dkarma - Slashdot User

Comment What a joke (Score 1) 504

by dkarma on Saturday December 20, 2008 @11:19PM (#26188525) Attached to: An In-Depth Look At Game Piracy

Water is free, but companies charge for it...does that mean i'm stealing if i drink the same water out of a clean stream even though a company processes that water and sells it? Many people play video games that others have bought and never pay a dime...they play for free. The same is true of data available on the internet or via bittorrent. Just because I play a game for free that someone is selling doesn't mean I've violated a moral code. Furthermore, the more disturbing trend is the idea that just because a company has made a product they morally deserve to get paid for it. If i play a friend's game that he rented for a dollar. I played for free. If i download the same game I played for free. Why is one less moral than the other simply because in case A. the company got money? Deserving is subjective and there is no metric by which to measure deservedness. Just because you make a product doesn't mean you DESERVE to get paid for that product. Especially if that product is nothing but positive and negative charged ions on MY computer hardware. Claiming loss from computer "piracy" is a universal negative that can never be proven. Just because I didn't buy your product doesn't mean you lost anything...you didn't I just didn't buy it. Whether or not I play it anyway is irrelevant. By the author's logic you're stealing from the water company every time you drink from a stream. You're stealing from a car company every time you walk. Don't you know that people PAY to transport themselves? YOu're stealing right now because you didn't PAY FOR THAT LIBRARY'S INTERNET CONNECTION! Don't you know that companies charge for internet access?!?! If we learned anything from Enron it is that companies and morality can be (and usually are) mutually exclusive.

Submission + - Missouri police abuse caught on tape, again (thenewspaper.com)

Submitted by

Fry-kun

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @08:07PM

Fry-kun writes: ""A motorist who refused to discuss his personal business with a St. George, Missouri police officer was threatened with arrest last Friday. Brett Darrow, 20, no stranger to unconventional encounters with police, caught a St. George Police Sergeant James Kuehnlein stating that he had the power to invent charges that would put Darrow behind bars. Update: Sergeant Kuehnlein was placed on unpaid leave Monday pending an investigation." Brett Darrow had already videotaped an abusive encounter with Missouri police in the past."

Submission + - Senate website withholding wiretap law roll call (pressesc.com)

Submitted by

amigoro

on Sunday August 05, 2007 @09:22AM

amigoro writes: "The US Senate website is not publishing the roll call of votes by Senators on the bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act making President George W. Bush's illegal wiretapping order retroactively legal."

Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack 122

Posted by Zonk on Saturday August 04, 2007 @04:24PM from the maybe-they-should-install-macafee dept.

mcgrew writes "PC world is reporting that Diebold's super-popular voting machines are coming under even more scrutiny. A security review has revealed that they are simply 'not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election.' This is according to a report from the University of California Berkley, who did a two-month top-to-bottom review of all California e-voting systems. That's a subject we've discussed before, but Diebold's setup is truly unsettling. An attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an entire election using viruses. From the article: 'The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said. The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.' Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."

Submission + - FTC wants to hear your comments on SSN use (commentworks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04, 2007 @12:24AM

An anonymous reader writes: The FTC is allowing people to voice their concerns and opinions on the private sector's use of SSNs (Social Security Numbers). The page to voice your comments can be found here: https://secure.commentworks.com/ftc-SSNPrivateSect or/ Note that the only required fields are: Last name, state, and country.

Submission + - Opalescent plastic could be both pretty and handy

Submitted by AnotherDaveB on Saturday August 04, 2007 @12:19AM

AnotherDaveB writes: A group of researchers from the University of Southampton, in England, and the German Plastics Institute in Darmstadt, led by Jeremy Baumberg, have discovered how to create a plastic with th Opal's iridescent properties. Their invention could be used to make a sparkling substitute for paint, banknotes that are hard to counterfeit and chemical sensors that can act as visible sell-by dates.

Submission + - Resident Evil 5 Trailer Spawns Racism/PC Debates

Submitted by on Friday August 03, 2007 @10:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Resident Evil 5 trailer shown at E3 2007 has received a largely positive response from gamers and the gaming-related media. However, a blog entry by an African-American woman (who's apparently not a gamer) is critical of the trailer's "depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young fearing, hating, and destroying Black people." Not surprisingly, forums and talkbacks have degenerated into allusions of racism, reverse-racism, and out-of-control political correctness. On the other hand, some blogs have started questioning the racial sensitivity of the trailer which shows the mass killing of Black zombies (who may look more "sick" than zombie-like) in a part of the world (Africa) that has been ravaged by AIDS and has a relatively recent brutal history of Black racism.

Submission + - Broadcasters want cash for media streamed at home (webtvwire.com)

Submitted by

marcellizot

on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:17PM

marcellizot writes: "What would you say if told you that there are people out there that want to make sharing your media between devices over a home network illegal? According to Jim Burger, a Washington, D.C attorney who deals with piracy in the broadcasting industry, certain broadcasters want to do just that. Speaking in a recent podcast, Burger remarked about how the broadcasting industry is keen to put controls on sharing media between devices even if those devices are on a home network and even if the sharing is strictly for personal use. When pressed as to why broadcasters would want to do this, Burger replied simply 'because they want you to pay for that right'. WebTVWire has a full report."

Submission + - SystemAddict: Taxed to Death (gamedaily.com)

Submitted by

njkid1

on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:06PM

njkid1 writes: "The saying goes, "The only things certain in life are death and taxes." However, we may stand on the threshold of a new twist on the old line... we could someday see death BECAUSE of taxes. Thousands will fall in a virtual genocide, empires will crumble and continents will vanish. Why such a big alarm? As CNET News reported, Congress and the IRS finally caught on that the trade of virtual items for real-world money remains unregulated. In August, Congress will issue a report regarding the possible taxation of virtual goods. No one knows what the report will say, but taxing real-life money on virtual items, whether the owner has the intention of selling them or not, could spell doom for massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games."

Submission + - Diebold Source Code Reviewed, Found Vunerable (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Shteven on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:12PM

Shteven writes: The state of California has managed to independently review Diebold's source code for vulnerabilities. From the article:

"The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," read the University of California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State as part of a two-month "top-to-bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for use in California. The assessment of Diebold's source code revealed an attacker needs only limited access to compromise an election.

Submission + - Let's Meet a Romanian eBay Scammer

Submitted by Aaron on Friday August 03, 2007 @11:09AM

Aaron writes: This week Broadband Reports tracked down a Romanian eBay phish & scam ring, infiltrated all of their accounts, posted photos of the scammers, and began warning potential victims they were being conned. In the process they discovered one Russian kid who had lost his entire life's savings ($2,000) in a Nokia phone scam. To help the kid out they dug up the scammers' phone numbers and called, pretended to be the kid's uncle (and part of the Russian Mob), and scared the scammers into returning the funds, in full.

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