A problem that anyone using the Internet sees is that the endpoints (or the users) are just too distributed to be able to reach effectively. Because of the anonymous nature of much of what goes on, people are encouraged to do questionable or illegal things with the knowledge that it is just too distributed to ever get caught. They are at the endpoints.
So, the thinking goes that the right way to deal with this is to attack the source or the single point of contact. This means going after the supplier, the target web site or the source rather than trying to individually go after users or abusers.
If you have 100,000 machines trying a brute force attack on a bank login screen it only makes sense to change the login screen rather than trying to track down 100,000 people trying to rob the bank. If you have a server distributing a copy of AutoCAD and 10,000 people download it you don't try to sue the downloaders - you go after the owner of the server. Similarly, if you have a program whose function is to disrupt a game, a web site or whatever you don't try to go after the thousands or tens of thousands of people that are trying to use it, you go after the supplier. It is the only hope, because you just aren't going to be able to get to all the users.
Of course, the tactics vary somewhat but for the most part this is where things have evolved to. Blizzard in this case can (a) learn to live with cheaters and bots, (b) try to evolve their code so that it is impervious to this kind of thing, or (c) go after the supplier with enough resolve that other people think twice about doing this. Obviously, they are doing (c) and I would say most people would agree that (a) is the same as shutting down and saying it was nice while it lasted. Nobody really wants that, not even the cheaters.
Long term does attacking the source work? It doesn't seem to. The environment we are leading up towards would be roving bands of ninja warriors rented out to corporations for attacks on their rivals. Because legal action doesn't really cut it these days. You set up an operation with very low paid people in Romania or Russia and can pretty much get away with anything. Laws that have been in existance for a very long time, such as those making fraud, extortion and robbery crimes do not seem to apply everywhere the Internet reaches.
So how do you attack the source when the source is like The Pirate Bay? Legally, they are fine in their country and can laugh at laws elsewhere. Same thing with DDoS attacks from Russia - it's not a crime there to put online casinos out of business so they just have to pay their protection fees to keep from getting shut down.
No, while it is an obvious strategy today attacking the source long term is going to fail to have any real impact. Roving bands of ninja warriors might, though. Or figuring out a distributed electronic attack against the endpoints. Who knows? Maybe there is a secret instruction sequence that makes the processor burn up in a puff of smoke.
with the idea that there are thousands of web pages out there that essentially say "come and get your real, official Coca-Cola right here!!!" When you get to the page you see either (a) nothing at all having to do with Coca-Cola (odd, but OK I guess) or lots of stuff that says "Get your Coca-Cola right here!!!" again. Finally, when you get down to the ordering and paying part of the purchase you discover in teeny print "Note: the product you are buying has nothing whatsoever to do with Coca-Cola but our substitute is just as good in every way."
Repeat this for every product that people might buy on the Internet. It is designed to trick you. If a store did this, they would be closed down almost immediately in the US by a number of different regulators at local, state and maybe federal level. However, we get to see this on the Internet every day and maybe, once in a great while, someone gets sued over it and closed down. After five years of selling stuff getting a fine of $25,000 is just a cost of doing business.
As far as I know, the RIAA does not sue or do anything with "downloaders". If you are downloading and not sharing there is virtually nothing they can do about it. There isn't a good way to identify these people and no clear trail that they downloaded anything at all.
However, uploading means that your IP address and computer can be identified by a simple search. They can then find out the entire catalog of what you are sharing with the world at large. If there is a large enough quantity being shared you lose the ability to use the "but I didn't know" defense.
If you are sharing a song that may be worth only $1 but 150,000 people download it (or parts of it) from you, then you have contributed to $150,000 loss in sales. Multiply this by thousands of songs your average hard-core file sharer has and you begin to see the reasoning behind this.
I've not seen any ISP agreement that has a clause in it that says the account holder is responsible for activity on the account.
You would think, especially in the case of minor children. that someone needs to be responsible. Apparently not.
This pretty much leaves the RIAA and folks in the position of suing an IP address that may or may not belong to any real individual. Apparently, they then try to gain access to a computer to "depose" it through forensic examination. And if they find nothing then obviously nothing was happening that they can sue for.
If this is really how it is operating, then it is clear why there are so few computer-related prosecutions in the US. Nobody is responsible for anything, at least not unless you find some clear evidence after the fact. And you are going to have to have really deep pockets to fund the discovery when there is such a low likelihook of finding anything real.
Ever wonder why computer breakins aren't prosecuted more? You are seeing the reason in action. Even if they have an IP address, the account holder's name and address, and clear logs of what happened it is meaningless. I know of no company that can afford to pursue stuff under these termms.
If I understand you correctly you are proposing that people would pay for collections of stuff they could download for free and the value proposition would be that they wouldn't have to hunt down all the songs in the collection. Now maybe if you had an album of 10 songs and only one of them was freely available some folks might buy the album with the other nine.
But I certainly don't see any disincentive to share the results of that purchase. You are still trapped by the "let's share" meme that pretty much means any digital item should be sold for its reproduction cost - zero.
No ISP is going to shut off an account because of an infected computer. They might throttle it somewhat, but it is the site administrator's responsibility to deal with infected computers. What? Your parents don't have a "site administrator" overseeing their computers? (((except when you are there... ha ha))) Well, that sounds like a real problem, doesn't it?
What we have are general-purpose computers that people install random software on without thinking about where it came from, what it might do and the consequences of having that happen. Then, they don't check to see what their computer is doing when it is supposedly idle and thrashing around on the hard drive or is really slow. Well, maybe it is just getting old and needs to be replaced. Right.
So we have the equivalent of handing a loaded revolver to a three-year-old and leaving the room. We have seen how they can hurt themselves with it. We can see how they hurt others with it. And about all that is done is giving them some more bullets.
Let's be clear about one thing here. Windows "security" or the lack of it is not the problem. If the machine is locked down utterly so that nothing can be installed, removed or modified Windows security is perfectly adequate. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to run their computer this way. There is no security if the "user" can simply install any old thing they want, be it some new flash player with a bug in it, WeatherBug or a bot trojan. Signing code is not the answer - people aren't reading the messages that are displayed. You could have a page of text displayed when a trojan is installed that says in eight different ways "this will take over your computer and make it ours" and people would install it.
The answer is pretty clear. General purpose computers that can have software installed are a tool that must be monitored, controlled and administered. Giving one to a user and leaving them alone with it is a reciepe for disaster. Just like the disaster with spam, botnets and viruses we are seeing right now.
Musicians before 1976 made a lot of money because the process of "recording" and "duplicating" involved lots of expensive equipment and supplies. It was not accessable to the average Joe. It was pretty much at the same level as "duplicating" a large 3-inch bolt is today. Yes, it is possible and the equipment to do so is well known and available. But it is way cheaper to go and buy the bolt in the hardware store.
Music today can be duplicated and redistributed by everyone. There is no value associated with it and nobody should be paying anything for it any longer. The fact that people still are paying is mostly because they do not have the knowledge or availability of the materials (a fast Internet connection).
Software is pretty much going the same way. How excited are people to be able to go out and pay $200 for a new version of Windows when they get 50 spam emails a day advertising how they can get it for $20? Windows, Photoshop, Quicken, Office, it is all there courtesy of some folks in Russia and Romania.
Problem with this model is if you can wait to be in the second wave, after the early adopter, you get everything for free. The early adopter who just has to have everything new right now might make for an interesting way to run a business but today companies that cater to the early adopter only die really early. This is essentially what the dot-com boom was all about - they found ways to finance a company based on early adopters and when that dried up there was nothing.
It is having a business that can reach into the second and third waves of having a mature product after the early adopters that is a success today.
So, I dispute that you can have a functioning economy based on patronage today. I don't think you can make things work for early adopters and give the rest away for free.
Yes, there will always be music. And there will be live performances, but nobody is going to get rich or even support themselves beyond the most modest of ways through this. You will have the three or four guys that go to a bar to play after work and they get drinks for free. But the idea of a concert where 70,000 people show up and pay $100 each is pretty much over.
$10 for 19 tracks when you say right above that it costs less than $1.50 when someone else makes them for you? So why are you charging $10 and not $1.50 or $2? Greed perhaps?
Or, do you think your CD is somehow worth something more than the time and materials used to make it?
DRM? How about music, period. It is all available free today. Why pay? Out of some misguided loyalty? Because you feel guilty because you are breaking the law?
It is well and truely over. The youth of today are downloading their fill of music and not paying anything for it, anywhere. If it isn't free, they are not interested. They are spending their money on other things.
It is the people over 30 and those without broadband Internet connections that are still flocking to WalMart and BestBuy to buy CDs. The people over 30 will be gone soon. The people without broadband connections will likely always be with us, but this is unlikely to be enough to keep the CDs on the store shelves.
Nobody is going to pay for a service when an identical free service exists. At least nobody with any sense.
Yes, there was a policy change. Unfortunately, the resultant changes in the environment took about 20 years less than anyone evisioned and nobody has any explanation for why it took less time.
It is like you put your microwave popcorn in for 4 minutes, the oven dings after 20 seconds and it is done. Most of humanity would say "Wow. Way cool." and go and eat popcorn. Some would extrapolate this to mean everythihg should take less time because we're getting more efficient.
Right now, we just noticed the difference and a very small number of people are interested in why.
"Population control" isn't going to be anywhere near sufficient for reducing the population by 5 billion people. Actually, the reduction needed is probably closer to 5.8 billion people today and by the time it was finished it would be a lot closer to 6.5 billion.
China's one child policy may have helped China some, but it hasn't reduced population in China.
If you want to make everything fit in the tiny basket that is Earth, it is going to take drastic measures to make this happen. Such drastic measures that even the most eco-minded freaks are likely to think twice about the value of space exploration.
If we started today killing off 1 million people a day, every day, day in and day out, for 20 years this would be just about enough people. This is another Holocaust every six days. In a little less than a month this would be equal to every person that has ever died until about 1700 or so.
Do you think maybe that it is time to think about exploiting resources off planet? No? OK, just think about what it is going to take to get you, your friends and everyone you have ever known to line up to be killed tomorrow. Can you explain it to them, make them see how important it is that they go willingly?
No, the message is irrelevent. It is the fact of face-time in front of the crowd. His name becomes more familiar and people think "election = Fred". It has nothing to do with the message.
I think in the US the message ceased to have any meaning in about 1960 when they discovered television for presidential compaigns.
And certainly in most places crowd = mob, with just as much mob-style thinking as you would expect.
You would like to believe "it should be easy for the company that that discovered it to dominate the market in the future." It isn't today.
The problem is that it is cheaper to take someone else's design, run over to China or Taiwan and have the device built. Meanwhile, the original developer is too small to order in lots of 100,000 units and WalMart is dictating how to run their business. New company steps in, already in distribution and says "why not buy from us" and the developer is shut out completely.
This happens today. If the R&D could be patented and actually is an infringment going on, they can hopefully sue and get something out of the deal. Otherwise, they are just gone. Size is everything today, along with distribution. And smaller tech developers have no way to break out of the box.
Charter and Comcast have nothing to fear - they are building a parallel network. Their customers are connected through their wires and not piggybacking on Verizon (and other) lines to sell their product.
This doesn't piss off the telecom companies anywhere near as much as using their own DSL lines to compete with them.
The only thing that is going to happen with the cable companies is they are going to find themselves in the tariffed telephone business as real providers. With the full load of Utility Boards, 911 requirements, coverage requirements and so on and so forth.
Let's see, Vonage builds... nothing and sells little boxes to people to connect to their Internet connection. This then connects to a couple of termination sites that either connect to other Vonage customers (maybe) or just dumps the call out on the standard telephone network.
Yes, individual calls out cost them something, but that infrastructure is built and maintained by the other companies. Generally, by the people too dumb to have switched away to Vonage and their VOIP ilk.
The problem is that Vonage is 100% dependent on the telephone network they are competing with. They are selling a service which requires their competitor to operate. This is generally a bad business model, except it can generate extremely high profits for a short period of time. Vonage can't put Verizon out of business as it would eliminate their ability to operate.
Of course having a leech syphoning off the high-value residential customers does nothing but piss Verizon, AT&T and others off. This has been coming for a long time and it isn't over yet. I would guess some telecom company finds some way to put every one of the leeching VOIP services like Vonage and Lingo out of business soon.
Any newspaper would collect enough billing information to send the person a bill. And, by the way, have enough real identification to be able to track down the person that did it.
Craigslist, because it is on the Internet and anonymous, has no identity verification at all. Many people, most in fact, will do things they would never consider doing if they know it can never be traced back to them and there cannot possibly be any consequences.
I assure you, there would be consequences with a newspaper classified.
Craigslist says they will reveal information about the poster if served with a subpoena. Great. So what are they going to reveal? A fake name, a temporary, anonymous email address and and an IP address that ends at the public library.
So what?
This person has gotten away with this completely. There are no consequences on the Internet. The poor woman has nobody to go after. This is pretty funny, after all.
Wow, wouldn't it be wonderful if Microsoft finally got it and made Windows really secure?
No, it wouldn't It wouldn't sell, nobody would use it and it would be a complete flop.
Windows is designed to be usable by people without one little bit of computer knowledge. It therefore does things "for you" in the background that can be good and helpful. If they are subverted, they are bad and insecure. Take all of this away and leave just the command line and Windows would be much more secure, but it would be unusable by most people.
If it is programmable and the programming can be added to or modified in the field, it needs controls on who can modify that programming. If the inexperienced user can, it isn't secure. Period. When users run programs to install games they purchased they are using the same resources as when the click on an email attachment to install some bit of malware. They have no way of knowing the difference and it would seem no amount of education is going to fix that problem.
What most people need is a locked-down appliance that cannot be modified in the field without extraordinary effort. And certainly cannot be modified over the Internet. This could be user friendly and secure, but you wouldn't install software on it, ever.
Windows is trying to be user friendly and general-purpose. This has no choice but to fail to be very secure. The user cannot tell the difference between a program that is from Microsoft that is something they want and a program from microSoft that isn't something they want at all. Or from MircoSoft. Or really, anyone else at all. Sure, you can try to give them a chance to tell the difference - and Vista does try - but it isn't going to work. People gave up reading messages from computers and just click OK beginning in 1979 with CP/M and they aren't about to change now.
I contend that there is no material difference between the security present on a Macintosh or Linux and Windows in the hands of a user that doesn't understand how the system works. If they get an email that says to run some program, they are going to run it if they want what the email says they are going to get. If this requires using sudo to get root authority, they will do so if they have the ability to do it.
So how do you have security in that environment? You don't. You can't ever be secure against the naive user in charge of their own computer.
Labor in the US is certainly one of the most expensive in the world. As a direct result of this it should be obvious that any technique that will move the work elsewhere where labor is cheaper is going to be done. Any technique.
Outsourcing will continue because it is at least on the surface cost effective. It will displace higher paid American labor in favor of lower paid labor elsewhere. It does not seem reasonable to assume that at some point all foreign labor will become as expensive as American labor is today. At least not for a long, long time.
Many people in the US are under some kind of illusion that we can be a country of "knowledge workers" where everyone is above average and college educated. We can simply export work or import labor for anything that is not covered by this. There is a false assumption here that everyone in the US is capable of being trained as a "knowledge worker". We are reforming the economy such that there are no jobs in the US which someone of more modest intelligence and capabilities can perform. This is a mistake on several levels.
Obviously, we can move work offshore to cheaper labor but we will then be dependent on a longer supply chain and whatever occurs in these foreign locations. This means that an earthquake in India can wipe out a company in the US. Does not sound like a good plan.
It also means that it is possible to seriously damage the US ability to compete in the world by attacking non-US facilities. If a majority of consumer electronics devices are made in Indonesia, burning down a factory there may prevent a US competitor from entering the market and preserve the market dominance of other countries.
Certainly when all our military equipment is made overseas, as will soon be the case, it will be nearly impossible to use the military against foreign enemies in league with producing countries. We can also expect complex military hardware to be dependent on foreign powers continued good will to keep it operating. Logic bombs in such equipment can be expected.
How about a specially-crafted USB key that damages the computer physically? Better still, wipes the hard drive and then physically damages the computer?
I suspect you might be able to force a reset with a long enough pulse of -5V on the power supply to the USB port. You might be able to smoke a significant portion of the machine by sending 10,000V through the USB data pins. All it would take would be a capacitor and a charge pump. I think it would end up looking like one of the Memorex 5GB USB devices when you were done because 10,000V capacitors aren't real small.
Never underestimate the wickedness of someone that believes they will not get caught. Especially when there is substantial evidence they are correct in this belief.
Windows is supposed to be "user friendly". User friendly implies that when I put the CD for the game I just bought into the computer I do not have to figure out how to install or play the game - I put the disc in, so I must want to play, right?
Previous to autorun, I would have to search the CD, sometimes reading the instructions to find out that I needed to run D:\PC\X86\INSTALL\SETUP\SETUP.EXE in order to actually install the game. Autorun was introduced 12 years ago with Windows 95 and was a significant improvement.
Unfortunately, it is direct conflict with computer security. Microsoft has come down clearly on the side of the "user" and not the "security expert" pretty much for the last 10 years or so making computers a lot easier to use and a lot more vulnerable to malicious attack.
I think giving people non-modifiable appliances for web surfing and email reading which are completely safe from any sort of attack makes sense. The people that can operate extremely user-unfriendly (and safe) programmable general-purpose computers can have them. The rest clearly cannot handle it and shouldn't be burdened with having to figure out what is safe and what isn't.
Reminds me of a story about the Shortstack. The idea is you build a very, very tall tube that ends where the air pressure is significantly lower. Unsealing the bottom of the tube at ground level than causes the higher pressure air to be sucked upwards where it is a near vacuum. This would introduce an entirely new cycle of circulation and clear polluted cities where the air is trapped by ground features.
Of course, the original proponent seemed to miss out that the air in the tube might be affected by gravity. Nice idea, though.
Slashdot Mirror
A problem that anyone using the Internet sees is that the endpoints (or the users) are just too distributed to be able to reach effectively. Because of the anonymous nature of much of what goes on, people are encouraged to do questionable or illegal things with the knowledge that it is just too distributed to ever get caught. They are at the endpoints.
So, the thinking goes that the right way to deal with this is to attack the source or the single point of contact. This means going after the supplier, the target web site or the source rather than trying to individually go after users or abusers.
If you have 100,000 machines trying a brute force attack on a bank login screen it only makes sense to change the login screen rather than trying to track down 100,000 people trying to rob the bank. If you have a server distributing a copy of AutoCAD and 10,000 people download it you don't try to sue the downloaders - you go after the owner of the server. Similarly, if you have a program whose function is to disrupt a game, a web site or whatever you don't try to go after the thousands or tens of thousands of people that are trying to use it, you go after the supplier. It is the only hope, because you just aren't going to be able to get to all the users.
Of course, the tactics vary somewhat but for the most part this is where things have evolved to. Blizzard in this case can (a) learn to live with cheaters and bots, (b) try to evolve their code so that it is impervious to this kind of thing, or (c) go after the supplier with enough resolve that other people think twice about doing this. Obviously, they are doing (c) and I would say most people would agree that (a) is the same as shutting down and saying it was nice while it lasted. Nobody really wants that, not even the cheaters.
Long term does attacking the source work? It doesn't seem to. The environment we are leading up towards would be roving bands of ninja warriors rented out to corporations for attacks on their rivals. Because legal action doesn't really cut it these days. You set up an operation with very low paid people in Romania or Russia and can pretty much get away with anything. Laws that have been in existance for a very long time, such as those making fraud, extortion and robbery crimes do not seem to apply everywhere the Internet reaches.
So how do you attack the source when the source is like The Pirate Bay? Legally, they are fine in their country and can laugh at laws elsewhere. Same thing with DDoS attacks from Russia - it's not a crime there to put online casinos out of business so they just have to pay their protection fees to keep from getting shut down.
No, while it is an obvious strategy today attacking the source long term is going to fail to have any real impact. Roving bands of ninja warriors might, though. Or figuring out a distributed electronic attack against the endpoints. Who knows? Maybe there is a secret instruction sequence that makes the processor burn up in a puff of smoke.
with the idea that there are thousands of web pages out there that essentially say "come and get your real, official Coca-Cola right here!!!" When you get to the page you see either (a) nothing at all having to do with Coca-Cola (odd, but OK I guess) or lots of stuff that says "Get your Coca-Cola right here!!!" again. Finally, when you get down to the ordering and paying part of the purchase you discover in teeny print "Note: the product you are buying has nothing whatsoever to do with Coca-Cola but our substitute is just as good in every way."
Repeat this for every product that people might buy on the Internet. It is designed to trick you. If a store did this, they would be closed down almost immediately in the US by a number of different regulators at local, state and maybe federal level. However, we get to see this on the Internet every day and maybe, once in a great while, someone gets sued over it and closed down. After five years of selling stuff getting a fine of $25,000 is just a cost of doing business.
As far as I know, the RIAA does not sue or do anything with "downloaders". If you are downloading and not sharing there is virtually nothing they can do about it. There isn't a good way to identify these people and no clear trail that they downloaded anything at all.
However, uploading means that your IP address and computer can be identified by a simple search. They can then find out the entire catalog of what you are sharing with the world at large. If there is a large enough quantity being shared you lose the ability to use the "but I didn't know" defense.
If you are sharing a song that may be worth only $1 but 150,000 people download it (or parts of it) from you, then you have contributed to $150,000 loss in sales. Multiply this by thousands of songs your average hard-core file sharer has and you begin to see the reasoning behind this.
Clearer now?
I've not seen any ISP agreement that has a clause in it that says the account holder is responsible for activity on the account.
You would think, especially in the case of minor children. that someone needs to be responsible. Apparently not.
This pretty much leaves the RIAA and folks in the position of suing an IP address that may or may not belong to any real individual. Apparently, they then try to gain access to a computer to "depose" it through forensic examination. And if they find nothing then obviously nothing was happening that they can sue for.
If this is really how it is operating, then it is clear why there are so few computer-related prosecutions in the US. Nobody is responsible for anything, at least not unless you find some clear evidence after the fact. And you are going to have to have really deep pockets to fund the discovery when there is such a low likelihook of finding anything real.
Ever wonder why computer breakins aren't prosecuted more? You are seeing the reason in action. Even if they have an IP address, the account holder's name and address, and clear logs of what happened it is meaningless. I know of no company that can afford to pursue stuff under these termms.
If I understand you correctly you are proposing that people would pay for collections of stuff they could download for free and the value proposition would be that they wouldn't have to hunt down all the songs in the collection. Now maybe if you had an album of 10 songs and only one of them was freely available some folks might buy the album with the other nine.
But I certainly don't see any disincentive to share the results of that purchase. You are still trapped by the "let's share" meme that pretty much means any digital item should be sold for its reproduction cost - zero.
No ISP is going to shut off an account because of an infected computer. They might throttle it somewhat, but it is the site administrator's responsibility to deal with infected computers. What? Your parents don't have a "site administrator" overseeing their computers? (((except when you are there... ha ha))) Well, that sounds like a real problem, doesn't it?
What we have are general-purpose computers that people install random software on without thinking about where it came from, what it might do and the consequences of having that happen. Then, they don't check to see what their computer is doing when it is supposedly idle and thrashing around on the hard drive or is really slow. Well, maybe it is just getting old and needs to be replaced. Right.
So we have the equivalent of handing a loaded revolver to a three-year-old and leaving the room. We have seen how they can hurt themselves with it. We can see how they hurt others with it. And about all that is done is giving them some more bullets.
Let's be clear about one thing here. Windows "security" or the lack of it is not the problem. If the machine is locked down utterly so that nothing can be installed, removed or modified Windows security is perfectly adequate. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to run their computer this way. There is no security if the "user" can simply install any old thing they want, be it some new flash player with a bug in it, WeatherBug or a bot trojan. Signing code is not the answer - people aren't reading the messages that are displayed. You could have a page of text displayed when a trojan is installed that says in eight different ways "this will take over your computer and make it ours" and people would install it.
The answer is pretty clear. General purpose computers that can have software installed are a tool that must be monitored, controlled and administered. Giving one to a user and leaving them alone with it is a reciepe for disaster. Just like the disaster with spam, botnets and viruses we are seeing right now.
Yes, you are going to be in the same position as the folks that create botnets. We see every day how these people are treated.
Are they arrested in thrown in jail? No, they are living very well in Russia from their ill-gotten gains.
There is no liability unless you are a complete idiot.
Musicians before 1976 made a lot of money because the process of "recording" and "duplicating" involved lots of expensive equipment and supplies. It was not accessable to the average Joe. It was pretty much at the same level as "duplicating" a large 3-inch bolt is today. Yes, it is possible and the equipment to do so is well known and available. But it is way cheaper to go and buy the bolt in the hardware store.
Music today can be duplicated and redistributed by everyone. There is no value associated with it and nobody should be paying anything for it any longer. The fact that people still are paying is mostly because they do not have the knowledge or availability of the materials (a fast Internet connection).
Software is pretty much going the same way. How excited are people to be able to go out and pay $200 for a new version of Windows when they get 50 spam emails a day advertising how they can get it for $20? Windows, Photoshop, Quicken, Office, it is all there courtesy of some folks in Russia and Romania.
Problem with this model is if you can wait to be in the second wave, after the early adopter, you get everything for free. The early adopter who just has to have everything new right now might make for an interesting way to run a business but today companies that cater to the early adopter only die really early. This is essentially what the dot-com boom was all about - they found ways to finance a company based on early adopters and when that dried up there was nothing.
It is having a business that can reach into the second and third waves of having a mature product after the early adopters that is a success today.
So, I dispute that you can have a functioning economy based on patronage today. I don't think you can make things work for early adopters and give the rest away for free.
Yes, there will always be music. And there will be live performances, but nobody is going to get rich or even support themselves beyond the most modest of ways through this. You will have the three or four guys that go to a bar to play after work and they get drinks for free. But the idea of a concert where 70,000 people show up and pay $100 each is pretty much over.
$10 for 19 tracks when you say right above that it costs less than $1.50 when someone else makes them for you? So why are you charging $10 and not $1.50 or $2? Greed perhaps?
Or, do you think your CD is somehow worth something more than the time and materials used to make it?
DRM? How about music, period. It is all available free today. Why pay? Out of some misguided loyalty? Because you feel guilty because you are breaking the law?
It is well and truely over. The youth of today are downloading their fill of music and not paying anything for it, anywhere. If it isn't free, they are not interested. They are spending their money on other things.
It is the people over 30 and those without broadband Internet connections that are still flocking to WalMart and BestBuy to buy CDs. The people over 30 will be gone soon. The people without broadband connections will likely always be with us, but this is unlikely to be enough to keep the CDs on the store shelves.
Nobody is going to pay for a service when an identical free service exists. At least nobody with any sense.
Yes, there was a policy change. Unfortunately, the resultant changes in the environment took about 20 years less than anyone evisioned and nobody has any explanation for why it took less time.
It is like you put your microwave popcorn in for 4 minutes, the oven dings after 20 seconds and it is done. Most of humanity would say "Wow. Way cool." and go and eat popcorn. Some would extrapolate this to mean everythihg should take less time because we're getting more efficient.
Right now, we just noticed the difference and a very small number of people are interested in why.
"Population control" isn't going to be anywhere near sufficient for reducing the population by 5 billion people. Actually, the reduction needed is probably closer to 5.8 billion people today and by the time it was finished it would be a lot closer to 6.5 billion.
China's one child policy may have helped China some, but it hasn't reduced population in China.
If you want to make everything fit in the tiny basket that is Earth, it is going to take drastic measures to make this happen. Such drastic measures that even the most eco-minded freaks are likely to think twice about the value of space exploration.
If we started today killing off 1 million people a day, every day, day in and day out, for 20 years this would be just about enough people. This is another Holocaust every six days.
In a little less than a month this would be equal to every person that has ever died until about 1700 or so.
Do you think maybe that it is time to think about exploiting resources off planet? No? OK, just think about what it is going to take to get you, your friends and everyone you have ever known to line up to be killed tomorrow. Can you explain it to them, make them see how important it is that they go willingly?
No, the message is irrelevent. It is the fact of face-time in front of the crowd. His name becomes more familiar and people think "election = Fred". It has nothing to do with the message.
I think in the US the message ceased to have any meaning in about 1960 when they discovered television for presidential compaigns.
And certainly in most places crowd = mob, with just as much mob-style thinking as you would expect.
You would like to believe "it should be easy for the company that that discovered it to dominate the market in the future." It isn't today.
The problem is that it is cheaper to take someone else's design, run over to China or Taiwan and have the device built. Meanwhile, the original developer is too small to order in lots of 100,000 units and WalMart is dictating how to run their business. New company steps in, already in distribution and says "why not buy from us" and the developer is shut out completely.
This happens today. If the R&D could be patented and actually is an infringment going on, they can hopefully sue and get something out of the deal. Otherwise, they are just gone. Size is everything today, along with distribution. And smaller tech developers have no way to break out of the box.
Charter and Comcast have nothing to fear - they are building a parallel network. Their customers are connected through their wires and not piggybacking on Verizon (and other) lines to sell their product.
This doesn't piss off the telecom companies anywhere near as much as using their own DSL lines to compete with them.
The only thing that is going to happen with the cable companies is they are going to find themselves in the tariffed telephone business as real providers. With the full load of Utility Boards, 911 requirements, coverage requirements and so on and so forth.
Let's see, Vonage builds ... nothing and sells little boxes to people to connect to their Internet connection. This then connects to a couple of termination sites that either connect to other Vonage customers (maybe) or just dumps the call out on the standard telephone network.
Yes, individual calls out cost them something, but that infrastructure is built and maintained by the other companies. Generally, by the people too dumb to have switched away to Vonage and their VOIP ilk.
The problem is that Vonage is 100% dependent on the telephone network they are competing with. They are selling a service which requires their competitor to operate. This is generally a bad business model, except it can generate extremely high profits for a short period of time. Vonage can't put Verizon out of business as it would eliminate their ability to operate.
Of course having a leech syphoning off the high-value residential customers does nothing but piss Verizon, AT&T and others off. This has been coming for a long time and it isn't over yet. I would guess some telecom company finds some way to put every one of the leeching VOIP services like Vonage and Lingo out of business soon.
Any newspaper would collect enough billing information to send the person a bill. And, by the way, have enough real identification to be able to track down the person that did it.
Craigslist, because it is on the Internet and anonymous, has no identity verification at all. Many people, most in fact, will do things they would never consider doing if they know it can never be traced back to them and there cannot possibly be any consequences.
I assure you, there would be consequences with a newspaper classified.
Craigslist says they will reveal information about the poster if served with a subpoena. Great. So what are they going to reveal? A fake name, a temporary, anonymous email address and and an IP address that ends at the public library.
So what?
This person has gotten away with this completely. There are no consequences on the Internet. The poor woman has nobody to go after. This is pretty funny, after all.
Wow, wouldn't it be wonderful if Microsoft finally got it and made Windows really secure?
No, it wouldn't It wouldn't sell, nobody would use it and it would be a complete flop.
Windows is designed to be usable by people without one little bit of computer knowledge. It therefore does things "for you" in the background that can be good and helpful. If they are subverted, they are bad and insecure. Take all of this away and leave just the command line and Windows would be much more secure, but it would be unusable by most people.
If it is programmable and the programming can be added to or modified in the field, it needs controls on who can modify that programming. If the inexperienced user can, it isn't secure. Period. When users run programs to install games they purchased they are using the same resources as when the click on an email attachment to install some bit of malware. They have no way of knowing the difference and it would seem no amount of education is going to fix that problem.
What most people need is a locked-down appliance that cannot be modified in the field without extraordinary effort. And certainly cannot be modified over the Internet. This could be user friendly and secure, but you wouldn't install software on it, ever.
Windows is trying to be user friendly and general-purpose. This has no choice but to fail to be very secure. The user cannot tell the difference between a program that is from Microsoft that is something they want and a program from microSoft that isn't something they want at all. Or from MircoSoft. Or really, anyone else at all. Sure, you can try to give them a chance to tell the difference - and Vista does try - but it isn't going to work. People gave up reading messages from computers and just click OK beginning in 1979 with CP/M and they aren't about to change now.
I contend that there is no material difference between the security present on a Macintosh or Linux and Windows in the hands of a user that doesn't understand how the system works. If they get an email that says to run some program, they are going to run it if they want what the email says they are going to get. If this requires using sudo to get root authority, they will do so if they have the ability to do it.
So how do you have security in that environment? You don't. You can't ever be secure against the naive user in charge of their own computer.
Labor in the US is certainly one of the most expensive in the world. As a direct result of this it should be obvious that any technique that will move the work elsewhere where labor is cheaper is going to be done. Any technique.
Outsourcing will continue because it is at least on the surface cost effective. It will displace higher paid American labor in favor of lower paid labor elsewhere. It does not seem reasonable to assume that at some point all foreign labor will become as expensive as American labor is today. At least not for a long, long time.
Many people in the US are under some kind of illusion that we can be a country of "knowledge workers" where everyone is above average and college educated. We can simply export work or import labor for anything that is not covered by this. There is a false assumption here that everyone in the US is capable of being trained as a "knowledge worker". We are reforming the economy such that there are no jobs in the US which someone of more modest intelligence and capabilities can perform. This is a mistake on several levels.
Obviously, we can move work offshore to cheaper labor but we will then be dependent on a longer supply chain and whatever occurs in these foreign locations. This means that an earthquake in India can wipe out a company in the US. Does not sound like a good plan.
It also means that it is possible to seriously damage the US ability to compete in the world by attacking non-US facilities. If a majority of consumer electronics devices are made in Indonesia, burning down a factory there may prevent a US competitor from entering the market and preserve the market dominance of other countries.
Certainly when all our military equipment is made overseas, as will soon be the case, it will be nearly impossible to use the military against foreign enemies in league with producing countries. We can also expect complex military hardware to be dependent on foreign powers continued good will to keep it operating. Logic bombs in such equipment can be expected.
How about a specially-crafted USB key that damages the computer physically? Better still, wipes the hard drive and then physically damages the computer?
I suspect you might be able to force a reset with a long enough pulse of -5V on the power supply to the USB port. You might be able to smoke a significant portion of the machine by sending 10,000V through the USB data pins. All it would take would be a capacitor and a charge pump. I think it would end up looking like one of the Memorex 5GB USB devices when you were done because 10,000V capacitors aren't real small.
Never underestimate the wickedness of someone that believes they will not get caught. Especially when there is substantial evidence they are correct in this belief.
Windows is supposed to be "user friendly". User friendly implies that when I put the CD for the game I just bought into the computer I do not have to figure out how to install or play the game - I put the disc in, so I must want to play, right?
Previous to autorun, I would have to search the CD, sometimes reading the instructions to find out that I needed to run D:\PC\X86\INSTALL\SETUP\SETUP.EXE in order to actually install the game. Autorun was introduced 12 years ago with Windows 95 and was a significant improvement.
Unfortunately, it is direct conflict with computer security. Microsoft has come down clearly on the side of the "user" and not the "security expert" pretty much for the last 10 years or so making computers a lot easier to use and a lot more vulnerable to malicious attack.
I think giving people non-modifiable appliances for web surfing and email reading which are completely safe from any sort of attack makes sense. The people that can operate extremely user-unfriendly (and safe) programmable general-purpose computers can have them. The rest clearly cannot handle it and shouldn't be burdened with having to figure out what is safe and what isn't.
Reminds me of a story about the Shortstack. The idea is you build a very, very tall tube that ends where the air pressure is significantly lower. Unsealing the bottom of the tube at ground level than causes the higher pressure air to be sucked upwards where it is a near vacuum. This would introduce an entirely new cycle of circulation and clear polluted cities where the air is trapped by ground features.
Of course, the original proponent seemed to miss out that the air in the tube might be affected by gravity. Nice idea, though.
Check out WW II under the heading "barrage ballons". They were used in England quite a bit.