If you're on FiOS, you might think, like I did, that big honking battery in the ONT unit will keep your Internet connection up during a power outage. The backup power in the ONT only applies to the voice telephone circuit since it's mandated by regulation.
I now have my ONT plugged into a UPS to avoid future service interruptions.
Oh, and the only thing that locks up my Linksys WRT54GS is bittorrent. Once I limited the total number of connections I haven't seen it lock up since. However I only use the Linksys for wireless connectivity behind my Linux firewall since I need to run OpenVPN tunnels, TCP proxies, and a variety of other services not available with commercial routers.
The AccionTec routers that Verizon supplies are pretty poor, in my experience. A client had one for their DSL connection, and it randomly would drop them off the Internet. The more recent models they're distributing seem a bit better so far. The AccionTecs seem pretty susceptible to power blips as well.
Remember that forwarding via procmail means the message will be sent from the unqualified username on the account. So if the message comes to the mailbox for joe, the forwarded message will be addressed as coming from joe@thishost.example.com unless appropriate domain-level masquerading is employed. This may seem trivial but if the receiving server rejects mail for which a valid MX record does not exist, messages from joe@thishost.example.com may not be delivered. (This is especially common when the mail server is behind a firewall.)
For sendmail users, the alternative is to maintain a genericstable that will map joe to joe@example.com.
Yes, of course, but for how long? What are their retention policies? Is there any plausible reason that they'd need to maintain backups for longer than, say, six months (which is the time period at issue in this case)? For a service as large and as busy as Yahoo's, I could see an argument that backups more than a month old are too out of date to be useful.
What if I were using a provider offering a POP3 service? Once I download my mail (assuming I don't enable the "leave mail on server" switch), it should be removed from the server. How long is it reasonable to expect that mail I've already removed be archived? I maintain thirty days of backup for my clients' POP3 email; after that it's gone. None of them has ever complained because I wasn't able to retrieve a message older than that.
I'm not suggesting that ISPs shouldn't maintain backups; far from it. The more important questions are for how long and under what circumstances. If I'm using an IMAP provider and don't delete things from my mail spool, that's my decision. If I delete every message as soon as I read it, or remove it from the server with a protocol like POP, what obligation does the ISP have to keep an archive of my messages? Can users of free email services like Yahoo or gmail request that the services retrieve from backups a message that was accidentally deleted? I'd be really surprised to hear that any of these providers would honor such a request.
"The government sought permission from a magistrate judge to require Warshak's internet service providers--NuVox Communications and Yahoo!--to turn over Warshak's account information, "[a]ll [l]og files and backup tapes" and the contents of e-mails that had been "accessed, viewed, or downloaded" or that were more than 181 days old."
Why were his emails still available to government in the first place? Does this mean that Yahoo maintains copies of every email sent through its system for time immemorial? Looking at both Yahoo's Privacy Policy, and its policies concerning email in particular, I see nothing about archiving emails or the length of time the archives are maintained. Should I infer from this case that any email anyone ever sent to anyone on Yahoo is archived somewhere and available for government perusal at any time?
I know there is an ongoing controversy between ISPs and the Justice Department concerning the archiving of logs containing login information, but how many Yahoo users do you think might be surprised to hear that all their email is archived, too? Why isn't Yahoo required to tell its users about these policies, which seem to raise much bigger privacy concerns than whether they might send me an "Alert" once in a while?
Numerous states have attempted to block access, by law, to what they deem to be illegal content.
Are you talking about American states? Can you point me to a story that describes this practice? In general state governments have no jurisdiction over telecommunications traffic that crosses state lines; then it falls into the FCC's jurisdiction.
A state could pass a law that prohibits you from having child pornography on your computer, but I don't think it could pass a law prohibiting that traffic from entering the state.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'd just like to see some examples.
SUV sales are falling fast while the demand for smaller fuel-efficient or hybrid vehicles is currently outstripping supply.
Yes, it's true that the demand for gasoline was historically quite price-inelastic. As oil heads toward $200/barrel, we're starting to see real price effects.
in the end, a huge proportion of the money you spend on your iPod, car, or even tooth brush is basically money that is leaving the country permanently.
Last night the Discovery Channel showed the first of a four-part series by Ted Koppel on capitalism in China. He claimed that Apple makes a profit of $70 on a $300 iPod. The Chinese company that built the iPod makes a profit of $4.
I'm actually more curious about whether it comes with licensed versions of the various codecs and other multimedia items. MP3? WMV? H.264? The list goes on. I'd gladly switch to [K]Ubuntu and pay $20 if I knew I had legitimate copies of these items rather than downloading them from Livna to install on my Fedora boxes.
How about DeCSS? Is it even possible to license that in the US?
Macroscope has less sexuality than some of his other works and is a pretty good story to boot. In comparison, some of his works like the "Cluster" series have a good dose of erotic content. I especially recall one species that had a ball for a foot with intercourse consisting of rolling over one another's slime trails. Each of the various galactic cultures reflect its method of procreation with the humans described as a "thrust" culture!
Wow, another Bester/"Stars" fan? I thought I was among the five people left in the world who loved this story. I was about 12-13 at the time I read it for the first of perhaps half-a-dozen times. Now that you've reminded me about it, I'll have to read it again. It's in my now almost fifty-year-old copy of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction edited by Anthony Boucher which I just found on the bookshelf.
I like many of the Heinlein novels from his early period, particularly the ones that were political in nature. His depiction of an America with politics based on fundamentalist Protestantism seems remarkably prescient since the Reagan years. Once sexuality appears on your childrens' horizons, it might be time to read Stranger in a Strange Land.
I was a pretty devout Catholic as a child and remember the impression Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" made. Like the protagonist in the story, it may have marked the beginning of doubt.
Another author that I loved in my youth was "Andre" Norton, the pen name of Alice Mary Norton. When she started writing SF and fantasy, women were so rare in the profession that she took a man's first name to get published. Looking at her bibliography, I recall reading a number of books that she wrote in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Finally if your children like fantasy, I strongly recommend Ursula LeGuin'sEarthsea Trilogy, another series intended for young readers but with great appeal to adults as well. Le Guin was the daughter of the famous American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an influence that's obvious in many of her best works like The Dispossessed.
Suppose Flickr decided to remove any pictures of black people or catholics, do you think they would be exercising legitimate property rights? Do you think that they could get away with it?
Yes, and maybe. There might be issues about blacks because they have a special protected status under a variety of civil rights laws; Catholics have no such protected status. How many pictures of black people would you expect to find on this site? Do you think the Klan is somehow not allowed to have a website because of their beliefs?
The bigger "maybe" concerns what would happen once people discovered that Flickr was doing this. Don't you think it would become a matter of public controversy?
f you have access to a high-speed connection that allows you to host a server, and can afford it, you could host it locally, but that is a huge number of people you just removed free speech online from.
I keep reading this thread in disbelief at the level of hyperbole involved. I'm pretty absolutist on free speech issues, but the idea that people are somehow guaranteed a platform to speak for free has little historical or constitutional justification.
When printing presses were the standard for press freedom, the people who could afford printing presses had more opportunities to speak, and to reach a broader audience, than those without the presses. Now that the printing press has been replaced by a computer, people here seem to think we need to change the rules of the game? Why? What happened to the meme that things "on the Internet" should be governed in the same manner as things in meatspace?
I'd argue it's a lot cheaper for someone to put their views forward on the Internet than it ever was in, say, 18th-19th century America. There are lots of hosting sites; not all of them are going to censor you. (GoDaddy is well-known for a variety of pernicious activities; I'd never send anyone there to host a site.) Or, as others have sagely remarked, you can set up your own server. Do you really think it's more expensive for you to do either of these than it would have been for you to buy a printing press and open a newspaper or publish a broadsheet in 1830's America?
I also don't hear much about how this supposed regulation of ISPs would come about. If you don't like how private parties censor the Internet, do you really believe you'd be happier with a system where the government gets to determine who can say what? I'm a lot more comfortable with a system where the means of speech reside in private hands since that insures one of those pairs of hands can be my own.
I also agree with the poster earlier who suggests this article again misunderstands the nature of the Internet. In essence the author buys in to the erroneous belief that what matters are the decisions made by a few large players like Flickr or GoDaddy because that happens to be where a lot of people congregate. The Internet has been a "peer-to-peer" system since its inception. That's why it's become the most significant facilitator of free speech in human history. It offers everyone the opportunity to become a publisher.
The take-down actions against AMVs have mostly been initiated by the Japanese music rights holders, not the anime studios. The original request to remove 30,000 AMVs from YouTube ih 2006 came from the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC).
YouTube/Google don't really have much say in the matter; they simply have to follow the take-down provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. If you wished to contest their decision, you could have filed a counter-notice. That requires the rights holder to file suit within fourteen days or else the ISP must restore the material.
Anybody creating material that might trigger a DMCA takedown notice should definitely read the FAQ at chillingeffects cited above before posting. You have rights, too.
While I admire the effort these academics have invested in this document, it might have more clout if there were a few names from the content industries on the list. Their interpretations seem reasonable on the face of it, but I wonder if Viacom's or Elektra's attorneys would agree with their views.
I note that they make the point repeatedly about how fair use requires a transformation of the copyrighted material being used, and that the use of entire works generally has less protection than excerpts. Still I don't think I came away knowing whether making a music video from a complete song would qualify as fair use or not. On the one hand, the original work might be "transformed" by adding the video component, but the song itself was still used in its entirety. A mix of different video clips backed up with excerpts from a variety of different songs probably has a better chance at a fair-use defense.
They're arguing that YouTube gets more viewership from copyrighted materials than non-copyrighted stuff, and they want the viewer logs to prove that. Then they'll go after Google and others for more money because they're profiting more from it.
This argument doesn't justify the complete itemization of every viewer ID and IP address for every video on YouTube. The only reason that Viacom wants that information is to go on a fishing expedition to see who else they might sue.
Why didn't Google offer to provide the individual viewing records with the IP addresses and usernames removed? Wouldn't that still address the issue of the relative viewership of different types of materials while protecting the privacy of the millions of people around the world who have watched a video on YouTube?
Reading the decision tells me the judge is much more sympathetic to business concerns than to individual privacy matters. He often seems more concerned with protecting Google's trade secrets than he does with protecting the identities of the YouTube audience.
Notice that Google put themselves in this position, too. Judge Stanton uses this comment from a Google engineer as part of his argument for why privacy concerns are "speculative:"
(Decision, p. 14)
Google has elsewhere stated:
We . . . are strong supporters of the idea that
data protection laws should apply to any data
that could identify you. The reality is though
that in most cases, an IP address without
additional information cannot.
Google Software Engineer Alma Whitten, "Are IP addresses personal? [GOOGLE PUBLIC POLICY BLOG (Feb. 22, 2008]]
Now Google has a clear corporate interest in maintaining the notion that IP addresses are not personally revealing. Interestingly so do most filesharers and their attorneys. Of course, as a technical matter, IP addresses are not personally identifiable, but taken together with usernames they can provide an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence.
Suppose, for instance, I find a user named ILikeJonStewart who appears repeatedly over the course of many months watching a YouTube upload of The Daily Show. The connections come from a number of different IP addresses, but lets suppose 80% come from the IP ranges assigned to Comcast. If Viacom can legally compel Comcast to reveal the physical addresses associated with these IP addresses, aren't we pretty far down the road to finding specific households?
I realize there are many technical reasons why IP addresses alone are insufficient from a legal perspecitive. However I do think that Slashdotters overemphasize this argument for political reasons and often fail to consider just how revealing IP addresses are for the millions of Internet users who live in the same home with the same ISP for years.
However I don't think Viacom's goal is prosecuting thousands of individual suits against people who once watched Rugrats on YouTube. (Whether they choose to bring suit against the uploaders, for whom Google has already agreed to provide complete records, might be a different matter.)
I'll suggest a different future target for Viacom — Starbucks and other companies that offer Internet access in their establishments. Suppose that it turns out that millions of viewings of Viacom's works came from IP addresses used by Starbucks. Does that make Starbucks a "contributory infringer" because it profits from the infringement of Viacom's properties? Does your viewing of The Daily Show on your laptop in a Starbucks constitute a "public performance" of the work? Showing a copyrighted work in a public location like a Starbucks usually requires special licensing (think jukeboxes or sports bars).
If Viacom's first target was Google, what kinds of entities do you think Viacom would sue next? Individual infringers or other large entities?
Most research-oriented universities wouldn't care beans about your having published a textbook. The publications that count are either in refereed journals or books. The sciences and a few other fields like economics tend to favor journal articles; more traditional fields like history look to books.
For serious scholars, textbooks are what you write when you've gotten some research out there, achieved tenure, and want some additional income.
The primary problem is one of trying to maintain a price point for products and the only way to do that today is through an authorized reseller program.
Not everybody sees that as a problem. I see the problem as one of manufacturers invoking the power of the state to protect their monopolistic or oligopolistic profits in the face of "market forces." You do recall that segment in Economics I where we discover that markets are "efficient" because profits are driven to zero, and the sale price of an item (its "marginal" price) exactly equals the cost to produce it (its "marginal" cost). Society as a whole benefits most from this situation because "consumer surplus" is maximized.
The Internet drives these competitive forces forward by abolishing intermediaries and providing additional consumer information. (Price is hardly the only piece of information available; we have reputational information about sellers' past behavior as well.) To me such "disintermediation" and expanded consumer knowledge define the marketplace all companies face today. In the long run producers will be able to "maintain their price points" only by getting governments to intervene and protect their excess profits through policies like the French court has imposed.
Disintermediation is a more complicated problem. As you say, "authorized resellers" provide items of value like service, support, and authentication of product. Where I part company with you is in the belief that we need to preserve today's manufacturers and resellers by fixing prices. I'd always go for more competition rather than less.
One obvious solution is insurance. Rather than finance the provision of service, support, and authentication by propping up prices, let me buy a service contract instead. In fact, let me buy that contract from a variety of competing service providers. For purchases of trademarked goods, let me buy insurance against counterfeiting.
In the world of eBay, the best provider for this insurance might be eBay itself. They'd have the market clout to negotiate a good deal with insurers on behalf of their sellers. Sellers could choose to purchase insurance or not. Obviously if you're buying a supposedly-authentic Vuitton handbag, but your seller isn't willing to insure the item's authenticity, you might choose to buy that handbag from someone else. Notice how this model would give eBay some responsibility for policing its sellers as well (resolving the problem known as "moral hazard" in economics).
The insurance model I described is but one method we could invent to mitigate the problems you describe. I"m comfortable with any method that doesn't involve government price-fixing either directly or indirectly via the more insidious methods at issue here.
(Actually the high-end bag market has created another solution -- bag rentals. Fashion trends are so fickle that investing in any handbag makes little sense to women carrying items in this bracket. Better to rent a new one each month for $50-100. What happens to those bags after a number of rentals? Do they appear on eBay? Why shouldn't I be able to buy those? Or buy them from Vuitton itself at a reduced price? Firms like Harmon Kardon sell refurbished equipment on eBay; Vuitton could, too. Well, maybe not on eBay, but how about if Vuitton and Rolex and the like set up their own high-end Internet auction site for authentic used products?
It's a whole new world out there; time for these companies to start dealing with that fact head on rather than crying to the governments of the world all the time for protection.)
With virtual machines becoming ever easier to install and use, maintaining a Windows VM on my Linux desktop substantially reduces my need for Wine. Will Wine become an afterthought in another ten years as we move to desktops running multiple operating systems simultaneously?
Anyone who thinks these figures are small should take a look at the reported rates of telephone "penetration" by country as reported by the International Telecommunications Union.
In general there were well under 10 telephones (including both wireline and cellular) per 100 people in most African countries as of 2004. For some countries the figure is between zero and five per 100. In developed countries this figure is usually over 100.
The data for Internet usage per 100 population follows a similar pattern but is still well under 100 even in countries like the US. New Zealanders seem to have an unusual fondness for the Internet. There the figure is just under 90 Internet users per 100 population as of 2006.
When I read that comment in the much more extensive story in the Times, I wondered about that lady's priorities. Not only was she not aware of any stealing in Grand Theft Auto, she seemed more offended by the stealing than by the killing. I hope she was just misquoted since parents who teach their children that stealing is worse than killing need some serious parental retraining.
I also found this quote from the plaintiffs' attorney quite puzzling:
Besides, the [plaintiffs'] lawyers argue, if the lawsuit had no merit, should that not make the settlement that much more impressive?
This argument makes no sense to me. Take-Two faced the option of a lengthy and expensive litigation where they might have demonstrated that the plaintiffs' case lacked merit. Instead they chose the quicker, and presumably cheaper, approach of reaching a settlement. Anyone who has read a Slashdot story on the RIAA suits understands this logic.
I'm amazed at how long it took for someone to mention Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in this discussion. Perhaps it's because it doesn't deal with space, math, or physics it hasn't been as popular among Slashdot readers?
I'll just say that few books I've read have had such a profound effect on my thinking. Diamond's attempt to understand the modern global distribution of resources takes him into areas I knew nothing about like the prevalence and types of food grains and domesticated animals across the world.
This is a great book and certainly deserving of its Pulitzer Prize.
I was a reseller for TFS Gateway in 1995. We used it to help companies add Internet mail to their existing proprietary systems like Novell GroupWise or MS Mail. We would install TFS on a computer with a modem at the client's site, then configure its internal mail system to send Internet traffic through the gateway. The gateway would call our Internet-connected server and exchange mail via UUCP.
Lo and behold, I still have a copy of TFS Gateway, but sadly it's version 2.22 with a copyright date of 1996. However I don't think there were many changes between that version and version 2.1 which is the relevant product for a "prior use" defense. On page 88 of my copy of the Administration and User Guide for TFS 2.22 is a section entitled "Virus Scanning." The first paragraph reads:
"TFS Gateway has the feature of checking attached files for viruses in all incoming and outgoing mails. If an attached file is found in an incoming or outgoing message, TFS will launch the specified virus scan program. If the file contains a virus recognized by the anti-virus software, the infected file will be deleted and both the recipient and the administrator of TFS will be notified."
Perhaps some other packrat like me can dig up an earlier copy of TFS and find the same anti-virus hooks as existed in version 2.22.
There was a competing product called "Connect2" from Infinite Technologies that was also available in 1995, but my copies of that product don't show any virus scanning hooks. However Connect2 was packaged as many modules, and I don't have all of them any more. One of them perhaps added virus scanning to the product, but I don't have any evidence to support that.
In 1994 I remember being able to download a database of the entire list of.com domains. I was trying to name a company and wanted to have a unique domain.
I can't imagine how big that database would be today, if you could even obtain it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're on FiOS, you might think, like I did, that big honking battery in the ONT unit will keep your Internet connection up during a power outage. The backup power in the ONT only applies to the voice telephone circuit since it's mandated by regulation.
I now have my ONT plugged into a UPS to avoid future service interruptions.
Oh, and the only thing that locks up my Linksys WRT54GS is bittorrent. Once I limited the total number of connections I haven't seen it lock up since. However I only use the Linksys for wireless connectivity behind my Linux firewall since I need to run OpenVPN tunnels, TCP proxies, and a variety of other services not available with commercial routers.
The AccionTec routers that Verizon supplies are pretty poor, in my experience. A client had one for their DSL connection, and it randomly would drop them off the Internet. The more recent models they're distributing seem a bit better so far. The AccionTecs seem pretty susceptible to power blips as well.
Remember that forwarding via procmail means the message will be sent from the unqualified username on the account. So if the message comes to the mailbox for joe, the forwarded message will be addressed as coming from joe@thishost.example.com unless appropriate domain-level masquerading is employed. This may seem trivial but if the receiving server rejects mail for which a valid MX record does not exist, messages from joe@thishost.example.com may not be delivered. (This is especially common when the mail server is behind a firewall.)
For sendmail users, the alternative is to maintain a genericstable that will map joe to joe@example.com.
Yes, of course, but for how long? What are their retention policies? Is there any plausible reason that they'd need to maintain backups for longer than, say, six months (which is the time period at issue in this case)? For a service as large and as busy as Yahoo's, I could see an argument that backups more than a month old are too out of date to be useful.
What if I were using a provider offering a POP3 service? Once I download my mail (assuming I don't enable the "leave mail on server" switch), it should be removed from the server. How long is it reasonable to expect that mail I've already removed be archived? I maintain thirty days of backup for my clients' POP3 email; after that it's gone. None of them has ever complained because I wasn't able to retrieve a message older than that.
I'm not suggesting that ISPs shouldn't maintain backups; far from it. The more important questions are for how long and under what circumstances. If I'm using an IMAP provider and don't delete things from my mail spool, that's my decision. If I delete every message as soon as I read it, or remove it from the server with a protocol like POP, what obligation does the ISP have to keep an archive of my messages? Can users of free email services like Yahoo or gmail request that the services retrieve from backups a message that was accidentally deleted? I'd be really surprised to hear that any of these providers would honor such a request.
From the ruling:
"The government sought permission from a magistrate judge to require Warshak's internet service
providers--NuVox Communications and Yahoo!--to turn over Warshak's account information,
"[a]ll [l]og files and backup tapes" and the contents of e-mails that had been "accessed, viewed, or
downloaded" or that were more than 181 days old."
Why were his emails still available to government in the first place? Does this mean that Yahoo maintains copies of every email sent through its system for time immemorial? Looking at both Yahoo's Privacy Policy, and its policies concerning email in particular, I see nothing about archiving emails or the length of time the archives are maintained. Should I infer from this case that any email anyone ever sent to anyone on Yahoo is archived somewhere and available for government perusal at any time?
I know there is an ongoing controversy between ISPs and the Justice Department concerning the archiving of logs containing login information, but how many Yahoo users do you think might be surprised to hear that all their email is archived, too? Why isn't Yahoo required to tell its users about these policies, which seem to raise much bigger privacy concerns than whether they might send me an "Alert" once in a while?
Numerous states have attempted to block access, by law, to what they deem to be illegal content.
Are you talking about American states? Can you point me to a story that describes this practice? In general state governments have no jurisdiction over telecommunications traffic that crosses state lines; then it falls into the FCC's jurisdiction.
A state could pass a law that prohibits you from having child pornography on your computer, but I don't think it could pass a law prohibiting that traffic from entering the state.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'd just like to see some examples.
I suspect we are at the faux tipping-point - where everyone starts squealing about prices but few are actually willing to change their behavior.
Apparently you haven't been reading the latest news on automobile sales trends.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121484164201916119.html
SUV sales are falling fast while the demand for smaller fuel-efficient or hybrid vehicles is currently outstripping supply.
Yes, it's true that the demand for gasoline was historically quite price-inelastic. As oil heads toward $200/barrel, we're starting to see real price effects.
in the end, a huge proportion of the money you spend on your iPod, car, or even tooth brush is basically money that is leaving the country permanently.
Last night the Discovery Channel showed the first of a four-part series by Ted Koppel on capitalism in China. He claimed that Apple makes a profit of $70 on a $300 iPod. The Chinese company that built the iPod makes a profit of $4.
I'm actually more curious about whether it comes with licensed versions of the various codecs and other multimedia items. MP3? WMV? H.264? The list goes on. I'd gladly switch to [K]Ubuntu and pay $20 if I knew I had legitimate copies of these items rather than downloading them from Livna to install on my Fedora boxes.
How about DeCSS? Is it even possible to license that in the US?
What about KDE anyway? Am I stuck with GNOME?
Macroscope has less sexuality than some of his other works and is a pretty good story to boot. In comparison, some of his works like the "Cluster" series have a good dose of erotic content. I especially recall one species that had a ball for a foot with intercourse consisting of rolling over one another's slime trails. Each of the various galactic cultures reflect its method of procreation with the humans described as a "thrust" culture!
Wow, another Bester/"Stars" fan? I thought I was among the five people left in the world who loved this story. I was about 12-13 at the time I read it for the first of perhaps half-a-dozen times. Now that you've reminded me about it, I'll have to read it again. It's in my now almost fifty-year-old copy of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction edited by Anthony Boucher which I just found on the bookshelf.
I like many of the Heinlein novels from his early period, particularly the ones that were political in nature. His depiction of an America with politics based on fundamentalist Protestantism seems remarkably prescient since the Reagan years. Once sexuality appears on your childrens' horizons, it might be time to read Stranger in a Strange Land.
I was a pretty devout Catholic as a child and remember the impression Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" made. Like the protagonist in the story, it may have marked the beginning of doubt.
Another author that I loved in my youth was "Andre" Norton, the pen name of Alice Mary Norton. When she started writing SF and fantasy, women were so rare in the profession that she took a man's first name to get published. Looking at her bibliography, I recall reading a number of books that she wrote in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Finally if your children like fantasy, I strongly recommend Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, another series intended for young readers but with great appeal to adults as well. Le Guin was the daughter of the famous American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an influence that's obvious in many of her best works like The Dispossessed.
Suppose Flickr decided to remove any pictures of black people or catholics, do you think they would be exercising legitimate property rights? Do you think that they could get away with it?
Yes, and maybe. There might be issues about blacks because they have a special protected status under a variety of civil rights laws; Catholics have no such protected status. How many pictures of black people would you expect to find on this site? Do you think the Klan is somehow not allowed to have a website because of their beliefs?
The bigger "maybe" concerns what would happen once people discovered that Flickr was doing this. Don't you think it would become a matter of public controversy?
f you have access to a high-speed connection that allows you to host a server, and can afford it, you could host it locally, but that is a huge number of people you just removed free speech online from.
I keep reading this thread in disbelief at the level of hyperbole involved. I'm pretty absolutist on free speech issues, but the idea that people are somehow guaranteed a platform to speak for free has little historical or constitutional justification.
When printing presses were the standard for press freedom, the people who could afford printing presses had more opportunities to speak, and to reach a broader audience, than those without the presses. Now that the printing press has been replaced by a computer, people here seem to think we need to change the rules of the game? Why? What happened to the meme that things "on the Internet" should be governed in the same manner as things in meatspace?
I'd argue it's a lot cheaper for someone to put their views forward on the Internet than it ever was in, say, 18th-19th century America. There are lots of hosting sites; not all of them are going to censor you. (GoDaddy is well-known for a variety of pernicious activities; I'd never send anyone there to host a site.) Or, as others have sagely remarked, you can set up your own server. Do you really think it's more expensive for you to do either of these than it would have been for you to buy a printing press and open a newspaper or publish a broadsheet in 1830's America?
I also don't hear much about how this supposed regulation of ISPs would come about. If you don't like how private parties censor the Internet, do you really believe you'd be happier with a system where the government gets to determine who can say what? I'm a lot more comfortable with a system where the means of speech reside in private hands since that insures one of those pairs of hands can be my own.
I also agree with the poster earlier who suggests this article again misunderstands the nature of the Internet. In essence the author buys in to the erroneous belief that what matters are the decisions made by a few large players like Flickr or GoDaddy because that happens to be where a lot of people congregate. The Internet has been a "peer-to-peer" system since its inception. That's why it's become the most significant facilitator of free speech in human history. It offers everyone the opportunity to become a publisher.
The take-down actions against AMVs have mostly been initiated by the Japanese music rights holders, not the anime studios. The original request to remove 30,000 AMVs from YouTube ih 2006 came from the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC).
YouTube/Google don't really have much say in the matter; they simply have to follow the take-down provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. If you wished to contest their decision, you could have filed a counter-notice. That requires the rights holder to file suit within fourteen days or else the ISP must restore the material.
Anybody creating material that might trigger a DMCA takedown notice should definitely read the FAQ at chillingeffects cited above before posting. You have rights, too.
While I admire the effort these academics have invested in this document, it might have more clout if there were a few names from the content industries on the list. Their interpretations seem reasonable on the face of it, but I wonder if Viacom's or Elektra's attorneys would agree with their views.
I note that they make the point repeatedly about how fair use requires a transformation of the copyrighted material being used, and that the use of entire works generally has less protection than excerpts. Still I don't think I came away knowing whether making a music video from a complete song would qualify as fair use or not. On the one hand, the original work might be "transformed" by adding the video component, but the song itself was still used in its entirety. A mix of different video clips backed up with excerpts from a variety of different songs probably has a better chance at a fair-use defense.
They're arguing that YouTube gets more viewership from copyrighted materials than non-copyrighted stuff, and they want the viewer logs to prove that. Then they'll go after Google and others for more money because they're profiting more from it.
This argument doesn't justify the complete itemization of every viewer ID and IP address for every video on YouTube. The only reason that Viacom wants that information is to go on a fishing expedition to see who else they might sue.
Why didn't Google offer to provide the individual viewing records with the IP addresses and usernames removed? Wouldn't that still address the issue of the relative viewership of different types of materials while protecting the privacy of the millions of people around the world who have watched a video on YouTube?
Reading the decision tells me the judge is much more sympathetic to business concerns than to individual privacy matters. He often seems more concerned with protecting Google's trade secrets than he does with protecting the identities of the YouTube audience.
Notice that Google put themselves in this position, too. Judge Stanton uses this comment from a Google engineer as part of his argument for why privacy concerns are "speculative:"
(Decision, p. 14)
Google has elsewhere stated:
Google Software Engineer Alma Whitten, " Are IP addresses personal? [GOOGLE PUBLIC POLICY BLOG (Feb. 22, 2008]]
Now Google has a clear corporate interest in maintaining the notion that IP addresses are not personally revealing. Interestingly so do most filesharers and their attorneys. Of course, as a technical matter, IP addresses are not personally identifiable, but taken together with usernames they can provide an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence.
Suppose, for instance, I find a user named ILikeJonStewart who appears repeatedly over the course of many months watching a YouTube upload of The Daily Show. The connections come from a number of different IP addresses, but lets suppose 80% come from the IP ranges assigned to Comcast. If Viacom can legally compel Comcast to reveal the physical addresses associated with these IP addresses, aren't we pretty far down the road to finding specific households?
I realize there are many technical reasons why IP addresses alone are insufficient from a legal perspecitive. However I do think that Slashdotters overemphasize this argument for political reasons and often fail to consider just how revealing IP addresses are for the millions of Internet users who live in the same home with the same ISP for years.
However I don't think Viacom's goal is prosecuting thousands of individual suits against people who once watched Rugrats on YouTube. (Whether they choose to bring suit against the uploaders, for whom Google has already agreed to provide complete records, might be a different matter.)
I'll suggest a different future target for Viacom — Starbucks and other companies that offer Internet access in their establishments. Suppose that it turns out that millions of viewings of Viacom's works came from IP addresses used by Starbucks. Does that make Starbucks a "contributory infringer" because it profits from the infringement of Viacom's properties? Does your viewing of The Daily Show on your laptop in a Starbucks constitute a "public performance" of the work? Showing a copyrighted work in a public location like a Starbucks usually requires special licensing (think jukeboxes or sports bars).
If Viacom's first target was Google, what kinds of entities do you think Viacom would sue next? Individual infringers or other large entities?
Most research-oriented universities wouldn't care beans about your having published a textbook. The publications that count are either in refereed journals or books. The sciences and a few other fields like economics tend to favor journal articles; more traditional fields like history look to books.
For serious scholars, textbooks are what you write when you've gotten some research out there, achieved tenure, and want some additional income.
The primary problem is one of trying to maintain a price point for products and the only way to do that today is through an authorized reseller program.
Not everybody sees that as a problem. I see the problem as one of manufacturers invoking the power of the state to protect their monopolistic or oligopolistic profits in the face of "market forces." You do recall that segment in Economics I where we discover that markets are "efficient" because profits are driven to zero, and the sale price of an item (its "marginal" price) exactly equals the cost to produce it (its "marginal" cost). Society as a whole benefits most from this situation because "consumer surplus" is maximized.
The Internet drives these competitive forces forward by abolishing intermediaries and providing additional consumer information. (Price is hardly the only piece of information available; we have reputational information about sellers' past behavior as well.) To me such "disintermediation" and expanded consumer knowledge define the marketplace all companies face today. In the long run producers will be able to "maintain their price points" only by getting governments to intervene and protect their excess profits through policies like the French court has imposed.
Disintermediation is a more complicated problem. As you say, "authorized resellers" provide items of value like service, support, and authentication of product. Where I part company with you is in the belief that we need to preserve today's manufacturers and resellers by fixing prices. I'd always go for more competition rather than less.
One obvious solution is insurance. Rather than finance the provision of service, support, and authentication by propping up prices, let me buy a service contract instead. In fact, let me buy that contract from a variety of competing service providers. For purchases of trademarked goods, let me buy insurance against counterfeiting.
In the world of eBay, the best provider for this insurance might be eBay itself. They'd have the market clout to negotiate a good deal with insurers on behalf of their sellers. Sellers could choose to purchase insurance or not. Obviously if you're buying a supposedly-authentic Vuitton handbag, but your seller isn't willing to insure the item's authenticity, you might choose to buy that handbag from someone else. Notice how this model would give eBay some responsibility for policing its sellers as well (resolving the problem known as "moral hazard" in economics).
The insurance model I described is but one method we could invent to mitigate the problems you describe. I"m comfortable with any method that doesn't involve government price-fixing either directly or indirectly via the more insidious methods at issue here.
(Actually the high-end bag market has created another solution -- bag rentals. Fashion trends are so fickle that investing in any handbag makes little sense to women carrying items in this bracket. Better to rent a new one each month for $50-100. What happens to those bags after a number of rentals? Do they appear on eBay? Why shouldn't I be able to buy those? Or buy them from Vuitton itself at a reduced price? Firms like Harmon Kardon sell refurbished equipment on eBay; Vuitton could, too. Well, maybe not on eBay, but how about if Vuitton and Rolex and the like set up their own high-end Internet auction site for authentic used products?
It's a whole new world out there; time for these companies to start dealing with that fact head on rather than crying to the governments of the world all the time for protection.)
With virtual machines becoming ever easier to install and use, maintaining a Windows VM on my Linux desktop substantially reduces my need for Wine. Will Wine become an afterthought in another ten years as we move to desktops running multiple operating systems simultaneously?
Anyone who thinks these figures are small should take a look at the reported rates of telephone "penetration" by country as reported by the International Telecommunications Union.
In general there were well under 10 telephones (including both wireline and cellular) per 100 people in most African countries as of 2004. For some countries the figure is between zero and five per 100. In developed countries this figure is usually over 100.
The data for Internet usage per 100 population follows a similar pattern but is still well under 100 even in countries like the US. New Zealanders seem to have an unusual fondness for the Internet. There the figure is just under 90 Internet users per 100 population as of 2006.
When I read that comment in the much more extensive story in the Times, I wondered about that lady's priorities. Not only was she not aware of any stealing in Grand Theft Auto, she seemed more offended by the stealing than by the killing. I hope she was just misquoted since parents who teach their children that stealing is worse than killing need some serious parental retraining.
I also found this quote from the plaintiffs' attorney quite puzzling:
Besides, the [plaintiffs'] lawyers argue, if the lawsuit had no merit, should that not make the settlement that much more impressive?
This argument makes no sense to me. Take-Two faced the option of a lengthy and expensive litigation where they might have demonstrated that the plaintiffs' case lacked merit. Instead they chose the quicker, and presumably cheaper, approach of reaching a settlement. Anyone who has read a Slashdot story on the RIAA suits understands this logic.
I'm amazed at how long it took for someone to mention Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in this discussion. Perhaps it's because it doesn't deal with space, math, or physics it hasn't been as popular among Slashdot readers?
I'll just say that few books I've read have had such a profound effect on my thinking. Diamond's attempt to understand the modern global distribution of resources takes him into areas I knew nothing about like the prevalence and types of food grains and domesticated animals across the world.
This is a great book and certainly deserving of its Pulitzer Prize.
I was a reseller for TFS Gateway in 1995. We used it to help companies add Internet mail to their existing proprietary systems like Novell GroupWise or MS Mail. We would install TFS on a computer with a modem at the client's site, then configure its internal mail system to send Internet traffic through the gateway. The gateway would call our Internet-connected server and exchange mail via UUCP.
Lo and behold, I still have a copy of TFS Gateway, but sadly it's version 2.22 with a copyright date of 1996. However I don't think there were many changes between that version and version 2.1 which is the relevant product for a "prior use" defense. On page 88 of my copy of the Administration and User Guide for TFS 2.22 is a section entitled "Virus Scanning." The first paragraph reads:
"TFS Gateway has the feature of checking attached files for viruses in all incoming and outgoing mails. If an attached file is found in an incoming or outgoing message, TFS will launch the specified virus scan program. If the file contains a virus recognized by the anti-virus software, the infected file will be deleted and both the recipient and the administrator of TFS will be notified."
Perhaps some other packrat like me can dig up an earlier copy of TFS and find the same anti-virus hooks as existed in version 2.22.
There was a competing product called "Connect2" from Infinite Technologies that was also available in 1995, but my copies of that product don't show any virus scanning hooks. However Connect2 was packaged as many modules, and I don't have all of them any more. One of them perhaps added virus scanning to the product, but I don't have any evidence to support that.
Well, you can already receive absolution for your sins online, so I'm not sure I'll be needing any indulgences. But thanks for asking.
In 1994 I remember being able to download a database of the entire list of .com domains. I was trying to name a company and wanted to have a unique domain.
I can't imagine how big that database would be today, if you could even obtain it.
Indeed. Can someone tell me exactly what problem we're trying to solve here? What's wrong with the current system except that ICANN wants more cash?