as napster is put to sleep, will that just mean more for the hibernating bearshare? heres iNother one.
Eban Moglen has a piece in The Nation. He's a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School, and serves without fee as general counsel of the Free Software Foundation. That makes him the number one legal mind of the "information should be free" school of thought. Or, if you just want the short version I've put my years of schooling to work on the following 100% accurate summary of his feelings on Napster's much publicized demise: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah OpenNap blah blah blah blah blah..."
Oh yeah, also, it's not so clear yet what is actually happening. Some of the reports make it seem like Napster is just going to start filtering based on song title. I can't really see that working too well (and this is exactly why Napster kept saying this sort of control is not technically possible.) As slashdot put it, with a mocking "awe" at the sophistication of filtering by filename, "no one would ever spell Meta11ica wrong." Or what about a little script that would go through your computer and rename every mp3 to "nap_" + the original name. Even I could write that script. 1.5 minutes of work. To really work they'd have to use something like an MD5 hash of the binary contents of the file, but they can't compute that without downloading every possible offending file themselves and checking it. And that's not going to happen. This is going to be interesting.
|
- dave 3-02-2001 8:50 pm
Eban Moglen has a piece in The Nation. He's a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School, and serves without fee as general counsel of the Free Software Foundation. That makes him the number one legal mind of the "information should be free" school of thought. Or, if you just want the short version I've put my years of schooling to work on the following 100% accurate summary of his feelings on Napster's much publicized demise: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah OpenNap blah blah blah blah blah..."
- jim 3-02-2001 11:20 pm [add a comment]
Oh yeah, also, it's not so clear yet what is actually happening. Some of the reports make it seem like Napster is just going to start filtering based on song title. I can't really see that working too well (and this is exactly why Napster kept saying this sort of control is not technically possible.) As slashdot put it, with a mocking "awe" at the sophistication of filtering by filename, "no one would ever spell Meta11ica wrong." Or what about a little script that would go through your computer and rename every mp3 to "nap_" + the original name. Even I could write that script. 1.5 minutes of work. To really work they'd have to use something like an MD5 hash of the binary contents of the file, but they can't compute that without downloading every possible offending file themselves and checking it. And that's not going to happen. This is going to be interesting.
- jim 3-02-2001 11:38 pm [add a comment]
This is my compaq home computer ($100.00 from a local stoop sale)so will (may) read anom.
Curt Loadster says :
- bill 3-04-2001 12:21 am [add a comment]
Cookies working fine. You can be logged in on as many different machines (at the same time) as you want. Stuff you read on one machine will register on all machines holding your cookie. (I remember Alex being surprised/impressed by this when he realized it worked that way in terms of his work/home surfing, and of course that pleased me to no end. I didn't really mention to him at the time that this is just the way things work if you use cookies, and not really any special magic worked by me.) The negative here is that if you don't log out on a specific machine, somebody else can open the browser on that machine, go to digitalmediatree.com, and they will be you. This includes the ability to delete posts. (Yes, I think this is a design flaw, and it will be fixed in dmtree2.0) Logging out from one machine does nothing to the status of other logged in machines. Also, the sole purpose of logging out is to stop someone else from logging in from that machine. You aren't freeing up any resources, or anything like that. So if your machine is secure (physically) then just stay logged in. If you share a machine, or if you log in from a public machine (like in a coffee shop or something) then for god sakes log out. This has been a public service announcement.
- jim 3-04-2001 12:59 am [add a comment]