Except for the pig lady barging into the shop again, it was a nothing day. The pig lady? Well, let’s just say she deserves the handle. I don’t know what her problem is, but we did not “lose” her ballet slippers. Even if we did, like, what does she need them for? She can’t see her toes, much less dance on them. She is trying to get away with not paying her $20 bill. When I get the video cam set up, she’ll get her 15 seconds of fame.It’s plain talk about computers again, always a treat for those who don’t understand geekspeak. The neighbor says he’s tried a new wireless router, WebGear, with a range of 200 yards. Since he runs a phone outlet and can get me wireless service for $10 a month, I must look into the router. We talked about the possibility of trying my postal outlet idea and he likes the concept.
Limewire. It is a file-sharing program and yes, you can use it to download illegal copies of software, should you be so inclined. The question is, can you be caught using it for pirating software? First, a little background and then I will explain. The concept of file-sharing proved its popularity some ten years back with a system called Napster, whose usage was almost totally confined to music piracy. (Musicians, who always get the short end of the stick, don’t seem to have complained much, since like myself, they realize most people making said copies are those who would never spend $15 on a CD anyway.)
The fatal flaw with Napster is the shared (illegal) files were on a central server (computer), making it easy to shut down, which the recording studios finally did. By then and by accident, an AOL affiliate had accidentally published source code for a decentralized system. You download from multiple computers. By the time they realized the error, an estimated 12,000 copies had been downloaded. Using this code, there is no central server, rather each computer that logs on joins the active sharing group. This is why sometimes you get an incomplete download—the last computer with the file you requested has logged off.
Oh, and for the record, that $15 CD costs $2.21 to produce, including the musician’s share. The rest is pure gravy for the resellers, who for some reason can’t understand why CD sales keep dropping while they keep putting one hit on each CD. Enter Apple, with iTunes, where you buy just one tune at a time for 99 cents. Apple is drowning in money.
Can you be caught with Limewire? Yes, everything you do on the Internet is recorded somewhere. The trick is to make yourself unworthy of prosecution. When you are a Limewire member (or any other Gnutella-based sharing system), regularly move files out of your shared folder so you never have many more than 40 in there at a time. The lawyers tend to go after the major distributors, not the downloaders. Why 40? Fewer shared files can give you a lower and slower access to newer Limewire searches, which is why I stick with version 4.18.
Of course, if you want blanket security, you can use a proxy server or anonymizer service. For total security, use a file encryption program, as it is too burdensome for the studios to crack the keys just to see if you might be up to something. If you want invisibility, use somebody else’s computer to do all your illegal stuff, making sure you reset the system clock to a time when you are gone for lunch or something. But there is no perfect method and there never will be.
A little off the topic but to clear up some related questions, those who copy will often see references to an ISO file. This file is nothing more than an uncompressed image of an optical disk that is stored on your hard drive by disk copying software (Nero, NTI). The image, which can be surprisingly large compared to what you are copying, is used to defeat copyrighting programs on certain disks. Copyright programs must be “played” before they are effective and ISO wisely never opens anything it copies, it merely detects the presence of the copyright file and displays a warning.
A little further off topic is the WMA files and other music files that can require a license to play. The way to deal with them is to take these unplayable files and burn them to a CD. Then use ripping software to peel the tunes off the CD. Then use Audacity to convert them to MP3s. It doesn’t take long [so I’ve been told] and now you know.
The last item today can be skipped by most people, it concerns the public and private keys used by encryption systems. The problem with private keys is that the remote parties either have to meet in person or trust an intermediary. Like James Bond. I won’t go into major detail, but it seems the concept of a public key is baffling to many people. How could a key be any good if everybody has it? This is also today’s trivia. It is because the public key can only be used to “lock” files. A public key cannot be used to unlock files. Savvy? To unlock the file, you’ll need a separate private key. Ah, so.
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