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PapaZit asks: "Laptop and home users don't alway have access to a network. There are many tasks that can be done off-line, but require an occasional network connection (reading and responding to email, for example). In the Free Unix front, there has been some work in this direction, but it hasn't made it anywhere outside of Windows. Coda has made it possible for me to work with centralized files offline, and I have some ugly scripts involving perl, fetchmail, and procmail that handle email, but I wouldn't inflict them on others. An OS with automated "Network indifference" seems like it would be useful to both novice users and power users, and it's the sort of thing that could make these alternative operating systems more appealing to the masses. Are there any efforts in this direction that could use support or testers? Are people waiting until networking becomes so ubiquitous that the problem goes away?"

akkem writes "For a while now, we've been running out of IPv4 address space, resulting in more and more computers getting put behind NAT devices. That's fine for many computers, but what if you want that computer to be available as a server? As part of his PhD work, my friend Eugene has come up with a nifty solution, AVES, which enables any computer on the Internet to reach one or more servers placed behind a NAT. His approach is to give each server a unique name (via DNS), and to handle all the IP address translation automatically via an overlay network." This looks somewhat similiar to virtual DNS, but taking it another step, and having the server route the requests behind itself instead of just handling it a little differently.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Updates and revisions for you on various and sundry stories you've seen here recently, from Parrot to Linux on handhelds to the recent judgement against MP3.com and more. Read on below to find them.

At least the jurors don't get to set the value of Pi. openbear writes: "According to a story at c|net the jurors meant for MP3.com to pay $3 million and not $300,000 in the court decision made last week. This may sound bad for MP3.com, but considering that TVT was originally going for $8.5 million I suppose that $3 million still looks like a good ruling. Espically since they have $42.9 million set aside for damage awards in pending suits."

(Here are some other articles about MP3.com as well.)

Parroting the (ORA, ActiveState, etc.) company line: rjoseph writes: "Perl.com's managing editor Simon Cozens has written a quick article on O'Reilly.com that explains the April Fools joke of the faked colaboration between Perl and Python to produce Parrot. He explains how the most interesting aspect about the whole affair is the fact that, to pull it off succesfully, the Perl and Python communities had to work together more than they had in a long time!"

Humor may suffer from analysis, but this is a cool explanation of what it took to pull off what turned out to be probably the most convincing Fool of the year, at least for those in the very small Venn diagram with the background and motivation to care about open-source programming languages and their creators;) Of course, now no one will believe it when the two do actually merge. (For a while I thought that the talk of "Python 3000" was a joke, too.)

Small steps on tiny machines n7lyg writes: "IEEE Computer has an article this month about a prototype PDA developed at Compaq's Western Research Labs: Itsy: Stretching the Bounds of Mobile Computing. Itsy has been through two implementations and has several unique features, including using MEMS accelerometers to implement a gesture interface (Rock'n'Scroll). This is all just research, but it does show promise for Linux-based PDA's. Itsy runs the X Window System and Qt Palmtop. The WRL website for Itsy is here."

This is really cool background material; now the earlier Itsy work has led to Linux on the iPAQ, I wish Compaq would actually sell a PDA with the size and shape of the Itsy itself. And tiny accelerometers for gesture-control would be welcome on my visor as well, and surely for small video game systems.

Big Blue, Big Blue, your transmission is fading, please say again, over. An Onymous Coward writes: "This sucks. At LWCE there was a big display at the KDE booth using ViaVoice to control KDE apps through Qt. Now it looks like the project is dead in the water, according to this article at Newsforge -- maybe lack of interest from IBM?"

What with the billion dollars that IBM has pledged to spend on Linux-related projects, and the fact that ViaVoice has shipped for a while with the high-end boxed version of Mandrake, hopefully this is just an oversight. ViaVoice is a cool technology -- but if things don't work out between Qt and IBM, perhaps KDE (and GNOME, and others, level playing field here!) can work on integration with Sphinx. An Apache-style license should be all-around friendly, right?

Mihai Budiu sent in this interview with Bruce Maggs, a computer scientist who used to work at Akamai, the company which caches content for a great many popular websites. An interesting look at the combination of solving research problems and starting up a new company.

Mihai Budiu sent in this interview with Bruce Maggs, a computer scientist who used to work at Akamai, the company which caches content for a great many popular websites. An interesting look at the combination of solving research problems and starting up a new company.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University has updated his DARPA-funded MARS program page , including new info about the possibily of having photo-realistic 3D mapping for robots in the near future. "Our machines will navigate employing a dense 3D awareness of their surroundings, be tolerant of route surprises, and be easily placed by ordinary workers in entirely new routes or work areas. The long-elusive combination of easy installation and reliability should greatly expand cost-effective niches for mobile robots, and make possible a growing market that can itself sustain further development...We expect our new data to bring us further towards photorealism, and more importantly extremely reliable 3D maps." Check out all the slides and movies at the bottom of the page."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University has updated his DARPA-funded MARS program page , including new info about the possibily of having photo-realistic 3D mapping for robots in the near future. "Our machines will navigate employing a dense 3D awareness of their surroundings, be tolerant of route surprises, and be easily placed by ordinary workers in entirely new routes or work areas. The long-elusive combination of easy installation and reliability should greatly expand cost-effective niches for mobile robots, and make possible a growing market that can itself sustain further development...We expect our new data to bring us further towards photorealism, and more importantly extremely reliable 3D maps." Check out all the slides and movies at the bottom of the page."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University has updated his DARPA-funded MARS program page , including new info about the possibily of having photo-realistic 3D mapping for robots in the near future. "Our machines will navigate employing a dense 3D awareness of their surroundings, be tolerant of route surprises, and be easily placed by ordinary workers in entirely new routes or work areas. The long-elusive combination of easy installation and reliability should greatly expand cost-effective niches for mobile robots, and make possible a growing market that can itself sustain further development...We expect our new data to bring us further towards photorealism, and more importantly extremely reliable 3D maps." Check out all the slides and movies at the bottom of the page."

Jón Ragnarsson asks: "I'm loosing my mind over my bookmarks. I use 3 computers on a daily basis, and not even one of them is mobile. I have about 10 instances of browsers on them, each and every one with it's own bookmark system. I have countless times cursed when I'm at home but need some obscure bookmark on my computer at work, and just can't remember the url or phrases to find it in Google. So last night I went on a mission: I decided to think up a standard to store and retreive bookmarks. But first I deceided to search the Net just in case if somebody else had done the same thing. I typed 'bookmark protocol' in Google and behold, the fourth link mentioned the ACAP - Application Configuration Access Protocol, defined in rfc2244. So, why isn't it used?"

"It's much more than a simple bookmark storage, the RFC remarks:

The Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP) is designed to support remote storage and access of program option, configuration and preference information.

Probably the main reason this isn't being used is because you can't rely on every user having access to an ACAP server. Well, why not have both? Your browser could implement a mini-server until you find one that you can use. So should I suggest this to Mozilla/Microsoft/Opera? Or is there a simpler way. When Netscape was the king, I simply uploaded the bookmark file to my homepage area, it worked (more or less). And since I use browser 90% for content not on my computer I'm very likely to have net access when I'm using my browser. So could this be feasable, or am I daydreaming again?"

Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down. Read on to understand what this means.

This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken hearted about it than me. It's a bad precedent, and a blow for the freedom of speech that we all share in this forum. But this simply doesn't look like a case we can win. Our lawyers tell us that it appears to be a violation of Copyright law, and under the terms of the DMCA, we must remove it. Else we risk legal action that would at best be expensive, and potentially cause Slashdot to go down temporarily or even permanently. At the worst, court orders could jeporadize your privacy, and we would be helpless to stop it.

We need to choose our battles and this isn't one we want to have. We want Slashdot to be a forum where you can say what's in your heart, but we simply can't defend an anonymous poster who violates copyright law. Keep that in mind when you post in both this discussion, and in others in the future. Post your ideas. Post your thoughts. And most of all, post your links. We need to play by the rules or it's game over.

Now there is the matter of this specific comment. It contained a text called "OT III", part of what is known as the Fishman Affidavit. This text is Copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. In compliance with the DMCA, we are removing it from Slashdot. In its place we are putting non-copyrighted text: Links to websites about the church of Scientology, as well as links to how you can contact your congressman about the DMCA. Thanks a lot to Jamie for putting this together.

First of all, we would like to point out that the text of OT III is available at many other places on the web. To many to list here in fact. Instead, try a Google search on "OT III" and "Fishman", which as of this writing (March 2001) returns over 250 pages. A broader search on AltaVista returns over 2,000 webpages.

Operating in the jurisdiction of the Dutch courts, Karin Spaink's Fishman Affidavit webpage has fended off two lawsuits from Scientology, one in 1996 and one in 1999. The latter suit, according to the page, is still being appealed. >From the link listed just above, you can click through to the Fishman Affidavit, which contains links to not only to an annotated copy of OT III, but to the documents on the other OT levels as well, number one through the disputed number eight.

If you would like a plain English explanation of OT III, see OT III Rewritten For Beginners, by Jon Atack. Its author is a former Scientologist who himself completed level OT III. The webpage contains nothing copyrighted by a Scientology organization. It is an explanation of what OT III says and what that means, along with commentary by the author. Jon Atack is also the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, which is a history of Scientology from before its founding to after L. Ron Hubbard's death. At the above link, you can either purchase it, or read it in its entirety online.

If you are interested in Scientology, you will want to visit Operation Clambake, at xenu.net. It seems to be the most important central resource for information on the organization.

You may also want to visit the Lisa McPherson Memorial Page, which claims that "Lisa died needlessly at the hands of Scientology." Her case is truly a tragic one and she deserves to be remembered. The site has a great deal of information on her death. Related is The Lisa McPherson Trust, which has not only information about Lisa, but a very large archive of interviews, court transcripts, news reports, testimonials, and videos about Scientology.

Here's a Slashdot story last year on eBay removing auctions for e-meters based on the Church of Scientology DMCA copyright allegations, which is odd because Copyright law doesn't cover a physical device.

If there's anything else about Scientology you want to know, you will want to see AltReligionScientology.org, which contains a huge list of links to all the sites I don't have room to list here.

The DMCA is actually five separate modifications to copyright law. Its Title I is known for providing legal protection for "technological measures" (typically encryption) which prevent copying; this is the part that empowered the MPAA to sue over DeCSS, to name the best-known example.

That's not the part that concerns us here; Title II is its other major modification of copyright law and that's what we're dealing with. Title II created 17 U.S.C. Section 512, and we're specifically looking at our liability under paragraphs (c)(1)(A), which says we have to act "expeditiously to remove or disable access to the [infringing] material." Here's the U.S. Copyright Office's 18-page summary of the DMCA as a whole. If 18 pages is too long for you, here's the American Library Association's much quicker summary

Here's a list of resources on the DMCA, including the DMCA itself in PDF format. The EFF page on the DCMA seems to relate mostly to Title I, the anti-encryption-circumvention portion, but it's too good not to mention anyway.

Don't know who your Congressperson or Senators are? That's OK, now's as good a time as any to learn. Finding your Senators is easy, just go to Senate.gov. To find your Representative, you just need your zip code. You can use the form on the website to write them if you're lazy, but if you want your message to have more impact, print it out and send it in a real envelope. Anything's better than nothing, though.

When you write, you'll want to write something they'll read. Here are the ACLU's tips for writing to your Congressperson or Senators.

Tonight: Reactions and reductions of previous Slashdot appearances, including but not limited to: in-dash video gaming for the less upwardly mobile; a CSS descrambler you could scratch as a crib onto the side of your #2 pencil; and more on the engineers vs. scientists brouhaha. Enjoy!

I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."

Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.

Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...

If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.

PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."

Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."

Wrote Evans in response:

"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.

Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.

In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."

What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.

The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"

An Anonymous Coward, who wears a Camel on his shirt, asks: "Dr. David Touretzky has done it again, posting a 7-line 526-byte Perl VOB descrambler on his ever-growing Gallery of CSS Descramblers. 'qrpff' was written by MIT Student Information Processing Board members Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz for a 6-hour seminar on 'Decrypting DVD' taught at MIT in January-February. Did those guys violate the DMCA by teaching the class?" Click below for the script, which is among the most obscure pieces of code I've ever seen. For something so small, this is quite an accomplishment. It's also a bit of an embarassment for Hollywood when you consider that the basis of a multi-billion dollar revenue-stream can be foiled by such a small piece of code!

Here's the script:

$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=($t=255)&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9
,$_=(map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t
^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271))
[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

A rewrite, using an extra five bytes (!) of perl code, caches a table, which apparently makes the program fast enough to decode a movie in realtime:

$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

As Touretzky writes on his Gallery page, typical usage is just: cat /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILE_NAME | qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -

An Anonymous Coward, who wears a Camel on his shirt, asks: "Dr. David Touretzky has done it again, posting a 7-line 526-byte Perl VOB descrambler on his ever-growing Gallery of CSS Descramblers. 'qrpff' was written by MIT Student Information Processing Board members Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz for a 6-hour seminar on 'Decrypting DVD' taught at MIT in January-February. Did those guys violate the DMCA by teaching the class?" Click below for the script, which is among the most obscure pieces of code I've ever seen. For something so small, this is quite an accomplishment. It's also a bit of an embarassment for Hollywood when you consider that the basis of a multi-billion dollar revenue-stream can be foiled by such a small piece of code!

Here's the script:

$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=($t=255)&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9
,$_=(map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t
^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271))
[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

A rewrite, using an extra five bytes (!) of perl code, caches a table, which apparently makes the program fast enough to decode a movie in realtime:

$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^
$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^
(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

As Touretzky writes on his Gallery page, typical usage is just: cat /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILE_NAME | qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -

xueexueg writes: "Dr. David Touretzky has posted a new piece of DeCSS art here, as well as his response to a threatening letter from the MPAA. Both are triumphantly good, one an epic haiku with the most intelligent and beautiful commentary I've heard in months, the other a response to the MPAA lawyers who evidently told Touretzky that his entire home page is a 'circumvention device.'" Both are good reads. I realize that posting this sort of thing on Slashdot is simply preaching to the choir, but some part of me hopes that in the end we'll still have a freedom of speech, a freedom to reverse engineer, and a freedom to watch the media we purchase. Sure seems less likely these days.

Comment: 02/25 2:35 PM EST by J : My favorite source for CSSdescramble() is the DVDCCA's own DNS server.

Do dig ns dvdcca.org to verify that their DNS servers are (as of right now) mercury.hypersurf.com and west.mainstreet.net.

Then, to pull the gzip'd code straight off their servers, this will work on any vaguely sh-like shell:

for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org @mercury.hypersurf.com ; done | perl -ne 's/\.//g; print pack("H224",$1) if(/^x([^z]*)/)' | gunzip > myfile.c

This trick is number nine on zoy.org's 42 ways to get DeCSS. You're actually requesting data which resides on zoy.org's DNS server, but it's being delivered to you by the DVDCCA's DNS server.

xueexueg writes: "Dr. David Touretzky has posted a new piece of DeCSS art here, as well as his response to a threatening letter from the MPAA. Both are triumphantly good, one an epic haiku with the most intelligent and beautiful commentary I've heard in months, the other a response to the MPAA lawyers who evidently told Touretzky that his entire home page is a 'circumvention device.'" Both are good reads. I realize that posting this sort of thing on Slashdot is simply preaching to the choir, but some part of me hopes that in the end we'll still have a freedom of speech, a freedom to reverse engineer, and a freedom to watch the media we purchase. Sure seems less likely these days.

Comment: 02/25 2:35 PM EST by J : My favorite source for CSSdescramble() is the DVDCCA's own DNS server.

Do dig ns dvdcca.org to verify that their DNS servers are (as of right now) mercury.hypersurf.com and west.mainstreet.net.

Then, to pull the gzip'd code straight off their servers, this will work on any vaguely sh-like shell:

for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org @mercury.hypersurf.com ; done | perl -ne 's/\.//g; print pack("H224",$1) if(/^x([^z]*)/)' | gunzip > myfile.c

This trick is number nine on zoy.org's 42 ways to get DeCSS. You're actually requesting data which resides on zoy.org's DNS server, but it's being delivered to you by the DVDCCA's DNS server.

xueexueg writes: "Dr. David Touretzky has posted a new piece of DeCSS art here, as well as his response to a threatening letter from the MPAA. Both are triumphantly good, one an epic haiku with the most intelligent and beautiful commentary I've heard in months, the other a response to the MPAA lawyers who evidently told Touretzky that his entire home page is a 'circumvention device.'" Both are good reads. I realize that posting this sort of thing on Slashdot is simply preaching to the choir, but some part of me hopes that in the end we'll still have a freedom of speech, a freedom to reverse engineer, and a freedom to watch the media we purchase. Sure seems less likely these days.

Comment: 02/25 2:35 PM EST by J : My favorite source for CSSdescramble() is the DVDCCA's own DNS server.

Do dig ns dvdcca.org to verify that their DNS servers are (as of right now) mercury.hypersurf.com and west.mainstreet.net.

Then, to pull the gzip'd code straight off their servers, this will work on any vaguely sh-like shell:

for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org @mercury.hypersurf.com ; done | perl -ne 's/\.//g; print pack("H224",$1) if(/^x([^z]*)/)' | gunzip > myfile.c

This trick is number nine on zoy.org's 42 ways to get DeCSS. You're actually requesting data which resides on zoy.org's DNS server, but it's being delivered to you by the DVDCCA's DNS server.

PimpBot writes: "I'm taking a class in software engineering. To model our project, we're using UML, but I'm running into a problem - the software we're using, TogetherJ, is written in Java. The program has obscene memory requirements (128MB RAM min, 512 recommended), and being a poor college student, my box isn't close to supporting that. Are there any UML modeling clients out there that are dirt cheap, and don't use Java?"

The webmaster responsible for putting Red Hat Linux in service for the Royal Family steps down, The A in ALS stands this year for "oAkland," DSS hackers can rejoice for the moment, and visions of Perl will soon adorn at least two continents. For more on these completely explicable statements, read on in tonight's episode of Slashback.

007 would prefer not to be required to go reinstall Linux. You may recall that in addition to various other pieces of head-adornment, the members of Britain's Royal Family rely on Red Hat, by way of their webmaster, Mick Morgan.

Brian writes: "Looks to me as if the Queen's webmaster is pulling out. See the letter at http://www.open.gov.uk/services/letter201200.htm. Let's hope the new owners keep Linux eh?"

Yet another yet another. Pittsburgher Kevin Lenzo wants you to know that June 13-15 in Montreal marks yet another Yet Another Perl Conference. They're also looking for sponsors worthy enough to fund their deeds of derring-do. Suggested reading includes parent organization the Yet Another Society and YAPC Europe (which will be terrorizing Amsterdam sometime in early August, CFP soon), and darn-near required reading includes the (and I quote) "kick-ass" Damien diary going at the Joy of YAS.

Do you ever suspect that some people code Perl strictly for the interesting conferences?

Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland? In a clever move which might have caused Sherman some consternation, one of the coolest things about the city of Atlanta will shortly be appearing in Oakland, CA. A notice sent out by Usenix announces that November 6-10th of this year will be the next manifestation of ALS. Maddog Hall is sure to be there, so play hookey from work or school to go visit. The announcement reads, in part:

The ALS 2001 Program Committee invites you to contribute your ideas, proposals, and papers for tutorials, invited talks program, refereed papers track, workshops, work-in-progress reports, and symposia tracks. We welcome submissions that address any and all issues relating to Linux and the Open Source world.

The Call for Papers with submission guidelines and suggested topics is now available at http://www.linuxshowcase.org.

Submissions are due June 5, 2001

Revenge of the -- oh, I won't say it. A coward who failed to sign his name writes: "DirecTV stuck on Sunday a week before the Superbowl and wiped out 98% of hacked DSS cards. Supposedly DirecTV wrote to an area that is write once thereby making the cards go into an infinite loop. Now the hackers have found a way to bypass that sequence in the ROM in the form of a DPBB (Dead Processor Blocker Board). The board has a simple Atmel ROM that glitches pass the looped part of the ASIC on the DSS cards. DSS hacking is back."

sighup asks: "My company is in the need of a distributed file system for WAN use. I've looked around. CODA and InterMezzo aren't there yet. NFS is not going to work well in our instance. So, I went looking at AFS (having used it in college). I found that IBM had announced that they were opensourcing AFS. We were willing to pay for it, but this is soooo much better. The original announcement said that IBM would be releasing the source code in September. September has come and gone and October is almost gone. They've posted the docs, but nothing else. I've even mailed DeveloperWorks and got no response. So, when's OpenAFS -actually- going to be out?"

generic-man writes: "As part of the Earthware Symposium on the next 50 years of technology, Carnegie Mellon researchers invited many people prominent in technology to speak about what lies ahead. They created a Synthetic Interview with Bill Joy -- ask it a question, and you'll get the most appropriate answer out of the many that were provided. Questions about the future of technology are the most appropriate things to ask him."

generic-man writes: "As part of the Earthware Symposium on the next 50 years of technology, Carnegie Mellon researchers invited many people prominent in technology to speak about what lies ahead. They created a Synthetic Interview with Bill Joy -- ask it a question, and you'll get the most appropriate answer out of the many that were provided. Questions about the future of technology are the most appropriate things to ask him."

Pizon writes: "Ever wonder what else you can do with your Palm? Well, here is a good start. This clever little monkey used the 3Com Palm Pilot to build a fully autonomous robot out of standard, readily available parts (glue, tape, and a small amount of soldering). The robot can then drive itself around on flat surfaces, using optical range sensors to sense nearby obstacles and walls." Proof that not everything requires scads of hardware or the latest processor -- sometimes small is beautiful.

What will They think of next? Easier to start with what They've thought of previously. For instance: How is Steven King's online book experiment going? And speaking of Them, where lies the trend in The War Between The Pitiful RIAA and the Splendid Universities? And when will They realize that I don't want to talk into my address book, even if that's a PDA? Those people have a lot to answer for.

Allegedly U.S. $299, allegedly end-of-year, allege, allege. Good news for those of us equipped with the quaint alternative to Palm Computing's organizers, even if less than impressed by most combination PDA / phone attempts -- InaneBoy writes: "Handspring's got a bunch of pictures and details of their new 'Visor Phone' Check it out! Super-keen!"

Of course, hemos is right -- there's a reason that most phones aren't as wide as your average PDA. This one looks like a reasonable -- if expensive -- way to combine the two items, especially if it will work with the combination mic / speaker earbud things. (But shouldn't the people making Springboard modules be a little busier with my GPS reciever?)

Plus, many colleges have declined to ban copying machines, tape recorders and ethernet. carlocius writes: "It appears that my college, Michigan State University, just handed Metallica and Dr. Dre another loss in their attempt to get Napster blocked on large Universities. MSU's administators stated that the Acceptable Use Policy of the university already covers copyright issues and there is no reason for Napster to be banned before a trial. GO STATE!!!"

Likewise, jellings writes: "The University of Pennsylvania joined the ranks of leading universities who are refusing to shut down access to the Napster on their campus, according to an article from the university press. U Pres. Judith Rodin said that "banning the Internet service would go against the University's educational mission by denying students freedom of inquiry and expression" and pointed to the Digital Millenium Act for further justification, saying that limiting access is not her responsibility ("Internet service providers cannot be held accountable for illegal activity on their networks if they are unaware of the activity"). Although the awareness of the activity of the issue may be questionable, it is certainly good to see a big U not yielding to the demands of Dr. Dre & Metallica ..."

The list of schools refusing to buckle under keeps growing; campus admins and sysadmins seem justifiably adamant about letting their policies be dictated by corporate vulture groups. Bandwidth reasons may be another story entirely, though.

Of course, not everyone has the awesome power of ResNet behind them ... ca1v1n writes: "The awesome power of the record labels has come through again. The Offspring have cancelled their plans to distribute their next album for free, after legal action and the threat of a lawsuit from Sony music. Yahoo! news has the scoop. So much for protecting the artists' interests."

An enquiry into establishing a curve of electronic book sales ... Triumphant former astronomy student jamie points out this CNN story on the continuing book experiment by Stephen King, who is still selling his novel online. Here's a telling snippet:

...since the first installment's release July 24, the percentage of readers paying for their downloads has dropped from 76 percent to less than 70 percent for the second installment. Part three goes up on Monday.

jamie points out that 70 "but he's giving us part 3 anyway. The more telling figures: 172,004 people had paid for part one and 74,373 people had paid for part two."

maomoondog pipes in: "Apparently, King's company is upset that too few of the downloads are being paid for. Stephen King comments on the progress here. Personally, I'm impressed that 70% of the downloads are being paid for. With as low a per-item cost as a text download is, the author should really clean up in this sort of arrangement."

If you're one of the 172,004, liked the story, but are not part of the 74,373, please consider joining the second group on jamie's behalf, because as he says: "It's actually not a bad story and I want to see how it ends :)"

rageout noted that Cisco seems to have filed patent US5793763, which looks remarkably like RFC 1631 (the RFC that defines NAT). This came from this story on freebsddiary.

Ted Pham asks: "I want to purchase an 802.11b wireless base station for my house. My top two candidates are the Apple Airport and the Orinoco RG-1000, and I have a few questions about how these products compare." Anyone care to give comments on any experiences they have had with these pieces of hardware. Read on for more specifics.

Ted's Questions:

1. How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
2. I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?
3. The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?
4. Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?

Extra, extra -- Read more about it! Yes, that means another round of Slashback, bearing this time: The stillborn auction of [expletive deleted]company.com's domain name; why EPIC has decided to stop sailing with Amazon; and another tantalizing glimpse of a world so advanced we can watch instruction videos on personal computers. More, too.

Even Richard Feynman could have figured this out! Logos writes: "It seems that EPIC has decided to end their relationship with Amazon. Here is a link to the letter that I received on their mailing list. The final straw was Amazon's announcement that they are no longer able to ensure the privacy of their Customer Info."

How apropos! Servius writes: "Doublespeak is a wonderful thing. CNN has this story about EPIC dropping out of the Amazon affiliate program because of Amazon's recent relaxation of their rules for the use of personal data. Quote: 'The new policy is actually stricter than the previous one because it spells out the conditions under which personal information can be transferred.' I hope that makes you feel a lot safer."

Potty mouth, potty mouth, Milkman Dan! Domain shoppers everywhere, your time to mourn has come. After placing the domain f*ckedcompany.com for sale on everyone's favorite auction site site owner Philip Kaplan pulled the auction.

h0ngk0ngph00ey writes:

"After a quick check back at eBay today to see how high the bidding went for f*ckedcompany.com, I was somewhat surprised to see that the auction was ended. A look at the bid history seems to indicate that either eBay pulled it for being offensive, or the seller just got too many responses from people who weren't at all serious. /.'ed to death it seems."

lee@lvcm.com has a different perspective:

"Well without warning the owner pulled the auction from ebay. I was one of the serious high bidders and was never contacted by the owner. CNNfn contacted me and asked me questions (along with several other news organizations) and they were all under the assumption that he really wanted to sell the domain. I guess it was all a publicity stunt."

Will the Geeks in Space have to play Apollo 13? rak3 writes: "The Sync, home for the broadcasts of Geeks in Space and JenniShow (of JenniCam fame), seems to have run into some troubles. The company was going to be acquired, but this has fallen through and they might have to shut down the site. Read more about it here."

It's sad, since the folks behind The Sync have served to support everyone from local artists to aforementioned Geeks in Space. Hopefully, they can pull through this. If not, smart companies everywhere will start mailing them job offers right about now!

Soon I will watch Carlito Brigante kick ass with penguin supervision. cyber-vandal writes: "Two days after the Ask Slashdot on Intervideo's LinDVD, the announcement has been made here. No sign of the actual player being available, but this is a good sign that it wasn't merely MPAA-inspired vapourware. At last I can look forward to fragging my Win9x partition."

And here's another tibdit to add to the DeCSS gallery, for anyone else who admires the technical possibilities of the DVD format but not the politics attached thereto, GeekLife.com writes: "[H]ere's the DVD Logo rendered in beautiful shades of gray using the DECSS code as ink. "

Extra, extra -- Read more about it! Yes, that means another round of Slashback, bearing this time: The stillborn auction of [expletive deleted]company.com's domain name; why EPIC has decided to stop sailing with Amazon; and another tantalizing glimpse of a world so advanced we can watch instruction videos on personal computers. More, too.

Even Richard Feynman could have figured this out! Logos writes: "It seems that EPIC has decided to end their relationship with Amazon. Here is a link to the letter that I received on their mailing list. The final straw was Amazon's announcement that they are no longer able to ensure the privacy of their Customer Info."

How apropos! Servius writes: "Doublespeak is a wonderful thing. CNN has this story about EPIC dropping out of the Amazon affiliate program because of Amazon's recent relaxation of their rules for the use of personal data. Quote: 'The new policy is actually stricter than the previous one because it spells out the conditions under which personal information can be transferred.' I hope that makes you feel a lot safer."

Potty mouth, potty mouth, Milkman Dan! Domain shoppers everywhere, your time to mourn has come. After placing the domain f*ckedcompany.com for sale on everyone's favorite auction site site owner Philip Kaplan pulled the auction.

h0ngk0ngph00ey writes:

"After a quick check back at eBay today to see how high the bidding went for f*ckedcompany.com, I was somewhat surprised to see that the auction was ended. A look at the bid history seems to indicate that either eBay pulled it for being offensive, or the seller just got too many responses from people who weren't at all serious. /.'ed to death it seems."

lee@lvcm.com has a different perspective:

"Well without warning the owner pulled the auction from ebay. I was one of the serious high bidders and was never contacted by the owner. CNNfn contacted me and asked me questions (along with several other news organizations) and they were all under the assumption that he really wanted to sell the domain. I guess it was all a publicity stunt."

Will the Geeks in Space have to play Apollo 13? rak3 writes: "The Sync, home for the broadcasts of Geeks in Space and JenniShow (of JenniCam fame), seems to have run into some troubles. The company was going to be acquired, but this has fallen through and they might have to shut down the site. Read more about it here."

It's sad, since the folks behind The Sync have served to support everyone from local artists to aforementioned Geeks in Space. Hopefully, they can pull through this. If not, smart companies everywhere will start mailing them job offers right about now!

Soon I will watch Carlito Brigante kick ass with penguin supervision. cyber-vandal writes: "Two days after the Ask Slashdot on Intervideo's LinDVD, the announcement has been made here. No sign of the actual player being available, but this is a good sign that it wasn't merely MPAA-inspired vapourware. At last I can look forward to fragging my Win9x partition."

And here's another tibdit to add to the DeCSS gallery, for anyone else who admires the technical possibilities of the DVD format but not the politics attached thereto, GeekLife.com writes: "[H]ere's the DVD Logo rendered in beautiful shades of gray using the DECSS code as ink. "

adric writes: "It seems that MP3.com has removed decss.mp3 (but its still available), allegedly for having "offensive lyrics". You can read a bit more here. The best part is the gallery of DeCSS showing the world of clever places this little bit of code has migrated to. T-Shirts, songs, poetry, non-existent languages, PNG comments, embedded in jpgs, gifs, and more. Even if the MPAA's lawyers can make source code illegal, they'll never remove DeCSS from the Net. Can everyone please just drop this now and let us have Linux drivers (and for that matter, let us fast forward through commercials on DVDs!)

Mihai Budiu wrote to us with an interview done with Brian Kernighan, one of the High Creator's of C. Good reading and good perspective on C.

Mihai Budiu wrote to us with an interview done with Brian Kernighan, one of the High Creator's of C. Good reading and good perspective on C.

tickback asks: "As I was reading about how the International Olympics Committee has bandied the television companies together for something along the lines of several BILLION dollars worldwide (Over $700 Million to NBC alone for this year) and how they're citing copyright laws as a way to police ANY Internet traffic relating to video of the Olympics, a thought-sequence started to form on how simple it would be to get video into the hands of the Internet users at large, regardless of how deeply entrenched the IOC has their hooks in the television and data carriers in Australia. Of course, as with any self-respecting geeky thought-process that these days seem to end up with some sort of a lawsuit because you happen to ask how a law should be interpreted (See the wonderful discussion at Dr. Touretzky's page Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers), I'd like to explicitly state that this is simply a plausible hypothesis meant to encourage thoughtful discussion on the pro's and con's of current copyright law and enforcement of such and how effective it is or isn't."

"Normally with video, the problems are that it has to be really well handled in terms of latency, is delivered using UDP (ie, lossy) transfer, and can be traced easily through the ports used to deliver it. What if the live or close to live video was encoded by a party in Australia or any area served by satellite or whatnot, automagically broken into 5 minute pieces (to pick a reasonable small chunk) of realvideo (to pick a random but popular video codec), encrypted, dispersed to any number of mirror sites over any normal TCP form (SMTP/FTP/HTTP/POP whatever), re-assembled, and then broadcast in its normal form with the resulting say 15 minute delay meaning the video would still be over 12 hours ahead of whatever the IOC is allowing to be broadcast?

Now, there are some technical issues that whoever pursuing this path would have to overcome: how to distribute the material from the mirrors, how to anonymize any connections, how to handle similar streams from mutiple sources, and after the recent rashes of gnutella 'spamming' and such, how to distinguish 'legitimate' incoming data from 'trojan' data meant to disrupt any system.

Now, I'm not a programmer by any means, so I certainly have no way of testing this theory even in a closed network (although it doesn't seem like the technical hurdles are insurmountable, or even serious hurdles at all) and I honestly don't care much about the Olympics (I'd be happy getting the data the next day, since I don't watch much video on my computer; I happen to think TV belongs on a 32" screen, and I can't afford a monitor that large). I *do* wonder about just how often laws are being used to enforce practices that the internet has made a bit archaic, and think that a few more discussions into the matter are needed. Hopefully, this will promote just such a discussion, especially considering how quickly new laws are being discussed concerning digital copyright."

jsarnat writes "A recent Ask Slashdot revealed revealed that there are indeed many programming language bigots (myself included) who read Slashdot. What better way to prove that your favorite language is the best one there is than to win the Third Annual ICFP Programming Contest? The contest doesn't start until August 26th, but they encourage you to register soon. Prizes include: `cash awards, famous texts on functional languages donated and autographed by the authors, and, of course, unlimited bragging rights.'"

roca writes: "Check out this new CNET article, then check out the thread that spawned it. Some random person in a Mozilla newsgroup said "hey, wouldn't it be cool to build Office-like functionality on top of Mozilla", and CNET decided this means a MozOffice project is happening (WRONG), and that millions of people need to know about this. Naturally, many readers believe them and are now flaming away because "Mozilla hasn't shipped a browser and now they're doing THIS!" What can a free software project do about this? Close the mailing lists or newsgroups to the media? Flame/sue the people who screw up? What?"

Well, it looks like James Russel has set up a site devoted to this idea on which he outlines why he thinks such a confluence would be a good idea, but he honestly notes: "This site is a placeholder that I hope to turn into an organizational centerpiece for what I think has the potential to be the most powerful side of Mozilla yet." And why shouldn't it be? Can't a modular framework grow far enough to cobble some words together? So long as it stays modular, that is. Even if a pipedream, it's an interesting that will no doubt inspire further inquiry.

We got word last night that Copyleft has joined the ranks of the named defendants in the DeCSS suit - they received their subpoena yesterday, because they "distribute" the DeCSS source code - on t-shirts.

Carnegie Mellon Professor David Touretzky testified before the court on this very issue. (See his Gallery of CSS Descramblers.)

Here's Touretzky being questioned:

19 Q. The next item, the DeCSS T-shirt, why did you post this on
20 the website on the gallery?

21 A. Well, this is a photograph of a T-shirt that's offered for
22 sale by an outfit called CopyLeft, and I purchased one of
23 those shirts myself. And the point of including it here is it
24 seems to me that there is some confusion among all the parties
25 in this case about whether something is speech or not.
1 And my reaction is if you can put it on a T-shirt,
2 it's speech. And so the point of showing the T-shirt was to
3 illustrate that and, also, to raise the question if this
4 T-shirt, itself, would have to be prohibited, then I wonder
5 what would happen to me if I wore the shirt in public.
6 Wearing the shirt in public could, perhaps, be interpreted as
7 engaging in trafficking a circumvention device.
8 So if one really wants to afford the plaintiffs the
9 protection that they seek, I think I would only be able to
10 wear my shirt in the privacy of my own home and must not go
11 outdoors with it.

Touretzky drew up a lengthy argument showing that if the DeCSS source code were banned, the only way to prevent that knowledge from being transmitted would be to ban it in all its forms - image file, various perturbations of the code into forms similar to plain English, annotated commentary, even on t-shirts and hidden in image files - all of these would have to be banned because the source code is easily retrievable from all of them. The Technical Term for this is "opening up a can of worms". Touretzky was trying to show the court that the issue was hardly open-and-shut - if you look at it one way, it's a device which can perform a task, but if you look at it another, it's speech that's expressive and communicative. If you're a programmer who's never taken much of a look at the legal issues surrounding computer programs, it may be patently obvious to you that code is speech, but to the judicial system, it is not so clear.

The judge was apparently much impressed, and started seriously thinking about the free-speech implications of banning DeCSS, possibly for the first time in the case. He seemed to take Touretzky's argument to heart - either all would have to be banned, or none. Apparently the MPAA took Touretzky's argument to heart as well, and they're therefore doing what is necessary to remain consistent with their argument: going after the T-shirts.

Maybe they'll go after the New York Times as well. Perhaps if the Times gets dragged into the case for posting an image of the illegal shirt, it might finally become clear to all and sundry that this case is about much more than copyright infringement.

Subject: [CAFE-News] EFF DeCSS Trial Summary

DVD Update: July 31, 2000
Universal City Studios et al v. 2600 Magazine

EFF DeCSS Trial Summary:
Facts in EFF's Favor as MPAA Claims Collapse Under Scrutiny

EFF defense team established a solid record at trial that the major film studios are attempting to use the DMCA to ban DeCSS so it can monopolize the DVD player market. Despite its immense investigative resources and months of effort, the MPAA was forced to concede at trial that it could not find a single instance of piracy related to the software. The First Amendment rights of all citizens have been endangered because of the studios' panic and over reaction.

Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen testified for the defense that he was working to build a DVD player for the Linux operating system when he posted the program to the LiVid list that he and two others authored. LiVid Project Leader Matthew Pavlovich testified that his development group used DeCSS to create a Linux DVD player that can compete with the studios' and DVD-CCA's current monopoly on DVD players. The studios were hoping to ban the software before a competing DVD player could be created that is not required by a CSS license to restrict features which allow people to exercise their legal rights. Journalist Emmanuel Goldstein, the editor of 2600 Magazine testified that he published the code in his reporting of Hollywood's crazed reaction to the software's existence, when the studios launched this legal attack against him.

The high point of trial was the electrifying testimony of Professor David Touretzky of Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department, EFF's final witness before resting its case. Touretzky explained to the court how computer programmers use computer code to communicate to one another with precision. He showed the court how an injunction against DeCSS chills his ability to express himself. Judge Lewis Kaplan stated Touretzky's testimony was "persuasive" and "educational" and would likely change his First Amendment analysis of the case. The judge did not indicate that he intends to rule in favor of defendants however, and EFF is prepared to take an immediate appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Trial briefs are due August 8 and a short turn-around is expected for a ruling.

After the close of trial, DVD-CCA filed a motion to intervene in the NY litigation to fight EFF's challenge to unseal the Xing CSS license entered into evidence. DVD-CCA has requested to keep its CSS license out of the public record and Judge Kaplan will accept papers opposing DVD-CCA's intervention and secrecy request until August 2 at 5p.m.

You can subscribe to EFF's mailing list to receive the regular DVD updates. To subscribe, email majordomo@eff.org and put this in the text: subscribe cafe-news

EFF's archive of MPAA v 2600 litigation:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/

---------------------------------------------------------------
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) is the leading global nonprofit organization linking technical architectures with legal frameworks to support the rights of individuals in an open society. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most-linked-to Web sites in the world.

MaxVlast asks: "I was browsing around Helix Code's site looking at their interpretation of GNOME when I found the program that they claim is 'the next step forward in GNOME applications,' Evolution. I was startled and upset--this program is, from what I can tell, a direct transfer of MS Outlook to Linux. It's bothered me for some time that the two major file and desktop managers for Linux are all clamoring to look more like Windows than their competitors, and in the scuffle, are missing some very effective paradigms (like Miller columns). Do people think it is good that Linux seems to be shooting for the 'looks like Windows, but without all the features' market? The popularly available apps seem to say so." Please pause for a moment before saying "But you've done this already!". Before the question was "Do new GUIs exist?", the answer to that was a resounding yes, but now the question is "Why do our applications still look the same?", even across platform boundaries and for two different applications?

Why does Evolution have to look like Microsoft Office? I'll buy the form-follows-function argument to an extent, but there are other alternatives to things like the standard menu/button bar and other GUI elements that could be applied to applications and at the very least, give users more choice in how they operate. Are there any projects looking to bring other not-often-seen UI elements like pie-menus and the previously mentioned Miller Columns ^[?] to our applications?

More on the conflict of interest in the 2600 / DeCSS case. More on the South African penguins trapped in a world of petroleum, currents and love beneath the panopticon world of satellite observation. And congratulations to Distributed.Net for setting in place their new milestone. All below!

Why no, gentlemen, I see no conflict of interest. You may recall reading that Lewis Kaplan, the judge in the DeCSS trial underway in New York right now, consulted for Time-Warner, raising questions about conflict of interest. Jim Tyre of The Censorware Project writes: "Yesterday, CT posted a piece on 2600's attempt to disqualify Judge Kaplan in the New York DeCSS trial. Last night, Kaplan's 51 page Order denying the motion made it to the Net. No doubt he spent the weekend writing it, putting him in a nice mood for when trial commenced yesteday. Interesting reading for those who like to slog through such things."

The first 1000 days. emerson writes "According to their RC5-64 Stats Page, distributed.net's RC5-64 project turns 1000 days old today (July 18th; the stats page will show 1000 days when today's stats are digested and displayed tomorrow), with just over 28% of the keyspace checked out. Makes me feel pretty safe about RC5-64 versus brute-force attacks ..." Oskuro writes: "Today is the 1000th day distributed.net is searching for a winning key on RSA's RC5-64 contest. In that long time, the 28% of the keyspace has been tested, so there's a long way to go still. Maybe you want to download a client and start crunching for Team Slashdot?" Note: this means that as of today (day 1001), the stats reflect the 1000-day figure.

Wish I had scientists helping find me a mate ... John B. Hayes writes "Yahoo! News has a great story on an heroic high-tech penguin and his surviving the impossible. I wonder if there is a deeper meaning here... I mean, he made it 600 miles without a re-boot; ok, so there were some unexpected obstacles to deal with and the programmer had to step in, but that's the beauty of it. I'm charged!" cvd6262 writes "It seems that all's weel that ends well. Our Beloved Jackass Pequin, Peter, arrived home. I quote from the site: 'At 0456 this morning, Peter's satellite tag reported that he was at 33 48 S 18 22 E. Wait a moment. Those are the coordinates for Robben Island. Peter is home.' Now he only has to find a suitable Jackass Penquin mate."

All the same, I think I'd prefer some privacy. Oostendorpophile writes "I got this email today:

'Thank you for your inquiries into the FBI's "Carnivore". We have received many inquiries, many Kudos and many sneers for what has been in the news in the last couple weeks. Much of the information that the press has published has been inaccurate or misleading. Earthlink takes the following stance (in quotes below).

"We do not allow the installation of Carnivore on our network because it has the potential to compromise the privacy of our legitimate users and the performance of our network. We have an internal solution which allows us to comply with court orders without the presence of government personnel or equipment in our buildings. The government accepts this solution since they still receive the requested information about the criminal suspect, and we sleep well knowing that our customers are safe from unauthorized surveillance."

Sincerely,
Mary Youngblood
Privacy Policy
Earthlink/Mindspring Abuse Team Manager'"

This isn't the most satisfying possible answer, but at least it's nicer than block committees and "an enthusiastic welcome to the nice gentlemen who'll be sharing the building with us" ... Earthlink / Mindspring is one of the largest if not the largest ISP, though -- will smaller ISPs be able to stare down Carnivore as well?

And Apple Legal hasn't said a thing about this yet? Hollis writes "After months of discussion and work, linuxppc.org has been rewritten and is hosted at penguinppc.org. The new site has a slick design and lots of new content... check it out." And today's announcement of the new cube PowerMac puts a different light on the criticism Ryan Meader received for posting about such a thing on MacOS Rumors. It's a good thing to be wrong about! Dual G4 in a cube. Linux on PPC. Repeat.

ten thirty writes: "TECHNOCRAT.NET recently featured a great article regarding the dawning (well, it's only a few of years old anyway) of speech recognition software within the open source community. In particular, the Sphinx project of Carnegie Mellon University is discussed, as well as some other systems such as Festival and a public domain project at the University of Missouri. The notion here is that eventually the GUI, which has come so far over the past two decades, will eventually be supplanted, at least for some applications, by the VUI. The question is, will the open-source community allow the integration of this technology into our society be spearheaded by closed-source vendors?"

IntelliTubbie writes: "In an 'unorthodox form of brand sponsorship,' RadioShack is teaming up with LunaCorp, a Virginia-based space exploration startup. The goal: put a robotic rover on the moon featuring the RadioShack logo. Artist's renderings of the monstrosity can be seen at LunaCorp's web site. We're one step closer to the eerie predictions in 'Fight Club': The IBM Stellar Sphere. Planet Starbucks. Yikes." Unfortunately the robot will be powered by a TRS-80 ModelII, requiring 14 extra tons of propellant (grin). More coverage can be found at Yahoo! and discovery.com; CMU is creating the H₂O-seeking robot for the mission. (More.)

And on a related note for anyone interested in going to the moon in the relatively near future, MrScience writes: "I just received a link for this job in my mailbox from Guru.com, a pretty decent headhunter website. They are looking for a Financial Analyst to evaluate the NASA Academy, and "The end result will be a recommendation that the program either *is* or *is not* beneficial, and the specific reasons to justify such a conclusion. This report will then go before the NASA Administrator to justify the existence (or removal) of the program." I grew up dreaming of going to this, who wouldn't after seeing SpaceCamp?" Pound foolish, anyone?

CMU_Nort writes "Orson Scott Card is at it again. Hot on the tail of Ender's Shadow, he's writing another sequel to the Ender's Game story. This one seems to cover the story of the immediate history following the original story when all of the children return home. Called Shadow of the Hegemon, it should give us some of the story of what happened to Peter. The first five chapters are already available online." The rest of his website looks interesting too.

Does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cover electrical religious artifacts? Apparently the Church of Scientology thinks so. eBay has been yanking auctions of e-meters because of complaints by the CoS. In response to queries by a collector, eBay said "the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason." Does the DMCA really prohibit the sale of these boxes? (more)

The short answer is: "No" -- as far as I can tell -- I'm not a lawyer. But this is just one more data point in the disturbing trend of the DMCA being used as an all-purpose club to remove material from the Internet.

On hearing of this, my first thought was that perhaps the devices in question are actually licensed somehow, instead of being sold outright. But I spoke to two former members and the spouse of a current member of the CoS, each of whom assured me categorically that the devices were purchased outright, with no license required to be signed. A staffer at the Lisa McPherson Trust found a catalog where anyone can buy an e-meter; the "public price" is a little higher than the price to CoS members, but there are no apparent limitations to the purchase. A credit card is all you'll need.

The device itself is just an electrical mechanism, somewhat like a fancy multimeter or oscilloscope. It's patented, but of course thousands of patented items are sold on eBay every day.

To members of the Church of Scientology, however, it's more than just an electrical device. It's used in "auditing," which apparently helps new members advance in the program. Members of the CoS who have become experienced in this process are licensed by the CoS to audit others (but, again, the purchase of the items themselves is not under license).

Some e-meters apparently have Intel Inside (an 8-bit microprocessor which performs some rudimentary functions). But ever since a 1963 raid in which the FDA took exception to the marketing of the device as medically beneficial, e-meters have carried a disclaimer which begins: "By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counselling."

I'd hard-pressed to think of why copyright could apply to a piece of electronic gadgetry which "does nothing." So why is eBay refusing to allow its sale?

Because DMCA is such an effective club.

Rod Keller, a Scientology critic, noticed that e-meter auctions were being taken down, and wrote eBay to ask why. The response was:

Hello,

These items are not prohibited due to their nature, but the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason.

Regards,

[...]
eBay Community Watch Supervisor

(Emphasis added.) That explanation, by the way, is a little facile: eBay is "legally required to honor" such notices if it wants to remain lawsuit-proof about the item. They would be well within their legal rights to leave the auctions up. More on this later.

When Mr. Keller expressed surprise at this, the next message went into a little more detail:

Hello,

There is a procedure under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act whereby someone who claims to be an owner of Intellectual property can send a notice sworn under penalty of perjury that an item is infringing. The internet provider must then remove the item. The seller of the item (not a third party) can request and fill out a counter notice. If he/she does so, the complaining party who filled out the original notice has a limited period of time to file suit, or the provider can go ahead and relist the item.

This is set up under the statute so that the interested parties will be the ones doing any litigating.

Regards,

eBay Customer Support

In response to my requests for more detail on exactly how the DMCA was being invoked by the CoS, an eBay representative promised that someone would get in touch with me. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from them by press time.

Here's what I think happened, based on the above -- feel free to follow along in the full text of the DMCA if you like.

The DMCA is an unusual regulation in that it principally protects service providers from litigation and then rigidly defines the steps they must follow to stay under its umbrella. It puts eBay in a position a little bit like Bart Simpson's, when Sideshow Bob announces:

"The following people will not be killed by me: Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Lisa Simpson, that little baby Simpson.... That is all."

Title II of the DMCA, otherwise known as the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act," is what seems to be relevant. It describes under what conditions a service provider is not liable "for infringement of copyright." My guess is that eBay is looking at section 202(c): "Information Residing On Systems Or Networks At Direction Of Users." The system is ebay.com; the users are the sellers; presumably the information is, in this case, the item being auctioned. Or the text and graphics used to describe the auction? I'm not sure.

Section 202(c)(1)(C) indicates that eBay will not be subject to liability as long as it, "upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity."

Paragraph (3) describes the elements which must be present in a notification, including: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Based on eBay's statements, the Church of Scientology has sworn under penalty of perjury that it has an "exclusive right" to copyright on the material that was posted in the auction.

To me, that seems obviously wrong. An e-meter is an electrical device, or a religious artifact, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's sold to customers who may or may not be members of the Church. Once they've bought the items, they should be able to do with them what they wish, including reselling them to whoever they wish.

But to enjoy the protections of the DMCA, service providers must remove any material as soon as they're told it infringes on copyright. Once material has been challenged, the service provider must act "expeditiously" to remove it. Only when the material is gone can the accused user make a case to defend it.

The carrot for service providers becomes a stick for users.

Meanwhile, I'd like to see the statement that the Church of Scientology made, under penalty of perjury, that an auction of an e-meter infringes on their copyright in some way. Any spokespeople for the CoS reading this are welcome to contact me to discuss it.

But, as Declan McCullagh wrote in an unrelated DMCA story yesterday, we are moving toward a two-tier copyright system on the internet -- at least in this country. If you don't host your own content, the DMCA's censor-first, ask-questions-later mandate effectively strips you of your rights.

Does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cover electrical religious artifacts? Apparently the Church of Scientology thinks so. eBay has been yanking auctions of e-meters because of complaints by the CoS. In response to queries by a collector, eBay said "the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason." Does the DMCA really prohibit the sale of these boxes? (more)

The short answer is: "No" -- as far as I can tell -- I'm not a lawyer. But this is just one more data point in the disturbing trend of the DMCA being used as an all-purpose club to remove material from the Internet.

On hearing of this, my first thought was that perhaps the devices in question are actually licensed somehow, instead of being sold outright. But I spoke to two former members and the spouse of a current member of the CoS, each of whom assured me categorically that the devices were purchased outright, with no license required to be signed. A staffer at the Lisa McPherson Trust found a catalog where anyone can buy an e-meter; the "public price" is a little higher than the price to CoS members, but there are no apparent limitations to the purchase. A credit card is all you'll need.

The device itself is just an electrical mechanism, somewhat like a fancy multimeter or oscilloscope. It's patented, but of course thousands of patented items are sold on eBay every day.

To members of the Church of Scientology, however, it's more than just an electrical device. It's used in "auditing," which apparently helps new members advance in the program. Members of the CoS who have become experienced in this process are licensed by the CoS to audit others (but, again, the purchase of the items themselves is not under license).

Some e-meters apparently have Intel Inside (an 8-bit microprocessor which performs some rudimentary functions). But ever since a 1963 raid in which the FDA took exception to the marketing of the device as medically beneficial, e-meters have carried a disclaimer which begins: "By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counselling."

I'd hard-pressed to think of why copyright could apply to a piece of electronic gadgetry which "does nothing." So why is eBay refusing to allow its sale?

Because DMCA is such an effective club.

Rod Keller, a Scientology critic, noticed that e-meter auctions were being taken down, and wrote eBay to ask why. The response was:

Hello,

These items are not prohibited due to their nature, but the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason.

Regards,

[...]
eBay Community Watch Supervisor

(Emphasis added.) That explanation, by the way, is a little facile: eBay is "legally required to honor" such notices if it wants to remain lawsuit-proof about the item. They would be well within their legal rights to leave the auctions up. More on this later.

When Mr. Keller expressed surprise at this, the next message went into a little more detail:

Hello,

There is a procedure under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act whereby someone who claims to be an owner of Intellectual property can send a notice sworn under penalty of perjury that an item is infringing. The internet provider must then remove the item. The seller of the item (not a third party) can request and fill out a counter notice. If he/she does so, the complaining party who filled out the original notice has a limited period of time to file suit, or the provider can go ahead and relist the item.

This is set up under the statute so that the interested parties will be the ones doing any litigating.

Regards,

eBay Customer Support

In response to my requests for more detail on exactly how the DMCA was being invoked by the CoS, an eBay representative promised that someone would get in touch with me. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from them by press time.

Here's what I think happened, based on the above -- feel free to follow along in the full text of the DMCA if you like.

The DMCA is an unusual regulation in that it principally protects service providers from litigation and then rigidly defines the steps they must follow to stay under its umbrella. It puts eBay in a position a little bit like Bart Simpson's, when Sideshow Bob announces:

"The following people will not be killed by me: Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Lisa Simpson, that little baby Simpson.... That is all."

Title II of the DMCA, otherwise known as the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act," is what seems to be relevant. It describes under what conditions a service provider is not liable "for infringement of copyright." My guess is that eBay is looking at section 202(c): "Information Residing On Systems Or Networks At Direction Of Users." The system is ebay.com; the users are the sellers; presumably the information is, in this case, the item being auctioned. Or the text and graphics used to describe the auction? I'm not sure.

Section 202(c)(1)(C) indicates that eBay will not be subject to liability as long as it, "upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity."

Paragraph (3) describes the elements which must be present in a notification, including: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Based on eBay's statements, the Church of Scientology has sworn under penalty of perjury that it has an "exclusive right" to copyright on the material that was posted in the auction.

To me, that seems obviously wrong. An e-meter is an electrical device, or a religious artifact, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's sold to customers who may or may not be members of the Church. Once they've bought the items, they should be able to do with them what they wish, including reselling them to whoever they wish.

But to enjoy the protections of the DMCA, service providers must remove any material as soon as they're told it infringes on copyright. Once material has been challenged, the service provider must act "expeditiously" to remove it. Only when the material is gone can the accused user make a case to defend it.

The carrot for service providers becomes a stick for users.

Meanwhile, I'd like to see the statement that the Church of Scientology made, under penalty of perjury, that an auction of an e-meter infringes on their copyright in some way. Any spokespeople for the CoS reading this are welcome to contact me to discuss it.

But, as Declan McCullagh wrote in an unrelated DMCA story yesterday, we are moving toward a two-tier copyright system on the internet -- at least in this country. If you don't host your own content, the DMCA's censor-first, ask-questions-later mandate effectively strips you of your rights.

Does the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cover electrical religious artifacts? Apparently the Church of Scientology thinks so. eBay has been yanking auctions of e-meters because of complaints by the CoS. In response to queries by a collector, eBay said "the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason." Does the DMCA really prohibit the sale of these boxes? (more)

The short answer is: "No" -- as far as I can tell -- I'm not a lawyer. But this is just one more data point in the disturbing trend of the DMCA being used as an all-purpose club to remove material from the Internet.

On hearing of this, my first thought was that perhaps the devices in question are actually licensed somehow, instead of being sold outright. But I spoke to two former members and the spouse of a current member of the CoS, each of whom assured me categorically that the devices were purchased outright, with no license required to be signed. A staffer at the Lisa McPherson Trust found a catalog where anyone can buy an e-meter; the "public price" is a little higher than the price to CoS members, but there are no apparent limitations to the purchase. A credit card is all you'll need.

The device itself is just an electrical mechanism, somewhat like a fancy multimeter or oscilloscope. It's patented, but of course thousands of patented items are sold on eBay every day.

To members of the Church of Scientology, however, it's more than just an electrical device. It's used in "auditing," which apparently helps new members advance in the program. Members of the CoS who have become experienced in this process are licensed by the CoS to audit others (but, again, the purchase of the items themselves is not under license).

Some e-meters apparently have Intel Inside (an 8-bit microprocessor which performs some rudimentary functions). But ever since a 1963 raid in which the FDA took exception to the marketing of the device as medically beneficial, e-meters have carried a disclaimer which begins: "By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counselling."

I'd hard-pressed to think of why copyright could apply to a piece of electronic gadgetry which "does nothing." So why is eBay refusing to allow its sale?

Because DMCA is such an effective club.

Rod Keller, a Scientology critic, noticed that e-meter auctions were being taken down, and wrote eBay to ask why. The response was:

Hello,

These items are not prohibited due to their nature, but the Church of Scientology is giving us Notices of Infringement, which we are legally required to honor. These items are being ended for that reason.

Regards,

[...]
eBay Community Watch Supervisor

(Emphasis added.) That explanation, by the way, is a little facile: eBay is "legally required to honor" such notices if it wants to remain lawsuit-proof about the item. They would be well within their legal rights to leave the auctions up. More on this later.

When Mr. Keller expressed surprise at this, the next message went into a little more detail:

Hello,

There is a procedure under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act whereby someone who claims to be an owner of Intellectual property can send a notice sworn under penalty of perjury that an item is infringing. The internet provider must then remove the item. The seller of the item (not a third party) can request and fill out a counter notice. If he/she does so, the complaining party who filled out the original notice has a limited period of time to file suit, or the provider can go ahead and relist the item.

This is set up under the statute so that the interested parties will be the ones doing any litigating.

Regards,

eBay Customer Support

In response to my requests for more detail on exactly how the DMCA was being invoked by the CoS, an eBay representative promised that someone would get in touch with me. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from them by press time.

Here's what I think happened, based on the above -- feel free to follow along in the full text of the DMCA if you like.

The DMCA is an unusual regulation in that it principally protects service providers from litigation and then rigidly defines the steps they must follow to stay under its umbrella. It puts eBay in a position a little bit like Bart Simpson's, when Sideshow Bob announces:

"The following people will not be killed by me: Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Lisa Simpson, that little baby Simpson.... That is all."

Title II of the DMCA, otherwise known as the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act," is what seems to be relevant. It describes under what conditions a service provider is not liable "for infringement of copyright." My guess is that eBay is looking at section 202(c): "Information Residing On Systems Or Networks At Direction Of Users." The system is ebay.com; the users are the sellers; presumably the information is, in this case, the item being auctioned. Or the text and graphics used to describe the auction? I'm not sure.

Section 202(c)(1)(C) indicates that eBay will not be subject to liability as long as it, "upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity."

Paragraph (3) describes the elements which must be present in a notification, including: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Based on eBay's statements, the Church of Scientology has sworn under penalty of perjury that it has an "exclusive right" to copyright on the material that was posted in the auction.

To me, that seems obviously wrong. An e-meter is an electrical device, or a religious artifact, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's sold to customers who may or may not be members of the Church. Once they've bought the items, they should be able to do with them what they wish, including reselling them to whoever they wish.

But to enjoy the protections of the DMCA, service providers must remove any material as soon as they're told it infringes on copyright. Once material has been challenged, the service provider must act "expeditiously" to remove it. Only when the material is gone can the accused user make a case to defend it.

The carrot for service providers becomes a stick for users.

Meanwhile, I'd like to see the statement that the Church of Scientology made, under penalty of perjury, that an auction of an e-meter infringes on their copyright in some way. Any spokespeople for the CoS reading this are welcome to contact me to discuss it.

But, as Declan McCullagh wrote in an unrelated DMCA story yesterday, we are moving toward a two-tier copyright system on the internet -- at least in this country. If you don't host your own content, the DMCA's censor-first, ask-questions-later mandate effectively strips you of your rights.

rhet writes "Here's an interesting article about an autonomous robot that is exploring the Antarctic looking for meteorites. So far it has found three of them. The robot, Nomad, is built by Carnegie Mellon. Nomad's home page is here."

Mandrake wrote in: "CMU Sphinx (the speech recognition software being developed at CMU being funded by DARPA and NSF for the last 15 years) has gone open source and is up for download on SourceForge. You can check out the announcement, go to the home page at CMU, or download the code for yourself. It should build out-of-box on several platforms, linux, freebsd, sun4m, etc. - but work is still needed. Help with documentation would be greatly appreciated, too. It's important that people grab this stuff ASAP, too, just in case some people decide to go after it for potential patent violations (we all know how much people love the patent system)."

We asked Jim Hall a bunch of questions Monday. Today we get answers about the reason for and future of FreeDOS, along with a sprinkling of advice for FreeDOS users and developers. Thanks, Jim, for taking the time to do this. (Guys like you, who work on "lower profile" open source projects, don't get nearly as much recognition as you deserve.) Click below for the complete interview.

1) Lifespan of DOS
by ucblockhead

While it is very nice to have some sort of non-MS DOS available (at least for us gamers), it still basically 15-20 year old technology. How much longer do you think DOS, or DOS emulation, will be necessary?

Jim:

I think DOS will be around for quite some time yet. DOS remains a great environment to work in if you are building an embedded system, for example. The operating system is light, so it will run well in a device that doesn't have a lot of memory. You can burn it into ROM, boot from a floppy, or a small micro-drive. There aren't many operating systems that you can find these days that will boot from a floppy, yet still leave you enough room on the disk for your embedded program and maybe some room for data files.

I think the embedded systems market is one of the markets that will keep DOS alive, at least for several years to come. (Exactly how many years that will be is hard to guess. Yoda: "Always changing is the future.") Look at some of the alternatives that you have today if you want to build a small embedded device: DOS, Windows CE (and there's a reason they call it "wince"), or an embedded Linux (ala Elks). Look at it a little more closely, and you'll see that if space becomes an issue for you, DOS is really the only way to go. Linux and Windows both require too much overhead to build an efficient embedded system.

Another thing that will keep DOS alive, even behind the scenes, is the PC market. A lot of companies that make computer hardware (disk arrays, video cards, controller cards, etc.) use some kind of BIOS. (This is just an example.) Now, the way of the operating system is to make it free, and for more and more operating systems to become available and popular (right now, looking at my friends and people around the office, we use: Windows 95/98, Windows NT, Linux, FreeBSD, FreeDOS.) The hardware manufacturer may not care exactly what operating system you use. After all, they provide hardware, and others may provide the software drivers that make use of it.

At some point, you'll need to provide a patch, and the user will need to flash the BIOS on their device. If you are the hardware manufacturer, how do you distribute a flash update to all your users? Will you provide a different update program for every operating system platform that might be using your hardware? In my quick list, I count five different operating systems. Will you create five different versions of your update program, and provide support on all those platforms (remember also that the Windows NT credo is "thou shalt not touch thy hardware")? For a lot of companies, the answer is no. It's a lot simpler if they can give their users a bootable floppy disk that they put into their computer, and the boot floppy automatically flashes the BIOS.

If all you need is a simple program that updates the BIOS with new instructions, do you really need a multitasking kernel for that (ala Linux or a Windows-like kernel)? The simplest choice is to use DOS, with the SHELL= line in your CONFIG.SYS file set to the flash program. At least, that's how I'd do it. (There may be some hardware vendors out there who read this and think "Gee, glad he's not on my project.")

2) Best thing about DOS
by Jon Peterson

Since you must be very well acquainted with the internals of DOS, are there any parts of it that have struck you either as being very clever in a hackerish sort of way, or very clumsy and kludgy (in an equally hackerish sort of way)?

Whilst we all loathed DOS when it was around, there was no debating that it was danged fast for some things, and its complete lack of abstraction was fun for games programmers and the like who got to cut through to the hardware when it suited them (and when it didn't!). Do you miss this rawness and freedom in more protective environments like Unix and Win32?

Jim:

I like the simplicity that DOS offers. As a DOS user, you have the equivalent of 'root' access on your computer. Anything that you want to do on the PC is possible. Nothing is really stopping you, other than hardware limitations. I find that this additional degree of freedom is nice to have, although since I work in both environments (UNIX and DOS) I tend write programs that stick to "safe areas" that work on both platforms.

DOS is also easy to learn, at least on the technical side. It's not nearly as complicated as something like UNIX, and even a user who is untrained in DOS can figure out that if you twiddle this thing here, that thing pops out over there. UNIX isn't as easy to pick up.

What don't I like? There are some things about what Microsoft did with DOS that do irk me. The biggest is that MS-DOS commands lack options, not that there are lots of MS-DOS commands anyway. Look at MS-DOS TYPE. Under MS-DOS, you can only type:

TYPE file.txt You don't have any options on that command line. Compare it with UNIX 'cat', which has more options than you can shake a stick at. It's the same with the other DOS commands.

I suppose that in a way, it was part of what got me to start FreeDOS in the first place. I wanted to have more powerful tools than what MS-DOS provided me with. So I hacked some of my own. (I wasn't a strong C programmer at the time, so this wasn't very beautiful code.) After I'd written over a dozen utilities that replaced MS-DOS commands, and found some public domain source that implemented other functionality, I realized that you could reproduce what MS-DOS does and make it a free software project. The rest, I guess, would be what we are today.

**There's an interesting bit of history here. When I first wrote my DOS utilities, my TYPE command had 8 command line options, with functionality that was similar to UNIX 'cat'. But later, I went back to read my code and realized that my code sucked! So I cleaned it up a bit, and decided that I would implement a TYPE that was more like MS-DOS. Yet no one has complained. Interesting...

3) Project suitable for a moving target?
by Wholeflaffer

Do you think this sort of project is only suitable for dead or dying software? By this I mean, DOS hasn't been in significant development for a while now, so making a clone is like reconstructing a static subject. Do you think your project could have been successful during the time of MS-DOS 6.0, or instead do you think commercial developers would have torpedoed your efforts by redesigning their next release to be less cloneable?

Jim:

Looking at MS-DOS 6 is kind of unfair. By that time, I think Microsoft had enjoyed success with Windows for a fair bit, and was starting to realize that they could make a hell of a lot more money if they switched to that. FreeDOS in the days of MS-DOS 6 really wouldn't have made things turn out much different than they are today. Anyway, FreeDOS *was* around in the MS-DOS 6.x days.

If FreeDOS had been around earlier in the MS-DOS 6 lifespan, Microsoft would have made moves to protect its interests. The DOS interface would have changed, or (more subtly) new, hidden DOS API would appear that the next version of Windows would depend on. "Free version of DOS? Hah! You can't run our version of Windows with it."

Actually, you saw a bit of this with the Caldera lawsuit on behalf of DR-DOS.

I think things really might have turned out differently if we had come out with a FreeDOS back in the days of MS-DOS 5. At that point, DOS was *the* desktop operating system. In at least the areas that I could see, people weren't making the switch to Windows, and DOS apps dominated the office desktop PC.

Introducing a free version of DOS, where the source code was available so that developers could see what was going on and make their own fixes and improvements, would have really shaken up the DOS market. I think a company would have started doing with DOS what Red Hat and Caldera are doing with Linux: bundle it, sell it, and support it. If popularity grew similarly to the way Linux's popularity has grown, I think the DOS vendors of the time would have had no choice but to consider FreeDOS a viable alternative to their commercial, closed-source DOS systems. And consider this: with a low cost to create a product (testing and support) and a relatively low barrier to entry at the time, and Microsoft would have been given a run for its money.

Microsoft has a little statement on their FreeDOS forum(MSN) that I like to bring up at times like this: "DOS is still a viable choice for millions of computers worldwide and FreeDOS offers an alternative to commercial DOS operating systems. FreeDOS does not use any Microsoft (MS-DOS) or Caldera (DR-DOS) code. The developers used public descriptions of DOS (i.e., user manuals) to recreate DOS functionality. In other words, FreeDOS is a clone."

You can assume different things about how people might have responded to a free version of DOS in the MS-DOS 5 days. I look at the proliferation of shareware at the time - I mean things that people brought into the office and actually *used* - and I like to think that people would have reacted favorably to a FreeDOS.

I wonder what the world be like if FreeDOS became so popular and widespread, and Microsoft would have had to make modifications to release an MS-DOS 5.1 that was compatible with any extensions added by the free DOS? :-)

4) How close is 1.0?
by Paul Neubauer

I've played a bit with FreeDOS (Beta3) on a spare 386 some. I will likely be trying Beta4 (or later, depending on my time..) in the foreseeable future. I'm reasonably impressed with the "lite" setup version. (Though warning a third disk, blank, may be needed would be a Good Idea, IMO.)

What do you feel are the remaining steps that must be taken to move from beta to the first non-beta version?

Jim:

I'll take that advice for the FreeDOS install program. That's a project that I maintain, and that particular bug is one that really got annoying when I installed it on my system at home. It's a kernel thing.

On the other question of when will a Version 1 be ready? If you look at the FreeDOS Software list you'll see that not all of the MS-DOS functionality has been reproduced in FreeDOS. For example, we don't have a MS-compatible BACKUP/RESTORE, we don't have CHKDSK/SCANDISK and we don't have EMM386. But I don't really see that as much of a barrier to going to Version 1. After all, if someone really wanted to have those functions available under the GNU GPL and supplied by FreeDOS, someone would have written them by now.

For example: A lot of people get by with using zip/unzip to backup their software (when's the last time you backed up *your* home system?) And there are shareware programs that do the same job as CHKDSK/SCANDISK (many people still use the venerable Norton Utilities, which does one better.)

The big barrier to Version 1 is, I think, the 512MB bug. Right now, the FreeDOS kernel can't handle hard disks that are larger than 512MB. If you try to even do a DIR on a FAT bigger than 512MB, you hose the FAT.

At one time, we did have a fix for the 512MB bug. But I'll be honest: that fix was lost and will need to be recreated. The version with the 512MB fix had some other issues anyway, so when we changed maintainers that code was dropped. But until the FreeDOS kernel can support large disks, I don't want to make a Version 1 FreeDOS distribution.

5) DOS Based Pseudo Embedded Systems
by Doug Dante

There are a lot of pseudo embedded DOS based systems out there. My previous employer had a remote access concentrator product in this category, and paid a non-trivial sum per box to Microsoft for DOS 5.0, a product that Microsoft refused to support. Unfortunately, I was unable to convince management to give Free DOS a try.

Has Free DOS made any progress in these types of markets? Are people using Free DOS to replace MS-DOS in these pseudo embedded systems? )

Jim:

FreeDOS is definitely being used in these markets, and FreeDOS is definitely being taken as an alternative to MS-DOS in these areas.

John Price has a really good example of an embedded system that uses FreeDOS. It's called The Box: "It is a box with a single board computer (a 486DX made by Ampro), and an LCD display, two volume knobs, and four push buttons. The push buttons are connected to four inputs of the PRINTER port, and the software polls the printer port inputs to read the key presses and control the operation of the program.

At one point, I had started a list of ways in which FreeDOS is being used in the commercial market. I can't seem to find that list anymore. Guess I've been a bad web guy!

But the list goes something like this, as far as I can remember (I'd need to find the list before I can report names, since I'm not sure):

• a Japanese company is using FreeDOS as an embedded controller for a piece of machinery.
• a graphics card company distributes FreeDOS on boot disks that they distribute to users to flash their BIOS.
• a disk array manufacturer put FreeDOS on boot disks to let you control options on the disk array.
• Maximum PC Magazine ran an article about FreeDOS in reviving old PC's as Internet terminals. A PC manufacturer in Germany is doing just that - collecting old 486 hardware, installing FreeDOS, and selling the systems.

And more!

I'd really like to do more with embedded computing myself, but I haven't found the time to go in that direction. But EMJ Embedded Systems is selling a '386-24MHz PC/104 SBC for less than $200, and this is just the kind of low-end system that I would like to play with. Maybe I'll have to make time for this, anyway. Another hobby.

6) Reverse Engineering
by Effugas

The DVD CCA's argument has essentially become, had MS thought in advance to include but a single sentence in a license agreement, FreeDOS could have been supressed.

How do you feel about this, and what advantages do you feel society has a whole has received from the fruits of your reverse engineered labors? Similarly, what harms would we have as a society if you could never have rewritten DOS?

Jim:

I guess I'll weight in with my two cents here, even though I'm no expert on the DVD-CCA thing. Remember that the entire PC industry exists because of a single reverse engineering effort. When Compaq first debuted with the IBM-compatible PC, it launched a computer revolution. Now everyone could build their own PC company, compatible with IBM's original effort. Because of that, you have increased competition to make a better product. Prices get lower, while quality gets better (Microsoft not withstanding.) You try to do it as cleanly as you can (in terms of clean room engineering.) I think the DeCSS guys had every right to reverse engineer how DVD systems work. It opens up the market (which is what DVD-CCA doesn't want.) By creating a free version of DOS, I believe we have improved the state of DOS everywhere. Unlike the DOS'es that came before it, FreeDOS opened up its source code. You can look at it, and if you find a bug you can fix it right away without waiting for a service patch. If you find that your DOS application would run better if DOS ran just a little differently, you have the ability to make that change. And under the GNU GPL, you have the right to distribute those changes. As a DOS community, we all benefit from this.

7) How do you feel about Caldera?
by MrHat

A previous Slashdot article included reactions to the settling of Caldera's lawsuit regarding DR-DOS, their non-free DOS clone. What are your feelings on the lawsuit and its settlement? Even though your development isn't focused upon running Windows, have you ever run into any similar "forced incompatibility" issues (Microsoft-related or otherwise)?

Jim:

I have a lot of feelings about Caldera. I could write tomes on that one.

One one hand, Caldera has done some cool things with DOS. I really like the idea of writing a TSR that provided a wrapper for all the missing functionality between DR-DOS and MS-DOS 7 (the version of DOS that underlies Windows 95.) I listened to Bryan Sparks from Caldera speak at a TCLUG meeting once. One of his topics was the lawsuit, and how their TSR program lit up an indicator every time Windows 95 accessed a DOS API. This showed how much DOS was part of Windows 95, that it wasn't really a new operating system that just happened to have a command-line interface that looked a heck of a lot like DOS. It really was a play on DOS + Windows, just like the old Windows 3.1.

On the other hand, I think Caldera has done some bad things that have been hurtful to free software. Hopefully, they will turn that act around.

Back to the Caldera v. Microsoft suit. I think it would be more fair to call it the DR-DOS v. Microsoft suit, since what was really at stake was an accusation that Microsoft had hacked its pre-release version of Windows (the version that all the IT managers were using to evaluate this new thing called Windows, and see if it will work on top of the really cool DR-DOS that most of them were using.) The hack was supposedly to make it appear as though DR-DOS was not capable of supporting MS Windows, so if you wanted to jump on the GUI bandwagon, you better buy MS-DOS to go with it since you know they'll work together.

Caldera had already bought the rights to DR-DOS. I think it was really part of Caldera's responsibility to carry on the fight that DR couldn't continue - that Microsoft might have intentionally broken its own software's compatibility to put a stain on the reputation of a customer. In my view, Caldera bought DR-DOS's benefits, but it also bought its history, and this Microsoft thing was sitting right there as a stain on its record. It was in Caldera's best interest to take it to court.

On the "forced incompatibility" thing: no, I don't recall any issues that we ran into with that. When Pat Villani wrote the first kernel, he implemented only those DOS API that he needed to support his applications. I suspect a lot of that was analysis to figure out what was breaking, and how it was really supposed to work (things like _Undocumented DOS_ weren't available.) Later, when Pat's kernel became the FreeDOS Kernel, we had access to terrific resources like Ralph Brown's Interrupt List. That's your compatibility right there. It tells you all the features you need to add to become compatible with MS-DOS.

8)Internals Question
by jd

DOS had some fascinating internals, some of which were never really exploited or realised. One example was the disk drive. DOS supported, at the machine-instruction level, 127 floppy drives and 127 hard drives, for example. Indeed, some early PCs came with 4 floppy drives as standard.

What is FreeDOS' take on such quirks? In other words, where the system call specification is more general than what was actually implemented, are you referring back to the specification or what Microsoft actually coded?

Jim:

I don't see us implementing these kind of interesting quirks. I've seen it, but you have to remember that people hack code to support the systems they have. And not too many people have PC hardware that actually includes 127 floppy drives and 127 hard disks. :-)

I guess the trend has been that, when you're adding compatibility, you look at what the program actually needs and you work from there. These kinds of quirky underpinnings don't really come into it. Sorry.

9)Packet Drivers & tcp/ip Stacks
by flaw

I find DOS to be an extremely useful system, and a necessary one if you're running old hardware. I personally know know several students who contentedly write their essays on 286 machines using DOS WordPerfect or WordStar. I myself have an old PC XT, running DR DOS, networked to my Linux router using a DOS plip packet driver and wattcp. There's a lot of old hardware around, and I think that tcp/ip network connectivity is one of the most useful ways of breathing added vitality into old boxes. The problem with it now is that it can be a bear to setup (especially dialup ppp connections), and most of the people I know who would make use of it are not exactly computer enthusiasts.

Looking through the FreeDOS software lists I don't see any mention of packet drivers, tcp/ip stacks, or pppd implementations. Are there any plans of integrating some form of tcp/ip network connectivity in future versions of FreeDOS? If so, would it be easier to setup then what is presently available?

Jim:

Actually, I would like to include Internet dial-up software with the next FreeDOS distribution. The real reason that I haven't done so up until now is that I'm lazy. I admit it.

In the early distributions (Alpha1-5) that were put out by M. "Hannibal" Toal, we did have DOSPPP and a web browser. When I began to manage the FreeDOS distributions, I simplified the distributions so I could put things into packages, make them easier to maintain and install, etc. One of the first things to go was DOSPPP.

As we released more FreeDOS distributions, people have become more comfortable with FreeDOS as their version of DOS. Until now, most people have been installing FreeDOS to use under DOSEmu or something similar where you don't need a network connection (because you have it under the primary environment that is running the emulator.) But I think it is time to add the DOSPPP package again. Look for a new disk set to appear in Beta5.

Note that the TCP/IP stack does not necessarily go through the network redirector (which is broken.) There is even a free Web server (FISH) that runs on FreeDOS and shows how to write TCP/IP-enabled applications on FreeDOS.

10) FreeDOS and Redirection
by BacOs

I have recently setup a client with a Linux server running DOSEMU and one of the requirements was to access network shares from within the DOSEMU session using LREDIR or emufs.sys.

We had to deploy the system with MS-DOS 6.22 (in other words we could not deply the system using Free DOS) because FAQ 6.1 of the DOSEMU FAQ says "First make sure you aren't using DosC (the FreeDos kernel), because unfortunately this can't yet cope with the redirector stuff." (I know it doesn't work - I tried anyway :))

Anyway, my question is, when will FreeDOS work with redirection?

Jim:

I think network redirection is coming, but I can't tell you exactly when that will be. I have to give James Tabor a lot of credit for making the patches to the kernel that provided CD-ROM support. John Price (kernel maintainer) has also put a lot of work into it to bring the kernel where it is today.

The CD-ROM support definitely started to add redirector support to the FreeDOS kernel, but network redirector support just isn't there yet.

I guess all I can do to answer this question is re-post part of a message from James Tabor at the time that we posted kernel build 2017f (CD-ROM support) back in December: I hope this is it. I would like to see this kernel tested! I know there is probably something I forgot, if so let me know. I did not remove SHSUCDX from the bin directory. I think everyone needs it. MSCDEX works but it is unable to read file entries. I'm going to start work on the Network part of this. I'll wait until next year to post unless someone wants it now. Still can't find out why SCSI device drivers boom during any device access. Darn! I'm going to take a break for the next month. So let me know!

BONUS QUESTIONS (chosen by Jim):

I found out about this a while ago, when I first heard about Litestep, but I've always wondered one thing...

Could you rewrite a version of DOS that'll work with Windows 9x and have the correct slashes ( / ) in the filesystem instead of those bass-ackward ones ( \ ) that are always in the wrong spot to type quickly?

Jim:

Actually, you could use switchar to change the DOS application's idea of the switch character. You might change it to '-' for example, meaning that '/' could be used for directory separators (Note: DOS doesn't care if you use '\' or '/' to separate directories- look at Freemacs.)

However, the bigger problem is that not all DOS apps honor the switchar value in DOS. A lot of apps (I'll admit it - even my own) just assume '/' as the option character, and look specifically for that. My hack to GNU Getopt assumes '/', and my hack to HTML Help to use PD getopt also assumes '/'.

So it's a mixed answer: yes, you can use switchar to change the switch character with some apps, but you will still need to use '/' for those apps that don't recognize switchar.

What's the meaning behind the "names" for the Beta distributions?

Jim:

We've had several code names in the Beta distributions: Orlando (Beta1), Marvin (Beta2), Ventura (Beta3), and Lemur (Beta4). The short answer is that I thought it was cute.

The origin of each of the code names are:

- Orlando (Beta1)

At the time that I created the first Beta distribution for FreeDOS (the first distribution to actually have an install program, rather than being just a huge zip file) I was about to take a vacation to see my brother. Since he lives in Orlando, FL I thought it would be cool to name the distribution based on that trip.

- Marvin (Beta2)

I was starting to wax nostalgic for FreeDOS's roots. When I started the FreeDOS Project, I was a physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Marvin was a VAX system that was being de-commissioned at about the time I announced FreeDOS.

- Ventura (Beta3)

Jesse Ventura had become governor of my state. 'Nuf said. (Save us!)

- Lemur (Beta4)

I've always wanted to have a mascot for the FreeDOS Project (it's a gimmick.) Linux has the penguin, BSD has the daemon, and GNU has the gnu. I've never pushed the idea of officially adopting a FreeDOS mascot because I didn't want to get distracted by the noise that would create. Not when I could be hacking code. I guess naming the Beta4 the "Lemur" distribution was my way of adopting a mascot when we really didn't. Plus, I've always thought lemurs looked cool.

-jh

..............

Jim Hall lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife (Sara) and four cats (Midnight, Murphy, Vita, and Linus.) Yes, he named the cat after Torvalds. So he's a geek.

..............

Next week: Jon Johansen, the deCSS guy.

Nelson Weiderman writes "For about 36 hours (as of 9 a.m EST 12/31), cihost.com and the domain names it serves have been off the air with attempts to access them getting "the server does not have a DNS entry" message. Calls to their customer service (when you can get through) have a recording indicating that they attempted an equipment upgrade and that they tried to restore a backup NameServer, which apparently failed. They are trying to reassure customers that none of their data has been lost. Anybody know what's happening there or what the prospects are for recovery? I chose CI Host because they were rated in the top five web hosting services by three separate rating organizations. " We've been getting a huge amount of submissions about this, especially in light of the Masslinux Disappearing Act. Click below for more details - but from what research I've been able to do, it appears that they've been hit with a terribly timed series of mishaps and problems, and are working on getting back online.

This e-mail came to me as well: Hi,

Below is a copy of a post to alt.www.webmaster by Graham Wideman. I confirm his comments in every detail. I personaly have five domains (addresses below) with CiHost which are currently totaly unavailable (http,ftp,mail you name it)..

----------------

Major Hosting service provider (28,000 domains?) CI Host has been attempting to move their servers for the last 10 days, with one problem after another, including webmasters unable to access their sites for update, and old backups being restored over new data.

Now we are up to 24 hours during which all sites, plus the email they support, are completely inaccessible due to CI Host's name servers being off the net. For many, this means they cannot even transfer their sites elsewhere (due to the way Network Solutions requires transfer email to come from the registered webmaster's address).

Adding spice to this picture is the fact that CI Host is a charter member of, and "certified" by the Web Host Guild, which is the main activity of Sumo Inc, now owned by CNet.

For further info on CIHost downtime, see alt.www.webmaster.
--
Regards
Alan Cowderoy