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Or perhaps this type of shit would qualify as an example of the violation of our freedom to take pictures of anything we want.

When the gov't wants to take pictures of you, the claim is always that there is no expecation of privacy in public. But if a private citizen wants to take a picture of something in public that the "powers that be" decide they shouldn't, some poor bastard gets arrested.

Military bases are one thing. When the military is working on a top secret project, they go to great lengths to prevent folks from taking pictures by secluding those projects, or picking remote areas for testing that are inaccesible by the public. This, I understand. You wouldn't want your defenses thwarted by potential enemies before you have a chance to use them. But this whole idea of "we can take pictures of anything we want, but you can't or face the consequences" boils down to a "do as I say and not as I do" mentality that undermines the very fabric of our society and sets up what amounts to nothing less than Orwellian politics.

Perhaps Corey Doctorow wasn't too far off the mark!

Or perhaps this type of shit would qualify as an example of the violation of our freedom to take pictures of anything we want.

When the gov't wants to take pictures of you, the claim is always that there is no expecation of privacy in public. But if a private citizen wants to take a picture of something in public that the "powers that be" decide they shouldn't, some poor bastard gets arrested.

Military bases are one thing. When the military is working on a top secret project, they go to great lengths to prevent folks from taking pictures by secluding those projects, or picking remote areas for testing that are inaccesible by the public. This, I understand. You wouldn't want your defenses thwarted by potential enemies before you have a chance to use them. But this whole idea of "we can take pictures of anything we want, but you can't or face the consequences" boils down to a "do as I say and not as I do" mentality that undermines the very fabric of our society and sets up what amounts to nothing less than Orwellian politics.

Perhaps Corey Doctorow wasn't too far off the mark!

DRM helps no one achieve anything. Best selling author and former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com/ is an interesting guy and practices what he preaches. He lets you download his books from his website for free. Of course, if you want a nicely bound paper version, you can buy a copy. Of you can go to see the stage show of the book or the film of the book. I don't think he's starving.

No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.

You're free to make that choice. But:

(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)

(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.

I second this. I've got one and use it all the time. It is really excellent for taking your library with you, and it doubles as a notebook (a book to take notes in, not a notebook computer). The wifi works OK, but can be finicky. This is one of the only e-ink devices with a Wacom digitizer for taking notes and annotating documents. The software has been opened up and there is some community development Open Iliad, but you will find most of the active discussions and news on the forums.

It is hackable to extend the battery life to several days, and it supports CF flash, SD, and USB memory. The USB port can also be used for running a USB light or hooking up an external keyboard. For updating, it is possible to use SSH to connect to it, and then just rsync or whatever you want.

Since I've gotten this, I've started being able to read many books that are available for free as a CC licensed digital download. Cory Doctorow is a good example.

The cost is higher than similar readers due to the digitizer and wifi and *most importantly* the fact that it is a full A5 sized screen (8" diagonal). I've compared this to the smaller Sony reader, and the additional screen space is particularly valuable for reading PDFs since they do not re-flow the text to fit the screen.

You miss his point. His works are available for other search engines to index because they are available at his site. No gatekeeper controls access to his work because it is all freely available at his own site: http://craphound.com/

As foreseen by Cory Doctorow in Little Brother !

I got back to class and sat down again, Ms Galvez warmly welcoming me back. I unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into classroom mode. The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot -- they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.

Gotta run! I'm late for Harajuku Fun Madness!

Hate to burst your bubble, but http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt.

What Would Cory Do?

More practically, have you talked to Google, this seems like a clear opportunity for them to microtune their ranking algorithm.

(yes, I'm serious)

Big Brother has the power to take away all that from "little brother".

You only need the government to realise every young person totting around with cellphone cameras etc is a threat and then your main point starts to fall down. You also misunderstand that these things can also become part of the surveillance mechanism itself. Just what is happening to those pictures you send over a mobile network?

George Orwell did paint a fanciful worst case scenario, but very few academics come out and say it's outright poppycock, because it still has some plausibility. I also think you forget history, Gestapo, Cold war anti-communism in the united states. Yes the west has spent some time scrabbling for traction on the slippery slope.

Today's CCTV + Wiretapping world is far removed from Big Brother, yes, and a lot would have to go wrong for it become reality, but that doesn't make it OK nor not worth fighting.

I suggest Cory Doctorow's Little Brother as further reading: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Don't mess with slashdot hysteria. Oh and get off my lawn.

That might apply to musicians (concerts etc) but how does it apply to writers? How do they make money if their books are free. Same for software and movie companies.

http://craphound.com/index.php?cat=5

No, it is up to the creator to decide how to distribute his/her work. Note Cory Doctorow's stand on the matter at http://craphound.com./ Cory releases all of his work under a Creative Commons (copyleft) license, so anyone at all can download his work for their own pleasure without paying him one single penny. How the hell does he make a living? Because there are enough of us who feel the work is valuable and are willing to pay money to him and his publisher for it. His latest novel is still on the New York Times bestseller list and is now in its 8th printing, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has made him more money than any of his previous books.

Also take note of the policies at Baen Books http://www.baen.com/ a longtime publisher of science fiction that began posting the entire text of some of their books online for free a few years ago. They would let readers download and read the first book of a series for free, and then saw sales skyrocket for other books in the same series. You can purchase a hardcover copy of some of David Weber's Honor Harrington novels at Barnes and Noble, and in the back of the book you will find a CD-ROM containing the entire text of all the earlier books in the series. And you can read them for free. Baen is counting on you to enjoy them so that you will pay money for the next book in the series when it is published.

It may be counter-intuitive to 20th century MBAs, but this is a business model that works. Both TOR (which publishes Doctorow's books) and Baen Books are making money by giving away product for free. Radiohead made millions of dollars by allowing their fans to download their album "In Rainbows" on a PriceLine style "name your own price" model. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have a similar pricing scheme for their music and likewise are making lots of money by cutting the record labels and the RIAA out of the process.

When artists take control of their own work, they know how to sell it, market it and profit from it, even if that means giving it away for free.

So if the CAPTCHA is doomed, what is the next approach? Letting spam bots go rampant over a site is not an acceptable alternative.

Better get the form ready...!

Oh, how I wish I lived in the Culture. Damn you fuckers, make contact already! Sigh.

Anyway, if you haven't heard of it, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom goes into much more detail about a possible post-scarcity society, where the currency is kind of like /.'s Karma, only it works.

Go look up http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt. Fill it in for yourself, please, with particular attention to the existence of botnets (which steal email services from zombied machines worldwide), non-profit spam (which will get away with it free as they do under the CAN-SPAM act), and the difficulties of micropayments (handling many thousands of small transactions is extremely expensive when you start handling real money).

In other words, it will hurt legitimate email far, far, far more than spam, which will simply steal the service from others. Or do you somehow think that you personally will magically profit from this one?

And for heavens sake, ban the "1984" book.

And Little Brother and probably dozens of others which are below most people's radar.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Cory Doctorow's awesome book Little Brother is a great read and can be downloaded for free from the author's site.

The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them...

Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.

There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).

See Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (particularly the chapter outlining the four types of "piracy") and the introduction to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for a far more succinct explanation of why Doctorow put it on the internet (and still sells tons of hardcover copies, iinm it was in the NYT's top 10). you and the publishers are not only wrong, but in the publishers' case, possibly terminally wrong.

Nobody ever went broke because of pirates, but lots of people have gone broke because nobody ever heard of their work.

When Asimov's Foundation trilogy was first published, he got no royalties at all from its publisher, a small company without the means to publicize. It only started making money when Doubleday bought the rights from that small publisher and let people know it existed. It won a Hugo for all time best science fiction series.

I don't know how many authors I've discovered by checking out their books at the library, then buying other of their books later. A free download, whether sanctioned or not, helps publishers rather than hurting them.

You can bash the man if you like, but you'd be more convincing if you laid off the ad hominem attacks and got your facts straight:

This latest is just the gasp of a flunkie, uneducated has-been science fiction author whose work is so spectacularly bad that he had never had a commercially successful work.

On the contrary; his latest novel "Little Brother" made the New York Times Bestseller list (Childrens), reaching the #8 spot after 6 weeks. It's had multiple print runs, been published in both the US and the UK, where they've sold well, and has been nominated for and granted a range of literary awards.

I'd say that qualifies as a commercially successful work by any reasonable definition!

Every single VC startup I have been a part of or seen close up are nothing more than a "buddy's clubhouse" where they waste money on stupid crap and dont really use their windfall of money for the real task at hand. If you have a personal investment into the company then you will work hard to make it succeed.

If you got your beer idea on a napkin that you convinced some moron to give you $800,000 to start doing, you're gonna screw off and try to play "rich guy" until the money runs out.

Can I join the clubhouse? Pleeeeeease? I've seen both sides, where the rich kids play there's tremendous flair and waste (see: ENRON, the smartest guys in the room for a nice illustration, I wasn't at ENRON, but another Houston company with startlingly similar stories in the halls.) When you get to the traditional North-East US VC outfits, they are tighter with their money and control than any normal company - and that really sucks for morale and productivity, while it totally crushes creativity and ingenuity. They also expect to fail 95% of the time. Cheerful bunch, they are.

So, what's better? I'd like to see a system inspired by Whuffie where there's a OSS development grant pool and somehow the developers who are getting the most merit points (most satisfied users, best peer reviews, etc.) get the compensation. It's a flawed system, at best, highly vulnerable to gaming and other manipulations, but if the rewards were in the moderate range - say, ranging from basic subsistence salary up to maybe triple that for the "best" of the grantees... maybe a self-policing mechanism could be worked out.

Not nearly as much fun as burning through $80K per month on good hotels, fine dining and cool gadgets, but maybe people who want to live like that should figure out a way to do it without having the money handed to them.

Would you be equally scared of a gated community set up in the manner of the fictitious X-net described in Little Brother?

That is to say that, in some respects, a gated community is a Good Thing, it's just that it depends on what kind of gates you use. If you use personal trust relationships, it may not be so big and useful (to begin with), but it should not be very scary, should it?

EPUB is pretty useful. It's an outgrowth of the Open eBook (OEB) format. If you have something in that form I expect all you'd need to do is change the filename to get an EPUB reader to open it. It's essentially XHTML plus some metadata, so it's pretty easy to convert existing HTML docs to the format. Likewise, Microsoft LIT files (non-DRM'd, anyway) can be pretty trivially translated to EPUB.

It would be nice if Baen supported EPUB directly. It would also be nice if they were consistent with their metadata... At least their HTML is reasonably clean, and fairly consistently formatted. It's not hard to automate conversion of their stuff to EPUB.

Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, distributes utter crap for HTML. It's not as bad as what MS Word produces, but it's close. (I think he uses OpenOffice and just dumps the doc to an HTML file.) No consistency whatsoever. No use of header tags. Lots of <font> tags and paragraphs with embedded style attributes. Hellish to try to convert to anything other than the malformed tag soup that it is. It took me 2 hours the other night to convert Little Brother to something useful, even with HTML Tidy and a good working knowledge of regular expressions.

Or maybe read Little Brother by Doctorow. And bring Doctorow with you, dressed in his red cape.

Seriously, it's almost trivial to completely avoid spam now. [...] They enjoy seeing the spam, because then they can get outraged and do stuff like this.

I wouldn't attribute that much malice to it.

Sure, the big players have great spam filtering, but the work it takes to get there isn't trivial. And there are a lot of us who don't use webmail. Having configured a few mail systems, it takes a lot of poking and prodding and fine tuning to get an anti-spam configuration that works really well. In the course of doing it, you see these strong spam signals, and get drawn into them. "Hey, what if I just turn up this setting here? That'd catch a ton of spam!" And upon doing it, you find you've walked right into one of the many pitfalls of spam filtering... You're silently rejecting legit mail, or running your false positives way up, or creating backscatter, or generating inappropriate reject codes, or in this case creating an exploitable avenue to harass innocent people...

But at first blush, when you're in there watching your logs and tweaking your configs, these ideas sound great. There's a reason the form letter exists. People get excited about their great new spam solution, and go to publish before they've thought it through, or realized that their idea's already been tried and failed. (I don't like the form because it's used to dismiss *any* new anti-spam idea, even the very few that are good and original, but that's beside the point.)

Anyway, I don't think it's out of a need for outrage. I think it's just people get caught up in what they're doing, and lose track of the implications.

Dear Slashdot poster,

We're sorry to hear that you do not approve of the Universal Crackpot Spam Solution Rebuttal Form. As you are no doubt aware, per Slashdot rules this form must be posted in all articles pertaining to a spam solution. This form was carefully crafted by leading experts in their field, and has been serving the community well for almost a decade.

Your opinion is important to us, but please be advised that we cannot answer all inquiries or complaints personally. If you have questions concerning the Universal Crackpot Spam Solution Rebuttal Form or its use, please feel free to pipe your inquires to /dev/null. All inquiries will be processed in the order in which they are received.

Sincerely,
The Slashdot Community

Ok, so I haven't exactly read all 24 pages, but I've given them a good skim and studied some of the notes.

It seems to me to be a good primer, but I don't for a second think that anyone who matters will pay it deserved consideration. (Such is my trust in and opinion of politicians.)

Anyway, Denmark, as I well knew already, is not really on the list except as part of the EU. But even so, we do have a central ID register that's represented in the form of a plastic card (no chip, only magstripe and barcode) with minimal info such as name, address, birthdate, and a few other things -- but nothing valid for getting you across a real border.

Still, this ID register --specifically, one's individual ID number-- is used *all over the place* where it's not s'posed to, solely because it's such a darn good unique ID for the customer database, you know? Wanna open a bank account or borrow a bucket of money? Fair enough, I'll need to give out my ID number so they can check I don't owe the Golden Gate Bridge worth in taxes. Wanna rent a video at Blockbuster? I have to give out my ID number as well, or entertain myself with my action figures instead. Nevermind that that's the key to privileged information which Blockbuster, bless 'em, just don't need. Making a statement to that effect is not going to get you a membership, as I suppose you've all guessed.

With this rant I really just mean to say that it's not about the KIND of key you have, it's how you USE it. And, given the (inter)national context, you don't get to decide how to use it, the politicians will take care of that for you -- and I don't think they've read this ... or Little Brother for that matter. Of course, making sure it's not sniffable is important, but if the law requires us to have the thing glued to our foreheads it's going to be a pain anyway.

On a side note, though I realise that passports!=ID cards, our passports are going all "arphid'ey", and from what I've seen and read I'm very happy my old one still has a number of years left on it. /rant off. Sorry.

You do realize that's not written by mindstorms, and is just a standard form to be used in all discussions of how to solve spam, right? You can find it at http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt.

It came about because there are so many "this is how to solve spam" posts with the same set of flaws, so this simply radically sped up the process of demonstrating why the plan wouldn't work.

What, you mean like this one?

You may like some of the Doctorow books - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for instance - I think they are on the strangely-named http://craphound.com/

That system has held in place until today, though you see technology (and history) repeat itself over and over. It's important not just from a DRM and YRO perspective, but also from a historical perspective. Beyond the moving-type press, this allowed for the greatest proliferation of music across America to be enjoyed cheaply by everyone. The roll single handedly changed the way America could experience music, and it completely defined the historical legislation and business practice of modern music. This is the passing of a titan, not just a kitchy thing that your great-grandparents might have owned.

Of course, now that I went to the effort to write all that, I remember Cory Doctorow mentioned the same thing in an old, well-read paper of his.

This filtering crap really chaps my ass. I really hate it that the govt thinks they need to know what everyone is doing all the time. I hope they can get those laws repelled. Read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ I don't think we are too far off from this stuff, especially the more the govt wants to stick their hand in our private lives. We can't let this happen!

He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we?

He never did say he was going to press charges.

Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?

Where did he incite a riot? Besides, if you read the comments associated with that same story, you'll notice that those same readers pointed out -- that the take down request wasn't even a real DMCA request and that the scribdb guys were just idiots for responding to that email (or to the followup email claiming that it was a DMCA request) the way they did.

It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"?

In most fields, a fellowship is just a scholarship. It doesn't mean much. It means someone/some organization is willing to fund your work. That's about it. Out of the 13 others they have listed as current 2007-2008 fellows, three don't seem to have College degrees at all (at least not listed), and only one seems to have just a Bachelor degree. Also, I would think she qualified for the fellowship because of the work she did for the BBC, not because of the last bit listed in her bio. At least, that seems like the common thread between all those non-degreed fellows, they all seem to have done some work for some media company.

He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we?

He never did say he was going to press charges.

Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?

Where did he incite a riot? Besides, if you read the comments associated with that same story, you'll notice that those same readers pointed out -- that the take down request wasn't even a real DMCA request and that the scribdb guys were just idiots for responding to that email (or to the followup email claiming that it was a DMCA request) the way they did.

It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"?

In most fields, a fellowship is just a scholarship. It doesn't mean much. It means someone/some organization is willing to fund your work. That's about it. Out of the 13 others they have listed as current 2007-2008 fellows, three don't seem to have College degrees at all (at least not listed), and only one seems to have just a Bachelor degree. Also, I would think she qualified for the fellowship because of the work she did for the BBC, not because of the last bit listed in her bio. At least, that seems like the common thread between all those non-degreed fellows, they all seem to have done some work for some media company.

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

or you could, I dunno, just send him a link to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ where he can download a copy for himself.

You don't have to post it. Cory has already posted it for you. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Don't bother, a guy named Cory Doctorow (coincidence?) beat you to it, you can download it on his website.

Unless you're writing this from my LAN or your time machine in 1972, you can take the very fact that you can read this online as proof that the internet scales well.

It may not scale optimally, but it's been running for a while and everywhere we can pump power and signal. His personal tech fiefdom is being attacked because he's criticizing a well-built and planned system while his own system is down frequently due strictly to poor design. For e.g., DNS is a pretty old system with many flaws in it's assumptions on how it would work operationally (a lot of trust was assumed) and therefore many of the security flaws that make it not-ideal are based on security exploiting the trust assumed when it was designed (c.f. the recent poisoning attacks). But it was designed in a manner that allows extending it to the point that it could, conceivably be fixed (c.f. DNSSEC).

His comments are offensive in that he hasn't built anything nearly as robust, extensible or ubiquitous as SMTP or IPv4 and therefore doesn't have the bona fides to actually criticize either one. Hell, he doesn't even propose his own alternative (I'm guessing to avoid having anyone who can think of a reason sending him a copy of spamsolutions.txt) so it just comes off as a petulant "this thing sucks because i can think of something better!" with nothing to back it up. When Twitter can route around damage at a whim and not show the failwhale quite so often, he might have a better position to speak from.

Well, he is right about SMTP. The amount of spam tells us it's a bad design, awful in fact, but it can't be changed. Using PGP will secure your message, but that's no good if it gets lost inside a flood of spam, or rejected because someone has blackholed your SMTP server's IP address. If only encryption and digital signatures had been part of the standard to begin with. But they're not, so we're stuck with spam-filled inboxes until email is entirely replaced by Facebook messages and MSN.

If they wanted their writings available for free, then why would they bother to publish in the first place?

Cory Doctorow answered you question in the forward to Little Brother far better than I can.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who faile

Two things:

First, Van Gogh painted Bruce Schneier's portrait over a hundred years ago.

Well ok, that's not Bruce but it sure looks like him, doesn't it? The linked picture is a Van Gogh self-portrait.

Secondly, I want to point to an afterward to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Bruce Schneier writes:

It's how security people think. We're constantly looking at security systems and how to get around them; we can't help it.

This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on. If you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to shoplift. If you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you don't, you're not going to design anything good.

So when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.

Spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You'll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You'll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think about.

Sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought about before. And maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system.

That's just a snippet, as the book is one long HTML page do a word search on "Bruce Schneier" to find the afterword.

That painting looks like Chuck Norris to me.
http://www.oktat.com/pictures/img/chuck_norris_01.jpg
http://www.petroz.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/images/vincent_van_gogh_16.jpg

Two things:

First, Van Gogh painted Bruce Schneier's portrait over a hundred years ago.

Well ok, that's not Bruce but it sure looks like him, doesn't it? The linked picture is a Van Gogh self-portrait.

Secondly, I want to point to an afterward to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Bruce Schneier writes:

It's how security people think. We're constantly looking at security systems and how to get around them; we can't help it.

This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on. If you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to shoplift. If you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you don't, you're not going to design anything good.

So when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.

Spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You'll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You'll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You'll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think about.

Sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought about before. And maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system.

That's just a snippet, as the book is one long HTML page do a word search on "Bruce Schneier" to find the afterword.

You've been reading Cory Doctrow (http://craphound.com/down/) again, haven't you?

Read his "Wilt" book, that's a simple humorous way to see what a combination of circumstances can do. You are presently assuming everything they collect will just work fine - not a track record I have seen so far. Alternatively, read Little Brother which will help a bit to understand where this is going.

A couple of things to think about: what if someone who really hates you gets hold of the information? Do you realise that a copy of everything means possibly that all that "everything" is going to be spilled on the street the moment some idiot again posts a couple of unencrypted CDs? Can you maybe remember an innocent Brazilian which they'd mistakenly tagged as dangerous? Are you insured for getting shot? Will your family cope?

Each step in itself doesn't look like a big deal, but track record of what has been done with those powers and how well all that data is kept is so bad, I wouldn't trust them to store my name properly.

In a number of countries you can't have an unregistered phone number. However, in those countries they know what "confidential" and "private" means and how important it is for a society to keep that protected. The 1984 fans in the UK don't.

But hey, it's your freedom. I left because I saw it coming, that's the advantage of working in gov and military. No bloody way.

You have a problem with the US being heavy handed. Here's a tip for you: they're only further along the path. Look at that supposed democracy and see what's left of it, they even spy on their own (and we help them with Menwith Hill).

Go to this web site and download and read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's free. It's apropos to this story. It's enlightening. And it may just change your view of the world.

Now seems like a good time to tell you all about the book I read yesterday. It is called "Little Brother", written by Cory Doctorow, and available for free download, as well as in dead tree form. Very fascinating.

http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Row-Boat.html Sorry about that. The extra slash at the end killed it.

I Row-Boat, possibly the story in question. It's a fairly entertaining read. http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Row-Boat.html/

Sorry, I just got finished reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and am feeling overly paranoid. I used to laugh at the idea of having copyright cops who would go around and arrest kids who had pirated music on their iPods, but it seems that day is growing ever nearer. Am I the only one who feels helpless against this growing insanity of the *AA controlled congress?

we might be able to increase the depressingly small fraction of encrypted traffic on the Internet.

I agree that this would indeed be a good thing for several reasons. An encrypted message in a medium where most everything is plaintext may attract the attention of attackers or, worse, be seen as "suspicious" by a government. (Certainly the U.S. and the PATRIOT Act spring to mind, but let's not forget the truly oppressive governments such as China's and any number of third-world dictatorships.) If online privacy via encryption comes to be a right that everyone gets used to enjoying—much like how almost all mail is sent in sealed envelopes, whether or not its contents are sensitive—then it will be that much harder, for technical and/or social reasons, for an authority to take away. If Obfuscated TCP is even a token step in that direction (and it seems to be a bit better than that), then it is probably a good thing overall.

Someone earlier today on Slashdot was plugging Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and I'm going to follow that example (you can read it for free!) as part of it advances the same idea.