The server would still choke processing the data. Even if it's discarding the posts, they would still be walking the wire with the data. If you read the article, what they were having to do, is monitor the incoming stuff, and see where it was originatiing. Then connect to the router and block the IP address there.
Even then, the pipe between your router, and the internet can be clogged, depending on how fat it is. I suppose it could be theoretically scripted so that it monitors incoming traffic at the server, and when it has a suspected spam attack happening, it logs into the router, and blocks the address or subnet the the attack is originating from. I'd be a little squeamish about my webserver having that kind of control over my router tho.
I didn't read that at all. This product was mentioned in many places, but the guys behind it let it all happen naturally from word of mouth across the net. That's the point they were trying to make. That a single posting in a newsgroup, can turn into a tidal wave of page hits in a very short period of time, as people tell other people on different forums.
Sounds like what we need CT & Co to do, is hire a crack team of investigators. And from now on, every submission should have someone dispatched in person to visit the company and verify all claims.
Short of that, occasionally stuff like this is going to slip through the system.
It took years for Bill to get to the point where his name was common knowlege. And it's difficult to blame individuals too much for the fact that the cult of personality hasn't built around him yet. When it comes to this sort of thing, it's very much driven by the media, and until they start breathlessly describing everything that he does, he won't enter the popular mainstream culture.
It's possible that 10 years from now, we may talk about him that way, but it's too early now Jon.
Nevermind the fact that no-one knows if the discs will even be readable anymore at that point. Could be that the media will become unreadable. Could be that it won't be affordable to buy a player on the antiques market.
Could always happen that civilization will come crumbling down (a somewhat less likely proposition (are we really all that civilized anyhow tho???))
I fail to see how limiting access to stuff like this is such a big deal.
If the community deems that these things are offensive, and should have a restricted audience, what's the problem? You're still even allowed to take your kids to the arcade, if you don't mind them playing. It merely moves the decision to play that sort of thing into the parents court theoretically, rather than letting possibly uninformed, immature kids make the decision on their own.
I have yet to see any strong advocacy movement on slashdot to allow children of all ages to see XXX porno freely. It's about the same issue.
There is a fairly long standing acceptance of movies being rated PG, meaning that a parent needs to guide the kids to see it. It's about the same issue. It's not really a constitutional issue as far as I can see.
The Constitution protects the expression of speech. And the game companies are still allowed to express the game however they want. They are merely being limited to who their audiece is, to a group that possibly is more mature, and better able to deal with it appropriately.
Now, if you want to discuss the futility of a measure like this, I'm on board. I don't see this changing anything in terms of what kids play. Not significantly. I went to R movies long before I was 18, and I fully expect Indianapolis kids to skirt this with impunity. And I do feel for the arcade owners who have to deal with this stuff. It's a hassle for them, and they can't win either way. Either the customers will get pissed at them, or the law will be all over them.
It's a stupid law, I think. But far from a meaningful one.
Eric Harshbarger who got credited with buil,ding a 2 foot high tux several months ago, is working on building a desk for a.com up in Seattle. One of their executives was hired, with the proviso that in addition to payroll, and whatnot, he wanted a fully functioning desk for the office made of Lego. So Eric wound up with the contract to build it. When it's done, he said he's gonna have pictures up on his site showing the process.
The person claimed that writing a story on a "news" site construed "fair use". Copying wholesale, of anything is not reporting. And so the nature of the material is irrelevant.
Unfortunately for you, Jon is a firm believer in copyright, when it applies to his own scribblings. It's just when anyone foolishly tries to apply it to a different medium that he worries about it.
Books are simply a sacred cow in his world, and can't be tampered with.
Fair use reporting, does not extend to wholesale copying of protected material.
Think about it this way, it's perfectly legal for a newspaper to write a story about the new Tom Clancy novel. It's not legal for them to print the text of the new Tom Clancy novel, verbatim, in the paper.
Reinstation isn't easy
on
An MP3 Update
·
· Score: 2
In order to get your account reinstated, you would need to ceertify under penalty of perjury, that you have not and will not make Metallica MP3's available.
And I believe that you have to supply "real" contact information when you do so. So it might be easier to track you down later, if you are in violation a second time.
Not to mention that if you are in violation a second time, you will be guilty of all the previous stuff, plus most likely perjury. And that one is definitely a biggie.
The general tone of the piece was extremely annoying. "Neener, neener, neener. I don't use MS stuff, and didn't get bit". Congratulations Nicholas, now did you have anything useful to say.
But the silliest thing in there, is his assumption, that any organization can turn on a dime. He thinks that a large company, or the military would be able to change standards at the drop of a hat, just because they were using Open Source. What a crock. Large companies don't do anything quickly. And if a large company was using a piece of software, that more or less worked. But there was an annoying feature, they might tell the vendor to change it. But the odds of them actually cramming a company wide change down the users throats, is vanishingly small. The amount of retraining alone, in a change like that, would kill it most of the time. Doesn't matter if it's MS code, or someone elses. I spent 3 months working on-site, to make sure that a 50 person LAN migrated smoothly to some new apps and servers. And most of that time, was spent validating assumptions that would immediately affect usability for the end users. That was 50 people. Imagine how much planning goes into what a multinational does.
And as a side note, accoording to Sophos there is one or more variants that are "for unix" (look at their comments at the bottom). Don't know what exactly they do.
When CD's were introduced, the labels "promised" that they would come down in price, as the technology matured. While they certainly haven't in absolute terms, they have on an inflation adjusted basis. Granted, that's a small consolation, but it's something at least.
And typically the price of something is based on something called supply and demand. Everyone that focus's on CD/Tape pricing, is ignoring that. Nowadays in the market, demand has shifted almost entirely to CD's. There is limited demand for tape. Tape's may be kept artificially lower in price, to keep them in the market at all. If tapes had risen in price, with inflation, so that they were up around $15, would anyone buy the damn things? The labels don't have a compelling reason to drop the format. The possibility of people buying 2 copies, is enough to warrant keeping the format available.
I can borrow my friend's CD. If make a SINGLE copy of it for personal use, I am under fair use.
Not quite. He can make a copy for personal use, you cannot. And if he gives away a CD that he has made a copy of for persona use, then he is obligated to destroy the copy(s) that he made.
I suppose that it would be somewhat legal to make a copy for personal use (perfectly legit), then loan the CD for an indefinite time to someone else. That should be within the letter, but certainly not the spirit of the law.
regarding point 3, In the last 6 months the only CD that I have gotten, was a Xmas present from my girlfriend. Coincidentally enough, Metallica S&M. And I don't begrudge the price that she (we) paid for it. I sure hope you make more than that on your books.
And no, I don't use Napster, or Gnutella, or anything else like that, in lieu of paying for CD's. I buy what I like, and never listen to most of the CD's that I own. I wish they were cheaper, but I'll continue to support the musicians that make the stuff that I enjoy.
I just had a brief dialogue with Eric S. Raymond (you might have heard of him Jon). The most recent bits of the conversation were...
"Bunn, Kent : > Thanks. I'm involved in a discussion with someone, and they are claiming > that it's simply impossible to find a publisher that would allow someone to > make their material available on the web, while it's being sold as a dead > tree version. Do you know of any such? It seems like O'Reilly has in the > past published stuff, that was available for free on the web. And I know > that Red Hat at least used to print a hardcover copy of the LDP.
I haven't had any trouble finding such punblishers. O'Reilly, Macmillan, and MIT Press spring to mind."
As I mentioned in my question to him, Red Hat had/has a copy of the LDP available as a book form. And that's certainly something that's freely available on the web. And he lists at least 3 publishers that would apparently be interested in publishing material thats available free on the web.
In item 1 of your piece, you said The whole point of a publishing contract is that a writer gives the publisher the right to his books..Otherwise why would the publisher pay anything? That's besides the point. You have the option of what rights to your words, you are willing to give the publisher. It's your decision to give them control over the electronic (or lack thereof) distribution of those words. I'm sure that you retain some rights to your books. All I'm suggesting, is that you retain a few more, so that you can distribute your books over the web for free, just like music should be distributed in your view.
In item 4, you accuse me of telling you to find a publisher that will gove your works away. Again, I'm not saying that at all. First and foremost, I don't expect your publisher to do the giving at all. I expect a community of avid JK supporters to spring up, sharing your writings across the web via assorted means. Much like the MP3's that you so love.
In the email that you sent me, you said Besides which, the comparison between books and songs is a bit of stretch...There are millions of songs, but far fewer books. They take longer and are more cumbersome to distribute. CD's are a bit of a chore to distribute too. But once it's reduced to an electronic media (mp3's/.txt files), they are almost equivalent. Tho frankly, the txt files are alot more manageable over a modem, maybe the books should have been available over the net a long time ago. Txt file formats have been around alot longer than mp3's. Whatcha been holding out on us for Jon? And in terms of numbers, have you ever worked for a bookstore Jon? There are tons of books released every week. I would guess at least as many books are released, as there are albums in a week. Probably many more.
Regarding point 5, if your publisher won't pay you for stuff that is available to the world for free, why do you expect a publisher to pay Metallica for things that are just as free?
And regarding 7, I never intended to paint you as a fatcat. I intended to point out, the hypocrisy in your stand. You want other people to give away their work for free, while paying for yours.
Jon, when are you going to stop negotiating contracts with your publishers, that don't allow you rights to your books?
I'm am 100% positive, that you could find a publisher that would allow you to reprint your material on the web, as freely as you claim to want it. I'm also sure that you'd have to take a haircut on the advance, which is why you don't negotiate just such a contract.
Until you're willing to give away your "art", then stop insisting that all the musicians in the world, must give away theirs.
I've asked this before, and Jon has not seen fit to answer, but I'll keep trying anyhow...
Jon, why have you negotiated a contract, that doesn't give you control over your work? I'm sure that if you wanted to, you could arrange to have whatever rights you want on your books. There has to be at least one publisher that would be willing to give you nothing up front, to publish your books. And then you would just get whatever royalties there were on the books. Then you could let the books be distributed as widely as possible over the net.
If you truly believed that information wants to be free, then you would arrange just such a contract. I'm also quite sure that it would mean taking a significant haircut on your earnings from your books. But according to you, it's the model that is applicable to the digital age, and I don't see how you can possibly advocate something that you refuse to back with your actions.
They don't need to lobby to make new laws. The existing copyright laws already should be protecting their business model. I see nothing wrong with publishers using legal force, to back up the existing laws. It's the responsibility of the community to lobby to get those laws changed, so that the record companies model is made obsolete. Until that happens, they are merely engaging in theft, and trying to make it more palatable, by claiming to be the injured party.
The same laws that protect the record lablels today, make the GPL possible. The people creating the works, make it available under a license. GPL is one example, and the license on music is another. You can't say that one should be enforced, and the other ignored, just because it suits your political agenda. Be consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
The server would still choke processing the data. Even if it's discarding the posts, they would still be walking the wire with the data. If you read the article, what they were having to do, is monitor the incoming stuff, and see where it was originatiing. Then connect to the router and block the IP address there.
Even then, the pipe between your router, and the internet can be clogged, depending on how fat it is. I suppose it could be theoretically scripted so that it monitors incoming traffic at the server, and when it has a suspected spam attack happening, it logs into the router, and blocks the address or subnet the the attack is originating from. I'd be a little squeamish about my webserver having that kind of control over my router tho.
That link wasn't there when the original story was posted.
I didn't read that at all. This product was mentioned in many places, but the guys behind it let it all happen naturally from word of mouth across the net. That's the point they were trying to make. That a single posting in a newsgroup, can turn into a tidal wave of page hits in a very short period of time, as people tell other people on different forums.
Sounds like what we need CT & Co to do, is hire a crack team of investigators. And from now on, every submission should have someone dispatched in person to visit the company and verify all claims.
Short of that, occasionally stuff like this is going to slip through the system.
It took years for Bill to get to the point where his name was common knowlege. And it's difficult to blame individuals too much for the fact that the cult of personality hasn't built around him yet. When it comes to this sort of thing, it's very much driven by the media, and until they start breathlessly describing everything that he does, he won't enter the popular mainstream culture.
It's possible that 10 years from now, we may talk about him that way, but it's too early now Jon.
Nevermind the fact that no-one knows if the discs will even be readable anymore at that point. Could be that the media will become unreadable. Could be that it won't be affordable to buy a player on the antiques market.
Could always happen that civilization will come crumbling down (a somewhat less likely proposition (are we really all that civilized anyhow tho???))
I fail to see how limiting access to stuff like this is such a big deal.
If the community deems that these things are offensive, and should have a restricted audience, what's the problem? You're still even allowed to take your kids to the arcade, if you don't mind them playing. It merely moves the decision to play that sort of thing into the parents court theoretically, rather than letting possibly uninformed, immature kids make the decision on their own.
I have yet to see any strong advocacy movement on slashdot to allow children of all ages to see XXX porno freely. It's about the same issue.
There is a fairly long standing acceptance of movies being rated PG, meaning that a parent needs to guide the kids to see it. It's about the same issue. It's not really a constitutional issue as far as I can see.
The Constitution protects the expression of speech. And the game companies are still allowed to express the game however they want. They are merely being limited to who their audiece is, to a group that possibly is more mature, and better able to deal with it appropriately.
Now, if you want to discuss the futility of a measure like this, I'm on board. I don't see this changing anything in terms of what kids play. Not significantly. I went to R movies long before I was 18, and I fully expect Indianapolis kids to skirt this with impunity. And I do feel for the arcade owners who have to deal with this stuff. It's a hassle for them, and they can't win either way. Either the customers will get pissed at them, or the law will be all over them.
It's a stupid law, I think. But far from a meaningful one.
You were distributing copyrighted works without permission, and were pursued for it. They had every right to do what they did to you.
Just because the technology exists to allow you to pirate music, doesn't mean that you have a right and obligation to do so.
Tux has been built, at least on a small scale. I don't think Eric's planning on putting it anywhere other than on his desk tho.
Eric Harshbarger who got credited with buil,ding a 2 foot high tux several months ago, is working on building a desk for a .com up in Seattle. One of their executives was hired, with the proviso that in addition to payroll, and whatnot, he wanted a fully functioning desk for the office made of Lego. So Eric wound up with the contract to build it. When it's done, he said he's gonna have pictures up on his site showing the process.
Regarding copy protection, many game CD's are.
The person claimed that writing a story on a "news" site construed "fair use". Copying wholesale, of anything is not reporting. And so the nature of the material is irrelevant.
Unfortunately for you, Jon is a firm believer in copyright, when it applies to his own scribblings. It's just when anyone foolishly tries to apply it to a different medium that he worries about it.
Books are simply a sacred cow in his world, and can't be tampered with.
Fair use reporting, does not extend to wholesale copying of protected material.
Think about it this way, it's perfectly legal for a newspaper to write a story about the new Tom Clancy novel. It's not legal for them to print the text of the new Tom Clancy novel, verbatim, in the paper.
In order to get your account reinstated, you would need to ceertify under penalty of perjury, that you have not and will not make Metallica MP3's available.
And I believe that you have to supply "real" contact information when you do so. So it might be easier to track you down later, if you are in violation a second time.
Not to mention that if you are in violation a second time, you will be guilty of all the previous stuff, plus most likely perjury. And that one is definitely a biggie.
The general tone of the piece was extremely annoying. "Neener, neener, neener. I don't use MS stuff, and didn't get bit". Congratulations Nicholas, now did you have anything useful to say.
But the silliest thing in there, is his assumption, that any organization can turn on a dime. He thinks that a large company, or the military would be able to change standards at the drop of a hat, just because they were using Open Source. What a crock. Large companies don't do anything quickly. And if a large company was using a piece of software, that more or less worked. But there was an annoying feature, they might tell the vendor to change it. But the odds of them actually cramming a company wide change down the users throats, is vanishingly small. The amount of retraining alone, in a change like that, would kill it most of the time. Doesn't matter if it's MS code, or someone elses. I spent 3 months working on-site, to make sure that a 50 person LAN migrated smoothly to some new apps and servers. And most of that time, was spent validating assumptions that would immediately affect usability for the end users. That was 50 people. Imagine how much planning goes into what a multinational does.
And as a side note, accoording to Sophos there is one or more variants that are "for unix" (look at their comments at the bottom). Don't know what exactly they do.
Some other thoughts to keep in mind.
When CD's were introduced, the labels "promised" that they would come down in price, as the technology matured. While they certainly haven't in absolute terms, they have on an inflation adjusted basis. Granted, that's a small consolation, but it's something at least.
And typically the price of something is based on something called supply and demand. Everyone that focus's on CD/Tape pricing, is ignoring that. Nowadays in the market, demand has shifted almost entirely to CD's. There is limited demand for tape. Tape's may be kept artificially lower in price, to keep them in the market at all. If tapes had risen in price, with inflation, so that they were up around $15, would anyone buy the damn things? The labels don't have a compelling reason to drop the format. The possibility of people buying 2 copies, is enough to warrant keeping the format available.
I can borrow my friend's CD. If make a SINGLE copy of it for personal use, I am under fair use.
Not quite. He can make a copy for personal use, you cannot. And if he gives away a CD that he has made a copy of for persona use, then he is obligated to destroy the copy(s) that he made.
I suppose that it would be somewhat legal to make a copy for personal use (perfectly legit), then loan the CD for an indefinite time to someone else. That should be within the letter, but certainly not the spirit of the law.
Anyone out there other than me remeber the Underground RPG? "It's 2021, and the dream is dead"
Tastee Ghoul!!!
regarding point 3, In the last 6 months the only CD that I have gotten, was a Xmas present from my girlfriend. Coincidentally enough, Metallica S&M. And I don't begrudge the price that she (we) paid for it. I sure hope you make more than that on your books.
And no, I don't use Napster, or Gnutella, or anything else like that, in lieu of paying for CD's. I buy what I like, and never listen to most of the CD's that I own. I wish they were cheaper, but I'll continue to support the musicians that make the stuff that I enjoy.
I just had a brief dialogue with Eric S. Raymond (you might have heard of him Jon). The most recent bits of the conversation were...
"Bunn, Kent :
> Thanks. I'm involved in a discussion with someone, and they are claiming
> that it's simply impossible to find a publisher that would allow someone to
> make their material available on the web, while it's being sold as a dead
> tree version. Do you know of any such? It seems like O'Reilly has in the
> past published stuff, that was available for free on the web. And I know
> that Red Hat at least used to print a hardcover copy of the LDP.
I haven't had any trouble finding such punblishers. O'Reilly, Macmillan, and
MIT Press spring to mind."
As I mentioned in my question to him, Red Hat had/has a copy of the LDP available as a book form. And that's certainly something that's freely available on the web. And he lists at least 3 publishers that would apparently be interested in publishing material thats available free on the web.
In item 1 of your piece, you said The whole point of a publishing contract is that a writer gives the publisher the right to his books..Otherwise why would the publisher pay anything? That's besides the point. You have the option of what rights to your words, you are willing to give the publisher. It's your decision to give them control over the electronic (or lack thereof) distribution of those words. I'm sure that you retain some rights to your books. All I'm suggesting, is that you retain a few more, so that you can distribute your books over the web for free, just like music should be distributed in your view.
In item 4, you accuse me of telling you to find a publisher that will gove your works away. Again, I'm not saying that at all. First and foremost, I don't expect your publisher to do the giving at all. I expect a community of avid JK supporters to spring up, sharing your writings across the web via assorted means. Much like the MP3's that you so love.
In the email that you sent me, you said Besides which, the comparison between books and songs is a bit of stretch...There are millions of songs, but far fewer books. They take longer and are more cumbersome to distribute. CD's are a bit of a chore to distribute too. But once it's reduced to an electronic media (mp3's/.txt files), they are almost equivalent. Tho frankly, the txt files are alot more manageable over a modem, maybe the books should have been available over the net a long time ago. Txt file formats have been around alot longer than mp3's. Whatcha been holding out on us for Jon? And in terms of numbers, have you ever worked for a bookstore Jon? There are tons of books released every week. I would guess at least as many books are released, as there are albums in a week. Probably many more.
Regarding point 5, if your publisher won't pay you for stuff that is available to the world for free, why do you expect a publisher to pay Metallica for things that are just as free?
And regarding 7, I never intended to paint you as a fatcat. I intended to point out, the hypocrisy in your stand. You want other people to give away their work for free, while paying for yours.
I'll keep asking this, until he responds.
Jon, when are you going to stop negotiating contracts with your publishers, that don't allow you rights to your books?
I'm am 100% positive, that you could find a publisher that would allow you to reprint your material on the web, as freely as you claim to want it. I'm also sure that you'd have to take a haircut on the advance, which is why you don't negotiate just such a contract.
Until you're willing to give away your "art", then stop insisting that all the musicians in the world, must give away theirs.
I've asked this before, and Jon has not seen fit to answer, but I'll keep trying anyhow...
Jon, why have you negotiated a contract, that doesn't give you control over your work? I'm sure that if you wanted to, you could arrange to have whatever rights you want on your books. There has to be at least one publisher that would be willing to give you nothing up front, to publish your books. And then you would just get whatever royalties there were on the books. Then you could let the books be distributed as widely as possible over the net.
If you truly believed that information wants to be free, then you would arrange just such a contract. I'm also quite sure that it would mean taking a significant haircut on your earnings from your books. But according to you, it's the model that is applicable to the digital age, and I don't see how you can possibly advocate something that you refuse to back with your actions.
ZDNet writes articles like this every once in a while that are blatantly false simply to generate traffic and comments
Sounds like Jon Katz's reason for being to me.
They don't need to lobby to make new laws. The existing copyright laws already should be protecting their business model. I see nothing wrong with publishers using legal force, to back up the existing laws. It's the responsibility of the community to lobby to get those laws changed, so that the record companies model is made obsolete. Until that happens, they are merely engaging in theft, and trying to make it more palatable, by claiming to be the injured party.
The same laws that protect the record lablels today, make the GPL possible. The people creating the works, make it available under a license. GPL is one example, and the license on music is another. You can't say that one should be enforced, and the other ignored, just because it suits your political agenda. Be consistent.