this for whole pages, it could be quite useful for small fragments of a page that should not be (easily) understood by spiders. Encoding email addresses in a spam harvester-resistant way comes to mind as one possible application. Or the same with names of audio and video files...
Yes, indeed. But killing backward compat could also easily kill a language, unless it is being done in a very careful manner (read: with gradual deprecations etc over many years). For ex., what about the dreaded Python 2.X -> 3.X transition? First of all, SWIG needs to be updated (there's a GSoC project for that) for a lot of C-based modules, then nearly all modules in PyPI and elsewhere would need attention here and there. For a long time to come, two versions of each module would need to be maintained in parallel (one for the 2.X and one for the upcoming 3.X version). If things go wrong here, and they're probably bound to go wrong, Python may well end up worse than Perl in the long run... not because of the language, but because of breaking backward compatibility.
What's wrong with the Cheese Shop PyPI? Even if it doesn't contain as many modules as Perl, let's not forget that a lot of modules are already part of the Python Standard Library. Additionally, many modules in the CPAN are either obsolete or orphaned. So more or less, support for Perl and Python in terms of modules is roughly equivalent (with Perl being still slightly at an advantage). And regarding DBI::DBDs, what's wrong with Python's DB-API 2.0? Or with object-relational mappers a la SQLObject, if you prefer that?
It's more likely a nice little Python script interacting with the prosecutor's office over XML-RPC, querying the DHCP/RADIUS logs, sending the data back to the prosecutor's PC and printing a (PDF) standard invoice over 17 EUR. Call it B2P (business-to-prosecutor interface, or rather bulk-to-prosecutor interface).
Of course you can buy a DRMed file: you just spent money on a bunch of bits, nothing more, nothing less. That the technology to make sense of those bits may not work in the future is not the seller's problem. Suppose you bought a film on VHS 10 years ago. Even if you can't play it back a few years from now when they stop making VHS players all along, you still bought the VHS cassette, and can't go back to the store and say: hey, the cassette I bought 10 years ago is useless: I want a refund. You bought the container, and relied on the fact, that technology would be around long enough for you to enjoy what's in the container.
It's not really about $$ but about $$$$. Just look at the list price of Borland products or a GPL-free license for Qt. Who would ever want to shell out so much?
I'm using FreeBSD 7 on Soekris (net4801) devices as PPPoE router here. Of course with pf, ntpd, named, postfix, cyrus-imapd and lighttpd. You may want to try this: it saves more power than mini-ITX boxes (using mini-ITXs as "always-on" desktops as well, again with RELENG_7).
At least, the paper version is inherently DRM-free.
Try to view Flash-only sites on FreeBSD and other non-supported OS by Adobe, and you'll come to a very different conclusion. And Flash is very bad and extremely inaccessible for the blind who use text-to-speech programs.
Actually, all this is already taking place. If as a european, you sign up with an EU-based bank, you will often find in the small print a warning that all international transactions are being processed by the SWIFT network with two data centers, one of them in the EU and the other one in the US... and that US agencies are routinely monitoring all international inter-bank transactions for anti-terrorism purposes.
Well, since the US already knows all international money flows into and out of the EU (not just for individuals, but for all companies as well), they may as well know how many times a day each EU citizens goes to the restroom. There ain't no data privacy anymore. Anyone (esp. in Europe) living under the illusion of their data being "protected", wake up: it's "1984" in all its glory. This latest piece of news is nothing really innovative or new.
But it DOES have some cool technologies like Dtrace and ZFS. So what best SUN can do is to integrate these technologies with Linux and try to get maximum hardware sale and service contract on Linux platform.
Meanwhile, this is exactly what FreeBSD developers are doing w.r.t. ZFS and Dtrace... On the one hand, as a long-time FreeBSD user (since 2.0) I'm glad to see this happen, yet on the other hand, as an even longer time SunOS/Solaris admin (since SunOS 4, way before Solaris), I'm kind of sad to see Sun's gems being canibalized this way, even though Solaris would definitely deserve more exposure. And don't get me started w.r.t. Java on officially non-supported platforms: the hoops we FreeBSD admins had to jump through to get Java support were just... well, totally insane. Thankfully, things have improved a little bit now, and let's hope Sun sees the light, though it may already be too late for them.Indeed. A dime for a song @128kbps would be about right. Allofmp3.com used to charge $0.03 per megabyte downloaded (they started with $0.01, but cranked-up the price later), and they made quite a lot of money, judging by their popularity. If prices were in this range, I'd buy digital music again: everything above that is way too high, IMHO.
He has some suggestions for naming this thing, basically variations around the word "Islamist", "Militant Islam", "Militant Islamism" etc., but I don't think any of those sound right. "Islamofascism" might not be accurate, but I guess we'll have to stick to it for se simple lack of a better alternative.
Well, on one hand, in Europe and in most muslim countries, there's a very clear distinction between "islamist" and "islamic": someone is islamist, if he aims to mix religion to politics; while he is merely islamic (or muslim) if he doesn't strive to impose charia law on society. In muslim countries, the term "islamist" or "islamism" is generally referred to as a problem and islamists are perceived as a danger to society.
On the other hand, in Europe and in muslim countries, the term "islamofascism" is considered a very bad pejorative Bushism intended to cast a bad light and hatred on all muslims (be they islamists -- in which case it is justified, or non-islamists alike, in which case it is deeply offending to them). Perhaps it's different in the US, where people are more used to that term... but should you visit Europe or muslim countries, it may be wise to stick to the technically correct term "islamism" and avoid "islamofascism". "Islamism" is strong enough, and everyone knows whom you'd be referring to.
Have you ever attached an Emacs generated "M-x spook" signature to outgoing e-mails to intentionally raise some red flags at NSA and wake up a human operator from his slumber, just for the fun of it? There's surely a more modern version of this prank in virtual worlds. Though you'll never know if the alerted Agent that will have to take care of you is real... or virtual, depending on whether the real world is virtual or the virtual one is real. We're all part of the Matrix after all, and we're all imaginary, thus complex.
Why can't amazon sell everything in multiple formats, are they hard up for disk space? Let us choose between 256k MP3 and 256K AAC, and perhaps even 128k of both, all ripped individually from lossless sources.
This is more or less what allofmp3.com used to provide... to a much more competitive and realistic price tag. The day amazon's service and pricing reaches that level, I'd gladly buy online music once again... a lot of online music by the way!
How many Congressmen does it take to replace a lightbulb? How many to replace them all? (the lightbulbs, not the Congressmen!)
only unbiased contributions should be allowed to edit Wikipedia. That's a simple rule to implement, right?
Okay, I volunteer to judge unbiased-ness of every new edit for the next... 2 secs?
"Introduce this bill again, pronto, or we'll flatten Toronto!" (Canadian Bacon).
If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.
If crypto is outlawed, communications will be hidden in spam. Let's see: can we coin a word for it? Steganography... spamenography... steganospam...?
But... aren't they already part or associates of that corporate government they paid for? Can't they already raid private houses and companies just like government can? Government wouldn't investigate against itself. Just imagine fbi investigating against cia or nsa investigating against the white house!