Free does not mean gratis in this context, as I am sure plenty of other people are going to point out. The Linux kernel is free in the sense that you may freely use, modify, or redistribute it, without worrying about patents or royalties, or EULAs or whatnot. Yes, I know some BSD license fans will probably point out that you are not free to redistribute it as if it were proprietary software, but the GPL is about protecting the other freedoms from that exact activity.
Who said that we were going to stop paying people to make these things? We are talking about the idiotic and insulting attempts that these companies are undertaking to create scarcity where there is none. Times have changed, technology has changed, and it is time for the movie and music companies to update their businesses; instead, they are trying to use the law to move us backward, so that the computer capable of processing a thousand songs at a time is reduced to a glorified phonograph player.
I certainly do agree about shortening the duration of copyrights. The US constitution requires copyrights to have a finite length, but lobbyists for media companies simply convince congress to extend that duration by 20 years ever 20 years. We no longer see copyrighted work enter the public domain during the same generation it was created; it now skips three generations, and the copyright lobbyists are still not satisfied (I think they hate the constitution, since it limits copyrights and fails to mention profits).
There was a recent 60 Minutes segment about copyright infringement, and it was nothing short of propaganda. The segment started with some details about how Mexican drug cartels are starting to sell illegal DVDs, and some FBI analyst spoke about how this is part of an attempt to diversify from drugs and child prostitution. Then, a sudden switch to a discussion about Bittorrent, with no attempt whatsoever being made to explain that Bittorrent does not support child prostitution, and a wrap up interview with a director talking about how nobody is going to make a movie like The Matrix until people stop downloading.
If it sounds like "two minutes hate," well, the only significant differences I can think of is that it was a 15 minute segment and there were no sheep involved.
Frankly, I am not all that opposed to paying for music and movies. What I am opposed to is paying for music and movies, and then finding out that I cannot play it on my device of choice, or that my operating system is not supported, or that at some point there will be an attempt to prevent me from playing the media unless I pay again. I do not want to lose access to the movie I paid for because someone claimed there was a copyright issue, even if I get my money back.
"Renting" digital media is the most ludicrously stupid concept I have ever heard of.
Show me where he said "communist" or "communism," or "socialist" or anything related to "marxist." A revolution that wrenches power from corporations is not necessarily "anti-capitalist;" it may simply mean that the people of the United States start demanding that their politicians do more for their constituents, and less for whatever corporations are paying for their campaigns. You know, we do still live in a democracy, despite what Citibank says.
That is really nowhere near as easy as you make it sound, at least not with any modern cipher. Even the NSA, with the most vast computing resources in the entire world, would have a lot of difficulty cracking AES or Serpent, barring some completely novel attack that has eluded the crypto research community thus far.
If you want to break someone's crypto, you should not even think about attacking it directly. You should think about attacking the person, or at least planting recording devices in their home or on their computer, so that you can get the secret key. If a foreign government wanted to do this, they would have to either commit an act of war by attacking a US citizen on US soil, or wait until you enter their country and kidnap you (or if you bring your computer with you, plant a recording device or software).
Posturing is still more than most companies are doing these days. How many companies are even mentioning the possibility of ending their operations in China as a direct result of the Chinese government's actions or policies? I seriously doubt that Google is the only major technology company that has to deal with Chinese government hacking, and I doubt that they are the only major company that has notice these sorts of intrusions.
I believe there is a limit to that logic; people still have to be able to broadcast themselves (e.g. for television), and people still have to be able to give legal confessions to crimes. Sure, you can say that when people are not aware that they are abandoning their privacy, companies cannot take advantage of them, but somehow I think that even a big, bold disclaimer on Facebook's login page that warned users that by logging in, they were waiving their privacy rights would not really deter people, or if it did that it would only be momentary. Case-in-point: when Facebook is too aggressive in eroding its users' privacy, the users do not respond by quitting Facebook, they respond by creating Facebook groups as a "protest."
Joe sixpack has nothing to worry about if he sends a photograph of his genitals to some random website. That is not really where the privacy problems of Facebook come up.
We are guaranteed the right to privacy to protect us from the government. Tyranny cannot exist when the government cannot pry open arbitrary aspects of the lives of the citizens -- tyrannical laws cannot be enforced if people can simply hide their activities. Unfortunately, this interpretation of privacy rights has been largely forgotten, and most people now think of privacy rights as a protection for criminals, if they even bother to think about their rights at all.
However, the law can only grant rights to the people; nobody can be forced to exercise them. These days, fewer and fewer people are bothering to keep any part of their lives private, and they are not stopping to think about the implications of mass numbers of people abandoning their rights. Worse, even those who do want privacy are finding it harder and harder to maintain, as their friends often post information online that they would not have posted themselves.
Facebook by its very design worsens the situation. Facebook is designed not just to collect data, but also metadata which allows our privacy to be violated in an entirely new way. Information about our lives can be deduced from the metadata that Facebook is collecting, even information that we did not deliberately post to Facebook. It is possible to categorize not just who is friends with whom, but how close that friendship is, and in some cases even more details about the nature of friendship can be obtained. This information has never been truly secret of course, but Facebook is amassing it all, allowing the information to be accessed with ease and without arousing suspicious: whereas it once required a detective to infiltrate a social circle to extract this data, it can now be accessed without any field work.
No, Facebook on its own will not lead to tyranny. It is the general trend, of which Facebook is not just a major enabler, but which Facebook is actively encouraging, that is the problem here.
However, data protection laws cannot reasonably cover situations where people voluntarily abandon their right to privacy, which is exactly the situation we are in now. Much as I hate to admit it, this guy is right: people are demonstrating less and less concern for their own privacy, and seem to think that the 4th amendment is for the protection of criminals. I once told a few friends that Facebook keeps track of every single mouse click they make on the website, beginning with their registration, and the response was telling: they shrugged, said that was fine and that since they were busy spying on each other anyway, it was reasonable for Facebook to do the same to them.
Perhaps this is yet another reason to use only free (libre) software: you do not have to rely on a greedy businessman to decide that a bug is worth fixing. Of course, this means that "responsible disclosure" flies out the window, since you cannot go around keeping bugs secret if you want random people to fix them, but give the content of TFA...
What I find striking is the utter lack of information that the FBI's website gives about what Infragard is really about. They give few details about what sort of information they are looking for, and what sort of information they give back to their members. That alone makes it difficult for me to trust...
In which case they are still idiots. If they want to hide their activities online, they should use a connection that is really far away from them, which is basically what Tor does automatically. Using a neighbor's Internet connection to mask your activities is the same sort of logic that Eliot Spitzer (the former governor of New York) used when he gave his friend's name to the "escort service" that ultimately led to his resignation as governor.
"The content needs to be incentivized in this society, or other pursuits will suppress it."
Really though, great artists enjoy what they do -- they still need to eat, of course, but they are not really trying to maximize their profits from their art. Where I see money playing the most important factor is in the industries that surround the art -- recording studios, movie studios, etc. Sure, it is a great thing when an artist can make a living just by creating art, but only a minority ever manage to do this; the majority of people who make their money in the music or movie businesses are the people who do work for an artist to help in the creation of the art.
That is why I said the recording industry must shrink, rather than "disappear." I am arguing for a change in the revenue stream, not an elimination of it.
"Take this concept, if you will, to a larger, more collaborative work like a movie. Live performances are out of the question,"
Instead of live performances, movie companies have theaters. Movie companies still have chances to license their movies for business use: every time you see a commercial with a movie character pushing some product, the movie studio is being paid royalties for the use of that character (likewise with fast food companies giving out toys in kids meals, etc.). If a movie studio finds that ticket sales are not high enough, too bad: they should have made a movie that people wanted to see at a theater. Yes, this means movie studios will shrink, but that is fine and necessary because of new technology. Great movies are not going to go away if people are allowed to share them, there will just be a change in the revenue streams.
"There may be justice in it, but the end result will be poorer content,"
I am not so sure about that. Most of the movies that have limited theater runs, and turn profits mainly from DVD sales, are really bad. Those that do well enough in theaters that DVD sales are not necessary to cover the production costs would not go away if people were allowed to liberally share movies with each other.
"Nobody says it is unethical to make better movies, either, which would be a better example of what you are talking about."
Except that digital cameras did not make higher quality photographs early on, and most digital cameras (commonly called cell phones) are still of much lower quality than a film camera (I am referring to 35mm film, which is the highest quality film most people are familiar with; medium and large format film are still used to create large, high quality prints). Digital cameras won because they made it easier to share photographs; as a result, an entire industry has been decimated, and there is a reduced incentive to develop film or to create film development products.
What was the result of obliterating that entire industry? Photographs are more available than ever before. You can easily find pictures of almost any inhabited area on Earth. You can find pictures of almost any object you can think of. Artists have even started to use digital cameras, and show off their work on the Internet; some artists even sell prints.
So, why is it that when it comes to photography, it is fine to download and share photos, even artistic photos, and even without compensating the person who make the photo? Why are music and movies so special? Is it just because the RIAA and MPAA have so much power, and have invested so much time and money creating propaganda? Hm...
"The presence of the physical magnetic media film is not the defining characteristic of the device. For a song or movie this is entertainment value."
Except that the physical medium can and does affect the value of a creative work. Seeing a movie in a theater is a lot different from seeing it on a television. A live concert (e.g. no physical media) is entirely different from hearing a song on your stereo. Until very recently, film photography was in an entirely different category (for creative purposes) th
"I hope the graduates are learning that documentation is a BIG ISSUE"
Only in engineering programs. CS programs still retain a lot of their "math heritage," and there is very little push for the students to write good documentation; at best, documentation seems to be an afterthought.
Not really. Where I studied as an undergrad, there was a lot of paranoia about (undergrad) student sysadmins abusing their power, and so students were only allowed to assist faculty or full time IT staff. When I was asked to do some routine maintenance, I was told that they would not be giving me the root password because I could potentially use it to read other people's email, and that my assurances that I would never do such a thing made no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Free does not mean gratis in this context, as I am sure plenty of other people are going to point out. The Linux kernel is free in the sense that you may freely use, modify, or redistribute it, without worrying about patents or royalties, or EULAs or whatnot. Yes, I know some BSD license fans will probably point out that you are not free to redistribute it as if it were proprietary software, but the GPL is about protecting the other freedoms from that exact activity.
Who said that we were going to stop paying people to make these things? We are talking about the idiotic and insulting attempts that these companies are undertaking to create scarcity where there is none. Times have changed, technology has changed, and it is time for the movie and music companies to update their businesses; instead, they are trying to use the law to move us backward, so that the computer capable of processing a thousand songs at a time is reduced to a glorified phonograph player.
I certainly do agree about shortening the duration of copyrights. The US constitution requires copyrights to have a finite length, but lobbyists for media companies simply convince congress to extend that duration by 20 years ever 20 years. We no longer see copyrighted work enter the public domain during the same generation it was created; it now skips three generations, and the copyright lobbyists are still not satisfied (I think they hate the constitution, since it limits copyrights and fails to mention profits).
We have upgraded; it is now trendy to say, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of 1TB hard drives."
There was a recent 60 Minutes segment about copyright infringement, and it was nothing short of propaganda. The segment started with some details about how Mexican drug cartels are starting to sell illegal DVDs, and some FBI analyst spoke about how this is part of an attempt to diversify from drugs and child prostitution. Then, a sudden switch to a discussion about Bittorrent, with no attempt whatsoever being made to explain that Bittorrent does not support child prostitution, and a wrap up interview with a director talking about how nobody is going to make a movie like The Matrix until people stop downloading.
If it sounds like "two minutes hate," well, the only significant differences I can think of is that it was a 15 minute segment and there were no sheep involved.
Frankly, I am not all that opposed to paying for music and movies. What I am opposed to is paying for music and movies, and then finding out that I cannot play it on my device of choice, or that my operating system is not supported, or that at some point there will be an attempt to prevent me from playing the media unless I pay again. I do not want to lose access to the movie I paid for because someone claimed there was a copyright issue, even if I get my money back.
"Renting" digital media is the most ludicrously stupid concept I have ever heard of.
Show me where he said "communist" or "communism," or "socialist" or anything related to "marxist." A revolution that wrenches power from corporations is not necessarily "anti-capitalist;" it may simply mean that the people of the United States start demanding that their politicians do more for their constituents, and less for whatever corporations are paying for their campaigns. You know, we do still live in a democracy, despite what Citibank says.
"crack the encryption"
That is really nowhere near as easy as you make it sound, at least not with any modern cipher. Even the NSA, with the most vast computing resources in the entire world, would have a lot of difficulty cracking AES or Serpent, barring some completely novel attack that has eluded the crypto research community thus far.
If you want to break someone's crypto, you should not even think about attacking it directly. You should think about attacking the person, or at least planting recording devices in their home or on their computer, so that you can get the secret key. If a foreign government wanted to do this, they would have to either commit an act of war by attacking a US citizen on US soil, or wait until you enter their country and kidnap you (or if you bring your computer with you, plant a recording device or software).
Posturing is still more than most companies are doing these days. How many companies are even mentioning the possibility of ending their operations in China as a direct result of the Chinese government's actions or policies? I seriously doubt that Google is the only major technology company that has to deal with Chinese government hacking, and I doubt that they are the only major company that has notice these sorts of intrusions.
If ever there was a need for a "wtf" tag...
"Right to privacy"
I believe there is a limit to that logic; people still have to be able to broadcast themselves (e.g. for television), and people still have to be able to give legal confessions to crimes. Sure, you can say that when people are not aware that they are abandoning their privacy, companies cannot take advantage of them, but somehow I think that even a big, bold disclaimer on Facebook's login page that warned users that by logging in, they were waiving their privacy rights would not really deter people, or if it did that it would only be momentary. Case-in-point: when Facebook is too aggressive in eroding its users' privacy, the users do not respond by quitting Facebook, they respond by creating Facebook groups as a "protest."
Joe sixpack has nothing to worry about if he sends a photograph of his genitals to some random website. That is not really where the privacy problems of Facebook come up.
We are guaranteed the right to privacy to protect us from the government. Tyranny cannot exist when the government cannot pry open arbitrary aspects of the lives of the citizens -- tyrannical laws cannot be enforced if people can simply hide their activities. Unfortunately, this interpretation of privacy rights has been largely forgotten, and most people now think of privacy rights as a protection for criminals, if they even bother to think about their rights at all.
However, the law can only grant rights to the people; nobody can be forced to exercise them. These days, fewer and fewer people are bothering to keep any part of their lives private, and they are not stopping to think about the implications of mass numbers of people abandoning their rights. Worse, even those who do want privacy are finding it harder and harder to maintain, as their friends often post information online that they would not have posted themselves.
Facebook by its very design worsens the situation. Facebook is designed not just to collect data, but also metadata which allows our privacy to be violated in an entirely new way. Information about our lives can be deduced from the metadata that Facebook is collecting, even information that we did not deliberately post to Facebook. It is possible to categorize not just who is friends with whom, but how close that friendship is, and in some cases even more details about the nature of friendship can be obtained. This information has never been truly secret of course, but Facebook is amassing it all, allowing the information to be accessed with ease and without arousing suspicious: whereas it once required a detective to infiltrate a social circle to extract this data, it can now be accessed without any field work.
No, Facebook on its own will not lead to tyranny. It is the general trend, of which Facebook is not just a major enabler, but which Facebook is actively encouraging, that is the problem here.
However, data protection laws cannot reasonably cover situations where people voluntarily abandon their right to privacy, which is exactly the situation we are in now. Much as I hate to admit it, this guy is right: people are demonstrating less and less concern for their own privacy, and seem to think that the 4th amendment is for the protection of criminals. I once told a few friends that Facebook keeps track of every single mouse click they make on the website, beginning with their registration, and the response was telling: they shrugged, said that was fine and that since they were busy spying on each other anyway, it was reasonable for Facebook to do the same to them.
Perhaps this is yet another reason to use only free (libre) software: you do not have to rely on a greedy businessman to decide that a bug is worth fixing. Of course, this means that "responsible disclosure" flies out the window, since you cannot go around keeping bugs secret if you want random people to fix them, but give the content of TFA...
What I find striking is the utter lack of information that the FBI's website gives about what Infragard is really about. They give few details about what sort of information they are looking for, and what sort of information they give back to their members. That alone makes it difficult for me to trust...
Heteronormative?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frot
Yeah well, why didn't this guy need any of those:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Fantastic
Well, you know...Italy does have an ancient heritage of strange sexual practices, some of which included animals...
"Boned" != "Wooded"
Now if only they would find a way to un-erect parts of the skeleton; that would be Fantastic.
In which case they are still idiots. If they want to hide their activities online, they should use a connection that is really far away from them, which is basically what Tor does automatically. Using a neighbor's Internet connection to mask your activities is the same sort of logic that Eliot Spitzer (the former governor of New York) used when he gave his friend's name to the "escort service" that ultimately led to his resignation as governor.
"The content needs to be incentivized in this society, or other pursuits will suppress it."
Really though, great artists enjoy what they do -- they still need to eat, of course, but they are not really trying to maximize their profits from their art. Where I see money playing the most important factor is in the industries that surround the art -- recording studios, movie studios, etc. Sure, it is a great thing when an artist can make a living just by creating art, but only a minority ever manage to do this; the majority of people who make their money in the music or movie businesses are the people who do work for an artist to help in the creation of the art.
That is why I said the recording industry must shrink, rather than "disappear." I am arguing for a change in the revenue stream, not an elimination of it. "Take this concept, if you will, to a larger, more collaborative work like a movie. Live performances are out of the question,"
Instead of live performances, movie companies have theaters. Movie companies still have chances to license their movies for business use: every time you see a commercial with a movie character pushing some product, the movie studio is being paid royalties for the use of that character (likewise with fast food companies giving out toys in kids meals, etc.). If a movie studio finds that ticket sales are not high enough, too bad: they should have made a movie that people wanted to see at a theater. Yes, this means movie studios will shrink, but that is fine and necessary because of new technology. Great movies are not going to go away if people are allowed to share them, there will just be a change in the revenue streams.
"There may be justice in it, but the end result will be poorer content,"
I am not so sure about that. Most of the movies that have limited theater runs, and turn profits mainly from DVD sales, are really bad. Those that do well enough in theaters that DVD sales are not necessary to cover the production costs would not go away if people were allowed to liberally share movies with each other. "Nobody says it is unethical to make better movies, either, which would be a better example of what you are talking about."
Except that digital cameras did not make higher quality photographs early on, and most digital cameras (commonly called cell phones) are still of much lower quality than a film camera (I am referring to 35mm film, which is the highest quality film most people are familiar with; medium and large format film are still used to create large, high quality prints). Digital cameras won because they made it easier to share photographs; as a result, an entire industry has been decimated, and there is a reduced incentive to develop film or to create film development products.
What was the result of obliterating that entire industry? Photographs are more available than ever before. You can easily find pictures of almost any inhabited area on Earth. You can find pictures of almost any object you can think of. Artists have even started to use digital cameras, and show off their work on the Internet; some artists even sell prints.
So, why is it that when it comes to photography, it is fine to download and share photos, even artistic photos, and even without compensating the person who make the photo? Why are music and movies so special? Is it just because the RIAA and MPAA have so much power, and have invested so much time and money creating propaganda? Hm... "The presence of the physical magnetic media film is not the defining characteristic of the device. For a song or movie this is entertainment value."
Except that the physical medium can and does affect the value of a creative work. Seeing a movie in a theater is a lot different from seeing it on a television. A live concert (e.g. no physical media) is entirely different from hearing a song on your stereo. Until very recently, film photography was in an entirely different category (for creative purposes) th
"I hope the graduates are learning that documentation is a BIG ISSUE"
Only in engineering programs. CS programs still retain a lot of their "math heritage," and there is very little push for the students to write good documentation; at best, documentation seems to be an afterthought.
Why not focus on the positive side of that instead? I would say the first lesson should be, "take pride in your work."
Not really. Where I studied as an undergrad, there was a lot of paranoia about (undergrad) student sysadmins abusing their power, and so students were only allowed to assist faculty or full time IT staff. When I was asked to do some routine maintenance, I was told that they would not be giving me the root password because I could potentially use it to read other people's email, and that my assurances that I would never do such a thing made no difference.