Yes, Virginia, downloading copyrighted material without permission is illegal…

/ Intellectual Property

There’s a myth I keep hearing that downloading copyrighted music without permission is perfectly legal under US law, and that only uploading is illegal. (I just got an anonymous comment on an old post to that effect, which is why I bring it up now.) I gather the myth spread after the RIAA decided to go after big uploaders but not big downloaders in their jihad, and was bolstered by a NYTimes piece that starts with the line “Downloading music from the Internet is not illegal.”

Unfortunately for would-be downloaders, this is just a myth, as the 9th Circuit’s ruling in A&M Records v. Napster makes clear:

We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders’ exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, § 106(1); and distribution, § 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs’ distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs’ reproduction rights.

The US Copyright Office’s FAQ also puts it quite plainly:

Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution.

So what did that old NYTimes article mean when it said downloading is legal? Simply that there is plenty of music available where the copyright holders have already given permission for you to download, share and enjoy. And that, Virginia, is why there is a Santa Claus.

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Why have the Senate confirm Supreme Court nominations?

/ Politics

Here’s what Alexander Hamilton had to say on the purpose of Senate confirmations:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entier branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

Of course, if the president has no shame then all bets are off…

(Thanks to Jay for the quote.)

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Robot Cafe in Osaka, Japan

/ Culture

This sounds fun: The ROBO CAFE [jp→en] has just opened up in Osaka, Japan, where customers can watch Nuvo dance, view a Segway of course have their crumbs cleaned by a Roomba. Sounds like a perfect place to unwind after a day at the wearable-computing conference I’ll be attending there in a couple of weeks :).

My Japanese is non-existant and Google’s isn’t much better, but here are links to a map and more details here [jp→en] and here [jp→en].

(Thanks to Rebecca for the link!)

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Potential DOS attack on cell networks

/ Security

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have determined that it’s possible to launch an effective denial of service attack on cellphone networks, either in a localized area or nationwide, by flooding known cellphones in the area with SMS messages (see summary, paper and NYTimes article). The attack relies on using web and Internet-based SMS portals to overwhelm the wireless data-band, which is also used for connecting voice calls. Since only messages that are actually delivered over-the-air contribute to the network congestion, attackers would first need to generating a “hit-list” of known-valid cellphones (for example, by scraping websites for cellphone numbers in a given prefix and then slowly testing those for SMS capability before starting the attack).

One snippit from the paper I found interesting was how different cellphone providers deal with a backup of SMS messages awaiting delivery to a single user (e.g. when the cellphone is turned off): AT&T buffered all 400 test SMS messages, Verizon only kept the last 100 messages sent (FIFO eviction), and Sprint only kept the first 30 (LIFO eviction).

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Happy Birthday EFF

/ Events

eff-15th-thumb.jpg

The Electronic Frontier Foundation just celebrated their 15th birthday this past weekend. I swear it seems like just yesterday when our biggest worries were 14-year-old hackers getting arrested and whether it was legal to export crypto. Since then we’ve seen the DMCA, RFID, UCITA, CALEA, CAPPS, FTAA and LBJ on the IRT.

Today we need groups like EFF more than ever — if you want to help build a cyberspace where freedom to speak, associate and create are protected and expected, please consider becoming a member.

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Good Night, and Good Luck

/ Media

WNYC’s On The Media has a great interview with Joe and Shirley Wershba, two of the journalists at CBS working with Edward R. Murrow when he took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. They’re talking about the new film about the confrontation, Good Night, and Good Luck [trailer, review].

One quote from Murrow that I love, in response to the fears a lot of people at CBS had about the consequences of taking on McCarthy: “Terror is right here in this room. No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”

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Sun SPOT: Java-based wireless sensor boards

/ Wearable Computing

sun-spot.jpg

Sun Labs have developed a cute little Java-programmable board called the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology), along the lines of the Berkeley Motes project and other small Ubiquitous Computing sensor boards:

Based on a 32 bit ARM-7 CPU and an 11 channel 2.4GHz radio, Sun SPOT radically simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications. The platform enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java™ using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication, and use familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as Net-Beans™ to write code.

The system uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard that’s designed for short-range (< 10 meters, same as Bluetooth) with low data rates but also low latency and ultra-low power consumption — pretty much what you need for individual sensors.

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Berkeley Juggling & Unicycle Festival (this weekend)

/ Events

This Friday through Sunday is the First Annual Berkeley Juggling and Unicycle Festival:

Now, rest assured, the title may say “Juggling and Unicycle”, but this is an inclusive event — contact juggling, poi, staff twirling, bullwhips, plate spinning, devil sticks, cigar boxes, diabolo, yo-yos, and that funky thing that one guy does with the rubber chicken — all are welcome here.

Perfect! I’ve always wanted to learn rubber chicken…

(Thanks to Glitter Girl for the link…)

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Science Fiction

/ Science

Bob Park over at What’s New sums up the trouble facing those who still try to insist that global warming is just a hoax:

fiction n. Imaginative creation that does not represent truth. For weeks the news was dominated by Katrina and Rita, which drew their energy from the record warm waters of the Gulf. The news this week included satellite images of an open ocean. What made it news was that it was the Arctic Ocean, where the ice cap is rapidly shrinking. What do you do if you’re Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and you’ve assured people over and over that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”? If you’re Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), you hold a full committee hearing and invite a science fiction writer to testify. Michael Crichton, author of “State of Fear,” an environmental thriller in which environmentalists cook up evidence to keep federal bucks coming, was Inholfe’s expert.

It must be tough for global-warming skeptics now that they can’t find who actually has credentials in the field to back their side. (If only they’d prepared ahead of time like the New-Earth Creationists did, and started their own “degree” programs…)

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OSX mv and File.renameTo() strangeness

/ Uncategorized

I’ve come across an annoying behavior in OSX which I’m documenting here mostly in the hopes that anyone else struggling to track down a similar bug will find this post in Google. (This’ll probably be quite dull to non-Unix geeks…)

My original symptom:

Java’s File.renameTo command won’t work when moving files from /tmp to a user directory encrypted with FileVault.

The actual cause (near as I can tell):

  • In Darwin/OSX (and in BSD), when a file is copied or created in a new directory it automatically takes on the GID (Group ID) of the target directory.

  • A file that is renamed (using the mv command or Java’s File.renameTo) should not change its GID, even if the target directory’s GID is different.

  • The /tmp directory is set with the group “wheel,” which before OSX 10.2 users with admin privileges were in but that’s no longer the case. This means normal users may not change a file to the group “wheel” without invoking admin privileges.

So here’s what was happening. First I created a new file in /tmp. The group ID on the file was automatically set to “wheel” on creation because that’s the GID for /tmp. Moving the file to another directory on the same disk works just fine because under the hood the OS is just swapping around pointers on the disk. However, when I tried to move the file to a directory on a different virtual disk (which is how OSX thinks of FileVault), it first copies the data and then tries to change the group ID of the newly created file to “wheel,” which it doesn’t have permission to do. If I use mv to do the move I get an error message but otherwise the file is moved correctly (albeit with my own group ID instead of wheel). If I use the Java routine File.renameTo(destination) it simply returns false (failure) and refuses to do the move — I suspect it realizes it can’t do it perfectly so it doesn’t even try.

You can get the same effect just moving a file from /tmp to an external firewire drive. In the snippit below, the directory ~bug/ is on the same local disk as /tmp and /Volumes/disk2/ is a mounted firewire disk:

$ ls -ld /tmp/
drwxrwxrwt 19 root wheel 646 Sep 27 20:54 /tmp/

$ groups
bug appserveradm appserverusr admin

$ touch /tmp/test1 /tmp/test2

$ ls -l /tmp/test*
-rw-r--r-- 1 bug wheel 0 Sep 27 20:54 /tmp/test1
-rw-r--r-- 1 bug wheel 0 Sep 27 20:54 /tmp/test2

$ mv /tmp/test1 ~bug/

$ ls -l ~bug/test1
-rw-r--r-- 1 bug wheel 0 Sep 27 20:54 test1

$ mv /tmp/test2 /Volumes/disk2/
mv: /Volumes/Blackjack/test2: set owner/group (was: 502/0): Operation not permitted

$ ls -l /Volumes/disk2/test2
-rw-r--r-- 1 bug bug 0 Sep 27 20:54 /Volumes/disk2/test2

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