Tough luck. Nobody forces you to do that, you know? You entered a business deal, it turned out that it is still profitable(!!!), but not as lucrative as you had hoped or as you have it with other deals.
false logic to think that that the gov needs ANY justification for more clamp-downs.
It does, if it wants to push them on a public that could vote them out of office. Or can vote in judges that take their laws apart. We are not yet in a tyranny.
But watching porn in public with non-interested people around you is inconsiderate, off-putting and a really creepy thing to do.
I agree.
And I also wonder why that is so. Watching an action movie in public would not be considered creepy, even though people die. And I doubt the difference is in one being simulated and the other real.
So why does our society have this ridiculous obsession with people fucking?
We are making the mistake that many losers in many conflicts have made: We think our enemy is stupid and not seing the obvious.
What if they are?
Imagine that Hollywood is as smart as us and knows everything we know. And still they are doing what they are doing. Why would it make sense?
One, it gives them time. They may know they need to change business models, but like all humans, they are risk-averse and they need time to adapt, to test out various strategies, to find the most profitable approach. At the same time, they want their revenue to continue coming in. Delaying the inevitable is sometimes a smart move, if you can use the time inbetween.
Two, making everything else illegal guarantees that they can take down the competition before it emerges. Many of the illegal online services like Napster or Megaupload were toying with the idea of going legit, because they realized that you can only get so big and so much exposure before the guys with the guns come knocking. A legal service that competes with the studios (instead of working with them, like iTunes) could emerge out of those. Can't have that, better to shut it down while it's still clearly on the illegal side.
There are probably more good reasons. Don't assume they are stupid without proof.
It just leaves me completely flabbergasted. I can't imagine this entire process coming to this point without someone, somewhere in the decision process saying "Who gives a shit what they think? Just do whatever's cheapest right now"
Almost certainly that is what happened.
Some tech guy probably pointed out that it was a really dumb idea and what the consequences would be. His manager got the job to run the numbers and say how much it would cost to avoid the "hassle". The number he came up with didn't please management. Legal was asked what the worst damage would be if they didn't do it. Legal went over the EULA and decided nothing bad could happen, at worst a couple small claims cases. Management compared figure A to figure B and went with B because the likely total cost was lower.
It's still illegal, since it depends on the DeCSS code for breaking the encryption
I host it on my site till this day, despite being a named defender in the DVDCCA case. They served me papers, but they never served me an order to take it down.
No, it's not as easy as that. We've had three court cases around DeCSS. The one in Norway was dropped, DVDCCA vs. The Internet was decided in our favour and Universal vs. Reimers was decided against us.
I'm quite sure that their legal department went over this beforehand and decided that their EULA made sure you had no rights.
And yes, you don't face a lawyer in small claims - but you will surely face some company drone with a sheet of paper with talking points that a lawyer has prepared for him.
This is a direct attack on law enforcement, and that's only going to end in one way.
I am missing one point in this discussion, namely the legal and civil rights angle.
Was this phone call even legal? They were exchanging sensitive information with a foreign power, after all. If I were a defendent in a criminal case and I find out that the police has talked to anyone who has no business knowing it, I'd definitely have my lawyer go over the event with a very fine comb.
The kid, for example, broke into his schools computers. In the UK. How is that a topic for the FBI?
I believe that most police officers are well-meaning and just want to do their job. But just like the hackers sometimes lose perspective and do shit that wasn't so smart, so do cops lose sight of the bigger picture and go beyond what is proper.
That is why we, the public, need to know as much as we can about how they work and what we do. And that's why leaks like this are good and should happen on a regular basis.
They're the internet equivalent of a mob of Molotov-cocktail tossing anarchists who burn things down because it's fun to do.
I'm torn on this, really.
On the one hand, it is high time that an entity emerged that shows the fucktards who run our countries that there are limits, and Anon is on its way to becoming that entity. They are doing a lot of what the media ought to do if it would function as a check-on-power: Reveal abuses and shit that's going on.
On the other hand, Nietzsche was right when he sad the kings should be glad for the anarchists, because only after those started shooting at them their power became solid again.
And then again I think that Anon is doing things exactly right. As long as what they do seems juvenile and "for the lulz", the government will have trouble using them to justify oppressive laws. If they'd do actual damage, they would be labeled terrorists and we'd have even more laws very soon.
That up there is exactly why it was the right move to put all the details of how they did it out there, so that everyone with 3 grams of brain knows that at least in this case, the carelessness of the involved LEAs is the threat, nothing else.
Full disclosure is the worst enemy of those who operate best behind closed doors. Leaks and transparency have brought down more secret services and intelligence agencies than frontal attacks.
You don't play hardball with these guys. You don't play hide-and-seek. You show them for what they are, because that is how you disarm them.
However, what I find surprising after following it as long as you have is why, why, why have we not made a concerted effort as a group to fundamentally change the way email works?
We have. But inertia is a force more powerful than any amount good ideas put together. Just ask Microsoft - their past mistakes are their worst enemies.
The technology isn't the problem. I believe we have the solution for every single "but" from a technological POV.
The problem is that we have several billions of devices out there that speak SMTP, POP3 and IMAP and nobody wants to exclude any of them. We have thousands of programs interfacing the these protocols. Millions of hacks, injections, senders and receivers. Our entire infrastructure is built on this old system. As long as you keep the old e-mail system around for compatibility reasons, you've not gained anything but added a lot of complexity to the system at considerable cost.
Yes, I do think that the major movers could get together and could get it done. But they would have to stop thinking like a business. They would have to agree to set a deadline and stop accepting old-system e-mail on that day, no matter how much it hurts.
But that's not going to happen. What is going to happen is that we move away from e-mail. Already a lot of people I know don't use e-mail anymore. If you want to reach them, you send them a message on FB or whatever.
This will accelerate the death of e-mail. Because with less signal, the signal-to-noise ratio drops.
Residential ISPs would be doing a service if they shut off a connection and routed all port 80 requests to a web page explaining to the consumer that they have been identified as belonging to a bot-net and are harming others through their continued inaction. Give them links to solutions. Allow some proxied access to Google maps to find Geek Squad or some shit. Upsell a service to come out to their home and fix the computer.
I used to work for an ISP and actually proposed exactly that solution... I don't remember, maybe 8 years ago? Must've been around that.
Technology? No problem, easy to do.
Legal is the mess. Unless you've done this from the start, it means changing contracts. I could never get it pushed through because legal and marketing resisted.
That is why I think we need to make ISPs responsible - right now, their "safe" choice is always with the spammers. Making them responsible in whatever way - legal, financial or by shooting them - would change that.
As for the data centers that are doing hosting you can already take pretty severe action against them if *we* all as a *group*/dev/null'd their traffic for a couple of hours. That will wake somebody up in a second.
They don't care. They already know that most of their crap goes straight into the filters.
But most of them pay by traffic, as they are hosted as business customers, often wholesale (so they can run their own server). Max out their line for an hour. Double the time every time they spam again.
Yes, I know... due process and all, hitting innocents. I know. The problem is that the right approach with all these things in it has been failing us for two decades.
The reason these assholes can run all over us is that too few of those involved care. I am very happy that MS has started to care, and it's probably the only good thing they've done all century, but it really is a powerful signal.
The next people who need to start caring are the ISPs. Just recently I complained to my own ISP that they are hosting the actual website that the spam I get is advertising. They told me to use the "unsubscribe" link. Yeah, right. Living under a nice rock there, customer service idiot?
I'm all for making ISPs responsible if they knowingly host spammers. I'm for vigilante action at this point, as nothing else seems to work. Get Anonymous on the subject. Blast the ISPs who say "fuck off" when you point out that they have a spammer in their hosting center off the 'net.
We all know that there is no single, simple solution to the issue. So instead of looking for it, why not combine all the imperfect, partial solutions we have? Let MS & Co. take down the botnets. Put pressure on the CC companies to stop dealing with them. Make the banks liable and cut off the money flow. Make the ISPs care and make it harder (thus more expensive) for the spammers to find a home. Shoot some spammers. Shoot some idiots who keep them in business by buying from them. Sacrifice a goat, stick needles in a puppet and pray to your god(s). Do it all at once.
What I don't get in the whole spam saga - and I've been following it for 15 years now - is why it is possible for law enforcement to cooperate internationally and do joint raids in several countries when it comes to fake products, unauthorized DVD presses or computer games piracy groups - but not when it comes to spam.
Ask Spamhaus - we know most of the top offenders. We know who they are and in many cases we know where they live. And law enforcement is sitting on their hands.
Because it is a small damage on many people - an attack on the commons, not on one particular company or individual. We as humans assess damages instinctively, not mathematically. And that leads to crazy results. We consider someone stealing $50k from a bank a serious criminal, but someone stealing $0.01 from 50 mio. people is a nuissance - even though the actual damage is 10 times higher.
Sadly, that's a trend not only with spam. When Mommy Jane illegally downloads a Disney movie, she is fined ridiculous amounts of money. When Disney corrupts the law to steal from the public domain by retroactively taking content back under copyright, or extending it so it enters it later (if ever), it is hard to even explain to people why that's bad.
We have lost the concept of the commons, and that is the real tragedy of the commons, not the bullshit neo-liberal bedtime story by the same name.
Not as batshit insane as it sounds at first glance, or compared to many other activities of our current breed of career politicians.
For one, it's a reasonable number that makes it probable he is serious and it's not a hidden "drive the prices up to make it unprofitable if we can't outlaw it" agenda.
Two, the cause is reasonable. Yes, it's a "for the children" cause, but definitely not the worst. I don't know how exactly he plans to get kids outside with money, short of paying them, but I don't think anyone would disagree that a healthy amount of physical outdoor activity is a good thing.
I'm not exactly convinced, yet - but compared to the usual utter nonsense we are used to, it sounds fairly reasonable and measured.
I'm not saying it doesn't. In fact, I'm not entirely sure. But just stating it doesn't make it so, please elaborate. I am seriously interested. As I said, I'm not really certain either way.
Slashdot Mirror
Tough luck. Nobody forces you to do that, you know? You entered a business deal, it turned out that it is still profitable(!!!), but not as lucrative as you had hoped or as you have it with other deals.
Stop whining.
On most of the other stories, the main parts of the comments was dedicated to talking about alternatives and providing links.
This one? Whining, misty eyes on good old times, copyright discussions. Are we getting old?
It is famously difficult to turn around a huge company,
Which gives support to my point one, doesn't it? They're trying to buy the time it takes them to change.
false logic to think that that the gov needs ANY justification for more clamp-downs.
It does, if it wants to push them on a public that could vote them out of office. Or can vote in judges that take their laws apart. We are not yet in a tyranny.
But watching porn in public with non-interested people around you is inconsiderate, off-putting and a really creepy thing to do.
I agree.
And I also wonder why that is so. Watching an action movie in public would not be considered creepy, even though people die. And I doubt the difference is in one being simulated and the other real.
So why does our society have this ridiculous obsession with people fucking?
We are making the mistake that many losers in many conflicts have made: We think our enemy is stupid and not seing the obvious.
What if they are?
Imagine that Hollywood is as smart as us and knows everything we know. And still they are doing what they are doing. Why would it make sense?
One, it gives them time. They may know they need to change business models, but like all humans, they are risk-averse and they need time to adapt, to test out various strategies, to find the most profitable approach. At the same time, they want their revenue to continue coming in. Delaying the inevitable is sometimes a smart move, if you can use the time inbetween.
Two, making everything else illegal guarantees that they can take down the competition before it emerges. Many of the illegal online services like Napster or Megaupload were toying with the idea of going legit, because they realized that you can only get so big and so much exposure before the guys with the guns come knocking. A legal service that competes with the studios (instead of working with them, like iTunes) could emerge out of those. Can't have that, better to shut it down while it's still clearly on the illegal side.
There are probably more good reasons. Don't assume they are stupid without proof.
STOP BUYING UBI GAMES.
I've already done that. They still don't stop doing this bullshit. What should I do next, grand smurf?
It just leaves me completely flabbergasted. I can't imagine this entire process coming to this point without someone, somewhere in the decision process saying "Who gives a shit what they think? Just do whatever's cheapest right now"
Almost certainly that is what happened.
Some tech guy probably pointed out that it was a really dumb idea and what the consequences would be. His manager got the job to run the numbers and say how much it would cost to avoid the "hassle". The number he came up with didn't please management. Legal was asked what the worst damage would be if they didn't do it. Legal went over the EULA and decided nothing bad could happen, at worst a couple small claims cases. Management compared figure A to figure B and went with B because the likely total cost was lower.
It's still illegal, since it depends on the DeCSS code for breaking the encryption
I host it on my site till this day, despite being a named defender in the DVDCCA case. They served me papers, but they never served me an order to take it down.
No, it's not as easy as that. We've had three court cases around DeCSS. The one in Norway was dropped, DVDCCA vs. The Internet was decided in our favour and Universal vs. Reimers was decided against us.
I'm quite sure that their legal department went over this beforehand and decided that their EULA made sure you had no rights.
And yes, you don't face a lawyer in small claims - but you will surely face some company drone with a sheet of paper with talking points that a lawyer has prepared for him.
This is a direct attack on law enforcement, and that's only going to end in one way.
I am missing one point in this discussion, namely the legal and civil rights angle.
Was this phone call even legal? They were exchanging sensitive information with a foreign power, after all. If I were a defendent in a criminal case and I find out that the police has talked to anyone who has no business knowing it, I'd definitely have my lawyer go over the event with a very fine comb.
The kid, for example, broke into his schools computers. In the UK. How is that a topic for the FBI?
I believe that most police officers are well-meaning and just want to do their job. But just like the hackers sometimes lose perspective and do shit that wasn't so smart, so do cops lose sight of the bigger picture and go beyond what is proper.
That is why we, the public, need to know as much as we can about how they work and what we do. And that's why leaks like this are good and should happen on a regular basis.
They're the internet equivalent of a mob of Molotov-cocktail tossing anarchists who burn things down because it's fun to do.
I'm torn on this, really.
On the one hand, it is high time that an entity emerged that shows the fucktards who run our countries that there are limits, and Anon is on its way to becoming that entity. They are doing a lot of what the media ought to do if it would function as a check-on-power: Reveal abuses and shit that's going on.
On the other hand, Nietzsche was right when he sad the kings should be glad for the anarchists, because only after those started shooting at them their power became solid again.
And then again I think that Anon is doing things exactly right. As long as what they do seems juvenile and "for the lulz", the government will have trouble using them to justify oppressive laws. If they'd do actual damage, they would be labeled terrorists and we'd have even more laws very soon.
That up there is exactly why it was the right move to put all the details of how they did it out there, so that everyone with 3 grams of brain knows that at least in this case, the carelessness of the involved LEAs is the threat, nothing else.
Full disclosure is the worst enemy of those who operate best behind closed doors. Leaks and transparency have brought down more secret services and intelligence agencies than frontal attacks.
You don't play hardball with these guys. You don't play hide-and-seek. You show them for what they are, because that is how you disarm them.
put justice out of reach for small business American victims of IP theft.'
When an industry lobby organisation suddenly finds its heart for those who are not amongst its members, you know something is up.
These guys aren't a non-profit. They are paid to do their job.
However, what I find surprising after following it as long as you have is why, why, why have we not made a concerted effort as a group to fundamentally change the way email works?
We have. But inertia is a force more powerful than any amount good ideas put together. Just ask Microsoft - their past mistakes are their worst enemies.
The technology isn't the problem. I believe we have the solution for every single "but" from a technological POV.
The problem is that we have several billions of devices out there that speak SMTP, POP3 and IMAP and nobody wants to exclude any of them. We have thousands of programs interfacing the these protocols. Millions of hacks, injections, senders and receivers. Our entire infrastructure is built on this old system.
As long as you keep the old e-mail system around for compatibility reasons, you've not gained anything but added a lot of complexity to the system at considerable cost.
Yes, I do think that the major movers could get together and could get it done. But they would have to stop thinking like a business. They would have to agree to set a deadline and stop accepting old-system e-mail on that day, no matter how much it hurts.
But that's not going to happen. What is going to happen is that we move away from e-mail. Already a lot of people I know don't use e-mail anymore. If you want to reach them, you send them a message on FB or whatever.
This will accelerate the death of e-mail. Because with less signal, the signal-to-noise ratio drops.
Spam earns a pittance for the pirates
There's your wrong assumption.
The top spammers have all grown rich doing it. Maybe not Megaupload rich, but in the same ballpark. We're talking houses, cars, several millions here.
Until the botnet's become completely P2P with no central C&C server(s), detecting C&C traffic is easy enough that all ISP's should be doing it.
They will the moment enough ISPs do it that it hurts them. The concepts and technology have been around for almost a decade.
Residential ISPs would be doing a service if they shut off a connection and routed all port 80 requests to a web page explaining to the consumer that they have been identified as belonging to a bot-net and are harming others through their continued inaction. Give them links to solutions. Allow some proxied access to Google maps to find Geek Squad or some shit. Upsell a service to come out to their home and fix the computer.
I used to work for an ISP and actually proposed exactly that solution... I don't remember, maybe 8 years ago? Must've been around that.
Technology? No problem, easy to do.
Legal is the mess. Unless you've done this from the start, it means changing contracts. I could never get it pushed through because legal and marketing resisted.
That is why I think we need to make ISPs responsible - right now, their "safe" choice is always with the spammers. Making them responsible in whatever way - legal, financial or by shooting them - would change that.
As for the data centers that are doing hosting you can already take pretty severe action against them if *we* all as a *group* /dev/null'd their traffic for a couple of hours. That will wake somebody up in a second.
They don't care. They already know that most of their crap goes straight into the filters.
But most of them pay by traffic, as they are hosted as business customers, often wholesale (so they can run their own server). Max out their line for an hour. Double the time every time they spam again.
Yes, I know... due process and all, hitting innocents. I know. The problem is that the right approach with all these things in it has been failing us for two decades.
The reason these assholes can run all over us is that too few of those involved care. I am very happy that MS has started to care, and it's probably the only good thing they've done all century, but it really is a powerful signal.
The next people who need to start caring are the ISPs. Just recently I complained to my own ISP that they are hosting the actual website that the spam I get is advertising. They told me to use the "unsubscribe" link. Yeah, right. Living under a nice rock there, customer service idiot?
I'm all for making ISPs responsible if they knowingly host spammers. I'm for vigilante action at this point, as nothing else seems to work. Get Anonymous on the subject. Blast the ISPs who say "fuck off" when you point out that they have a spammer in their hosting center off the 'net.
We all know that there is no single, simple solution to the issue. So instead of looking for it, why not combine all the imperfect, partial solutions we have? Let MS & Co. take down the botnets. Put pressure on the CC companies to stop dealing with them. Make the banks liable and cut off the money flow. Make the ISPs care and make it harder (thus more expensive) for the spammers to find a home. Shoot some spammers. Shoot some idiots who keep them in business by buying from them. Sacrifice a goat, stick needles in a puppet and pray to your god(s). Do it all at once.
What I don't get in the whole spam saga - and I've been following it for 15 years now - is why it is possible for law enforcement to cooperate internationally and do joint raids in several countries when it comes to fake products, unauthorized DVD presses or computer games piracy groups - but not when it comes to spam.
Ask Spamhaus - we know most of the top offenders. We know who they are and in many cases we know where they live. And law enforcement is sitting on their hands.
Because it is a small damage on many people - an attack on the commons, not on one particular company or individual. We as humans assess damages instinctively, not mathematically. And that leads to crazy results. We consider someone stealing $50k from a bank a serious criminal, but someone stealing $0.01 from 50 mio. people is a nuissance - even though the actual damage is 10 times higher.
Sadly, that's a trend not only with spam. When Mommy Jane illegally downloads a Disney movie, she is fined ridiculous amounts of money. When Disney corrupts the law to steal from the public domain by retroactively taking content back under copyright, or extending it so it enters it later (if ever), it is hard to even explain to people why that's bad.
We have lost the concept of the commons, and that is the real tragedy of the commons, not the bullshit neo-liberal bedtime story by the same name.
Not as batshit insane as it sounds at first glance, or compared to many other activities of our current breed of career politicians.
For one, it's a reasonable number that makes it probable he is serious and it's not a hidden "drive the prices up to make it unprofitable if we can't outlaw it" agenda.
Two, the cause is reasonable. Yes, it's a "for the children" cause, but definitely not the worst. I don't know how exactly he plans to get kids outside with money, short of paying them, but I don't think anyone would disagree that a healthy amount of physical outdoor activity is a good thing.
I'm not exactly convinced, yet - but compared to the usual utter nonsense we are used to, it sounds fairly reasonable and measured.
True.
You have convinced me to change my position on spam.
From "shoot the spammers" to "shoot the idiots who buy from them".
The only issue is that we must shoot idiots faster than they breed, and that is going to be challenging.
Yeah. I wonder when they'll simply release the trunk once a day and call if "Firefox 20120202" etc.
But I figure they'll stop the nonsense when they're some distance ahead of Chrome and feel like they've "won" the version number pissing contest.
I agree completely. I don't think there's any failure of science anywhere in sight, maybe you've confused me with another poster?
How does science fail in ethics?
I'm not saying it doesn't. In fact, I'm not entirely sure. But just stating it doesn't make it so, please elaborate. I am seriously interested. As I said, I'm not really certain either way.