And the FBI always has. Since the days of Prohibition the FBI has picked the which laws to enforce and which ones not to while J Edgar Hoover cranked out a publicity machine that let him get away with murder, violations of the US Constitution, civil rights and just about anything else you can think of.
OK, so they nabbed some crackers (aka Black Hat hackers as opposed to the white hat ones that work on code daily to IMPROVE it or just scratch an itch). Big fat hairy deal. They're dancing up and down celebrating and no one has even seen the inside of a courtroom yet.
Sure this bunch, and Anonymous, frequently carry on as if they're a collection of juveniles who still tell each other knock-knock jokes but there is a small number of crackers out there who are far more dangerous. And no, I'm not talking cyberwarefare junk like Russians and Chinese snooping on "secure' US traffic, or even industrial espionage but the types that grab bank account numbers, passwords and stuff with the end result of stealing someone's identity and making a small killing in profit before anyone notices.
But that's not as much fun and good PR as this sort of thing is and, far too often, that's what the upper echelon of the FBI has been about from day one.
Seems so. That being the case we can trot off to the patent office tomorrow and get a patent for the wheel. Just think of the money to be made from the lawsuits!
I'm sure there's a lawyer somewhere who'd take it on!
To be unfair while it wasn't software in game purchases are as old or older than Monopoly.
I also remember text adventure games from the 80s and 90s where in game purchases were part of the game. And they are in lots of graphic based games from complex to simple first person shooters.
Prior art doesn't just apply to a platform or programming language. Prior art is just that no matter where it first appeared in the software world.
It's this kind of blatantly ignorant granting of a patent to a software process that has existed almost as long as desktop machines (or longer) that has had me opposing software patents from the very start.
This is the height of absurdity. Right up there with one click patents and other idiotic nonsense.
In his defense of the RIAA as being a gatekeeper and judge of talent I keep remembering that it was a RIAA member in England (BFI is the British Equivalent?) who said the Beatles had no future because the day of guitar groups was over. (EMI if I remember correctly.)
So forgive me if I wonder, for a moment, how many other artists RIAA member companies have missed, how many we have missed before the Web trotted itself out.
And, OMG, Sherman the progressive face of the RIAA? If that's progressive then the RIAA is in worse trouble than I thought.
I'll close with the observation the Keen couldn't have sucked up to Sherman any harder and not crawled onto Sherman's lap with his tail wagging.
If, of course, all of the EU countries ratify the treaty/agreement which is looking kinda shaky.
Of course, the interests behind it will simply try another way to get what they want if ACTA and TPP fail.
That may sound pessimistic but it more than accurately portrays those interests and the ends they'll go to to get what they want -- civil society and the rights of citizens be damned.
I'm aware of that, I'm also aware of all the backbiting, ego clashing, OS debates and other things which have kept shipments down.
I'm glad that OLPC is still shipping and I mean that. My suggestion is that this may be a superior alternative given the ubiquity of tv sets even in some of the poorest parts of the world among other factors. The more devices we can get into children's (and adults) hands in the poorer parts of the world the better off we are as it may reduce the growing digital divide.
You might want to read the FAQ on the production model they're selling now because it does have a network port. Of course, in a pinch, you can always add a USB network port which the OS will detect on boot up.
Does it occur to you that most oppressive (not all are unfriendly to the west I need to point out, to our everlasting shame) regimes already have filters and firewalls in existence in place so this won't change things at all. That sort of traffic already exists and stands out but determined activists in those countries still find their way around it even if the results for them are often fatal.
As for semi-ignorance (actually approaching near total if you can't RTFM or FAQ) you've got Glyn beat by several light years.
Ahhh, last time I used Google, just a few minutes ago, it returns text results unless I set it and my browser up to return both text and illustrations.
The text result(s) also show a headline and a date which may go back a number of years. Now if you go directly from there to the pictures you get the pictures of a 30 year old incident I guess.
It does seem there's a bit of weakness in Google's famous algorithm from what the owner of the campsite is complaining about and to my mind Google should look into it and do what they can to mitigate it. The suggestion that they offer a sponsored link position sounds good to me but I can also see good reason why Google wouldn't do that from a sales perspective not to mention liability.
While I'm firmly of the opinion that copyright both isn't needed and isn't appropriate for fashion design.
One of the reasons is that there is no bigger collection of copycats I can think of than fashion designers who steal..ahhhh..are "inspired" by street trends which they then use for their own designs,
In fact I can't think of anything funnier than I saw that Stumble Upon led me to where certain members of the high fashion industry including Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld (sp?) taking credit for grunge as a broad fashion movement after they stole it from the followers of grunge music.
Keep in mind though that one of the set goals of ACTA, if I remember correctly, was to get copyright extended to fashion design. Not that it seems to have happened but you can bet they won't stop trying.
Re: "We'll absolutely cease and desist. Yes, sir."
Communications people should, and more often than not, do refer this sort of things to the institution's lawyers. Just why this one didn't is beyond me.
While the impact on openly oppressive regimes is likely to be great I can also see a great impact for activists in the increasingly oppressive western "democracies" and what we used to call the Free World. That's all the naked politics I want to get into for now because this is really about something else.
We've seen well intentioned and, sometimes, well designed small machines built for the world's poor but the projects often fall apart due to ego, greed and the seemingly endless fight between Windoze and Linux for a desktop. This little guy seems perfect for that kind of work and easily adaptable to most climate conditions.
Just a thought, because Glyn concentrated on political uses, to me this seems almost perfect for this sort of educational uses as well.
And before some AC jumps all over this by saying that if the code is open sourced then attackers only need to read the code to crack it I just want to add this.
Open source is, by and large, more secure by an order or two of magnitude to closed source as has been demonstrated over and over again.
E-voting can certainly do better but I'm firmly of the opinion that pencil and paper is far better.
Just an aside here, isn't it funny that the BBC isn't suing NBC, the Community and anyone else they can find even loosely connected to the program for airing Inspector SpaceTime to begin with as it's so clearly a rip-off (whoops parody) of Dr. Who?
Or does the Beeb know something about the value of (a) free publicity and (b) keeping the fans of the good Doctor happy than NBC is failing to understand with their screwing around with Community?
Incidentally Dr Who was finally brought back after a hiatus by it's fans and the Beeb's peek at it's account books which made them realize what a money maker Dr Who is in syndication, particularly the Tom Baker years.
So best leave well enough alone and let NBC do publicity for Dr Who for free. :)
Let me see now, the German government wants Google to pay for a link to a story in a German newspaper that may quote little more than a tweet,
In essence this means they want the index to pay the indexee for being listed,
So I guess I could say this is some kind of new sort of paywall to make sure that I actually have to search around without search engines to find the newspaper and then give up because I can't find it all for a couple of euros or marks if the euro continues on it's path to implosion.
Will someone, please, explain the sense in this?
(Yes, I know there is none but it's utterly fascinating to watch bureaucrats and politicians aim a shot gun loaded with a deer slug at their feet and pull the trigger and then complain that they can't find their foot anymore and would someone please call 911.)
Neither your or I know if darknets will get indexed on Google, or at least parts of them won't if they're part of the broader web or internet. It doesn't mean they identify themselves as that as there will be other ways to determine that.
Actually, decentralization makes files LESS prone to cracking not more so. Just what part of what torrent does the cracker break in order to screw up the download and not cause a retry. Distributed downloads check more than a checksum to see that the piece you just got is the one the seed sent.
I remember all the cheering from people like you when Napster was shut down and how that would cripple piracy. It didn't. It increased it.
And remember that bittorrent is a protocol NOT a program. Would bittorrent be part of the darknet? It wouldn't surprise me if the protocol was but that won't be all. It may be part bittorrent, part FTP, part HTTP and who knows what else. And it won't be long before downloading infringing material is as easy or easier than it is now.
It's far too early to gloat. Most file lockers are perfectly legal as is most other cloud storage, forums have been around since before the dawn of the Web and will also continue, torrents will continue to be used because they're an internet protocol. Repeat after me...just like FTP is.
There is no plus here for the people who pay you. Only somewhere else they'll have to dig for and find. If you or anyone denies a market what it wants it will find a way to get it. And then the chance that RIAA signed artists and MPAA member companies will recapture that market which was theirs to start with will drop to something less than the square root of -1.
the answer to the question of why Google hasn't MADE people look for what the MPAA is offering to sell to people misses the point again.
It's not Google's (or Yahoo's or Bings) job to MAKE people look for anything. Their job is to answer the search terms. And if those search terms are Jeremy Lyman download free then that's what will rise to the top because that's what most closely matches the search term.
Now if you want something else, type in a different search term. Then it will be ranked on popularity something each search engine guards jealously as trade secrets.
Spiders or tagging or web 2.anything have nothing at all to do with it.
If you don't like it build your own search engine!
On the post: UK ISPs Lose Their Challenge To The Digital Economy Act; Entertainment Industry Responds Condescendingly
Re: Re: How do I get a job as a copyright cop?
On the post: Louis Vuitton's International Tour Of Trademark Bullying Runs Smack Dab Into UPenn Law School Who Explains Trademark Law In Return
Re: Re:
It's certainly more entertaining that way :)
On the post: Attacking The Hacker Hydra: Why FBI's LulzSec Takedown May Backfire
Re: Re: I don't really understand
OK, so they nabbed some crackers (aka Black Hat hackers as opposed to the white hat ones that work on code daily to IMPROVE it or just scratch an itch). Big fat hairy deal. They're dancing up and down celebrating and no one has even seen the inside of a courtroom yet.
Sure this bunch, and Anonymous, frequently carry on as if they're a collection of juveniles who still tell each other knock-knock jokes but there is a small number of crackers out there who are far more dangerous. And no, I'm not talking cyberwarefare junk like Russians and Chinese snooping on "secure' US traffic, or even industrial espionage but the types that grab bank account numbers, passwords and stuff with the end result of stealing someone's identity and making a small killing in profit before anyone notices.
But that's not as much fun and good PR as this sort of thing is and, far too often, that's what the upper echelon of the FBI has been about from day one.
On the post: Social Gaming Patent Troll Goes After Facebook, Zynga For In-Game Purchases
Re:
I'm sure there's a lawyer somewhere who'd take it on!
On the post: Social Gaming Patent Troll Goes After Facebook, Zynga For In-Game Purchases
Re: Re:
I also remember text adventure games from the 80s and 90s where in game purchases were part of the game. And they are in lots of graphic based games from complex to simple first person shooters.
Prior art doesn't just apply to a platform or programming language. Prior art is just that no matter where it first appeared in the software world.
It's this kind of blatantly ignorant granting of a patent to a software process that has existed almost as long as desktop machines (or longer) that has had me opposing software patents from the very start.
This is the height of absurdity. Right up there with one click patents and other idiotic nonsense.
On the post: RIAA Still Doesn't Get It: Hopes SOPA Opposition Was A 'One-Time Experience'
So forgive me if I wonder, for a moment, how many other artists RIAA member companies have missed, how many we have missed before the Web trotted itself out.
And, OMG, Sherman the progressive face of the RIAA? If that's progressive then the RIAA is in worse trouble than I thought.
I'll close with the observation the Keen couldn't have sucked up to Sherman any harder and not crawled onto Sherman's lap with his tail wagging.
On the post: Darrell Issa Posts Text Of 'Unconstitutional' ACTA For Open Feedback; Something USTR Never Did
Re:
Of course, the interests behind it will simply try another way to get what they want if ACTA and TPP fail.
That may sound pessimistic but it more than accurately portrays those interests and the ends they'll go to to get what they want -- civil society and the rights of citizens be damned.
On the post: How The Runaway Success Of A Tiny $25 Computer Could Become A Big Problem For Oppressive Regimes
Re: Re: Potential Educational Uses?
I'm glad that OLPC is still shipping and I mean that. My suggestion is that this may be a superior alternative given the ubiquity of tv sets even in some of the poorest parts of the world among other factors. The more devices we can get into children's (and adults) hands in the poorer parts of the world the better off we are as it may reduce the growing digital divide.
On the post: How The Runaway Success Of A Tiny $25 Computer Could Become A Big Problem For Oppressive Regimes
Re:
Does it occur to you that most oppressive (not all are unfriendly to the west I need to point out, to our everlasting shame) regimes already have filters and firewalls in existence in place so this won't change things at all. That sort of traffic already exists and stands out but determined activists in those countries still find their way around it even if the results for them are often fatal.
As for semi-ignorance (actually approaching near total if you can't RTFM or FAQ) you've got Glyn beat by several light years.
On the post: Misfortune Sucks, But It's Not Google's Responsibility
The text result(s) also show a headline and a date which may go back a number of years. Now if you go directly from there to the pictures you get the pictures of a 30 year old incident I guess.
It does seem there's a bit of weakness in Google's famous algorithm from what the owner of the campsite is complaining about and to my mind Google should look into it and do what they can to mitigate it. The suggestion that they offer a sponsored link position sounds good to me but I can also see good reason why Google wouldn't do that from a sales perspective not to mention liability.
On the post: Louis Vuitton's International Tour Of Trademark Bullying Runs Smack Dab Into UPenn Law School Who Explains Trademark Law In Return
Re: Uggh, copyright for fashion design?
One of the reasons is that there is no bigger collection of copycats I can think of than fashion designers who steal..ahhhh..are "inspired" by street trends which they then use for their own designs,
In fact I can't think of anything funnier than I saw that Stumble Upon led me to where certain members of the high fashion industry including Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld (sp?) taking credit for grunge as a broad fashion movement after they stole it from the followers of grunge music.
Keep in mind though that one of the set goals of ACTA, if I remember correctly, was to get copyright extended to fashion design. Not that it seems to have happened but you can bet they won't stop trying.
On the post: Louis Vuitton's International Tour Of Trademark Bullying Runs Smack Dab Into UPenn Law School Who Explains Trademark Law In Return
Re: "We'll absolutely cease and desist. Yes, sir."
On the post: How The Runaway Success Of A Tiny $25 Computer Could Become A Big Problem For Oppressive Regimes
Potential Educational Uses?
We've seen well intentioned and, sometimes, well designed small machines built for the world's poor but the projects often fall apart due to ego, greed and the seemingly endless fight between Windoze and Linux for a desktop. This little guy seems perfect for that kind of work and easily adaptable to most climate conditions.
Just a thought, because Glyn concentrated on political uses, to me this seems almost perfect for this sort of educational uses as well.
On the post: The Details On How To Elect Futurama's Bender To Whatever Election Is Using Online Voting
Re: Open Source the Design and Test Test Test
Open source is, by and large, more secure by an order or two of magnitude to closed source as has been demonstrated over and over again.
E-voting can certainly do better but I'm firmly of the opinion that pencil and paper is far better.
On the post: Sony & NBC Interfere With Fan-Funded Web Series, Accomplish Nothing
Re: Re: 15 Seconds of fame
Or does the Beeb know something about the value of (a) free publicity and (b) keeping the fans of the good Doctor happy than NBC is failing to understand with their screwing around with Community?
Incidentally Dr Who was finally brought back after a hiatus by it's fans and the Beeb's peek at it's account books which made them realize what a money maker Dr Who is in syndication, particularly the Tom Baker years.
So best leave well enough alone and let NBC do publicity for Dr Who for free. :)
On the post: German Government Wants Google To Pay To Show News Snippets
In essence this means they want the index to pay the indexee for being listed,
So I guess I could say this is some kind of new sort of paywall to make sure that I actually have to search around without search engines to find the newspaper and then give up because I can't find it all for a couple of euros or marks if the euro continues on it's path to implosion.
Will someone, please, explain the sense in this?
(Yes, I know there is none but it's utterly fascinating to watch bureaucrats and politicians aim a shot gun loaded with a deer slug at their feet and pull the trigger and then complain that they can't find their foot anymore and would someone please call 911.)
On the post: Too Bad: SXSW Shuts Down Useful App For Finding New Bands You'd Like
Re:
Way to go SXSW!
On the post: File Sharing Moves En Masse To The Darknet; Good Luck Shutting That Down
Re:
Actually, decentralization makes files LESS prone to cracking not more so. Just what part of what torrent does the cracker break in order to screw up the download and not cause a retry. Distributed downloads check more than a checksum to see that the piece you just got is the one the seed sent.
I remember all the cheering from people like you when Napster was shut down and how that would cripple piracy. It didn't. It increased it.
And remember that bittorrent is a protocol NOT a program. Would bittorrent be part of the darknet? It wouldn't surprise me if the protocol was but that won't be all. It may be part bittorrent, part FTP, part HTTP and who knows what else. And it won't be long before downloading infringing material is as easy or easier than it is now.
It's far too early to gloat. Most file lockers are perfectly legal as is most other cloud storage, forums have been around since before the dawn of the Web and will also continue, torrents will continue to be used because they're an internet protocol. Repeat after me...just like FTP is.
There is no plus here for the people who pay you. Only somewhere else they'll have to dig for and find. If you or anyone denies a market what it wants it will find a way to get it. And then the chance that RIAA signed artists and MPAA member companies will recapture that market which was theirs to start with will drop to something less than the square root of -1.
Have fun.
On the post: RIAA's Cary Sherman: We Really Just Want To Give Consumers What We, Er, They Want
Re: Re:
On the post: Why Search Engines Can't Just 'Fix' Search Results The Way The MPAA/RIAA Want
Re: Re: That's how search engines already work
It's not Google's (or Yahoo's or Bings) job to MAKE people look for anything. Their job is to answer the search terms. And if those search terms are Jeremy Lyman download free then that's what will rise to the top because that's what most closely matches the search term.
Now if you want something else, type in a different search term. Then it will be ranked on popularity something each search engine guards jealously as trade secrets.
Spiders or tagging or web 2.anything have nothing at all to do with it.
If you don't like it build your own search engine!
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