Slashdot Mirror

here.

Hey, I just tried their new system, typing in "terrorist" and got this link.

It works!

No direct link anymore, but found this

By the way, yes, this has happened to me several times. Most recently was my battle with the DMCA over flipping embedding bits.

Tom, thanks for posting this. I went through and read all the letters, and I think I've learned a lot. It appears that the end result was the same -- you stopped responding, and they gave up on intimidating you. Is that correct? It is good to see someone stand up to legal threats.

Interesting, thanks.

Maybe these links will help: link link link

If you don't like this kind of bullying, definitely don't give in. Post your correspondence on your web page, with as little editorializing as possible, and let others draw their own conclusions. If their behavior is outrageous enough, I'm sure you'll find that it results in a lot of bad publicity for them, and the last thing they want is for students to have a good excuse to hate the association when they call asking for money. Go ahead and stick a paypal link on the site that lets alums donate to the school at their discretion. Make sure you use trademarks carefully (you can check a primer about this many places online), and build your site with renewed purpose. ;)

Spurious legal threats, be they from lawyers or just the old boys' club, are one of the worst problems in the legal climate today. Since there's so little cost to fire off a Cease and Desist letter that sounds scary but is essentially contentless, corporations do it as a last resort to harass small developers who they'd never be able to beat in court. The only way I know of to fix this situation is to make there be a *high cost* for waging war against the small guy, and this could easily come in the form of bad publicity if people don't just shut down their sites right away.

By the way, yes, this has happened to me several times. Most recently was my battle with the DMCA over flipping embedding bits .

Smart cards won't make PGP that much easier to use. Read "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" for some sobering facts about how hard it is to just get PGP set up right.

• MIT's RAW project
  
• Berkeley's Garp architecture
  
• CMU's PipeWrench

The integrated flux of the strongest burst, GB790305, was 10^-4 ergs/cm^2 (the time structure of this pulse was consistent with a
rotating or precessing neutron star; the period is about 8 seconds).
A lethal dose to unshielded astronauts would be about 4 x 10^6 ergs/cm^2, so anyone 200,000 closer to the burster than we were had
better have good shielding.

...

If the burster was at 5 billion light years (say), the lethal radius for unshielded astronauts would be around 25,000 light years. I hope one doesn't go off in our galaxy soon.

Maybe this one of the areas where free software really has a hard time catching up: small market, highly sophisticated software, small "coolness" factor, and very smooth desktop-integration a requirement...

Although I can't show you an iCluster of these particular models, perhaps you'll be satisfied with Carnegie Mellon's Habermann Labs (warning: QuickTime VR movie), which consist entirely of old-sunflower-model 15" iMacs.

Although I can't show you an iCluster of these particular models, perhaps you'll be satisfied with Carnegie Mellon's Habermann Labs (warning: QuickTime VR movie), which consist entirely of old-sunflower-model 15" iMacs.

Both scanned and HTMLed versions of the document are available on my web site at Carnegie Mellon.

For News picked up the story, as did the New York Post. But the local papers in Tampa and Clearwater, Florida (where a major Scientology bas is located) have not covered the story. I think they're afraid to touch it, even though their own readers' lives are at risk. Maybe someone should ask the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times why they've lost their nerve.

Both scanned and HTMLed versions of the document are available on my web site at Carnegie Mellon.

For News picked up the story, as did the New York Post. But the local papers in Tampa and Clearwater, Florida (where a major Scientology bas is located) have not covered the story. I think they're afraid to touch it, even though their own readers' lives are at risk. Maybe someone should ask the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times why they've lost their nerve.

Both scanned and HTMLed versions of the document are available on my web site at Carnegie Mellon.

For News picked up the story, as did the New York Post. But the local papers in Tampa and Clearwater, Florida (where a major Scientology bas is located) have not covered the story. I think they're afraid to touch it, even though their own readers' lives are at risk. Maybe someone should ask the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times why they've lost their nerve.

Rob Malda: "Our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down"

Here is the document that Slashdot removed when COS threatened them with the DMCA: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/Declaration/o t3-summary.html

Hosted right here in the USA by Dr. David Touretzky, research professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Another mirror at CMU:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~ees2/red_team.mpeg

Mirror hosted by CMU's Field Robotics Center: here.

Mirror hosted by Rutgers: here

Mirror hosted by CMU Computing Services: here

Yes we know that the external Red Team website is hosted on IIS and powered by ASP. We're working on fixing these two bugs. =) Also to our defense, our internal technical web is powered by TWiki on Linux with Apache.

Mirror hosted by CMU's Field Robotics Center: here.

Mirror hosted by Rutgers: here

Mirror hosted by CMU Computing Services: here

Yes we know that the external Red Team website is hosted on IIS and powered by ASP. We're working on fixing these two bugs. =) Also to our defense, our internal technical web is powered by TWiki on Linux with Apache.

Wow, this is the second CMU site taken down in the last few days. Well, lets see if we can take down an other! Here's a mirror of the movie and some documents on my CMU account:

http://andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/www.redteamracing.o rg/

Or you can run our code and make it walk twice as fast. The person here ported it into a smaller test program and has a nice demo. If you can't program, the Aibo is probably not a wise investment. If you can, think of it as a portable computer with a camera and legs... 1500-1600 USD isn't so bad for that.

Well, frob, I agree with you that frivolous lawsuits are a problem. But I think this would be a straightforward argument, and it hasn't been rejected in any of those court cases. The closest thing you cite above is actually my own run-in with the DMCA, (embedding fonts). I think you are totally wrong in claiming that there was a "big cost" in me keeping that software up. All I did was present essentially that legal argument (it cannot be a circumvention device because I use it on works for which I own the copyright), they harassed me a bit, and then they gave up.

Safe or not, it's an important thing to do, and therefore it should be done.

Wrong! ... Since an office file opener could be used to open your own documents, or documents that others want you to open, there exists a substantial non-infringing use, so the software would not be a circumvention device.

Yes, he is partly wrong, but so are you. It may be true that the circumvention device clauses are satisfied. Unfortunately, we don't have to look far to see how companies and projects that fit that exception are still prosecuted/persecuted and even killed.

This would be a good target for a bunch of SLAPP suits against the developers -- if they chose to implement it. The potential gain for Microsoft and others ("We bankrupted 30 contributers to OpenOffice for DMCA violations. We're sending you a DMCA notice. You wanna be bankrupt next?") far outweighs their potential cost ("We paid $250,000,000 in the cases we lost, but it's just an investment for product lock-in and extra FUD against developers.") .

Just being on the right side of the law does not mean that you will survive a massive legal attack from a multi-billion dollar company. Anti-SLAPP laws are in effect in most states but the DMCA altered the USC, which is the federal law, so those state laws could be carefully avoided.

Examples:

• DeCSS (multiple cases, some still in appeal)
• kazaa (in court and dying)
• napster (dead)
• CopyWrite (alive, after expensive years in court and an expensive appeal)
• Lessig about Fox fair use problems, MyMP3, Napster (in court & private settlements, dead, dead)
• DRM Conference transcrpt (discusses dead & dying, but legal, projects)
• Embedded fonts (alive, but at a big cost and avoidance of court)
• A student's paper with summaries of other cases (United States v. Sklyarov, Lexmark v. Static Control Components , Felton v. Recording Industry Ass'n of America) and several interesting hypothetical physical-world comparisons to the law (locking keys out of your car == loss of ownership of car until you present the Automobile Protection Assocaition with a proper court orders allowing you to jimmy the lock).

The unfortunate fact is that just because it is legal, and even if it is right, both StarOffice (Sun) and the contributors to OpenOffice (including Sun) could both face deadly lawsuits from Microsoft if they attempt compatability.

Strategic lawsuits (gray-area, predatory lawsuits), "death by lawsuit", and even Google's lists of Allegedly Unethical Firms, Corporate Accountability, and corporate criminals show how corporations are attacking and killing projects, even when the projects or public participation are the right and legal thing.

So while you are right that such a project would be legal, you are wrong in your implied statement that it would be a safe thing to do.

frob

programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.

So, apparently it is your contention that, over time, none of the programmers working on the Linux kernel, NFS, NIS, RPC, Apache, Sendmail, emacs, Xwindows, samba, ftpd, Windows NT, IIS, etc., etc., etc., have actually known what they are doing since all of them have produced all manner of security problems?

this is like saying people jump higher wearing nike's than they do in reeboks.

No, its not. Its more akin to saying that you are safer in a car that has seatbelts, airbags, antilock breaks, and a proximity warning system than in an old beater without any of the above. C is the beater, it provides few safeguards against all manner of programming problems.

Process only gets you so far. If all that mattered in the real world was process and all-knowing programmers, we would still all be writing almost all software in FORTRAN and produce it defect free. Last time I looked, most software was written in C/C++ and bug ridden. ( BTW - Don't kid yourself, people have done a heck of a lot of system programming in FORTRAN over the years.) If you can't identify the weaknesses of the C/C++ languages, particularly when writing large software systems, you don't know what you are talking about.

I find it ironic that you think that the "design paradigm" of programs needs to be looked at, but apparently not the "design paradigm" of programming languages, or the effect that their use has when used to produce programs, especially large software systems. Apparently you believe that there are no practical differences that result from using FORTRAN, B, BCPL, C, COBOL, ML, Basic, Pascal, Module 2, Occam, Ada, forth, Prolog, or Lisp since they all produce machine code. Right.

Before you spout off again, try spending some time perusing the material at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. You might learn something.

At Carnegie Mellon, unregistered boxes are automatically routed to a web page that allows them to do temporary or permanent registration based based on MAC address. Once you register, your machine can access the network and DHCP. This allows for easy monitoring, notification, and disconnection of zombies.

It's called AuthBridge and runs on a Linux machine with ethernet bridging and real time packet filtering based on the MAC address. See the link for technical descriptions, diagrams, and further details.

Seems to work quite seamlessly as an end user, IMHO.

The system has been abused in novel ways, but the idea of patents in itself isn't quite stupid; as a certain ex-trade minister once said, it's one of those few things that 146 countries the world over ever agreed upon completely.

Check out the graph I made to help me pick the right CPU to buy. I have a script which parses a website for data and uses gnuplot to create the image.

I did a report on this for my Computer Ethics course. The simple fact is this: the DeCSS code was published in an unsealed legal filing by John Hoy, president of the DVD-CCA (those fighting against DeCSS). By doing this, he made it part of the public record, thus nullifying any trade secret status it might have had.

I had a better link to the filing but I don't have time to track it down. Use google.

...the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, who ruled in the Bernstein cryptography case that source code is indeed protected speech. In their decision, The 9th Circuit even quoted some Scheme code from the declaration of MIT Professor Harold Abelson, explaining why source code is an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication. Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University also filed a declaration explaining the importance for computer science of being able to publish source code. More recently, the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in the Junger cryptography case that, independent of its functional significance, the expressive nature of source code affords it First Amendment protection.

There is a credible theory that modern democracy began because the nobles in England would not even consider following the king. So, rather than have a complete lock-up, they wrote the Magna Carta, which limited the power of the king.

I'm glad to see the same tradition being continued in the United States. The "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" says "Oh, you want to take away our freedom? Then our response is that we will exercise it more."

In the U.S. at the moment, the less intelligent, more conflicted people are in charge.

Sorry, but code can very well be free expression.

If I take something that is commonly available to anyone and render it in a unique or special way, is it art?

How about repurposing copyrighted or protected media into new forms? Is that art.

I may not think everything produced is art, but who am I to judge what is or is not creative expression? That is the slippery slope raised by this case.

DeCSS Prime

Gallery of CSS Descramblers

Our favorite dmca-flaunting professor Dr. David Touretzky has most of the decss implementations hosted at his site.

He also has the scientology documents that slashdot censors, which you can read here

Dr Touretsky also received a cease and desist letter from COS in an attempt to remove the material, but I guess he wasn't more worried about spending his dot com millions than setting a horrible precedent by caving.

Our favorite dmca-flaunting professor Dr. David Touretzky has most of the decss implementations hosted at his site.

He also has the scientology documents that slashdot censors, which you can read here

Dr Touretsky also received a cease and desist letter from COS in an attempt to remove the material, but I guess he wasn't more worried about spending his dot com millions than setting a horrible precedent by caving.

Our favorite dmca-flaunting professor Dr. David Touretzky has most of the decss implementations hosted at his site.

He also has the scientology documents that slashdot censors, which you can read here

Dr Touretsky also received a cease and desist letter from COS in an attempt to remove the material, but I guess he wasn't more worried about spending his dot com millions than setting a horrible precedent by caving.

Try this site: Gallery of CSS Descramblers

Art or Subversion? The real solution is not to stand for stooges on the take sell our freedoms to the corporations.

Postfix can do virtual domains with sasl authentication and imap/pop daemons from Project Cyrus.

Its also real cool because you can use a mysql database to manage the accounts over the domains so that the users do not need real shell accounts.

Dave Touretzky at Carnegie Melon keeps them hosted at his site.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/index.html

He also has all of the scientology documents that slashdot removed.

- Ray Kurzweil

The entire text

Wrong. Authors have the option of releasing something to the public domain.

Check out the NAVLAB 5 project, and other NAVLABS, there's some pretty impressive results although its hard to tell from the webpages.

Check out the NAVLAB 5 project, and other NAVLABS, there's some pretty impressive results although its hard to tell from the webpages.

Universities receive a lot of government funding. They also tend to contribute a lot to free software. Look at all the stuff that's come out of Carnegie Mellon, like the MACH kernel.

There's even a lot of work done where the project isn't directly government funded on grants or contracts, but the work is mostly done by grad students working on government stipends.



Anyway, while I am in favor of a lot more funding for free software, I'm not sure I'm entirely in favor of a lot of government funding for free software.

"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents."

Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Police and Fire Departments probably are better under government, but I'd disagree on libraries. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but there are other things government has partially taken over, like charity (welfare), that I think they do a much poorer job handeling than society would without them. If you disagree with that instance, I'm sure you can think of other instances where this applies. Software is a more complex, technical thing to manage, and I think we want politicians managing it as little as possible. In principle they could support it without influencing it, but this usually isn't the way of things.

I think it's easy to imagine how this could be bad. For example, the government could mandate the use of specific technologies or methods in free software. Or they could respond to industry pressure and refuse to fund any free software group that contributed to any peer-to-peer file sharing projects, etc. For some arguments on this, see this book or this article.

Universities receive a lot of government funding. They also tend to contribute a lot to free software. Look at all the stuff that's come out of Carnegie Mellon, like the MACH kernel.

There's even a lot of work done where the project isn't directly government funded on grants or contracts, but the work is mostly done by grad students working on government stipends.



Anyway, while I am in favor of a lot more funding for free software, I'm not sure I'm entirely in favor of a lot of government funding for free software.

"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents."

Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Police and Fire Departments probably are better under government, but I'd disagree on libraries. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but there are other things government has partially taken over, like charity (welfare), that I think they do a much poorer job handeling than society would without them. If you disagree with that instance, I'm sure you can think of other instances where this applies. Software is a more complex, technical thing to manage, and I think we want politicians managing it as little as possible. In principle they could support it without influencing it, but this usually isn't the way of things.

I think it's easy to imagine how this could be bad. For example, the government could mandate the use of specific technologies or methods in free software. Or they could respond to industry pressure and refuse to fund any free software group that contributed to any peer-to-peer file sharing projects, etc. For some arguments on this, see this book or this article.

Here is a copy of the plea bargain Austin signed. It doesn't mention any of the hacking allegations the FBI included on the warrent they used to search his house. Whether or not Sherman is a hacker, he was sentenced to prison for providing information - not conspiracy or incitement, but simply speech. Whether or not you agree with Austin's politics, that's quite simply terrifying.

Professor Touretzky of Carnegie Mellon University maintains a web page with much detailed information on this case. Apparently, he doesn't agree with Sherman's acts, but is at odds with the free-speech component of this case.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist/

Also of note is background on the case, where if you scroll down you find out about all sorts of better bomb making knoweldge you can get from a library or amazon.com. Legally. What makes this case different, unfortunately, is that it was done by someone who had unpopular views. So apparently some things are only illegal if you're a dissident - and that should worry us all.

You might want to look at:
Ismail Haritaoglu: "Scene Text Extraction and Translation for Handheld Devices", CVPR 2001
or
Jing Zhang et. al.: "A PDA-based Sign Translator"

For an interview where Mr. Kernighan did mention emacs, see here...

Actually, quite an interesting read too.