Please accept this letter as notification that your group visitors permit has been rejected on security grounds. Just to help you out, please accept the following pointers on how we spotted you and where you slipped up;
- The name. Bit of a give away.
- You tried to hide your funding sources, but, oopsie, you forgot that the mail address of your main bank account is the same as another account security forces froze last week.
If you want to try again, fixing the above problems, we may miss you next time and let you enter the country.
Please, if you want to know anything more about how we check these things, just drop us a line and we'll happily share it with you. As an agency we are always happy to discuss security matters. Remember, security through obscurity is no security at all!
I'm sure publishing a hash checksum as 100% safe will be the first thing any malware pirate outfit does. Who exactly do you trust to supply these checksums? Other pirates?
And you're dreaming if you think the average user downloading a pirated versions of vista will think of doing checksums. "ZOMG! WTF R chexsums? givf me my free windoze! lol!"
If you get your software, any software (whether free, open source or not) from dodgy places then you deserve whatever you get.
Or just don't fit public terminals with HDDs -- boot them from CD, or read-only Flash drive, with all writable directories in RAMdisk.
You're overlooking the fact that they were using Windows 3.1 systems. Why do you think they were doing that? Because they thought it just couldn't be beat?
What's more likely is they're using Windows 3.1 because the terminals are ancient and they don't have the cash to upgrade or replace them. So its rather unlikely that they have CDROMS drives, or flash drives, or gobs of memory for RAMDisks, or the money to equip them any of the above.
It is interesting to me that you feel this is unjust, but do not have a problem with copyright itself. Copyright is an artificial restriction created by governments that arbitrarily limits what everyone other than the original creator can do with items they acquire. Copyright is not a natural right.
Indeed it isn't, but I feel it is more a right than everyone else's right to the fruits of someone else's labour without paying them what they feel it's worth. That, I think, is a right. If you do not agree with their value of their labour, then do not pay them. You do not have a right to take it anyway and decide your own value for it.
Their arrangements in other countries are subject to that other country's laws, not Russia's laws.
My point was that if the RIAA agreed to deal with AllOfMP3s in a totally different set of rules, more than a few other countries may wish to "re-evaluate" their laws. The Russian laws are clearly flawed and being exploited. AllOfMP3 claim to pay a broadcaster's fee when they are obviously not 'broadcasting'.
Why would screwing someone slightly higher up on the chain bother him?
Two wrongs do not make a right. Is this too obvious and clear a moral standpoint? Whatever convenient criticisms you may have of the music industry, it does not excuse your, as an end-consumer, actions. Whatever way the monies are divided in the music industry, a lot of people still get paid.
AllOfMP3 currently exists as a freeloader, and no-one can offer any proof that if it was to operate as a genuine retailer it would be a fairer and more successful business model. Do you really think recording artists would be better off with their music being sold for pennies? Do you really believe that AllOfMP3 could operate successfully if it had to compete on a level playing field with all others?
If he buys a product from a store that is evading their taxes, should that be his responsiblity too?
Why do you think no-one should be accountable for their own behaviour, purchasing or otherwise? If you buy at a store that you know can only offer such low prices because they are avoiding taxes then you (in your own small way) are sustaining and justifying their criminal behaviour. It is not someone else's problem. You are part of the problem.
The RIAA didn't want to play ball with the Russians - primarily because their cut under Russian law was not as big as they get in the west, and not as big as they liked.
Interesting. You have a problem with an organisation responsible for collecting the money from the sale of someone's product also dictating the terms of the sale? Let's be quite clear about what you're saying here. If you do not approve of the terms and profit margins offered to you by a supplier, you can just go off and make your own up? And if they then refuse to take the cut of the profits that you decide they're due, then it's all their fault?
Clearly the reason the RIAA refuse to take the Russian licensing money is because to do so would legitimise the arrangement, and that would have implications for every other arrangement they have in other countries.
You may not like RIAA's policies, but why do you think that gives anyone the right to sell their product against their wishes? AllOfMP3 are exploiting a loophole ('a broadcast licence', yeah right), let's stop pretending they are attempting to be honest retailers.
I do not take responsibility for the money chain between my retailer and the artist. I don't do it when I buy a physical CD, and I don't do it when I download an album.
Also interesting. You would shop in a store that you knew was full of CDs that the producers of which receive no payment, all the time washing your hands of all responsibility? Copyright infringement is not theft, but your reasoning here is no different from buying stolen goods and pretending where they came from was none of your concern.
So back then more people had to buy a CD if they wanted music but did the price ever go down? NO!
It doesn't matter how much you repeat this, it's never going to get any truer. CDs are much the same price as they were when they were first introduced over 20 years ago. This is a significant decrease in price in real terms.
so if the RIAA embraced a legal store on the AllOfMP3 model then it'd be popular as it would provide convenience.
The AllOfMP3 'model' involves taking what someone else has produced and not paying them for it. The AllOfMP3 'model' has production costs approaching zero. How do propose anyone else emulates this???
So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more"
What is this? 1992? When was the last time you looked at spam?? Any reply address on spam is either fake, or some innocent third parties. The spammer certainly doesn't get any reply, never mind read it. So any automatic response would just be more junk cluttering up someone else's email.
The contact for the spammer is usually a url link in the body, that leads to some crappy website ready for some moron's penis pills order. And I certainly amn't allowing any software I own to automatically go through to populate it with false sales leads. The website is likely to have spyware/adware/viruses/browser exploits. How better for a spammer to increase their bot net and further hook the suckers?
And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from.
And within half an hour of implementing such a system it'll be getting used to launch DDOS attacks on Microsoft and whitehouse.gov. Guaranteed.
So your answer why MS, Google, Yahoo and Firebird won't implement these ideas? Cos' they're dumb, wouldn't solve anything and would make things worse.
If only VP's were able to see the undeniable logic here! It's like they don't understand anything about management!
I once showed my boss that if everyone was given a month's worth of postage stamps we could work from home for a ridiculously cheap amount compared to renting office space. Envelopes through the mail works out even cheaper than telecommuting!
Amazingly he didn't think that it would help his company and rejected it. Something daft worries about "no cohesion", "total lack of communication" and "impossible to supervise". Maybe your VP has the same lack of vision.
For such a little phrase, such a depth of ignorance. America has millions who cannot obtain medical care for treatable conditions because they do not have insurance/cannot afford insurance/cannot obtain insurance and cannot otherwise afford the medical bils.
Everything costs, and in a free market economy healthcare is just another commodity. But some might say that this is a scandal in the richest nation with the most advanced healthcare.
I can already see my car from space... google-earth anyone???
You are under the common misconception that everything on Google-Earth is a satellite photo. The photographs that features your car were taken from a plane.
I'm more interested in Zune compatability. Can I use Zune's great wifi capabilities to exchange MP3s with the onboard flight navigation system? They're DRMed to 3 days, but when your life expectancy is 1 hour max, who cares?!
Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows?
I would do it the same way I'd do it in Linux, from the embedded command prompt application.
The hard fact is that no matter what Linux version of distro I've ever installed or used, it has always involved mucking about with script files and command prompt invoked fixes. Often after hours of searching through online documentation to find some obscure library incompatibility and work-around. For the average desk-top user this is simply not acceptable.
Linux is great if you're a Linux enthusiast. As a server it's brilliant. It may be suitable for desktops in the work environment where you have trained support personnel. But for the average home computer? Forget it. Nowhere near close.
How does a company benefit from being the subject of a pump and dump scam? Unless the owners are bailing out?
So why would a spammer want to talk to you about pumping and dumping your stock? Why on earth would you pay them to do this? Would the spammer not be better talking to an entirely separate third party who buys your stock up cheaply and doesn't care about the fallout after the dumping?
I'm not saying your "PR firm" weren't up to some scheme involving pumping stock, but I don't see any clear connection to pump 'n' dump spamming scams.
Wow, and just think; every two-bit poster on Slashdot can see this but it hasn't occurred for one second to Novell. Nope. They'll blindly stumble through the next five years happily deploying MS patented code and then simply be staggered when the licence runs out and Microsoft come back for more. "D'oh!", they'll say. "All these years in the software industry and we didn't see this coming!"
Or just maybe Novell know what they're doing. You may not agree with what they're doing, but you're being very foolish if you believe that they haven't thought what happens when the licencing ends.
This is because spammers in many cases use these opt out requests to confirm an actual working email address.
This may once have been the case, but I no longer believe it to be true. Providing an opt out address that can then be used to confirm addresses provides a way of tracing the source of the spam. Spammers also no longer care if an address is valid or not. They don't do anything that could be called 'targeted marketing' When you're firing millions of spam out almost at random, and nowhere near the inevitable bounces, what do you care what's valid and what's not? It's too much effort, just keep collecting addresses and keep spamming it out.
Of course, there's still good reason not to reply to spam with opt-outs. Firstly, even if it is a valid opt-out, it legitimises the whole process where someone else's spam becomes your problem. Secondly, in 99% of spam you'd be wasting your time. The opt-out is just there to make the spam appear legal.
here have been many people who have made small steps in making spamming more expensive. These people understand that the spammers' weakest point is at their point of sale - usually a website. Many of these people have written programs called "spam vampires." These "vampires" are usually small programs or scripts embedded on a webpage, and they cause a visitor's browser to repeatedly download content from a spammer's website.
I don't know about you, but I have a problem with any website running such a "vampire". For a start, that bandwidth is not just the spammer's, it's mine too. I also wouldn't appreciate having my computer become little more than a bot for a DoS attack. Isn't this the spammers' tactics? Is it also not the case that many spammers websites are 'throwaway' sites; here today, gone tomorrow? So the real victims of these 'vampires' are the hosting provider, who may be unaware of the spammer's activities, or may have removed them weeks ago.
If people want a player locked into one store, they will get an ipod.
Strange... I own an ipod and I don't feel locked in. I've never bought a thing from iTunes. I don't even use the iTunes software. Yet there it is, chock full of legally purchased music that must have come from somewhere.
Finally, dolphins are a part of nature, and are therefore subject to the brutalities thereof.
True, and if this was happening between dolphins and, say, tigers, your point would be valid. But it's not what the dolphins are part of, its what we want to be part of. As humans in many ways we like to think ourselves as a step above the brutalities of nature, what with having conscious thought and stuff.
If you're fine with us playing an active part of the brutalities of nature, then great. Just don't expect any sympathy or help if you or your family are ever attacked and slaughtered. You don't get to have it both ways.
What they won't pay is absurd high prices. The cost of producing and distributing music has gotten much cheaper.
How often we going to hear this nonsense?
The price of music, like anything else in a free market economy, is based on the demand. It's priced at the point that makes most profit, just like any other product. The cost is only one of the factors. If you think music is absurdly priced don't buy it. If enough people agree, then the market will reduce their prices. If you don't like the way the free market economy works, go start the revolution.
The cost of producing and distributing music has gotten much cheaper. Distribution companies have the insane idea that none of the savings can be passed on to the consumer without consequences. This isn't new, when CD's came out, they were cheaper to produce than tapes but were priced higher. That price never went down and yet artists didn't get any more money.
CDs cost much the same as they did 20 years ago. In real terms that's one hell of a price reduction. So what exactly is your point??
But if costs were on par with allofmp3 almost all pirating would stop.
allofmp3 is pirating. It has a business model that's based entirely on selling product that has zero production costs for it. No wonder it's cheap!
only two thing: people's sense of morality ("I don't want to steal from artists") and people's fear of the law ("I don't want to be caught with illegal copies on my hard disk"). That's hardly the basis of a healthy business model.
The two things you mention are the the only things every business model is based on; morality and the law. Without both why would anyone pay for anything? They'd just take it.
record companies sell plastic disks, not music
And publishing houses sell paper, not literature. Your rather naive view seems to suggest that music just happens and the record companies just stick a microphone in front of it.
*or*... they could disappear and music bands could turn back into what they once were: live performers, who were paid to play music on a stage.
Many popular and successful artists cannot or do not wish to perform live to any great extent. Are we to do without them? I thought technology was supposed to increase choice, not remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Al Qaida Cell,
Please accept this letter as notification that your group visitors permit has been rejected on security grounds. Just to help you out, please accept the following pointers on how we spotted you and where you slipped up;
- The name. Bit of a give away.
- You tried to hide your funding sources, but, oopsie, you forgot that the mail address of your main bank account is the same as another account security forces froze last week.
If you want to try again, fixing the above problems, we may miss you next time and let you enter the country.
Please, if you want to know anything more about how we check these things, just drop us a line and we'll happily share it with you. As an agency we are always happy to discuss security matters. Remember, security through obscurity is no security at all!
Yours,
Homeland Security
And you're dreaming if you think the average user downloading a pirated versions of vista will think of doing checksums. "ZOMG! WTF R chexsums? givf me my free windoze! lol!"
If you get your software, any software (whether free, open source or not) from dodgy places then you deserve whatever you get.
You're overlooking the fact that they were using Windows 3.1 systems. Why do you think they were doing that? Because they thought it just couldn't be beat?
What's more likely is they're using Windows 3.1 because the terminals are ancient and they don't have the cash to upgrade or replace them. So its rather unlikely that they have CDROMS drives, or flash drives, or gobs of memory for RAMDisks, or the money to equip them any of the above.
How many people do you think falls into the category of being over 50 but not 40?
Indeed it isn't, but I feel it is more a right than everyone else's right to the fruits of someone else's labour without paying them what they feel it's worth. That, I think, is a right. If you do not agree with their value of their labour, then do not pay them. You do not have a right to take it anyway and decide your own value for it.
Their arrangements in other countries are subject to that other country's laws, not Russia's laws.
My point was that if the RIAA agreed to deal with AllOfMP3s in a totally different set of rules, more than a few other countries may wish to "re-evaluate" their laws. The Russian laws are clearly flawed and being exploited. AllOfMP3 claim to pay a broadcaster's fee when they are obviously not 'broadcasting'.
Why would screwing someone slightly higher up on the chain bother him?
Two wrongs do not make a right. Is this too obvious and clear a moral standpoint? Whatever convenient criticisms you may have of the music industry, it does not excuse your, as an end-consumer, actions. Whatever way the monies are divided in the music industry, a lot of people still get paid.
AllOfMP3 currently exists as a freeloader, and no-one can offer any proof that if it was to operate as a genuine retailer it would be a fairer and more successful business model. Do you really think recording artists would be better off with their music being sold for pennies? Do you really believe that AllOfMP3 could operate successfully if it had to compete on a level playing field with all others? If he buys a product from a store that is evading their taxes, should that be his responsiblity too?
Why do you think no-one should be accountable for their own behaviour, purchasing or otherwise? If you buy at a store that you know can only offer such low prices because they are avoiding taxes then you (in your own small way) are sustaining and justifying their criminal behaviour. It is not someone else's problem. You are part of the problem.
Isn't it just amazing how 'reasonable' you can make your prices when you're not paying for your product?
I have little sympathy for the large record companies: they too are screwing the artists.
Your parents appear to have missed something fundamental out of your early moral training. Here, I'll fill in for them;
Two wrongs do not make a right.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
Interesting. You have a problem with an organisation responsible for collecting the money from the sale of someone's product also dictating the terms of the sale? Let's be quite clear about what you're saying here. If you do not approve of the terms and profit margins offered to you by a supplier, you can just go off and make your own up? And if they then refuse to take the cut of the profits that you decide they're due, then it's all their fault?
Clearly the reason the RIAA refuse to take the Russian licensing money is because to do so would legitimise the arrangement, and that would have implications for every other arrangement they have in other countries.
You may not like RIAA's policies, but why do you think that gives anyone the right to sell their product against their wishes? AllOfMP3 are exploiting a loophole ('a broadcast licence', yeah right), let's stop pretending they are attempting to be honest retailers.
I do not take responsibility for the money chain between my retailer and the artist. I don't do it when I buy a physical CD, and I don't do it when I download an album.
Also interesting. You would shop in a store that you knew was full of CDs that the producers of which receive no payment, all the time washing your hands of all responsibility? Copyright infringement is not theft, but your reasoning here is no different from buying stolen goods and pretending where they came from was none of your concern.
It doesn't matter how much you repeat this, it's never going to get any truer. CDs are much the same price as they were when they were first introduced over 20 years ago. This is a significant decrease in price in real terms.
so if the RIAA embraced a legal store on the AllOfMP3 model then it'd be popular as it would provide convenience.
The AllOfMP3 'model' involves taking what someone else has produced and not paying them for it. The AllOfMP3 'model' has production costs approaching zero. How do propose anyone else emulates this???
They can't use that test. I thought of it first, I have a patent on it and they're not using it until I get paid.
What is this? 1992? When was the last time you looked at spam?? Any reply address on spam is either fake, or some innocent third parties. The spammer certainly doesn't get any reply, never mind read it. So any automatic response would just be more junk cluttering up someone else's email.
The contact for the spammer is usually a url link in the body, that leads to some crappy website ready for some moron's penis pills order. And I certainly amn't allowing any software I own to automatically go through to populate it with false sales leads. The website is likely to have spyware/adware/viruses/browser exploits. How better for a spammer to increase their bot net and further hook the suckers?
And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from.
And within half an hour of implementing such a system it'll be getting used to launch DDOS attacks on Microsoft and whitehouse.gov. Guaranteed.
So your answer why MS, Google, Yahoo and Firebird won't implement these ideas? Cos' they're dumb, wouldn't solve anything and would make things worse.
I once showed my boss that if everyone was given a month's worth of postage stamps we could work from home for a ridiculously cheap amount compared to renting office space. Envelopes through the mail works out even cheaper than telecommuting!
Amazingly he didn't think that it would help his company and rejected it. Something daft worries about "no cohesion", "total lack of communication" and "impossible to supervise". Maybe your VP has the same lack of vision.
Maybe you should be learning from this. Something like; I need to read more widely and pay more attention to the society and world about me.
You've answered your own question. The NPfIT project is a England & Wales project. It is nothing to do with Scotland or Northern Ireland.
For such a little phrase, such a depth of ignorance. America has millions who cannot obtain medical care for treatable conditions because they do not have insurance/cannot afford insurance/cannot obtain insurance and cannot otherwise afford the medical bils.
Everything costs, and in a free market economy healthcare is just another commodity. But some might say that this is a scandal in the richest nation with the most advanced healthcare.
You are under the common misconception that everything on Google-Earth is a satellite photo. The photographs that features your car were taken from a plane.
And when we crash, we'll go down grooving.
I would do it the same way I'd do it in Linux, from the embedded command prompt application.
The hard fact is that no matter what Linux version of distro I've ever installed or used, it has always involved mucking about with script files and command prompt invoked fixes. Often after hours of searching through online documentation to find some obscure library incompatibility and work-around. For the average desk-top user this is simply not acceptable.
Linux is great if you're a Linux enthusiast. As a server it's brilliant. It may be suitable for desktops in the work environment where you have trained support personnel. But for the average home computer? Forget it. Nowhere near close.
How does a company benefit from being the subject of a pump and dump scam? Unless the owners are bailing out?
So why would a spammer want to talk to you about pumping and dumping your stock? Why on earth would you pay them to do this? Would the spammer not be better talking to an entirely separate third party who buys your stock up cheaply and doesn't care about the fallout after the dumping?
I'm not saying your "PR firm" weren't up to some scheme involving pumping stock, but I don't see any clear connection to pump 'n' dump spamming scams.
Or just maybe Novell know what they're doing. You may not agree with what they're doing, but you're being very foolish if you believe that they haven't thought what happens when the licencing ends.
This may once have been the case, but I no longer believe it to be true. Providing an opt out address that can then be used to confirm addresses provides a way of tracing the source of the spam. Spammers also no longer care if an address is valid or not. They don't do anything that could be called 'targeted marketing' When you're firing millions of spam out almost at random, and nowhere near the inevitable bounces, what do you care what's valid and what's not? It's too much effort, just keep collecting addresses and keep spamming it out.
Of course, there's still good reason not to reply to spam with opt-outs. Firstly, even if it is a valid opt-out, it legitimises the whole process where someone else's spam becomes your problem. Secondly, in 99% of spam you'd be wasting your time. The opt-out is just there to make the spam appear legal.
here have been many people who have made small steps in making spamming more expensive. These people understand that the spammers' weakest point is at their point of sale - usually a website. Many of these people have written programs called "spam vampires." These "vampires" are usually small programs or scripts embedded on a webpage, and they cause a visitor's browser to repeatedly download content from a spammer's website.
I don't know about you, but I have a problem with any website running such a "vampire". For a start, that bandwidth is not just the spammer's, it's mine too. I also wouldn't appreciate having my computer become little more than a bot for a DoS attack. Isn't this the spammers' tactics? Is it also not the case that many spammers websites are 'throwaway' sites; here today, gone tomorrow? So the real victims of these 'vampires' are the hosting provider, who may be unaware of the spammer's activities, or may have removed them weeks ago.
Strange... I own an ipod and I don't feel locked in. I've never bought a thing from iTunes. I don't even use the iTunes software. Yet there it is, chock full of legally purchased music that must have come from somewhere.
True, and if this was happening between dolphins and, say, tigers, your point would be valid. But it's not what the dolphins are part of, its what we want to be part of. As humans in many ways we like to think ourselves as a step above the brutalities of nature, what with having conscious thought and stuff.
If you're fine with us playing an active part of the brutalities of nature, then great. Just don't expect any sympathy or help if you or your family are ever attacked and slaughtered. You don't get to have it both ways.
How often we going to hear this nonsense?
The price of music, like anything else in a free market economy, is based on the demand. It's priced at the point that makes most profit, just like any other product. The cost is only one of the factors. If you think music is absurdly priced don't buy it. If enough people agree, then the market will reduce their prices. If you don't like the way the free market economy works, go start the revolution.
The cost of producing and distributing music has gotten much cheaper. Distribution companies have the insane idea that none of the savings can be passed on to the consumer without consequences. This isn't new, when CD's came out, they were cheaper to produce than tapes but were priced higher. That price never went down and yet artists didn't get any more money.
CDs cost much the same as they did 20 years ago. In real terms that's one hell of a price reduction. So what exactly is your point??
But if costs were on par with allofmp3 almost all pirating would stop.
allofmp3 is pirating. It has a business model that's based entirely on selling product that has zero production costs for it. No wonder it's cheap!
The two things you mention are the the only things every business model is based on; morality and the law. Without both why would anyone pay for anything? They'd just take it.
record companies sell plastic disks, not music
And publishing houses sell paper, not literature. Your rather naive view seems to suggest that music just happens and the record companies just stick a microphone in front of it.
*or*... they could disappear and music bands could turn back into what they once were: live performers, who were paid to play music on a stage.
Many popular and successful artists cannot or do not wish to perform live to any great extent. Are we to do without them? I thought technology was supposed to increase choice, not remove it.
Wow. Great perk.