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Vernor Vinge coined the term.

And we really don't want it.

You won't like it.

I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument.

How about Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig?

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, CODE and THE FUTURE OF IDEAS, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in FREE CULTURE, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works—books, movies, records, software, and so on—are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible—technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the First Congress in 1790 was 14 years, renewable once. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we’ve forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

In other words: Code is Law. Whoever controls the code controls what happens, no matter what happens. It's the moderm version of "possession is nine points of the law".

RMS figured it out in 1883, Lessig figured it out in 2000, Jobs figured it out in 2001 (probably read Lessig), the music industry figured it out two minutes ago.

Protecting consumers? Could we please stop using this word and talk about protecting people's freedom in their exchanges over the internet? Freedom not to be called or spamed, freedom to choose privacy levels, freedom to share, and freedom to express our opinions. Today we are faced with the Internet being threatened by its appropriation from network owners who are starting to choose and select content (in France they are starting to filter out p2p software). That is number one threat to everyone and Lawrence Lessig has been screaming about this for years, and rightly so. In his 1999 book 'Code Is Law' (http://www.code-is-law.org/) he literally argued that the architecture we devise for our information systems are like laws that are directly enforceable. In the real world leniency is built in because full enforceability would be too difficult, expensive, unpractical, or unrealistic. This allows a certain degree of flexibility within which exceptions can have their space, thus avoiding suffocation by complete control over everything. However in the architecture of information systems we can ensure rules are followed whatever the situation. Such level of enforceability are not necessarily desirable, and an obvious example is in the domain of copyright and how computer systems can enforce them, leaving little or no space for fair use. This is why the model of the commons is so crucial, especially where technology inserts itself in-between people's relationships. Letting just private and commercial interests be solely in charge of the network is a fundamental mistake. A social network software which cannot be changed by its users is simply a new form of totalitarism (cybertotalitarism?). How about online marketplaces where participants can't have a say in how the market should be operated, or where they can be excluded arbitrarily, or where their personal information is used for deviated purposes? We need tools and platforms that give us choices. Not just skin(deep) choices, but real choice on how to play the games and what the rules are. How we architect the next version of the internet is the crucial point, and the FTC should better (re)read Lessig and make his concerns item number one on the agenda.

Evidently, YANAL. If you've any aspiration of becoming one, and especially if you have any intention of pontificating sensibly on privacy issues like the one being discussed here, you'll have to learn a heck of a lot of stuff that you seem not to get at the moment. Off the top of my head, one good place to look would be Larry Lessig's Code. Pay particular attention to the discussion of Olmstead v. United States and especially Katz v. United States, which overruled Olmstead and AFAIK remains legal precedent to this day.

Maybe then you'll have something even remotely sensible to say, about either the Fourth Amendment or anything else.

-HJ

As always, what you should use depends on your needs. If X works perfectly for you, then great. As a "frame-buffer oriented network-transparent graphics API" it'd be hard to beat. As the foundation for kits like Gtk and Qt (and even PicoGui sometimes) it works well.

However, as a platform (a standard for application creation) X is sub-optimal for users and developers.

The value of a standard comes not only from what it allows you to do, but what it forbids.

Suppose I write 3 programs to perform the same tasks under different GUIs: Microsoft's, Apple's OS X Quartz/Aqua, and X11R6. A Mac user can sit down without looking at the instructions and use his familiar old mouse motions, menu commands, and keystrokes with hardly a glance at the new stuff. A Windows(tm) user has nearly the same advantages. The icons for the same feature (Save, Print) look exactly the same, regardless of the program.
Of course that's not the case for X programs. Whenever I sit down at a new X11 program, I have to spend a few minutes recalibrating the basics ("How to I copy/paste, again?")

Because X allows the developer so much freedom, it deprives the user of the ability to anticipate how a program will operate. "The program can do nearly anything" sounds like an advantage, until you try to predict what a program will actually do!

Note that a weakness of Apple and Microsoft's GUI systems is that the "forbidding" part of their standard often comes in the form of "law" instead of "code". The taboos are enforced by developers getting chastised by the GUI vendor or the public when a non-ituitive program is released.

A weak method- the lag time for feedback is long, and if the offending developer works for the GUI vendor, he might insert loopholes into the rules.). But it produces superior results to X programs, where the users lack an imposing rulebook to point to as formal justification for their complaints. Improvements may happen, but there's nothing forcing them to converge on one way of doing things.

Some common responses to this argument:
"You want a toolkit, not X"
Maybe so. If a user's desktop could only run one toolkit, she'd never see an unfamiliar interface. This has the problem of discarding pre-existing programs, but argument-by-popularity is a logical fallacy (I'm talking about what solution would be best, not cheapest short-term). Better than using a single toolkit, though, is somehow allowing the application to be written independent of toolkit, and obeying whatever HCI conventions a particular user enjoys. PicoGui tries to do this.

"No one can be sure what the best interface is. Keeping flexibility gives us power."
In theory it does, but at the expense of accessibility. Too often it means that developers who don't want to be "HCI Researchers" find themselves wrestling with UI code that's entangled their applications.
PicoGui (and other "next-generation" UI systems) attempt to resolve this by keeping the application programmer further from the UI code than is traditional. (They haven't been totally successful yet)
He can't mess with the per-pixel alignment of buttons, because that's outside of the application's control.
This is fundamentally better than the way Apple and Microsoft's traditional Human Interface manuals have worked, because enforcement of the rules is done not by humans (punishing programs that act wrongly) but by software (doing the work for you, so it's guaranteed to do it right).

In many cases, however, a read through the theory will save you a lot of time

I think it's valuable to do reading in things other than technical manuals to get a handle on the forces that shape and are shaped by the technology that IT professionals help shape. I know I'm playing fast and loose with the context of the quote I put above, but I really think that computer professionals benefit a lot by reading about how the law and technology influence each other (and how one sometimes outpaces the other and the ramifications that can have).

To that end, I'll recommend anything written by Lawrence Lessig until I'm blue in the face. The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace go really far in illuminating what (to anyone without Lessigs years of education and practical application) can seem like randomly occuring and chaotic changes in policy and technology.

I also think that being able to speak about history and law in technology contexts is a good career move, especially for those of us who aren't the most talented coders. Business, government and education all waste millions every year because they lack the foresight to come up with good IT policy. There's a lot of change to be made here, but it takes more than just technical knowledge to do it right.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.

If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

the three tax related government bodies would require a special identity certificate... that can only be provided (and verified) by your bank.

In Code and other laws of cyberspace, Lessig talks about something just like this. Using digital certificates to indentify yourself online. The problem comes in when said certificate contains things like a "geographic location" field. Then, a gambling site hosted in Las Vegas can be forced to decline you access if you are living in Iowa, and other such abuses.

This is even without getting into the problems if something like this became prevalent to the point that you got this certificate from your ISP, and were required to have it to go online. Then you could be tracked *everywhere*.

Yeah, I can think of ways to preserve anonymity, like a "certificate proxy server" hosted someplace out of the reach of US law, but I'd rather not have to deal with it at all.

From this essay we can see that RMS holds a more fundemental view that everyone is skirting around but not really attacking directly. It is a particular view on what Freedom is, this is implicit in his being so it's hardly worth moaning on about sneaky redefinition on his part, actually no he wants to be our bearded master etc. etc. He is stating that the FSF reject the notion that software authors should be allowed to choose their own license for software. He makes no apologies that the FSF is a radical group, and the GPL is the most vocal expression, under current copyright law, of their ideals, and a bridge for authors to place their software into that world of quite specific ideals. But the ideals that the GPL represents are not best served by copyright law, and this essay reaches beyond copyright to an even more overtly political stance: that computer software is too important to be protected by copyright, which makes it "too" easy for authors to restrict what people do with their code. This is based on Lessig's maxim that "code is law"; as I understand it, he means that computer software regulates the pace and rules of modern living to such a degree that it thoroughly regulates our lives in many of the same ways that the government and police force would. Lessig concludes his book with a suggestion that the Y2K fears might have been allayed if software was treated as fundamentally as law, and at least deposited with a government agency in case of crisis; I think this is the direction that Stallman is leaning in. That is to say the very act of creating a piece of software that anybody, anywhere might use carries a public responsibility for its effects, and part of this responsibility must involve people who use it not being helpless to change it if the circumstances require: whether this be fixing a bug or removing an unneeded piece of functionality.

I've certainly formed some new conclusions as a result of this essay; but in general I agree that he's making his position more extreme by explicitly rejecting the current structure of (C) law with regard to software.

From this essay we can see that RMS holds a more fundemental view that everyone is skirting around but not really attacking directly. It is a particular view on what Freedom is, this is implicit in his being so it's hardly worth moaning on about sneaky redefinition on his part, actually no he wants to be our bearded master etc. etc. He is stating that the FSF reject the notion that software authors should be allowed to choose their own license for software. He makes no apologies that the FSF is a radical group, and the GPL is the most vocal expression, under current copyright law, of their ideals, and a bridge for authors to place their software into that world of quite specific ideals. But the ideals that the GPL represents are not best served by copyright law, and this essay reaches beyond copyright to an even more overtly political stance: that computer software is too important to be protected by copyright, which makes it "too" easy for authors to restrict what people do with their code. This is based on Lessig's maxim that "code is law"; as I understand it, he means that computer software regulates the pace and rules of modern living to such a degree that it thoroughly regulates our lives in many of the same ways that the government and police force would. Lessig concludes his book with a suggestion that the Y2K fears might have been allayed if software was treated as fundamentally as law, and at least deposited with a government agency in case of crisis; I think this is the direction that Stallman is leaning in. That is to say the very act of creating a piece of software that anybody, anywhere might use carries a public responsibility for its effects, and part of this responsibility must involve people who use it not being helpless to change it if the circumstances require: whether this be fixing a bug or removing an unneeded piece of functionality.

I've certainly formed some new conclusions as a result of this essay; but in general I agree that he's making his position more extreme by explicitly rejecting the current structure of (C) law with regard to software.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.
If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Although paying attention to the news is worthwhile (and was necessary for the first day or two to understand the magnitude of the situation), thinking strategically about some of the issues that will be addressed is a good idea. In particular for this forum, thinking about the tradeoffs of software freedom and security is a good idea.

I recommend reading comp.risks for an ongoing forum about risks to the public with computer systems.

Code , by Lawrence Lessig will help you think about more general public policy issues.

If you are interested in Usama Bin Laden, check out this accompanying website to a Frontline special . It has interviews from last week in response to the WTC and Pentagon incident.

Also, I recommend looking at a white paper America's National interests 2000 which was written by many individuals on Bush's staff, to get an insight for how they might think about this problem. It also does a good job illuminating what national interests are, as well as deals with some of the conflicts between national interests and national values.

Another paper: Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy co-authored by John Deutsch, former CIA head.

In the midst of all the pressure to create more security, don't forget individual liberties .

If anyone has good links about how to deal with this on an international level, that would be fantastic. I am sure one of the reasons this effort will take so long is because it will also include strategic alliances that will extend to the electronic sector.

For a US Attorney, officially there is no such thing as a bad law. But they're smart people and I'm sure most of them can spot bad laws when they see them. It's giving the DOJ a bit too much credit to think they're all on the side of civil liberties here, but it's also unlikely that they're all mindless corporate stooges like "our representatives" in Congress (who have given away their legislative power to corporations via the DMCA... rules are rules, whether they're law-code or bit-code, and now the corporations get to make up whatever rules they want for "copyright protection" and those rules have the force of law).

So maybe some of the Northern California US Attorneys have read Lessig's Code, or are otherwise smart enough to see that Congress has sold this legislative power to corporations (never mind the constitutionality); and maybe they aren't necessarily interested in spending their time enforcing what amount to laws made up by corporations, many of which are foreign companies anyway (several of the media companies and most of the consumer electronics companies); and so maybe they'd like to see the law struck down.

The Felten case might be a better straw man, what with Felten being a professor trying to publish real research, instead of some Russians selling circumvention software (which, despite what Sklyarov's lawyer says, is exactly what Congress/RIAA/MPAA/etc. had in mind with the anti-circumvention provisions). But the declaratory judgement that Felten and the other academics may get will be narrow in scope, whereas with this case, we might possibly see the anti-circumvention provisions struck down in their entirety.

Then again, the prosecutors may actually believe this is a good law; or they may be consummate professionals and not care. In any case, it's going forward, which in the end may be good for everyone (including the incredibly short-sighted media companies) except Dmitry, who, regardless of whether he's cleared or not, will be stuck here away from his family for a long time. Martyrs sometimes advance their causes greatly, but it's not much fun.

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is a fanatical Libertarian so extreme that he managed to have a chapter of a book using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues If you think I'm just flaming, this aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farber to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf he finally grudgingly retracted

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Lawrence Lessig in his excellent book "Code and other laws of Cyberspace" says that, if we aren't careful, the internet will become a technology of control, not of freedom.

As anyone who runs a web server knows, it's easy enough to track and log everything. The always-on internet opens up the possiblity of things like CPRM; Microsoft's plans for required registration before Office XP will work, and other sorts of digital rights management. DivX may have failed, but it failed because it didn't have a good enough value proposition, and it was a little ahead of its time. Once more houses have broadband connections, what's the big deal to the average consumer if your DVD player needs to be hooked up to the internet to play DVD's?

The idea that there will always be open alternatives to closed software or hardware isn't guaranteed. Lessig really hit the nail on the head in his book and predated a lot of this controversy. Will there be enough advocates to fund and continue producing open chipsets? You can look at the history of DAT to see a way things might play out.

There is a interview with him here that goes into more detail. (the streaming links didn't work for me, but the mp3 download did.)

I wonder if all this posturing on the big corporation side will lead to more polarization and zealotry. You'll have the totally proprietary and controlling microsoft camp, and the totally free and open Open Source camp. It'll be interesting to see.

- Twid

I posted a rough set of notes on what I felt are the components of a good moderation system at scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/). Unfortunately, the site's down at the moment.

Abstracting, the Scoop engine uses a bounded metric (floating point 1-5 score) plus editorial oversite (content can be removed) to filter content.

Some of the interface tools need to be improved. Bulk moderation (set scores, then submit en mass) and filtering (seting min/max thresholds) need to be implemented. There's also the whole issue of anonymous story and content submission -- I ultimately feel that a solution akin to that described by Larry Lessig in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, the "Yale Wall", is necessary. This describes a physical posting board on which anonymous posts were allowed (not garbage-collected), if signed, potentially by anyone. Weblog equivalent would be an anon queue, regularly cleaned out, in which registered users could "sign" posts, but wouldn't be obligated to. Anonimity is then a grant by the community, but isn't a fully free of responsibility.

I do feel somewhat strongly that there has to be an equivalent of what's called "karma" at /., though the past reaction has been rather strongly negative when the issue's been raised at K5. Advogato's trust metric is one implmentation, I think it's better than /.'s, but I haven't seen something that works really well yet.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

Face it, boys and girls. The day that it became possible to make billions of dollars on the internet was the day it stopped being free.

While it was an unimportant university backwater, nobody cared. Systems like DNS were under no commercial pressure, so worked for everyone.

But now that big money and big business have arrived, forget it. All free resources are being hooverdup and turned into cash (domain name hogs being the prime example). And because free speech has commercial implications (i.e. criticism of products, copyright issues etc) it is under attack too.

Nobody givesa shit about anonymous access to the internet. What people give a shit about itunconditional access to one's rights rather thanthe conditional access wecurrently have.

Code Is Law makes an excellent case for the suggestion that the "legal system" of the internet was written by the hackers that first createdit. Now that "legal system"is being over-ridden and overwritten bythe legal systems of the corrupt and corporate-run states of theso-called "realworld".

Take responsibility and fight back! We've had a good run in the ten-or-so years of freedom that the newnesso f the internet has given us. But now that the old powers have discovered this terra incognita, we will have to fight to defend it asthe settlers of every new frontier have had to fight to defendthemselves against the old empires which have come to take away that which they have found, and their self-determination with it.

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http://code-is-law.org.

That's the website for Lessig's book, CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace

It has excerpts

http://code-is-law.org.

That's the website for Lessig's book, CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace

It has excerpts

• Amicus Briefs == anyone can contribute
• Law Library == source code archive
• Lawyer Egos == Hacker Egos
• Law == Code

All kidding aside, we can either whine about how corrupt and mean the govt. is or we can participate in improving it (read replacing it a bit at a time rather than ripping the whole thing apart and hoping to profit from the ensuing chaos).

That would be the "Yale wall" idea (read about it a little more here (thanks KMSelf)), and yeah, people have thought about it before, but that doesn't make it a bad thing :> I've also lurked around here for a year or so now, without posting too much, but it seems to me that this idea is a very good one. Of course, moderators would still have to go through all the posts, in order to "approve" AC posts, but, technically, moderators should be browsing at -1 anyway, so that's not really relevant.

There is a "hidden" forum at sid=moderation on the topic of moderation. While useful, comments posted to it have the unfortunate tendency to disappear after time.

There are obviously several very broken things about /. which are defeating the moderation system. These include troll posts, the apparent inability to restrict nonsensical or repeated posts, and an serious shortage of moderation points to posts. With karma 44, I've had moderation privileges once this millenium -- prior to December, 1999, it seemed I had mod priv typically once or twice a week. Comments get caught in a vicious cycle of failing to be moderated up once an article topic has reached a hundred posts or more -- for meaningful use, I'm forced to read at score=1, score=2, or higher.

Repeating comments I've made (and have since slipped from) sid=moderation:

1. There need to be far more moderation points. The ratio of points to posts needs to increase at a rate greater than traffic.

2. Anonymous coward posting needs to be seriously rethought. CmdrTaco will insist on it being allowed. I'd propose a "Yale Wall" solution (See Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, p79.

   Essentially, the idea is that AC posts would require vetting by at least one registered user. The user would face the karmic consequences of any moderation of the post, and would grant the AC post any karmic benefits: If the post is moderated up or down, the signer's karma is increased or reduced, and whatever default posting level the signer has is given to the post. This preserves anonymity while allowing a modicum of control over the AC process.

   To do this, there would have to be a seperate viewing field for unvetted AC posts. Once vetted, the posts would enter the main forum and be subject to moderation. Only one vetting would be required to transfer the post to the main board.

3. The existing karma/default score system is working fairly well. The main problems are flagrant abuse by a very small number of individuals (whoring points, then spamming), and AC posts. The first problem could be addressed by administrative karmic reduction for spammage. The AC problem would go away with the vetting system, a default score of "unmoderated", and ranked moderation (see below).

4. A distinction must be made between posts which have and have not yet been moderated, and a moderation filter must exist to allow viewing (and moderating) of previously unmoderated posts. It's simply too painful to prowel through posts looking for that which should be moderated, up or down. The best current option is to view newest first w/o threads. It's still a poor proxy.

5. Moderating and posting to a forum should be allowed. CmdrTaco doesn't like it. Fooey. Moderating your own posts should not be allowed. Abuse can be detected in M2.

6. Notification of current moderation status of a post should be given before moderation points are committed. It's often the case when moderating an active forum that several people have moderated the same post(s) simultaneously. A confirmation screen saying "this post is currently moderated at [score], continue?" should be given. Wasting points shooting down crap is plain stupid. Boosting a decent but not brilliant post to +5 is silly.

7. Better filtering options. Score based filters are limited. It should at least be possible to set a ceiling as well as a floor (show all posts between -1 and 1). Better yet would be to allow filtering out posts according to criterion. I'm annoyed frequently by amusing, but otherwise not very interesting posts, which are highly scored. They're often the highest scored in an article.

8. I'd like to see moderation transformed from a voting system to a rating system. Essentially, now, a moderator can score a post up or down, and cumulative score is what counts. IMO, taking a weighted average of point scores -- say -5 to +5 -- for a post, would be a useful system. The number of points which could be voted, both on a single post and within a single moderating session, could be tied to karma. This would allow a moderator to express mild to high approval or disapproval of a post. Some measure of interest or intensity could be derived from the number of ratings, as well as the aggregate (mean) rating, and an inference of controversiality from the standard deviation (for all you stats hounds out there).

There are other problems. Karma whoring, gullibility traps (posts written to look informative but actually false), etc. I believe that as other issues in the moderating system are dealt with, the magnitude of these issues will be diminished. Or they won't <g>. But there are bigger fish to fry first.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?