> but it wouldn't exist in the first place without support from my customers. So find out a non-forceful way to get their support. If you can't, they obviously do not _want_ to support you, fully knowing that you wont be able to continue your art. Your assumption is that IF people liked what they downloaded, THEN they would pay for it in some way.

So where are all the checks flooding into artists pockets? They don't exist becuase people WON'T pay for what they can get for free. Face it.

Hey, I am all for the utopian vision where IF people would act ethically AND if they downloaded a file that the copyright holder charged for, AND (they liked it, AND they paid for it) OR (they deleted they deleted the file and never used it again) then I think you have a argument. But that is generally not what happens.

So your argument boils down to:

• I can do what ever I want because I say so, laws be damned
• People who spend their time, talent, and energy who want to control the rights to their work either play by YOUR rules or they can go flip burgers.
• And because you CAN illegally copy stuff, it's OK

That sum it up correctly?

What you want to do with your creative works is your business. If you want to give it away under a license, or no license, that is your choice. The world benefits from all the people who create and distribute works under licenses like creative commons, GPL, etc, and other open source initiatives.

But they choose to make their work freely available. Imagine the uproar of someone came along and said, "Nope, sorry, you have to charge money for what you do. No exceptions." The problem in that scenario is the creator has lost control of the distribution and licensing their work. Just like your ignoring their rights to require payment for use.

Respect the copyright holders wishes.

And by the way, you may not want to call copyright infringement theft, but if someone sells an electronic file, and you copy and use it without paying for it, you have stolen money from them. I am not going to quibble definitions. Just admit what you are and be done with it. Or are you ashamed of the truth?

The pirate bay exists simply to share stuff, illegal or not. Show me something where the developers/maintainers of TPB have said they designed it with the main intent being to distribute illegal content. Just because 'illegal' content is prevalent doesn't imply it's initial intent.

This is a disingenuous argument. It doesn't matter what the creators or maintainers say or don't (ok, it matter legally, but ethically, it doens't). TPB is use *primarily* to distribute torrents, locators, to copyrighted material. Period. Copyrighted material is not a little bit of TPB torrents, or a small minority, or half. It's the main reason it exists. If there were someway to magically make illegal torrents go away, the TPB would cease to exist.

Denying that TPB is uses primarily for distributing locators to copyrighted material shows you are either painfully ignorant, blind, or are lying.

Dude. Come. Fucking. On. It's 2009 and artists still have to make a living to continue to make art. You seem to think all the people out there illegally copying files are somehow noble and who would, if they knew how, listen to the song/movie/whatever and if they liked it, pay the perform(s) or if they didn't like it, delete it never view it again.

It ain't that way, junior mint, and your rationalizations aside, ain't never gonna be. You copy files that you 1) don't have permission to copy 2) have not paid, or 3) and are NOT exercising Fair Use you are:

1. Committing a crime
2. Stealing from the artist and those who have invested money in producing/distributing the thing you want to copy
3. Removing incentive for the producers to renew the artist due to reduced sales

If you think differently, then you have the ethics of a common thief and I'd love to see you in jail wedded to Bubba the ass fucker.

Bullshit on people not being able to change after 30. Utter bullshit.

To the poster, figure out what career you want and use that to plan out graduate work. You can always go back and get an MBA, even if you have a family and have kids. Harder? Maybe. But with work experience, you will get far more out of it.

Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution.

Um, I wouldn't stake my career on that. IANAL, but you are never obligated to commit a crime and you can't commit a crime and later claim you are innocent because committing the crime was a matter of company policy or not your responsibility.

You have to tell mgmt what is going on and tell them they need to purchase licensees. If they don't, they are liable for all sorts of headaches. If they don't want to believe you, then ask them to talk to your lawyers.

Under no circumstances should you continue to support or install pirated software. That puts you at legal risk and you can't CYA with a letter stating that mgmt is OK with breaking the law. If you do it, then you are liable.

If mgmt doesn't want to pay for licenses. Leave. Cause if they get caught, you will be the one to pay the price as the IT manager.

Save your self time and pain of automating ip lookups. Make your landing page a login box only adn force users to authenticate prior to any access.

Set-up a script to auto block IP addresses for a time period that fail to login 3 times.

this is not hard.

I am a Verizon customer and I have opted out of sharing CPNI. I don't know what the new privacy statements are, my privacy policy hasn't been updated in the last six months, but I bet it has to do with CPNI. Here is the section from VZW's customer agreement.

What is confusing is whether "personal information" is limited to Name, number, address, etc, or also includes CPNI (the non-identifiable info).

Your Privacy â" IMPORTANT INFORMATION â" PLEASE READ CAREFULLY BEFORE MAKING YOUR PURCHASE DECISION

In the course of providing services to you, we may collect certain information that is made available to us solely by virtue of our relationship with you, such as information about the quantity, technical configuration, type, destination and amount of your use of the telecommunications services you purchase. This information and related billing information is known as Customer Proprietary Network Information, or CPNI. (CPNI does not include your name, address and wireless phone number.) Further, except as provided in this agreement, we won't intentionally share personal information about you without your permission. SUBJECT TO THE FOREGOING, WE MAY USE AND SHARE INFORMATION ABOUT YOU AND HOW YOU USE ANY OF OUR SERVICES: (A) SO WE CAN PROVIDE OUR GOODS OR SERVICES TO YOU; (B) SO OTHERS CAN PROVIDE GOODS OR SERVICES TO US OR TO YOU ON OUR BEHALF; (C) SO WE OR OUR AFFILIATES IN THE VERIZON FAMILY OF COMPANIES CAN COMMUNICATE WITH YOU ABOUT GOODS OR SERVICES THAT ANY OF US OFFER; (D) TO PROTECT OURSELVES; OR (E) AS REQUIRED BY LAW, LEGAL PROCESS OR EXIGENT CIRCUMSTANCES.

IN ADDITION, WE MAY INCLUDE OUR OWN OR THIRDâ"PARTY ADVERTISING IN THE SERVICES YOU PURCHASE FROM US, AND WE MAY COLLECT NONâ"PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION ABOUT YOU AND YOUR USE OF THOSE SERVICES. WE MAY SHARE THAT NONâ"PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION WITH OTHER VERIZON COMPANIES, VENDORS AND THIRD PARTIES TO PROVIDE RELEVANT ADVERTISING. IF YOU DO NOT WANT US TO COLLECT OR USE SUCH NONâ"PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION FOR THIS PURPOSE, YOU SHOULD NOT USE OUR SERVICES; BY USING THE SERVICES, YOU EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZE US TO USE YOUR INFORMATION FOR THIS PURPOSE.

Dunno about music, but with books, the copyright holder is the author who licenses the rights of their work to a publisher. The contract should have language in it about how or when the rights revert back to the author.

Also the scarcity of ammunition and large amount of enemies makes it difficult if not impossible to kill them all by simply shooting them.

I am sure some of you can kill everything in Ravenholm with the crowbar, I can not. :)

This nails Ravenholm. Even though I have replayed that level several times, it still creeps me out becuase I am always making a decision about when to fight and when to run--and then what am I running into? I know what is coming, but I have to be ready. The constant decision making is what makes Ravenholm so much fun.

I also like that most of ravenholm is bright. Extended scenes that rely on obfuscated darkness to up the "scare factor" is distracting.

Nope, Honesty is what it is all about.

Some people steal (yes, pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition) what they can't have. Some people don't have the cranial capacity to understand that downloading stuff off the web is theft. The more that happens, the less money publishers and writers don't make.

Here is a side effect of pirating books. Publishers are prone to market conditions too. When the market goes south, publishers tighten up and stop taking on new writers. They also start knocking off low performing writers (low performing compared to others in the stable.) Every book that is pirated, and to the same degree where a book is swapped on an internet site, means one less sale to the author which means less money in their pocket, 6-8% of the cover price AND one less sale in their numbers column. Under performers are cut.

Pirating is NOT new, but the SCALE at which it can occur on the Internet is new. Back when vinyl was copied to cassettes, I bet the total impact was less than 1% of album sales because there really wasn't a big distribution channel, at least not in the US for illegal album copies.

But you know as well as I that with electronic copies, the barriers are completely removed.

That is why publishers want DRM. And, I think what killed the music industry and put Apple on top was NOT DRM, but the stakeholders--labels, distributors, and sellers--to come up with an *interoperable* format and method so that any song could be played on any device while still enforcing DRM.

The solution to this problem is simple, and I'm surprised browsers don't do this already: add fake '/' character isn't in the IDN blacklist. In Firefox, network.IDN.blacklist_chars already contains plenty of things that look like '/'. Maybe other browsers need to follow its example.

Do you know if FF will detect blacklist characters for all TLD's or just the non-IDN TLD's like .com and .net?

SSL is NOT broken. It is still an effective way to encrypt network traffic.

The attack breaks down two ways. Proxying web traffic between a user and a sensitive site like a bank and/or repsenting a URL to a user that looks legitimate but isn't.

The indicators that you are on an SSL site are varied. A lock in the lower right of the window (FF3), to the right of an address bar (IE 6 and below), or a green address bar (IE7 EV cert) or a green indicator to the left of the address bar (FF3). All except the EV SSL certs are pretty subtle. The success relies on the fact that there are so many varied ways that SSL protection is presented to the user, can you keep track of it all. Quick, which sites use EV certs? You don't know so you don't know what to expect.

So, the attack does a couple of things to fool you. First it proxies your web traffic to secure sites re-writing urls that start with HTTPS to HTTP. The only indicator in browsers is no lock. If you are not looking for it, then you probably won't miss it. But wait, since we are rewriting URL's, why not replace the favicon with a lock. Yummy.

The second type of attack is to proxy HTTPS to HTTPS, but this time the SSL session between you and the proxy is enabled with a valid and trusted SSL certificate. No SSL dialog boxes. Here is how it works. IDN is used so that countries can represent URL in their native character sets. Some non-ascii characters look like characters. So use them to fool the user. These are called homographs. Browsers will convert some IDN based on the TLD. But other TLD, like country codes TLD, the browser won't. The assumption being a .com hostname should be ASCII while a TLD for China should be IDN. Knowing that, get a hostname in a CC TLD. Get a certificate for your hostname. Then create a really long hostname using IDN so that the TLD portion will be pushed off the end of the address bar. You can forge any legitimate web site this way and the only indicator is either examining the certificate or looking at the TLD in the URL. There are IDN that look like slashes, so making a "path" is easy.

Moxies video is pretty clear.

Apparently this only affects those who don't pay attention...nothing to see here.

Can you make the claim you are 100% vigilant 100% of the time?

It's more subtle than that. It takes away one of the biggest indicators that there is an SSL problem--the dialogs. Watch the presentation video. It's pretty cool. What Moxie shows is that often the indicators of SSL enabled and not enabled are practically non-existent. It's easy to see how most users, even tech savvy ones, could be fooled.