And therein lies the rub with this; IMO, Comcast (or any ISP) would be within their rights to throttle bandwidth, number of concurrent TCP connections, etc. to their users. I've not seen anything in their advertising or service description indicating that these things were unlimited. (Their use of the term "unlimited" has pretty much ceased with regard to their broadband service, and even when they did use it it was just a holdover from dialup days when people paid by the minute anyway.)
What Comcast is doing though -- sending forged RST packets -- is, well... forgery. It's fraud. They are impersonating one of the parties in a TCP connection and sending control packets purporting to be from that party. Shouldn't this investigation deal with that fact in addition to the mere traffic meddling?
It's hard to overestimate the importance of the point you bring up.
If the tech community allows the courts to include failing to save volatile information (such as RAM dumps, unlogged server transactions, etc.) in their definition of "destroying evidence," this is going to be one impossibly difficult world for us.
Actually, the branding is -- for the first time -- becoming quite clear to me. Microsoft's DRM logos on a device means "protected content must be purchased separately for this device; you cannot transfer previously purchased content to it."
There. I'm not even an Apple fanboy, but that's an easy target for a "Hi, I'm a Zune," "...and I'm an iPod" commercial. Or better yet, "I'm a generic MP3 player, and content you purchased for me will play on damn near anything."
Thank you; I'm glad someone thinks so. I'm using SubText for my blog engine, and yeah, the captcha feature is none too reliable. I keep meaning to replace the contact form with a custom one, but haven't found the time yet.
At any rate, I'm reachable through moc liamg ta 86htimsluap.
That's the million dollar question in my head too.
Obviously, the BSA has enough leverage to extract / extort some hefty sums of cash from some non-insignificant business entities.
I can't imagine the conversation going like:
AUDITOR ON DOORSTEP:
Hi! I'm from the BSA, and I'm here to follow up on an unsubstantiated allegation by a disgruntled ex-employee of yours.
ALLEGED INFRINGER:
Well why didn't you just say so! Yes, by all means come in. Can I get you something to drink?
AUDITOR ON DOORSTEP:
Yes, thank you, I'll have some 21-year old scotch if you don't mind. Now then, on to business... we hear that you didn't buy client licenses for 5 of your 800 employees' workstations
ALLEGED INFRINGER:
Well Tony's sure pretty conscientious about that sort of thing, but just in case he made a mistake, why don't you poke around our systems a bit? I'll have IT security give you domain admin privileges
AUDITOR ON DOORSTEP:
Thanks so much. Could I also get some paper for the printer, and use your notary public to certify my printouts' dates & times before I leave?
So how does this go down? Has anyone here been forced or coerced to let a BSA auditor in the door? If so, how?
Right; I'm sure the RIAA wouldn't see that as an issue, but the courts should.
If the RIAA wanted to statistically estimate damages* in terms of lost revenue (I doubt that they do; I'm sure they prefer to maximize the amount by whatever justification is most expedient), I could see it working out into a multilevel-marketing-like formula, where the monetary amount associated with each copy gets divided by a factor related to how many generations that copy was removed from the sharer.
*As an earlier post mentioned, TFA is about cost rather than damages, and I realize that; I'm just following this line of thinking because I find it interesting.
(Yikes, it's scary to find myself offering an argument for the RIAA's side of something. I'll take a long shower after posting this, but anyway...)
IANAL, but I can't think the courts would refuse to admit a methodologically sound series of independent experiments into evidence, whereby the experimenter seeds a number of files (of varying popularity) with unique, recognizable bitprints, then measures and documents their distribution. The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
Admitting the study into evidence might make them have to adjust the damage amounts to consider each song's popularity, but it could conceivably justify an average of 750 copies in circulation * $0.99, over time.
You can see such things on X-Rays as well depending on the exposure & whatnot. Normally you might think that would be no big deal in a medical context, but once I was at a chiropractor when he had an X-Ray of me up on the lightbox, and you could see exactly the feature you mention. Then his girlfriend / receptionist knocked on the door, he said "come in," and I felt more than a little bit awkward. [This space reserved for others' endowment jokes.]
This was long before HIPAA, of course. I imagine that such occurrences would be less common nowadays, with the constant attention given to medical privacy.
Anyway, the above anecdote notwithstanding, I'm all for medical scans that are faster & more detailed. I mean, who enjoys holding still for minutes on end while the MRI machine does its thing?
For the price of a video card with S-Video, Component Video or HDMI output (or alternatively, a TV with VGA or DVI input), VLC player by VideoLan.org puts you in control quite nicely.
I use Windows XP MediaCenter Edition as the centerpiece of my home AV setup, and in addition making you sit through unskippables, it, "due to restrictions set by the broadcaster," prohibits you from playing a commercial (CSS protected) DVD at higher than 480p resolution. VLC kept me from having to start over with Linux MCE or MythTV -- at least until I have the time to learn it thoroughly and do it right.
If time travel were a reality, I would go back & work my arse off to become a "founding father" just so I could enshrine a right to tax-evasion in the constitution. Any tax-paying entity, whether person or (shriek) corporation, would have a constitutional right to 75% of their earned income, period. It would be the problem of the overlapping taxing entities to sort out how the 25% was split up; once any income-earning entity could show that 25% was consumed by tax burden, they'd be consitutionally protected from any further government action against them -- city, county, state or federal -- as far as tax-evasion was concerned.
But what do I know?
Anyway, how well-defined are the "many services"? Well enough that the/. crowd can't find a workable shell under which to move the pea? (Why yes, that *is* a challenge, to be met by/.ers and defended against by asshat-sympathizing lawyers.);=)
Dude, this is/. You can't just reference arcane details from TFA like that without explaining where they're from, lest you suffer death by 1,000 "offtopic" mods.
Perhaps they have to pay a use tax for Custom Software. But if I write custom software for an IL distributor who "shrinkwraps" it for resale, then a MD firm can buy it out-of-state just like any other out-of-state software purchase. The fact that it's an obscure SKU never purchased by anyone else is no business of the State of Maryland as far as the IL distributor is concerned.
I recently bid 5% over my nearest competitor on a somewhat lucrative project (by my standards) for a Maryland client. The competitor happened to be in-state for the client. I'm not in MD, and the (extremely price-sensitive) deal with the competitor isn't yet inked. I'll be giving them a follow-up call in the morning.
Thank you, Maryland legislature! And to all you other MD-based purchasers of "custom computer programming," I'm as custom as you can get, I have good references, and I come with a built-in 6% discount. Hurry, availability is limited.;-)
Sounds like one more reason to migrate business apps to a web platform.
It wasn't long ago that setting up a new workstation was a tedious process for me, having to install and configure all manner of office apps and mail clients and whatnot. Now though, with platforms like OWA and Google's hosted office & collaboration tools, this is as close to a non-issue as it's ever been.
I'm a Windows developer, and about half of what I do at work I can do just as easily from a Windows or Linux workstation these days. Give me a Visio-compatible diagramming tool and a little closer of a drop-in replacement for Visual Studio than Mono Develop and I'm set. Unless current trends completely reverse themselves in the coming years, Microsoft lock-in is going to weaken inexorably.
It just started hitting me within the last month or two, and it's so bad now that I've literally had to bring Speakeasy in and move my Subversion, FTP & web servers over to that connection. I know Comcast doesn't officially support servers, but I've been running all kinds of them without issue until just recently.
You know, since providers and governments are breaking TCP/IP with these strategies, I think it warrants some sort of firewall extension to run heuristics on RST packets and try to determine which ones are suspect & should be dropped. Then it's just a matter of getting every "guy on the other end" to use it.;-)
If you're ever in Chicagoland, I owe you the single malt (or other drink or consumable item of similar value) of your choosing. On the same night as I got GPG working in both FC6 and WinXP, I'm starting to feel like less of a n3wb.;-) Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
And therein lies the rub with this; IMO, Comcast (or any ISP) would be within their rights to throttle bandwidth, number of concurrent TCP connections, etc. to their users. I've not seen anything in their advertising or service description indicating that these things were unlimited. (Their use of the term "unlimited" has pretty much ceased with regard to their broadband service, and even when they did use it it was just a holdover from dialup days when people paid by the minute anyway.)
What Comcast is doing though -- sending forged RST packets -- is, well... forgery. It's fraud. They are impersonating one of the parties in a TCP connection and sending control packets purporting to be from that party. Shouldn't this investigation deal with that fact in addition to the mere traffic meddling?
Correction: This was just a latency thing... they've now scooped up http://www.nsiregisterseverydomainchecked.com/ and http://www.nsiregisterseverydomain.com./
I have to assume that http://www.reallyreallyuseless.com/ is only a matter of time.
Interesting; I started experimenting, and it seems they don't register *every* domain checked... wonder what their criteria are:
http://www.reallyreallyuselessdomain.com/ - scooped
http://www.reallyreallyuseless.com/ - left
http://www.2008twobit2008.com/ - scooped
http://www.nsiregisterseverydomain.com/ - left
http://www.nsiregisterseverydomainchecked.com/ - left
Don't people often punish their kids to the nth degree for some wrongdoing, and to the 2nth degree for the same wrongdoing plus lying about it?
If anyone wondered, the results in Windows are identical to the parent's screenshot.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007113005 Minefield/3.0b2pre
It's hard to overestimate the importance of the point you bring up.
If the tech community allows the courts to include failing to save volatile information (such as RAM dumps, unlogged server transactions, etc.) in their definition of "destroying evidence," this is going to be one impossibly difficult world for us.
Good question; I'd love to hear from an IAAL-positive individual on this.
What does one do when they find that the legal threat that scared them into submission might have been a load of crap after all?
So does this mean that the RIAA's past cases are subject to review if the defendant caved on the basis of MediaSentry evidence?
Actually, the branding is -- for the first time -- becoming quite clear to me. Microsoft's DRM logos on a device means "protected content must be purchased separately for this device; you cannot transfer previously purchased content to it."
There. I'm not even an Apple fanboy, but that's an easy target for a "Hi, I'm a Zune," "...and I'm an iPod" commercial. Or better yet, "I'm a generic MP3 player, and content you purchased for me will play on damn near anything."
Thank you; I'm glad someone thinks so. I'm using SubText for my blog engine, and yeah, the captcha feature is none too reliable. I keep meaning to replace the contact form with a custom one, but haven't found the time yet.
At any rate, I'm reachable through moc liamg ta 86htimsluap.
Cheers!
Remind me not to incorporate any more businesses in Lagos; could well be Nigeria's version of our 9th Circuit.
That's the million dollar question in my head too.
Obviously, the BSA has enough leverage to extract / extort some hefty sums of cash from some non-insignificant business entities.
I can't imagine the conversation going like:
So how does this go down? Has anyone here been forced or coerced to let a BSA auditor in the door? If so, how?
Right; I'm sure the RIAA wouldn't see that as an issue, but the courts should.
If the RIAA wanted to statistically estimate damages* in terms of lost revenue (I doubt that they do; I'm sure they prefer to maximize the amount by whatever justification is most expedient), I could see it working out into a multilevel-marketing-like formula, where the monetary amount associated with each copy gets divided by a factor related to how many generations that copy was removed from the sharer.
*As an earlier post mentioned, TFA is about cost rather than damages, and I realize that; I'm just following this line of thinking because I find it interesting.
(Yikes, it's scary to find myself offering an argument for the RIAA's side of something. I'll take a long shower after posting this, but anyway...)
IANAL, but I can't think the courts would refuse to admit a methodologically sound series of independent experiments into evidence, whereby the experimenter seeds a number of files (of varying popularity) with unique, recognizable bitprints, then measures and documents their distribution. The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
Admitting the study into evidence might make them have to adjust the damage amounts to consider each song's popularity, but it could conceivably justify an average of 750 copies in circulation * $0.99, over time.
You can see such things on X-Rays as well depending on the exposure & whatnot. Normally you might think that would be no big deal in a medical context, but once I was at a chiropractor when he had an X-Ray of me up on the lightbox, and you could see exactly the feature you mention. Then his girlfriend / receptionist knocked on the door, he said "come in," and I felt more than a little bit awkward. [This space reserved for others' endowment jokes.]
This was long before HIPAA, of course. I imagine that such occurrences would be less common nowadays, with the constant attention given to medical privacy.
Anyway, the above anecdote notwithstanding, I'm all for medical scans that are faster & more detailed. I mean, who enjoys holding still for minutes on end while the MRI machine does its thing?
For the price of a video card with S-Video, Component Video or HDMI output (or alternatively, a TV with VGA or DVI input), VLC player by VideoLan.org puts you in control quite nicely.
I use Windows XP MediaCenter Edition as the centerpiece of my home AV setup, and in addition making you sit through unskippables, it, "due to restrictions set by the broadcaster," prohibits you from playing a commercial (CSS protected) DVD at higher than 480p resolution. VLC kept me from having to start over with Linux MCE or MythTV -- at least until I have the time to learn it thoroughly and do it right.
If time travel were a reality, I would go back & work my arse off to become a "founding father" just so I could enshrine a right to tax-evasion in the constitution. Any tax-paying entity, whether person or (shriek) corporation, would have a constitutional right to 75% of their earned income, period. It would be the problem of the overlapping taxing entities to sort out how the 25% was split up; once any income-earning entity could show that 25% was consumed by tax burden, they'd be consitutionally protected from any further government action against them -- city, county, state or federal -- as far as tax-evasion was concerned.
/. crowd can't find a workable shell under which to move the pea? (Why yes, that *is* a challenge, to be met by /.ers and defended against by asshat-sympathizing lawyers.) ;=)
But what do I know?
Anyway, how well-defined are the "many services"? Well enough that the
Dude, this is /. You can't just reference arcane details from TFA like that without explaining where they're from, lest you suffer death by 1,000 "offtopic" mods.
Perhaps they have to pay a use tax for Custom Software. But if I write custom software for an IL distributor who "shrinkwraps" it for resale, then a MD firm can buy it out-of-state just like any other out-of-state software purchase. The fact that it's an obscure SKU never purchased by anyone else is no business of the State of Maryland as far as the IL distributor is concerned.
I recently bid 5% over my nearest competitor on a somewhat lucrative project (by my standards) for a Maryland client. The competitor happened to be in-state for the client. I'm not in MD, and the (extremely price-sensitive) deal with the competitor isn't yet inked. I'll be giving them a follow-up call in the morning.
;-)
Thank you, Maryland legislature! And to all you other MD-based purchasers of "custom computer programming," I'm as custom as you can get, I have good references, and I come with a built-in 6% discount. Hurry, availability is limited.
no (tagging beta)
Sounds like one more reason to migrate business apps to a web platform.
It wasn't long ago that setting up a new workstation was a tedious process for me, having to install and configure all manner of office apps and mail clients and whatnot. Now though, with platforms like OWA and Google's hosted office & collaboration tools, this is as close to a non-issue as it's ever been.
I'm a Windows developer, and about half of what I do at work I can do just as easily from a Windows or Linux workstation these days. Give me a Visio-compatible diagramming tool and a little closer of a drop-in replacement for Visual Studio than Mono Develop and I'm set. Unless current trends completely reverse themselves in the coming years, Microsoft lock-in is going to weaken inexorably.
It just started hitting me within the last month or two, and it's so bad now that I've literally had to bring Speakeasy in and move my Subversion, FTP & web servers over to that connection. I know Comcast doesn't officially support servers, but I've been running all kinds of them without issue until just recently.
;-)
You know, since providers and governments are breaking TCP/IP with these strategies, I think it warrants some sort of firewall extension to run heuristics on RST packets and try to determine which ones are suspect & should be dropped. Then it's just a matter of getting every "guy on the other end" to use it.
If you're ever in Chicagoland, I owe you the single malt (or other drink or consumable item of similar value) of your choosing. On the same night as I got GPG working in both FC6 and WinXP, I'm starting to feel like less of a n3wb. ;-) Thanks.