I’m amazed that you guys are apparently more incensed by the new copy-protected CDs than by what RIAA just tried to squeeze into the Anti-Terrorism Bill.
Just to remind everyone - What the RIAA just tried to do was sneak a rider into the anti-terrorism bill that would make it LEGAL for them to hack into any citizen’s computer, look for copywritten MP3 files, and destroy them. AND, they wanted to be held not liable for any collateral damage their hacks would cause.
One of the things they are doing is launching Denial-of-Service attacks against private citizens who are part of peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella. They are writing applications that flood a client with a request to download hundreds of files, then slow down the transfer to a crawl so that it takes forever to download them, tying up the computer.
And if you just happen to be someone transferring legal property with this service and they ‘accidentally’ shut you down, they don’t want you to have any recourse.
Luckily, this didn’t make it through the scrutiny of Congress, but the sheer audacity and immorality of trying to sneak this through such an important bill, and one that was getting minimal scrutiny because of its immediate importance, borders on treason. As I said, this kind of shit, if it passed through congressional scrutiny, would have done more damage to public confidence in the government than any amount of Bin Laden propaganda.
Sorry, Sam, I should have made myself more clear. First of all, I hacked into a few computers, never really damaged anything, just explored a bit. I was young and stupid, wouldnt do it now, and it wasnt even illegal back then.
As far as BBS’s go,the only ones I crashed were white supremest sites(because I have very little tolerance for such things). I know, I had no right to do so, but I have a hard time feeling guilty about it. I also crashed friends bbs’s(it was kinda of a game between people I knew, they did the same…They condsidered it a way to find holes in thier program), and there was a guy who I crashed who was screwed over a friend of mine really bad. I would never had just crashed a board just for the hell of it, and I certainly wouldnt crash one now for any reason. We do a lot of stupid things when we are young.
Doesn’t most peer-to-peer software allow you to block specific computers from downloading things from you or set limits as to how much can be downloaded at once?
Actually, it’s my understanding that these so-called CDs don’t conform to the Red Book Audio CD standard. As such, they are prohibited from displaying the “COMPACT DISC DIGITAL AUDIO” logo. If it’s not displayed anywhere on the cover, case or disc, then that’s a good indication of non-compliance.
Also it’s important to note that many high-end audiophile CD players and automobile players have incorporated CD-ROM error correction technology. These too will be unable to play the corrupted CDs.