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There's no proposal that can solve everything. Of the proposals that exist today, free software is just far and away the best situation life's offering.

It's not about *you* being free to read and change the source or distribute modified versions, it's about *all users* being able to do this. "freedom 3" makes this clear:

"The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this."

It's about allowing people to help each other, building an empowered community. If the situation is serious enough, anyone can take a look, or find/pay someone else to take a look. And even if the situation doesn't seem serious, there's still the possibility that someone will be taking a look at the code anyway. And once one person does this, then all users can benefit from that person's exercise of their freedoms.

The possibility of these things happening is usually enough to dissuade software publishers from putting nastyware into free software in the first place.

So, you're theory just predicts a problem that's possible but which is non-existant or practically non-existant in reality.

Which is why whitelists would go a long way towards solving most of these "problems".
The problem isn't windows. the problem is that people keep using terrible strategies.

The last enforced whitelist model tried was palladium, or it's more general brother TPM. And that was rejected because application whitelists
1) don't work for open source software, which is fundamentally less capable of resisting treason
2) they are trivial to use for DRM enforcement (esp. if you're running hardware-assisted code whitelists)
3) if code whitelists guarantees are extended over the network (ie. remote attestation) you get ... or rather you lose the right to read
4) same as 3, except with the government in charge of the keys, which is worse

In other words, almost nobody wants a working security model for content publishers, or software developers, or even enterprises (ie. leak protection type stuff).

Security, especially working security brings a lot of disadvantages.

LINUX has SOFTWARE REPOSITORIES, did I mention this?

The software repositories associated with major desktop Linux distributions, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, have a drawback: not all applications, even useful and legitimate ones, satisfy the licensing requirements of the repositories. For example, almost no major label video games are completely free software and free assets.

[...] IF Hurd becomes reality[...]

FIXED

Cathedral and Bazaar time. What you trade off in speed of development with the bazaar you gain in robustness from Cathedral top-down error. It takes longer but you are less likely to run into an evolutionary dead-end from well-intentioned global decisions. Which is why it is good that FreeBSD kernels exist in addtion to Linux ones and perhaps when Hurd becomes reality that will be genetic diversity as well. No single cause can kill them all.

Am I missing something?

Yes, you are. It's called 'freedom'. I wish you had some of it. You'd realize that it really is a wonderful thing, and you'd likely advocate seeing others get more of it, as I do.

I'm not sure what the uproar is about...

You're not the only one. Here's a place to get started: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

...if you agree to develop apps for Apple's devices, this is the agreement you sign. If you don't like it, don't make apps for Apple products.

We totally agree about this part.

It's the 'suffer in silence' part, that you've added - that is where we diverge.

This one: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

I wish I hadn't already commented on this topic (and with such a trivial comment too). I have mod points but can't mod this up.

This one.

Is Adobe is more excited about HTML5 than Apple?

If Adobe embraces HTML5 technologies that could displace SWF, then I imagine that Adobe considers Flash Player a cost center and wants to shift the player work to browser makers.

Why would HTML5 support the quicktime format and not FLV? both are the same degree of proprietary.

There are different degrees of proprietary. A non-free format published by ISO with a uniform-royalty licensing offer is less proprietary than an unpublished format with no standard license offer.

GPL would not be unnecessary at all then. Because the copyright being only 10 (or less) years, it would make all available open source code as public domain and you can close it and never show the source to anyone.

GPL is demanding that the software user who gets the binary, gets the sources as well by some way.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html

We can not throw away all the copyrights. There are many situations that you need to maintain the copyright. In one case 5 years is enough, but some cases over 50 years is enough.

And why we are always fighting with copyright laws in US or GB? There are lots of countries where are sane laws about copyright.

Example Finland. If you buy a CD or DVD (or Blu-ray) you have rights to make few copies of it for your own personal use or to your closest friends and family. Few means here 3-10. And those who gets copies, can not copy or deliver them to any other. So you can make your backups and copies to car, MP3-player, to summer house etc.

You can even break the encryption to see or listen video/music what you bought and translate the music to format what fits to you.

But you can not sell or share the mixed version of the copyrighted material what you have. No one can not stop you to mix it for yourself such thing but not to share it. If you mix music and you actually create something new what is not the original or similar, you can share it and you have the copyright for it.
But that line is very thin and very hard to say when you step over that so you can do it.

U.S and GB and many of their old ruled countries has a common law and it allows them to have very stupid laws in place. In other germanic countries there are laws but you always need to understand what is the reason why something has be done and judge it by moral and wisdom.

I cannot understand how people working at the keyboard will not invest a week of their time to learn how to actually use it. Get gtypist.

Who cares about some ubuntu? I don't and you shouldn't either.

Be a man, use http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

the good about compression, is less storage and better chance of detecting errors. the bad is at a minimum every bad bit becomes at least a bad byte, and if it is in the header, all data in that archive.
for example:
About corrupted compressed archives: gzip'ed files have no redundancy, for maximum compression. The adaptive nature of the compression scheme means that the compression tables are implicitly spread all over the archive. If you lose a few blocks, the dynamic construction of the compression tables becomes unsynchronized, and there is little chance that you could recover later in the archive.

So if the nature of the data is, "one bad bit means all data is garbage anyway" then compress away. If the nature of the backup, is "I may need a couple files out of a backup someday, who cares about the rest, then don't make a single compressed archive.

My method for filesystem backups was to do a file by file gzip in place on the backup server, this way I could lose a file, but not all files in a single archive.
I associated all .gz files with uncompress in place gzip on windows machines, so users would just have to click, wait a second, then click again if we had to jump to the backup file server...

It is an interesting concept for a low-level language and could be pretty important. And since the gccgo compiler has been accepted by the gcc steering committee (link), I am expecting Go to stay and prosper.

When a kernel upgrade goes south.... I learned my way through that just yesterday, in fact!

In the case of LILO, you want to configure a known-good kernel as the default and the test kernel as non-default. Run "lilo" to install this configuration, then run "lilo -R test-kernel" to boot the test kernel on the next reboot only. After reboot, if the test kernel causes a lock-up, a hard reset (button or power cycle) will take you back to the known-good kernel.

If you're using GRUB, I think you'll find this link informative.

The beauty of the GPLed client is that users and developers can choose which servers to point their clients at--and pick the ones that have terms they agree wtih.

Unfortunately, no. The sources can no longer be licensed under GPL, because Linden's new policy conflicts with GPLv2's clause 6:

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

This is literal wording taken from the GPLv2 license, and is further reinforced in the GPLv2 FAQ.

Linden Lab is imposing massive further restrictions on developer recipients of their code, making it completely impossible for them to distribute the code without accepting those restrictions. This restriction of the ability to distribute code is not permitted by the GPL (of any version).

GPL cannot be used to grant fewer freedoms than the GPL specifies. That's a core term of the license.

The freedom to develop and distribute cannot be impeded while you license under the GPL.

The beauty of the GPLed client is that users and developers can choose which servers to point their clients at--and pick the ones that have terms they agree wtih.

Unfortunately, no. The sources can no longer be licensed under GPL, because Linden's new policy conflicts with GPLv2's clause 6:

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

This is literal wording taken from the GPLv2 license, and is further reinforced in the GPLv2 FAQ.

Linden Lab is imposing massive further restrictions on developer recipients of their code, making it completely impossible for them to distribute the code without accepting those restrictions. This restriction of the ability to distribute code is not permitted by the GPL (of any version).

GPL cannot be used to grant fewer freedoms than the GPL specifies. That's a core term of the license.

The freedom to develop and distribute cannot be impeded while you license under the GPL.

Fair enough, in the end, I think that Linus got this right by saying: If it exists only to work with this GPL'ed software, then it's a derivative work, if it has standalone functionality then it ain't a derivative work. Which is roughly the resolution to virtually all of the cases described. So lets see if I got the logic on all this right:

• Apple's Objective-C - derivative work as it exists only to work with GCC
• NDIS drivers is not a derivative work as work fine with a Windows kernel
• NDISWrapper is a derivative work, as it exists only to make NDIS drivers work in Linux
• OpenSSL is not a derivative work, because it works outside of OpenRadius
• NVIDIA driver is not a derivative work as works with many non-GPL'ed Operating Systems
• NVIDIA shim layer is a derivative work, as it only exists to link the core NVIDIA driver into the Linux system.

Which seems pretty sensible, and appears to be what you're saying is came out of the IBM case? I think if you use the "line of thought" from the GPL FAQ about "shared data structures implies derivative works", that also lines up with the above thought processes. The FSF might not agree with that interpretation, but it would sure seem a very sensible line of demarcation. I'd have to ponder strange corner cases carefully.

Kirby

Sure there are rights being restricted. If you use GPL code you can not close your own code and still distribute it.

I'm afraid you sound a bit confused about this. If you apply the GPL to your own code, you certainly do have the right to close it and distribute it. All copyright holders have that right.

I'm not confused at all. If I modify BSDed code then distribute it I can close my code but I can not close my own code and distribute it when I modify GPL code. From GNU: "Using the GNU GPL will require that all the released improved versions be free software. This means you can avoid the risk of having to compete with a proprietary modified version of your own work. However, in some special situations it can be better to use a more permissive license." In other words if I make improvements, or modifications, I have to release my code. To make it even more clear:

"I want to distribute an extended version of a GPL-covered program in binary form. Is it enough to distribute the source for the original version?"

"No, you must supply the source code that corresponds to the binary. Corresponding source means the source from which users can rebuild the same binary."

However BSD licenses "allows proprietary use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary products. Works based on the material may be released under a proprietary license or as closed source software. This is the reason for widespread use of the BSD code in proprietary products, ranging from Juniper Networks routers to Mac OS X."

You are right in saying I was wrong about rights, "Sure there are rights being restricted", though. However as I said before BSD licenses offers freedom for programmers while the GPL offers freedom for users.

The problem from your perspective is that they aren't giving you all rights.

Nobody owes you a gift.

The BSD doesn't give any all the rights either. And I did not ask for a gift. Just as with the GPL the original programmer of BSDed software decides what rights other programmers and users have. If BSD code is open the programmer has given other programmers the right to close their own code modifications.

Related in a sense is dual licensing. Another thread on /. was about the effects MySQL had on the GPL using dual licensing, the GPL and closed source licensing. Especially now that Oracle now owns the former MySQL AB business.

Falcon

Sure there are rights being restricted. If you use GPL code you can not close your own code and still distribute it.

I'm afraid you sound a bit confused about this. If you apply the GPL to your own code, you certainly do have the right to close it and distribute it. All copyright holders have that right.

I'm not confused at all. If I modify BSDed code then distribute it I can close my code but I can not close my own code and distribute it when I modify GPL code. From GNU: "Using the GNU GPL will require that all the released improved versions be free software. This means you can avoid the risk of having to compete with a proprietary modified version of your own work. However, in some special situations it can be better to use a more permissive license." In other words if I make improvements, or modifications, I have to release my code. To make it even more clear:

"I want to distribute an extended version of a GPL-covered program in binary form. Is it enough to distribute the source for the original version?"

"No, you must supply the source code that corresponds to the binary. Corresponding source means the source from which users can rebuild the same binary."

However BSD licenses "allows proprietary use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary products. Works based on the material may be released under a proprietary license or as closed source software. This is the reason for widespread use of the BSD code in proprietary products, ranging from Juniper Networks routers to Mac OS X."

You are right in saying I was wrong about rights, "Sure there are rights being restricted", though. However as I said before BSD licenses offers freedom for programmers while the GPL offers freedom for users.

The problem from your perspective is that they aren't giving you all rights.

Nobody owes you a gift.

The BSD doesn't give any all the rights either. And I did not ask for a gift. Just as with the GPL the original programmer of BSDed software decides what rights other programmers and users have. If BSD code is open the programmer has given other programmers the right to close their own code modifications.

Related in a sense is dual licensing. Another thread on /. was about the effects MySQL had on the GPL using dual licensing, the GPL and closed source licensing. Especially now that Oracle now owns the former MySQL AB business.

Falcon

Larry Wall's Artistic License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License) got ripped to shreds under court scrutiny.

Understand when to use the LGPL or the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

use them.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src

Of note, copy.c, copy.h, and cp.c.

Wow.. it's like code that time forgot.

I love the way there's about a page of complex code that jumps through hoops to figure out a good buffer size, when 64KB would basically work well in all cases. From what I can see, there's a few situations in which 'cp' will pick tiny buffer sizes and waste a bunch of time on overhead. The default appears to be 32KB, which is too small these days. I've done experiments (admittedly on Windows, but same difference), demonstrating that using IO blocks as large as 1MB improves performance significantly. There's a reason Microsoft increased the default IO sizes on Windows Server from 64KB to 1MB.

A much better buffer selection algorithm would be to detect L2 or L3 cache sizes of the processor, and use a buffer slightly smaller than one of those. You'd have to play with benchmarks to see if staying within L2 is a benefit (I suspect that it isn't).

The biggest problem with 'cp' is that it's synchronous single-threaded. It does a read, then a write, then a read, then a write, etc... For comparison, Windows Vista and later does reads synchronously but then writes asynchronously so that the next read doesn't have to wait for the write to complete. Even with kernel buffering and lazy IO, 'cp' is probably much less efficient that it could be.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src

Of note, copy.c, copy.h, and cp.c.

Suggestion:

Free GNU/Linux distributions
-> http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

Are the overlapping boxes decoration, or is it more content?

Content, as opposed to malcontent?

No, content as in the data or information in the page, as opposed to the semantics or decorations.

The fact that RMS doesn't like the word because it doesn't fit his philosophy doesn't make it incorrect, or not a term of art; it just means that RMS is a fanatic.

Are the overlapping boxes decoration, or is it more content?

Content, as opposed to malcontent?

A lot of pages consist of a header, a vertical navigation strip floated on one side, a body text box floated on the other side, and a footer on the bottom. And IE 6 screws up floats incredibly often.

Very true. However, the Linux kernel is GPL'ed.

They provide binary patches which contain code that is a derivative work of the Linux kernel. What makes the binary ksplice patches derivative is they are converting patches that were created by other people under GPL terms, into a binary form suitable for use with ksplice.

This means those binary patches must be distributed under the GPL, allowing recipients to share those binary patches.

It also means they must make machine-readable source code available to all their patches, along with any changes they have made, and they must provide all compilation scripts, tools, and configuration files they use to build those patches. per the clause of the GPL that states:

The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require,

I can see a lot of people willing to pay $5 or so per month for access to the patches for each distinct OS their systems run.

And some big enterprises paying a per-system fee to ensure everything is fully supported, and that they can always call them for help if something goes wrong with any system.....

However, I don't see that it can be legal for them to force you to agree to pay a per-system fee to use a binary patch.

That would seem to be in violation of your GPL rights.

Given we've already established the binary patch files must be distributed under GPL.

Any kernel-mode components of the patcher must also be under GPL, and also any user-mode components that are specific to the kernel design.

The rest can be reverse-engineered.

Ditching a free software application for a closed source cloud application. Way to go Ubuntu... shame on you!

Eroding freedom, one bit at a time.

I find using the screen to manage my many simultaneous SSH sessions extremely helpful. This tool is so useful it's on the same level as Adblock is to Firefox. With this tool, the reconnect/connect issue is a moot point.

Richard Stallman already warned us about this threat to liberty 11 years ago in The Right to Read.

I prefer the Python interactive shell and GNU Octave (or any other Matlab-compatible environment, including Matlab itself) for numerical calculations, Asymptote for plots and other methods of data visualisation, Maxima when a CAS is in order and LaTeX to turn all the stuff generated by those packages into something readable and publishable.

Throw in some scripted links between all those tools, a few functions from Peter Acklam's Matlab Utilities, your favourite function for converting a matrix to a LaTeX table and saving it into a file in a single call, a few exec()-equivalents here and there, and you'll get a rig that auto-regenerates your report/publication/thesis/shopping list/whatever else you might have been doing, in a single run of a single program, should you spot a mistake somewhere deep in the calculations, or a typo in the input.

For one, I don't think I'll ever understand people who use spreadsheets. And copy their results to the word processor. And then spot a mistake in a formula, fix it and proceed to copy the new, correct results from scratch. And then spot a typo in the data.

Why biased? Well, I'm studying control systems and robotics. It's all about task automation. Besides, everything in this field involves using Matlab for something, and just about everyone in the academia (the technical side of it, at least) is using LaTeX, so you just kind of get used to using those two for just about anything after a while, and automating everything with scripts.

Of course, the above assumes somtheing more complicated than a few basic operations in a single line. We're talking about sophisticated calculators here. For simple tasks I'm just using Google...

To Free/Open alternatives.

I think I like Oracle even *less* than Microsoft, and that's saying something.

GCJ anyone?

No techie I know installs any toolbar...

Same here, but most of my family and friends probably would :-/

I don't see any easy solutions, but maybe one good idea would be for browsers that exist for their users (i.e. free software web-browsers) should consider adding the functionality in an optional way with the best privacy possible.

emacs and VIM are capable of using spell-checking only in comments:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spelling.html
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.editors/2008-09/msg00049.html

Except that Firefox is not licensed under the GPL

Sorry, but yes it is.

Core Mozilla project source code is licensed under a disjunctive tri-license giving you the choice of one of the three following sets of free software/open source licensing terms:

• Mozilla Public License, version 1.1 or later
• GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later
• GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later

This allows the use of our code in as wide a variety of software projects as possible, while still maintaining copyleft on code we wrote.

Except that Firefox is not licensed under the GPL

Sorry, but yes it is.

Core Mozilla project source code is licensed under a disjunctive tri-license giving you the choice of one of the three following sets of free software/open source licensing terms:

• Mozilla Public License, version 1.1 or later
• GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later
• GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later

This allows the use of our code in as wide a variety of software projects as possible, while still maintaining copyleft on code we wrote.

How does one bloat a text editor?

Practically obligatory reading on this issue, by some guy named Stallman:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Richard Stallman wrote an essay supporting free and open source philosophy by using that same concept: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

No license can (and the GPL does not attempt to) force anyone to "open source" their code.

From the GPL 3.0 license:

A "covered work" means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.

[...]

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.

It forces people who wish to "convey" (for example, sell) work which uses the licensed code to license their code under the GPL 3.0 license. Force here is the lawsuits that result, if the original license holder discovers use of their code in your code.

GCC provides (portable) vector types, and if you declare your variables as these then it just has to try to use SSE / AltiVec / Whatever instructions for the operations

I very much want to know more about this.

Is there a book or web site that you recommend where I can learn more about this? The GCC manual doesn't have much about it.

steveha

Wow, I just re-read RMS's "The Right to Read." It's really not that far fetched that 1st: debuggers become a common tool for ordinary users to "skip over" parts of programs like this, there purportedly to "protect" copyrights, and 2nd: some asshat judge decides that's their primary use and outlaws them except for licensed and bonded programmers. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

(captcha is ensnare!)

I think whoisisis's subtle point might have been that you should already be using free software where possible.

Actually there was a bit of a format war about .gif, which is why we have .png available. Though, to be honest having support for ogm and mp4+avc (h.264) would probably mean decent coverage overall, which seems to be the two formats with the biggest support. Though MS could pretty easily slip VC1 in there. IIRC MS provides their codec implimentations of VC1 and mp4/h.264 for free (as in beer for windows, osx and linux).

See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins and the next answer. "If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed." and "If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case."

IMO this conflicts with existing jurisprudence on the meaning of a "derivative work" because merely referring to another work without modifying it can (almost) never be a derivative - at least I am aware of no case saying so. Unfortunately the people who wrote the GPL use words like "combine" which have no meaning under copyright law. So, you have ambiguous language, and even worse ambiguity in the GPL FAQ.

- mike oliver

It is the Copyleft movement's position that freedom (to fork open source code and do with it whatever you see fit) is "tyranny". This implies that me closed-sourcing my own work (and only my own work, since the upstream code I've copied from remains open-sourced) is somehow an act of aggression, which clearly it isn't. I am not your slave, and GPL is not a legitimate contract that can dictate what I can or cannot do with my own computer and my own ability to write software!

You have the copyright of your own work. You are free to do with it what you want. You are not, however, free to do whatever you want with other people's work. Slave morality indeed.

Copyleft is utterly impossible without government force, without which all Copyleft code would be simply liberated into the public domain - this is why you see people like RMS so fiercely opposed to (semi)libertarian movements like the Pirate Party. And, returning to the topic at hand, here we see the violence inherent in Copyleft philosophy surface once again, attempting to get in the way of what millions of Sun and Oracle shareholders want to do with their own property!

Actually, RMS has stated that he generally supports movements like the Pirate Party. However, he cautions that such movements should level the ground for both Free Software and Proprietary Software, seeing the current activities of the Pirate Party tearing down the few restrictions of Free Software while leaving many additional restrictions of the Proprietary world intact. While I'm not a big fan of RMS himself, what you're portraying is misleading. You may not like the Free Software ideology but at least you can be accurate in your criticisms.

Along those lines, I fail to see how you've managed to return to the topic at hand. There is no Copyleft philosophy getting in the way of Sun and Oracle. The GPL has little to do with Monty's fear mongering. But that doesn't stop BSD fanatics such as yourself from using his noise as a platform.

Russia demanding compensation for every dystopian totalitarian novel...

If Russia manages to push through the compensations in all countries, many a dictator of a poor country might have to file for bancrupcy. Not the worst of turns...

and Israel demanding compensation for every Bible.

http://www.gnu.org/graphics/jesus-cartoon.html

why must this be seen as a threat to OSS? because stallman says so?

WTF are you on about? The same RMS who says "we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can"? I don't think you understand the whole concept of Free Software.

Beside, if they really wanted to track all connections to people they would also have to require all people to show their ID in every place with public internet: schools, libraries, internet-cafes, coffeeshops, everywhere... And that is also a step a little too far to be accepted by everyone everywhere.

Or they simply wall off these connections to only public spaces. They make it a crime to allow anyone to log into your server from such a location, because you might be harboring a terrorist, etc. These locations might be allowed to access any content that doesn't request identity, but nothing else.

Besides this is the future we're talking about, so the very necessity for 'public internet' could well have been eliminated by the ubiquitous cell-based internet we've been promised. Have you even seen a payphone in the last three years or so? Why shouldn't WiFi suffer the same fate?

Since there probably will be ways to defeat this (they can't secure it all) i'd say they would be back to where they are now: they can trace you by default when they know your home IP... but with a little trouble you are anonymous again.

In a fully secure world there will be zero anonymity. You could pretend to be someone else, but only at the cost of their identity. This is identity theft, and anonymity is not the same thing. Likewise the powers-that-be could readily make it a crime to allow someone else to use your connection, ala The Right to Read.

I wouldn't say it's incorrect. It's quite common to represent binary strings as hexadecimal strings regardless of the underlying format. After all, what units would you apply to an x86 opcode? what about a portion of an H.264 bit stream? Or heck, even a floating point number? 0x3F800000 is the hexadecimal representation of the IEEE 754 single precision floating point number 1.0. (And if you don't think people write floating point numbers in hex, think again.

Now the integer 10 encoded in standard binary format would be 1010, which written in hexadecimal would be A (or 0x0A in C syntax). It also happens to be the same as if you directly went from base 10 to base 16 and ended up with 0x0A. If the decimal number were encoded as BCD, though, the resulting binary string would be written 00010000 (or 0001 0000 if you so choose--the spaces are insignificant!), and that binary string is equivalent to the hexadecimal string 0x10. Note that "hexadecimal string" does not imply base-16 number. It's just a shorter representation than the binary string. It is not equivalent to the hexadecimal number 0x10. When I said "written in hexadecimal", I meant "when written as a hexadecimal string."

Look at it this way: If I were trying to hex-dump a file full of BCD values and the file had nothing but the value "10" (decimal) over and over in each byte, I would see 0x10 in every byte, not 0x0A. Try it. Go write a 6502 or x86 program that uses that processor's BCD mode, and then do a hex dump of memory. Or better yet, go get a BCD number, and pass it to the "%x" format specifier in your favorite C compiler (or other language that uses C's format specifiers).

In this case, one guy is talking BCD, another guy assumed binary, and it was no big deal until 2010 rolled around and 10 suddenly became 16.

I think you mean to say "one guy is talking BCD, another guy assumed standard binary integer. The "B" in BCD is "Binary" after all... Every number stored in the computer is in one binary format or another. Saying "assumed binary" is roughly the same as "assumed the number was stored in a computer." You have to say which format.