One problem- without paying the service fee, where would you obtain the programming data? Come to think of it, where does the Hauppage WinTV/PVR get their data?
There are exactly two sources of online television listing information for U.S. cable systems: Tribune Media Services, and TV Guide.
Both of these providers make their money by selling access to the data, and have a TOS on their web site that forbids extracting the data and loading it into your own PVR without paying them for their data.
Wrastlin' for example (ok ok, sports entertainment... whatever) is awesome on TiVo... 60x FF through commercials and "reviews", 2x FF through matches you don't care too much about (since you can still see all the action), and watch all of the rest of the program. I nuke a 1:07 WWF RAW in 31min.
Wrestling nothing- variable speed FF is made to order for porn!
Actually, considering the feature set- instant replay, backwards play, slow motion, freeze frame, it is clear that the primary purpose of the TiVo is for watching pornography.
Dmitry wrote and published the software while in Russia. The only reason he could be arrested in the US was because his company sells the software using a US-based 'agent' to collect the $99 fee.
Dmitry was not arrested because of his presentation at Defcon. If he had found the flaw and solely used this knowledge to publish papers and give speeches, he would likely not have been arrested- it's unclear whether publishing such information is unlawful under the DMCA, but it is clear that selling circumvention tools is a violation.
His software company published an implementation of a routine that exploits the flaw to extract eBooks from Adobe's encrypted format. They sold the software via a US agent. This act left him vulnerable to US law enforcement.
If you work for Jack Daniels in the USA making hard liquor, and visit an islamic country and do not bring any booze with you nor drink it there, would you expect to be arrested in their country because your activities in the USA violate their law of decency?
If Jack Daniels sells whisky via mail-order directly to customers in islamic countries, it would behoove their executives not to visit those nations!
When your actions are legal in your home country, and only performed in your home country, does excuse the behavior, and you should not be liable to arrest in a country where your actions would be illegal.
It is available as a
patch for Qmail pop3d and is built into many other POP servers, including the stock Berkeley popper.
Client support is primarily in Eudora- the option to enable this feature is tricky to find in the free Eudora client- in eudora.ini, set 'UsePOPSend=1'.
This isn't really a question of 'relaying' mail through their servers, it's more a question of preventing users on Verizon's network from forging the SMTP 'From' address, when sending outgoing mail through Verizon's mail hosts. This is a reasonable policy to enforce.
It prevents forgery, but also prevents users from using other legitimate email addresses as the sender- since there is no way for Verizon to know an address is legitimate, except for the one address they've assigned to the customer.
There's another tactic that some ISPs are using to prevent spamming- blocking or redirecting end-user connections to any port 25 at any remote host except for the ISPs own mail servers. If Verizon were to combine their anti-forgery rule with a 'you must use our mail hosts' rule, that would be a serious inconvenience to legitimate users.
There is a solution.
If you absolutely must send mail with the 'From' being a domain other than your ISP, see if the actual owner of the domain will set up a POPmail server with 'XTEND XMIT' support, allowing you to send out your mail from an authenticated POP session. Note that this is entirely different from the 'pre-authenticating SMTP relay access' technique that was found to be buggy recently.
The seminar is not why he was detained- the software he had previously written to implement the theory in his seminar was the justification.
Dmitry is not being detained for explaining. He is being detained for releasing a polished product for which the sole purpose is to unprotect protected documents.
While that may be nearly as scary, the persecution of Dmitry should not have been such a big suprise.
Along with the costs, you need to figure the benefits of doing e-mail in-house instead of at an external ISP:
Confidentiality. Assuming you take the most basic precautions (QMail on OpenBSD, update as needed), your spooled mail is more secure when it's stored on-site. Plus internal messages need never cross the internet.
Security. Usernames, passwords, and purely internal mail are never seen on the internet.
Offline access. When your internet connection is down, mail received previously but not yet read is still accessible on the local server.
Speed. Downloading mail from the server to the user is all on the local LAN.
Portability. If your ISP goes bankrupt, you need only update your DNS entries. Even easier when you have your own portable IP addresses.
Control. Add, delete, audit without waiting for response from an outside vendor.
If any of the above are important issues to your business, you will want to handle mail hosting in-house.
If you are tiny little group of a few dozen users with no expectation of growth and no in-house IT staff, then by all means, outsource email.
So what we really need is for some groups to start recording directly to digital formats, and releasing first to the Net, then to CD?
Are there any professional groups using digital recording studies, releasing their songs directly into a compressed digital format, with every step from the original recording being tuned toward releasing in a digital format that isn't locked to the CD source bitrate?
Is the issue really that making the original 'rip' is an exact reproduction, or that the third, fourth, or three-hundredth generation copy sounds just as good/bad as the second generation directly off the CD?
That always seemed to me to be the issue- If I copy a tape from a friend who copied it from another friend, each generation of copies degrades significantly. Every generation of copies of a digital file is identical to the first rip, aside from the usual Napster problem of losing the last 4 seconds of every song you download:-)
When I suggested Jabber for IM, there was immediate pressure from our Microsoft-centric mail server admins to instead just wait for Exchange 2000, which includes an intranet version of the Microsoft Messenger server.
I've been considering deploying Jabber for our internal IM needs, but Jabber.Com is not really interested in small (under 50K seat) deployments, and the open source server has no support and does not scale.
Any company that uses an external vendor to provide business-critical internal communications, be they e-mail, IM, or even in-house phone calls, is making a huge mistake.
Using MSN-Messenger for business IM is no better than using Hotmail for business email.
The solution is that you do not give the site 'your micropayment account number' and the ability to charge you whatever they like.
Instead, you use a micropayment system where, when they site wants to charge you for content, you get a popup from your micropayment bank asking
'Site XYZ wants to charge you $0.01 for item ABC. Accept/Deny/File Complaint'
.
You then authorize that single specific charge through your micropayment bank- not any larger amount. It's all pretty standard in the design documents for the more thorough micropay systems.
One such example is e-gold, where all transactions go through their servers, and must be authorized by the payer.
The e-gold/e-silver system is interesting for micropayment because transactions between users are free to the payer and 1% surcharge to the payee (max 50 cents). They make most of their money on moving funds between national currencies and gold.
They do seem to be missing one crucial feature- anonymous transactions, where you do not reveal your account information to the vendor at all.
I put a lot of time and effort into creating special purpose software, in return my consulting clients give me money. Why should somebody else get for free the product for which my client has paid huge sums?
Information costs money to collect and organize. For example, writing a non-fiction book is a huge effort, and can take years of an author's time and thousands of dollars for research.
Should the output of a non-fiction author be free, should their books be fair game for anybody to download? The publisher invested huge sums for the author to create the book, and both the author and the publisher depend on sales to pay their bills.
Nothing is free... it's just that sometimes the costs are well hidden.
I fully agree. As an employee of a corporation, your sole purpose should be 'Maximize shareholder value'. Anything else (lives, laws, principles) is subordinate to this goal.
In a University or other state-run institution, the primary purpose is to maximize taxpayer value.
He did not have permission to install RC5, and doing so did nothing for the University or the taxpapers- thus it was wrong. As it turns out, it was also illegal.
You say that you dismiss 'my Admin Staff' for installing 'unapproved software on systems regardless of reason'. I find it difficult to take advice from a manager who consistently misspells 'professional'.
I pay around $0.25/day for the newspaper, which is half-off the newstand price because I buy a six-month subscription.
Unlike a magazine, a newspaper is transient- very few sane people save the paper for more than a few days, or cut out many articles.
What I pay barely covers the cost of the pulp and getting the paper to my door- the rest is subsidized by advertisers- and much of the blow-in material is 'targeted ad' content.
Why do I pay for a paper but will not pay for online content?
Quality. Better writing, better writers.
Convenience. It's tough to read www.worldnetdaily.com while sitting on the 'throne'.
Value. It's easier to feel that you are getting something for your money, even if it's only a few pounds of low-grade paper.
I've found that it is _much_ easier to operate a one-man consulting firm than to try to make a financial success of a multi-employee firm.
As a single individual, if I don't have a client this month, I can sell some stock (well, not these days) and make it through a few months of hard times. With a group, you have to 'make the nut' every month, or draw down your working capital.
The other advantage I've found is that if you are really good in your field, you can usually find a new gig as the current contract is winding down, either by direct referral from the current client, or from friends who are also in the business.
The biggest headaches are handling billing and general accounting issues, and dealing with having too much work- you need to network with small firms and fellow one-man-bands, and be able to bring in additional talent or pass along new prospects, with a gentleman's agreement that they will do the same for you.
Network consulting has been a tight field since this past fall, and shows no sign of getting any better.
Re:Eco-Terrorism isn't always unjustified... see A
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
These 'eco-terrorists' are nothing more than vandals and arsonists with an agenda. Just because a criminal 'extensively plans' each crime doesn't make their crime justified, it just makes it premeditated.
So it's okay to burn down a man's house if the target is rich, you are sure nobody is inside, and you have a political cause to advance?
Lastly, these people are cowards. Just as the animal rights activists never throw red paint on a big biker's leathers, these eco-arsonists go after the easy targets, not anybody who can shoot back- figuratively or literally.
It's not just marketing, also market forces.
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Actually, I don't really care for the giant 'Excursion' style of SUV, but I do see legitimate reasons for owning the mid-sized models (Bronco, Cherokee, etc).
The much-maligned higher center of gravity and high ground clearance allows headway through deep/drifted snow.
Emissions and mileage requirements have eliminated all of the traditional 'full-size' domestic automobiles.
Mileage isn't everything.
Not all SUVs are limited to 'primitive part-time 4WD'. There are many models with 'advanced AWD systems', including several which offer shift-on-the-fly between 2WD/4-LO/4-HI/AWD.
The real reason people buy SUVs.
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 3
The stupid Federal emission and mileage requirements are the reason that people purchase SUVs- not because of marketing, but because all of the good 'full-sized' (Cadillac, Buick, Lincoln/Mercury etc) cars are no longer being produced.
Even the full size domestic 'sports coupe' designs are either being discontinued, or re-introduced as little tin cans with tiny little minimal displacement engines.
Sure, some people are swayed by marketing, but many people buy SUVs because they are the modern equivalent of the full-sized passenger car, a breed killed off by mandated mileage requirements and emissions laws.
We generally do pretty good on training budget, but that pool doesn't include funds for travel to get to the course or conference, nor lodging and other incidental expenses.
So I'm in a situation where the company is willing to pay thousands for training, but not the couple of hundred bucks it would cost to get me there:-(
Sun no longer makes any real money from selling the Solaris OS. They make their profits from selling Sparc hardware, and a little extra on the side from selling support services for Solaris. But they are primarily a hardware company.
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
Sun no longer makes any real money from selling the Solaris OS. They make their profits from selling Sparc hardware, and a little extra on the side from selling support services for Solaris. But they are primarily a hardware company.
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
There are numerous federal restrictions (FCC and FTC) on commercial 'cold calling' operations. It is acknowledged that commercial speech has less protection than other forms of speech.
The Federal Trade Commision regulates interstate telemarketing. Unsolicited faxes, and calls to pagers and cellular phones, or any number that will mean a charge to the person being called
are banned by the FTC, and for intra-state calls by many state legislatures.
The rules for faxes are very clearly opt-in:
Advertisements for any goods or services cannot be sent to your fax machine without
your prior express permission or invitation.
Permission to send unsolicited faxes is presumed to exist if you have an established business
relationship with whomever is sending the message.
You can end this relationship by telling the company that you do not want to receive any
more faxes from them.
nformation that must be placed either on the first page or on each page of a fax:
The date and time the transmission is sent;
The identity of the business, other entity, or individual sending the message; and
The telephone number of the sender or of the sending fax machine. The telephone number
provided may not be a 900 number or any other number for which charges exceed local
or long distance telephone charges.
E-Gold makes it very, very clear that they are a 'bailment' system, not a bank. There are some very important legal implications in the distinction between the two.
For most of us, the most important difference is that if E-Gold were to go bankrupt, we should be able to get our gold back out, not subject to being used to pay off the creditors first.
Slashdot Mirror
There are exactly two sources of online television listing information for U.S. cable systems: Tribune Media Services, and TV Guide.
Both of these providers make their money by selling access to the data, and have a TOS on their web site that forbids extracting the data and loading it into your own PVR without paying them for their data.
Wrestling nothing- variable speed FF is made to order for porn!
Actually, considering the feature set- instant replay, backwards play, slow motion, freeze frame, it is clear that the primary purpose of the TiVo is for watching pornography.
Dmitry was not arrested because of his presentation at Defcon. If he had found the flaw and solely used this knowledge to publish papers and give speeches, he would likely not have been arrested- it's unclear whether publishing such information is unlawful under the DMCA, but it is clear that selling circumvention tools is a violation.
His software company published an implementation of a routine that exploits the flaw to extract eBooks from Adobe's encrypted format. They sold the software via a US agent. This act left him vulnerable to US law enforcement.
If you work for Jack Daniels in the USA making hard liquor, and visit an islamic country and do not bring any booze with you nor drink it there, would you expect to be arrested in their country because your activities in the USA violate their law of decency?
If Jack Daniels sells whisky via mail-order directly to customers in islamic countries, it would behoove their executives not to visit those nations!
When your actions are legal in your home country, and only performed in your home country, does excuse the behavior, and you should not be liable to arrest in a country where your actions would be illegal.
Client support is primarily in Eudora- the option to enable this feature is tricky to find in the free Eudora client- in eudora.ini, set 'UsePOPSend=1'.
It prevents forgery, but also prevents users from using other legitimate email addresses as the sender- since there is no way for Verizon to know an address is legitimate, except for the one address they've assigned to the customer.
There's another tactic that some ISPs are using to prevent spamming- blocking or redirecting end-user connections to any port 25 at any remote host except for the ISPs own mail servers. If Verizon were to combine their anti-forgery rule with a 'you must use our mail hosts' rule, that would be a serious inconvenience to legitimate users.
There is a solution.
If you absolutely must send mail with the 'From' being a domain other than your ISP, see if the actual owner of the domain will set up a POPmail server with 'XTEND XMIT' support, allowing you to send out your mail from an authenticated POP session. Note that this is entirely different from the 'pre-authenticating SMTP relay access' technique that was found to be buggy recently.
Dmitry is not being detained for explaining. He is being detained for releasing a polished product for which the sole purpose is to unprotect protected documents.
While that may be nearly as scary, the persecution of Dmitry should not have been such a big suprise.
If any of the above are important issues to your business, you will want to handle mail hosting in-house.
If you are tiny little group of a few dozen users with no expectation of growth and no in-house IT staff, then by all means, outsource email.
Are there any professional groups using digital recording studies, releasing their songs directly into a compressed digital format, with every step from the original recording being tuned toward releasing in a digital format that isn't locked to the CD source bitrate?
That always seemed to me to be the issue- If I copy a tape from a friend who copied it from another friend, each generation of copies degrades significantly. Every generation of copies of a digital file is identical to the first rip, aside from the usual Napster problem of losing the last 4 seconds of every song you download :-)
I've been considering deploying Jabber for our internal IM needs, but Jabber.Com is not really interested in small (under 50K seat) deployments, and the open source server has no support and does not scale.
Any company that uses an external vendor to provide business-critical internal communications, be they e-mail, IM, or even in-house phone calls, is making a huge mistake.
Using MSN-Messenger for business IM is no better than using Hotmail for business email.
Instead, you use a micropayment system where, when they site wants to charge you for content, you get a popup from your micropayment bank asking
.You then authorize that single specific charge through your micropayment bank- not any larger amount. It's all pretty standard in the design documents for the more thorough micropay systems.
One such example is e-gold, where all transactions go through their servers, and must be authorized by the payer.
The e-gold/e-silver system is interesting for micropayment because transactions between users are free to the payer and 1% surcharge to the payee (max 50 cents). They make most of their money on moving funds between national currencies and gold.
They do seem to be missing one crucial feature- anonymous transactions, where you do not reveal your account information to the vendor at all.
I put a lot of time and effort into creating special purpose software, in return my consulting clients give me money. Why should somebody else get for free the product for which my client has paid huge sums?
Information costs money to collect and organize. For example, writing a non-fiction book is a huge effort, and can take years of an author's time and thousands of dollars for research.
Should the output of a non-fiction author be free, should their books be fair game for anybody to download? The publisher invested huge sums for the author to create the book, and both the author and the publisher depend on sales to pay their bills.
Nothing is free... it's just that sometimes the costs are well hidden.
Pay ten bucks a month, and download all their MP3s, and other content.
Oddly, even though it sounds great, I still haven't got around to signing up :-)
In a University or other state-run institution, the primary purpose is to maximize taxpayer value.
He did not have permission to install RC5, and doing so did nothing for the University or the taxpapers- thus it was wrong. As it turns out, it was also illegal.
You say that you dismiss 'my Admin Staff' for installing 'unapproved software on systems regardless of reason'. I find it difficult to take advice from a manager who consistently misspells 'professional'.
Unlike a magazine, a newspaper is transient- very few sane people save the paper for more than a few days, or cut out many articles.
What I pay barely covers the cost of the pulp and getting the paper to my door- the rest is subsidized by advertisers- and much of the blow-in material is 'targeted ad' content.
Why do I pay for a paper but will not pay for online content?
As a single individual, if I don't have a client this month, I can sell some stock (well, not these days) and make it through a few months of hard times. With a group, you have to 'make the nut' every month, or draw down your working capital.
The other advantage I've found is that if you are really good in your field, you can usually find a new gig as the current contract is winding down, either by direct referral from the current client, or from friends who are also in the business.
The biggest headaches are handling billing and general accounting issues, and dealing with having too much work- you need to network with small firms and fellow one-man-bands, and be able to bring in additional talent or pass along new prospects, with a gentleman's agreement that they will do the same for you.
Network consulting has been a tight field since this past fall, and shows no sign of getting any better.
So it's okay to burn down a man's house if the target is rich, you are sure nobody is inside, and you have a political cause to advance?
Lastly, these people are cowards. Just as the animal rights activists never throw red paint on a big biker's leathers, these eco-arsonists go after the easy targets, not anybody who can shoot back- figuratively or literally.
Not all SUVs are limited to 'primitive part-time 4WD'. There are many models with 'advanced AWD systems', including several which offer shift-on-the-fly between 2WD/4-LO/4-HI/AWD.
Even the full size domestic 'sports coupe' designs are either being discontinued, or re-introduced as little tin cans with tiny little minimal displacement engines.
Sure, some people are swayed by marketing, but many people buy SUVs because they are the modern equivalent of the full-sized passenger car, a breed killed off by mandated mileage requirements and emissions laws.
So I'm in a situation where the company is willing to pay thousands for training, but not the couple of hundred bucks it would cost to get me there :-(
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
Sun offers the Solaris OS at basically zero cost, because more people will buy their hardware if they have an operating system to run on them.
If you want to run Linux on your Sparc, Sun is not going to try to stop you- anything that encourages you to buy their hardware is a good thing.
The Federal Trade Commision regulates interstate telemarketing. Unsolicited faxes, and calls to pagers and cellular phones, or any number that will mean a charge to the person being called are banned by the FTC, and for intra-state calls by many state legislatures.
The rules for faxes are very clearly opt-in:
- Advertisements for any goods or services cannot be sent to your fax machine without
your prior express permission or invitation.
- Permission to send unsolicited faxes is presumed to exist if you have an established business
relationship with whomever is sending the message.
- You can end this relationship by telling the company that you do not want to receive any
more faxes from them.
nformation that must be placed either on the first page or on each page of a fax:Buy a car that comes stock with 'Z' rated tires, and you get a car with no limiter, or a 149MPH limiter.
For most of us, the most important difference is that if E-Gold were to go bankrupt, we should be able to get our gold back out, not subject to being used to pay off the creditors first.