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Too many people confuse the two. The medium doesn't matter anymore, only the message between people matters. Copyright law has long since lost sight of its foundations anyway... and needs a major overhaul.

Right click-Save Image as. . .

Well then, somebody needs to tell those photographers to stop putting their print resolution scans online then, right? Me saving a crappy 1024x768 image to my desktop background isn't going to deprive anyone of anything; there's already so much out there. If I love the image (and respect the artist's attitude) I may want a tangible copy on my wall, so I'll still go to the artist to get it signed, framed, and shipped.

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I wonder where the "line" between "internal" and "external" stops, eh? Suppose "my internet" was a private organization that you could join and particpate in. I wonder how trademark usage comes to bear in private communications between private individuals or companies.

This is a good question that nobody is addressing.

In that mindset, then, I knew we were "fucked" when, a few years ago, a simple piece of software that allowed users to make shared annotations on web sites (a piece of software that users consented to using by downloading and installing themselves) was held up as some kind of violation of intellectual property by content creators.

Serious question, is this a troll or a coincidence?

Anyways, it's not the same logic that says mix tapes are illegal or personal annotations are illegal, there are real differences, and IMHO, I think it's a bad sign that people still think the two are identical. You're welcome to your opinions on the validity of such software, of course, but your characterizations of my arguments as "the same argument that makes mix tapes illegal" is flatly wrong; I get to say what my arguments are ;-)

How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?

We've passed the point where the law can be patched back into usefulness; it's time to rethink on a more fundamental level.

I believe privacy-sensitive information should be treated as a form of intellectual property; it's the only thing that makes sense.

(Sure, I could copy and paste it, but Slashdot would probably get annoyed at the length.)

That point extends well beyond movies, of course. It's something that is going to have to be worked out, sooner or later.

This is Yet Another Example of how copyright laws are breaking down. If you're going to cite something academically, should you perhaps have the right of mirroring the content you are citing for the sole purpose of providing a backup if the original goes down, or even just changes?

Copyright law says no, that's copyright infringement.

But copyright law is based on the assumption that a published thing, like a book, is concrete and can't be changed, and can be referred to, forever and ever amen, by the same name, page number, etc. This is obviously no longer true. Should copyright law be changed as a result, now that the old idea of "expression" is breaking?

For an extended discussion of this, please see my communication ethics essay, particularly the section on the death of 'expression' (why copyright is totally broken).

This is Yet Another Example of how copyright laws are breaking down. If you're going to cite something academically, should you perhaps have the right of mirroring the content you are citing for the sole purpose of providing a backup if the original goes down, or even just changes?

Copyright law says no, that's copyright infringement.

But copyright law is based on the assumption that a published thing, like a book, is concrete and can't be changed, and can be referred to, forever and ever amen, by the same name, page number, etc. This is obviously no longer true. Should copyright law be changed as a result, now that the old idea of "expression" is breaking?

For an extended discussion of this, please see my communication ethics essay, particularly the section on the death of 'expression' (why copyright is totally broken).

BTW, before criticising this 'solution', be sure you understand what an arms race is. I know you could further obfuscate it. But you could also further de-obfuscate it. And believe me, with a halfway intelligent system I can keep pace with you; for instance, if I write my cheating spammer so it brings things to my attention in real time as it can't figure them out, I can build a solution bank pretty quickly, not quite as quickly as you can create new challenges (well, maybe, if I'm better then the challenge writer), but certainly faster then you could deploy the new challenges. If you're not bypassing the arms race entirely, you're not winning, you're losing long term.

This is a common failing of understanding when thinking about these technologies. You're not going up against a machine, you're going up against an augmented human.

What they should do is use a question, written out in regular HTML text that is easy for a human to answer but hard for a computer. Example: What color is the sky on a cloudless day?

I'm afraid I'd have to recommend against using that question for blind people.

Might want to pick your examples a bit more carefully ;-)

(Not that it's absolutely impossible they'd know the answer, but it's mere meaningless trivia to someone who has been blind from birth; I don't think I'd remember it.)

Think those are easy for basic AI bots?

Remember, you're not going up against the bots, you're going up against the bots as a proxy for a spammer. If you create a pattern "My name is $random_first $random_middle $random_last. What are my initials?" then the answer is something like

perl -pe 's/My name is (\w)\w* (\w)\w* (\w)\w*. What are my initials\?/$1$2$3/g'

(Try it on your question. Be sure to type the question precisely.)

Now you're back in an arms race against the spammers; the whle point is to avoid the arms race in the first place.

BTW, before criticising this 'solution', be sure you understand what an arms race is. I know you could further obfuscate it. But you could also further de-obfuscate it. And believe me, with a halfway intelligent system I can keep pace with you; for instance, if I write my cheating spammer so it brings things to my attention in real time as it can't figure them out, I can build a solution bank pretty quickly, not quite as quickly as you can create new challenges (well, maybe, if I'm better then the challenge writer), but certainly faster then you could deploy the new challenges. If you're not bypassing the arms race entirely, you're not winning, you're losing long term.

This is a common failing of understanding when thinking about these technologies. You're not going up against a machine, you're going up against an augmented human. (It's why I still think Bayesian filtering will fail eventually, too; the spammers can augment themselves with the same technology, fortunately they just haven't correctly figured it out yet. The clock is probably ticking, though.)

Times change. While what you say is definately the status of current law, it is certainly OK to question whether that law is a good idea.

Once upon a time, like oh, say, a decade ago, the only significant way to communicate for a company was to send forth written things, or videotaped things, or more generally things not under their control. We could then archive those things freely, and the company would not even be aware of it; libraries don't have to register with National Geographic that they are storing X years of their magazine, and National Geographic wouldn't care anyhow.

Copyright and other related laws were created to balance the interests of content "creators" and "consumers". (I put those in quotes because I no longer believe in that dichotomy, but for the purposes of this discussion we can use the terms.) If the balance changes, it's fair to question whether the laws should also change.

Does Archive.org have a right to exist? Or can the company now go after Archive.org and force the removal of their content, no matter what Archive.org wants? How does that affect the balances we've chosen as a society?

It's not obvious. It's probably not beneficial to society to allow people to whitewash history and allow only them to keep the history because they own an all-trumping "copyright" on it. That way lies 1984, only in the book the Ministry of Truth had to hire lots and lots of people to do the modifications since they didn't have computers. Sure, the companies have no obligation to maintain content forever, but can they prevent everyone else from doing so too? Should we create a "right to archive"? Should the public be allowed in to such an archive? How do we archive fee-based content? Do we need a legal concept of "abandonware"?

The real question is not what the companies have to do, but what we are allowed to do with "their" stuff to prevent them from pulling the wool over society's eyes.

These are not easy questions, but they really can't be answered with "This is what the law says now, it's it and that's that."

It's censorship.

Today they're redirecting you to an ad, tommorow they're blackholing anything they feel like it. It's the same technology; you should be concerned if they are allowed to get away with this. Once you start letting them tweak your messages, your free speech is gone.

It's censorship.

Today they're redirecting you to an ad, tommorow they're blackholing anything they feel like it. It's the same technology; you should be concerned if they are allowed to get away with this. Once you start letting them tweak your messages, your free speech is gone.

..if you can disable it, and the instructions mention that you can and explain how to, is this really that big a deal?

This is not adequate for two reasons.

First, many users will never discover it. For these users, the censorship is involuntary and permenent.

Second, Free speech is a right, not something any entity can predicate on an action at their whim.

The opposite might be acceptable, if the users could deliberately request this "feature". The fact no sane person would activate this "feature" also speaks to the fact it's a corruption of ethics.

..if you can disable it, and the instructions mention that you can and explain how to, is this really that big a deal?

This is not adequate for two reasons.

First, many users will never discover it. For these users, the censorship is involuntary and permenent.

Second, Free speech is a right, not something any entity can predicate on an action at their whim.

The opposite might be acceptable, if the users could deliberately request this "feature". The fact no sane person would activate this "feature" also speaks to the fact it's a corruption of ethics.

I'd be the first to agree (hey, I am, in fact), but I do believe that there's a moral and pragmatic foundation behind copy rights. The problem is that the law isn't consistent, and it isn't clear. Until we can get it cleared up, all that the RIAA can do to support their (theoretically moral, pragmatic) position is to play the cards as they're dealt.

You may find this interesting. The final bit of it should be posted this week; I've got it written now but I need to revise it, and I'm having writing trouble with the conclusion (which will probably be resolved soon).

1. Download, install, and run Freenet.
2. Download and install fcptools.
3. Instead of having your RBL list sourced from the HTTP net, have the RBL-client download the list periodically by running a quick invocation of fcptools.

sahalx partially replied to your point but to someone not already familiar with Freenet I'm not sure they'll understand why (s)he's right.

And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...

Freenet is not a "completely anonymous system" in the sense you seem to be using it. While you can not trace a file back to the owner necessarily, it is possible through the use of the SSK mechanism that sahalx mentioned to establish that a file came from the same source as another file.

Therefore, in conjunction with some of the other features of Freenet, once you decided you trusted a particular blocking list, perhaps one specifically mentioned on the former website of the blocking site, you can be reasonably confident that only that person is posting a block list to that file, short of someone breaking into their computer and stealing their key. (Which if they are good enough to not store the private key in their computer, perhaps by writing it down and typing it or eventually even just memorizing it, isn't possible either.)

Therefore, Freenet is perfectly capable of filling this role. You may not know that "Person X" is accountable, but you can know "Key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c://rbl.txt is reliable, and by extension the owner of key 7ch3babf83jcn1qws9c is reliable." and that's good enough for all but the most paranoid folk... and even if it DOES go bad, you tell your software to ignore it and move on to something else.

In fact, Freenet is probably superior to HTTP because of the signing, esp. w/ memorized or physically written keys. (Hopefully conventional RBLs are already signing their lists and hopefully you're using the signitures; I don't know what the state of the art is because I believe RBLs are censorship and do not use them. But I recognize not everyone agrees with this so discussing how to do them better and more securely doesn't give me too much cognitive dissonance.)

Also see the Freenet FAQ. (Freenet's documentation seems to come and go; right now it seems to be at a low period. I remember better discussion pages for "What is an SSK?" but I can't seem to find them from the site now and Google searching for it gets swamped by references to actual SSK-addressed files.)

L-loo-l-look at you, Hacker. A pa-pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you ru-run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machineeeenneeee-[electronic sounds]?

Yeah, patents suck and all, but there's one thing I'm not understanding here.

If Microsoft is forced to pay off Eolas, doesn't that mean they've paid for the patent? Does anyone seriously think that Eolas won't license the patent to Microsoft, or even be forced to by the judge? Why is the assumption that Microsoft will automatically be forced to remove the technology when they just paid half a billion dollars for it?

I admit I'd like to see Microsoft forced to remove it to highlight the fact that patent criticisms like mine are grounded in solid reality and not abstract fantasy, but I just can't see that happening this time. Instead, Microsoft will probably just pony up, because unless they really realize this is going to keep happening, over and over again, they probably still think the patent system is still a net gain for them, allowing them to use the system like this against certain pesky start-ups that may refuse to be bought out.

My explanation of why Software Patents are oxymoronic.

One point I think I made more clearly, that should have been made in that piece and would have fit perfectly, is that to my knowledge, only software is covered by both Copyright and Patents; it should be no surprise that two systems that were never designed to work together, basically don't! Copyright fits software much better then patents; that's a sign it should be treated under the copyright system and not the patent system. IMHO, I also did a somewhat more thorough job of exploring that point.

Still, for a 1991 essay, that was pretty darned good.

There is always a beneficial argument to be made for anything. I myself once for shock value in High School did a speech on why we should let loose with the nukes and come as close as sterilizing the planet as we can. You can easily fill five minutes with why that is a good idea. (The core point being that it may well be the best thing in the long term for "Mother Nature", a term I carefully left undefined.*)

You need to consider the whole story, and the fact is to start off with that the potential benefits to the consumer are fairly dar out. The only good thing is that increasing the efficiency of the shipping system will lower prices... albiet only marginally, since the efficiency is pretty high. Any other benefit is contrived.

The potential privacy implications are more interesting. Still, even as a certified privacy wonk, bar codes don't scare me much. They need to be actively physically scanned and it's hard to hide that. RFID tags are much more interesting.

(*: Incidentally, I think the opposite is true: The human extinction movement is totally wrong. Humans represent "Mother Nature"'s best and possibly only hope for spreading the biosphere beyond the confines of this planet. A few eggs will be broken on the way, there's no way around that. Even if humanity went extinct, there's no paticularly reason to believe that intelligent, tool-using life would arise again, nor to believe that such life would stand as good a chance to get off the planet as we do, especially since it already exists. (Imagine bobcats as tool-users; sure, they can make sticks but they have no social abilities to speak of, seriously limiting their potential.) The same characteristics that make us dangerous also make it possible to survive; there's no having one without the other.)

Support Human Justice for Human Beings!

could this not set a precedent for Civil copyright cases?

There shouldn't be a precedent to be set! If somebody else uses a computer to do something, it's 100% their responsibility if that's a legal thing to do. (If they don't have permission to use that computer, they're already starting out on the wrong foot legally.) The fact that it happens to be your computer should be mostly meaningless; you didn't do anything.

Maybe someday, when it's possible to reliably say "This computer is 100% secure", then we can blame people for everything their computer does. In the meantime, security vulnerabilities in old mainstays like ssh and man and other things continue to be found.

The only concievable legal basis for nailing a computer owner for something they had nothing to do with and weren't even aware was happening is sheer convenience, and the goal of Justice is not to make law enforcement convenient. In fact, convenient law enforcement is nearly diametrically opposed to Justice, as a practical matter.

Will this make people use it as an excuse? Of course it will! So what? People use "self-defense" as an excuse for murder all the time. Sometimes it's a lie. Sometimes it's the truth. It remains a valid defense; I would not want to live in a society where self-defense is the same as murder. That it might be used as an excuse is a completely invalid argument; you're implicitly appealing to law-enforcement convenience, and that is not a valid thing to argue for. Justice should not be convenient (mostly the first paragraph, although the point underscores the whole piece).

Now, I think, we get down to the heart of the matter. This isn't an attack on Linux per se. It isn't about IP or patents or copyrights. This is about trying to destroy the GPL. I think this statement, more than anything else, shows that MS really is behind this whole thing.

Up to this point I have been skeptical on that issue because it's easy to see a conspiracy where there is none. But I am forced to concede that that press release is exactly the press release that Microsoft would like to release, but don't think they can in a politic way.

The "SCO as a proxy for Microsoft" theory just got a lot more credible.

Copyright is not the threat to freedom. Indeed, copyright will be one of the utterly necessary tools to secure it, though it may not resemble its current form much. Copyright abuse is a threat to freedom, and the inability of the current system to correctly use copyright is a threat to freedom, but the answer is not to give up all copyright; that's tantamount to just giving up, because with no protection from the corporations, we lose, immediately.

Copyright is not the threat to freedom. Indeed, copyright will be one of the utterly necessary tools to secure it, though it may not resemble its current form much. Copyright abuse is a threat to freedom, and the inability of the current system to correctly use copyright is a threat to freedom, but the answer is not to give up all copyright; that's tantamount to just giving up, because with no protection from the corporations, we lose, immediately.

"iRights" - Voting Machine Analysed, Found Wanting.

From the linked site:

The authors have done a security analysis of Diebold code that was downloaded from an open FTP site earlier this year. While the paper is technical, significant portions of it can be read easily by a non-computer scientist.

From the conclusion of the paper, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, emphasis mine:

Using publicly available source code, we performed an analysis of a voting machine. This code was apparently developed by a company that sells to states and other municipalities that use them in real elections. We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple ballots with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater. Based on our analysis of the development environment, including change logs and comments, we believe that an appropriate level of programming discipline for a project such as this was not maintained. In fact, there appears to have been little quality control in the process....

The model where individual vendors write proprietary code to run our elections appears to be unreliable, and if we do not change the process of designing our voting systems, we will have no confidence that our election results will reflect the will of the electorate....

And finally, the text of the Voter-Verifiable newsletter I received regarding this issue, which should appear on this page sometime (July 24, 2003):

"iRights" - Voting Machine Analysed, Found Wanting.

From the linked site:

The authors have done a security analysis of Diebold code that was downloaded from an open FTP site earlier this year. While the paper is technical, significant portions of it can be read easily by a non-computer scientist.

From the conclusion of the paper, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, emphasis mine:

Using publicly available source code, we performed an analysis of a voting machine. This code was apparently developed by a company that sells to states and other municipalities that use them in real elections. We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple ballots with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater. Based on our analysis of the development environment, including change logs and comments, we believe that an appropriate level of programming discipline for a project such as this was not maintained. In fact, there appears to have been little quality control in the process....

The model where individual vendors write proprietary code to run our elections appears to be unreliable, and if we do not change the process of designing our voting systems, we will have no confidence that our election results will reflect the will of the electorate....

And finally, the text of the Voter-Verifiable newsletter I received regarding this issue, which should appear on this page sometime (July 24, 2003):

A description in an abstract has no legal bearing on the scope of the patent granted, nor does excerpts of language drawn from the specification. The claim is the thing. Arguing in general terms from a broad sweeping apprimation of the patent craft is simply quibbling about a straw man.

Normally I'd agree, but the typical technical patent simply is a restatement of the abstract, in all possible permutations of basic hardware and software setups. See the anatomy of a trivial patent for examples of that sort of thing. Combined with the way the Patent Office (and the rest of the system) is forced to take a broad view of patents, it regrettably is fairly valid to argue from the abstract alone.

There's no reasonable way to describe a true implementation of these ideas fully in the twenty or so pages most of these sorts of patents consume.

If you think a claim from a patent is valid, spell out the claim, offer a plausible construction of the claim and tell us what is the prior art. then we have a useful conversation going.

Generally speaking, while that may be useful in non-software domains, software patent claims are uselessly vague. Showing prior art for a patent claim that literally boils down to "Sending encrypted data with a network" (as opposed to the next claim, which could involve sending encrypted data with a modem) is so easy, the legal system refuses to believe it, so they make it impossible, because while specified prior art certainly invalidates the broad claim, it doesn't quite match the exact implementation or something stupid like that. Frankly, I have a hard time keeping all the rationalizations that make software patents possible straight; they are so nonsensical that they make no sense to me anymore.

A description in an abstract has no legal bearing on the scope of the patent granted, nor does excerpts of language drawn from the specification. The claim is the thing. Arguing in general terms from a broad sweeping apprimation of the patent craft is simply quibbling about a straw man.

Normally I'd agree, but the typical technical patent simply is a restatement of the abstract, in all possible permutations of basic hardware and software setups. See the anatomy of a trivial patent for examples of that sort of thing. Combined with the way the Patent Office (and the rest of the system) is forced to take a broad view of patents, it regrettably is fairly valid to argue from the abstract alone.

There's no reasonable way to describe a true implementation of these ideas fully in the twenty or so pages most of these sorts of patents consume.

If you think a claim from a patent is valid, spell out the claim, offer a plausible construction of the claim and tell us what is the prior art. then we have a useful conversation going.

Generally speaking, while that may be useful in non-software domains, software patent claims are uselessly vague. Showing prior art for a patent claim that literally boils down to "Sending encrypted data with a network" (as opposed to the next claim, which could involve sending encrypted data with a modem) is so easy, the legal system refuses to believe it, so they make it impossible, because while specified prior art certainly invalidates the broad claim, it doesn't quite match the exact implementation or something stupid like that. Frankly, I have a hard time keeping all the rationalizations that make software patents possible straight; they are so nonsensical that they make no sense to me anymore.

I call it a conspiracy of common cause.

Happens all the time.

I think the basic problem is the patent system is not designed to handle software or business method patents. It was set up from day one to handle physical objects and processes, and it does that tolerably well. It's possible to look at two processes or objects and make a reasonable determination whether they are the same. The equivalent is not really possible for software or business method patents.

Remember one of the purposes of patents was not to lock up entire ideas, but lock up one implementation, encouraging others to create other implementations to stimulate market competition. Since the patent system is fundamentally unsound in this domain, and has no reasonable way to determine if two things are the same, the patent system has "defaulted" to the broadest possible interpretation of "same" (as opposed to the narrowest possible, in which case it would be virtually impossible to violate a patent, patents would be nearly worthless, and by extension, the Patent Office would be nearly worthless and powerless, which is the Number One Anathema to a beauracracy). As a result it's not possible to create alternate implementations without automatically infringing.

Patents do not belong in this domain, they are downright oxymoronic.

I think the basic problem is the patent system is not designed to handle software or business method patents. It was set up from day one to handle physical objects and processes, and it does that tolerably well. It's possible to look at two processes or objects and make a reasonable determination whether they are the same. The equivalent is not really possible for software or business method patents.

Remember one of the purposes of patents was not to lock up entire ideas, but lock up one implementation, encouraging others to create other implementations to stimulate market competition. Since the patent system is fundamentally unsound in this domain, and has no reasonable way to determine if two things are the same, the patent system has "defaulted" to the broadest possible interpretation of "same" (as opposed to the narrowest possible, in which case it would be virtually impossible to violate a patent, patents would be nearly worthless, and by extension, the Patent Office would be nearly worthless and powerless, which is the Number One Anathema to a beauracracy). As a result it's not possible to create alternate implementations without automatically infringing.

Patents do not belong in this domain, they are downright oxymoronic.

The vast majority of patents are held by coroporations. The inventions of individual inventors are owned by corporations because of an employment agreement or are sold to a corporation for a pittance for fear that the corporation will win any legal battle owing to their superior financial resources, regardless of the merit of their claims.

There's an important lesson here that I wish all Slashbots would learn: Anything you give to the little guy is also given to corporations.

You think you can just "give" patents to the little guy and suddenly he can compete? Nope, a big corporation still has thousands of man hours vs. the little guy. You can't give the little guy anything that isn't multiplied by thousands in the hands of a large corporation.

The only way to give the little guy even a fighting chance is to take things away, or protect things for everybody. In this context, "taking things away" means no software patents for anyone, and ....

Make patents non-transferrable and make ip agreements that assign ownership invention to corporations illegal and they'll be back in business.

is an instance of protecting everybody equally, because the non-transferability means that corporations can't get an advantage. (Although you'll find a difficult way to make this stick and I'm not proposing it as a good idea; personally I go more for no software patents at all.)

Similar arguments arise in other domains, but they would not be on topic. It's a general principle, though.

Interesting; as a 25-ish Jeremy I've had the exact opposite scenario. In high school there were so many of us that when I heard my name I only turned to the person calling me if I recognized the voice. In fact the fastest way to get my attention is to call me Jerf (see nick), not because I'm necessarily smitten with it, but because it's sufficiently unusual that I can safely assume you mean me. (Apparently it is a relatively rare proper name in Norway, which I'm not likely to hear for real in my lifetime.) That's why it's my nick, too; it's unique enough that when I see it, I know with high probability it means me, even online where every "cool" nick is in use several thousand times over.

(However, it's not so rare that there's nobody with it; somebody beat me to it on the New York Times site, and every once in a while on a huge site I find it's been taken.)

"Ironically" (if it's still safe to use that word around here), my mother named Jeremy that because she thought it was an uncommon name.

Incidentally, for those who might want a nick like that (unusual, instantly recognizable), be ready to accept something that isn't a word in any language you know and just keep you eyes open; jerf started as a typo. Truly interesting and unusual nicks are just around the bend.

Yeah, it's offtopic. Bite me.

Software Patents are bad because they are oxymoronic; to summarize that link, the patent system was set up to protect certain kinds of things, and software is not that kind of thing. As a result, software patents fail miserably because patent protection is not appropriate. In order to make it appropriate, it has been twisted to the point of absurdity.

Your metaphors are pointless. Software is not clothing. Non-customized software is useless in a way that non-customized clothing is not. There are perhaps 20-ish common pants sizes for adult men. There are multiple thousands of software configurations for business, one for each business.

So a business can download Apache and install it. So what? Does Apache automatically integrate with accounts receivable? Does it automatically allow the customer to see their pending orders more efficiently then with the competition? Does one upgrade off of a mainframe database by the mere installation of MySQL?

If you insist on a metaphor, free software is a brick for business; it's great that free software drives the materials cost of the "software building" down to zero, but labor always dominated anyhow. The software equivalent of a downloadable house is still non-existent.

So your whole metaphor falls down on the fact that the final product is not freely available; the software equivalent of "commodity jeans" is not available, only the software equivalent of "commodity denim".

If you want to prove I'm wrong, show me the software package I can download off of Sourceforge that all I have to do is install it, and bam, I have a payroll system for a multi-national, multi-thousand employee company, tapping into our existing payroll databases and conversant not just with the laws of multiple countries, but also the multiple union contracts we've negotiated. Hell, show me the commercial package that can do that! Is that an extreme? A little, but you can't even download the equivalent for a four person plumbing company, either.

Failing that, you are pretty much wrong, and there's not much I can say to soften that.

I'd just like to echo two blog posts I made, an initial comment and a clarification after seeing how excited people were getting about this.

Summarizing, despite the fact I have one of the most stringent definitions of censorship I know of, this doesn't fit as long as it remains as limited in scope as it actually is. There are a lot of ways to screw this up, but the actual proposal (which should have been linked in the Slashdot article!) actually manages to avoid the traps. As such, this can qualify as a bona-fide cultural difference without destroying the world.

Now, be sure you understand that my approval is fragile and the things that people are reading into the proposal, since they didn't RTFProposal, are indeed scary and it's heartening to see people responding to that. But the limited proposal as it stands is not really a threat, until it is expanded.

(If you are against it because you feel it will inevitably expand into unethical extremes, well, I'd say the odds of that are pretty decent too so I would definately respect that view of things.)

I'd just like to echo two blog posts I made, an initial comment and a clarification after seeing how excited people were getting about this.

Summarizing, despite the fact I have one of the most stringent definitions of censorship I know of, this doesn't fit as long as it remains as limited in scope as it actually is. There are a lot of ways to screw this up, but the actual proposal (which should have been linked in the Slashdot article!) actually manages to avoid the traps. As such, this can qualify as a bona-fide cultural difference without destroying the world.

Now, be sure you understand that my approval is fragile and the things that people are reading into the proposal, since they didn't RTFProposal, are indeed scary and it's heartening to see people responding to that. But the limited proposal as it stands is not really a threat, until it is expanded.

(If you are against it because you feel it will inevitably expand into unethical extremes, well, I'd say the odds of that are pretty decent too so I would definately respect that view of things.)

I'd just like to echo two blog posts I made, an initial comment and a clarification after seeing how excited people were getting about this.

Summarizing, despite the fact I have one of the most stringent definitions of censorship I know of, this doesn't fit as long as it remains as limited in scope as it actually is. There are a lot of ways to screw this up, but the actual proposal (which should have been linked in the Slashdot article!) actually manages to avoid the traps. As such, this can qualify as a bona-fide cultural difference without destroying the world.

Now, be sure you understand that my approval is fragile and the things that people are reading into the proposal, since they didn't RTFProposal, are indeed scary and it's heartening to see people responding to that. But the limited proposal as it stands is not really a threat, until it is expanded.

(If you are against it because you feel it will inevitably expand into unethical extremes, well, I'd say the odds of that are pretty decent too so I would definately respect that view of things.)

Sure, I've "learned" more out of class. It's almost impossible for class to keep up with a motivated learner; it's only a handful of hours a week.

But I've learned different getting my grad degree. I would not have my familiarity with graph theory, algorithmic complexity, internals of compilers, etc. While perhaps none of these things were as in depth as you'd need to actually do work, the framework I've acquired to handle these in two years in grad school would easily have taken me 10 years of my own to learn... because on your own you get very focused on the task(s) at hand and never learn anything more.

Also, unless you're a rare genius with math, having accountability to a professor to really learn the material, and not just skim a book and fool myself into thinking I understood intensely mathematical material, is invaluable. It's a rare person that can truly force themselves to learn material like that... and for things like graph theory that can be important.

Each of those things is paying off, too, in my work. Graph theory in particular, though it's hard to point at a useless class.

(Of course, if you go into the classes assuming that you'll never get anything useful out of them, you won't.)

Note that I did a Masters, and I did not do a thesis; IMHO two years is too small for a thesis, so I actively chose to take the classes instead, which were more valuable to me. (I feel like this was my thesis, since I was writing it the whole time I was in grad school, but they'd never give me a masters in computer science for that.)

I read that as "For an average website, only 30% of it will be read."

Consider the vast number of archives online, mostly unread. For instance, I have my weblog posts going back to 2000. I probably use them more then anybody else (due to the nature of the weblog and a project I'm doing) and I still don't use that much.

If you're talking about read reasonably "often", then the vast majority of jerf.org is unread.

However, it was all read at some point, so it depends on the exact definition. If you're talking ever it's close to 100%.

Also, I was disappointed to see the "We're post-scarcity" canard. It's not true; information is too scarce. The whole problem with info glut in the first place is that the vast majority of it isn't information we want, it just is, while meanwhile information we want is either obscured or not actually available. Mere quantity does nothing to guarentee that what exists corresponds to what we want. (Another example of the "infinite (or very large) sets must contain all possibilities" fallacy.)

I'm honestly not completely sure how Mozilla implements Bayesian classification, but I was under the assumption that it did do both. Paul Graham's method involves a corpus of good and bad, and provides for a method to move a message from one corpus to the other (eg, when marking a message as spam, it's removed from the "good" corpus and added to the "bad").

So I assumed Mozilla's implementation was following Paul's specification, but I could be wrong. I do know that, prior to the newer types of spam messages, it worked very well (and still does on the "obvious" stuff). But my false-positive rate has gone up significantly, which I suspect is partly due to my marking the sneaky ones as spam. It throws the whole system off when the difference between good and not-good email is so slight (in the realm of classification).

An article I read a while back -- and disagreed with at the time -- puts some of this into perspective, and can be found here. I'm starting to see first-hand some of his points, and he may be correct. Basically, he says that once spammers defeat Bayesian classification, there's not much more we can do (as far as automated filtering that is).

Objects don't have intents.

And the problem is that this is a matter of how you read it; a lawyer could certainly go for my interpretation, and that's all that would matter to you for the duration of the trial...

To put it another way,

Please don't. Wireless nodes aren't locks, and hackers aren't using lockpicks.

Oh, and I meant to link to my essay Why Software Will Never Stop Sucking, which incidentally shreds the tool metaphor.

Oh, and it's not contradictory: The point of the essay is software will never be 100% intuitive... but that doesn't let people off the hook today for gratuitously making stuff harder to use and thinking their somehow justified.

Wrong.

Bayesian classification, by definition, cannot have a zero false-positive rate without a 100% false-negative rate except in the most trivial cases.

I should have clarified, but even in my experience there wasn't a zero false-positive rate. Early on, I did get a couple mailing list subscriptions (which I had legitimately subscribed to) marked as Junk.

But it is low, lower than any other type of filtering I have seen/used so far to date. The point is, as long as you double check (once per day perhaps) the classification, it can still save a lot of time.

...but I am quite certain that it wouldn't last very long if spammers were trying to avoid it.

Well, yes, but those of us using Bayesian filters aren't the target of the spammers. Those who actually make purchases as a result of SPAM aren't running Bayesian filters. See the patern? The spammers have nothing to gain by trying to circumvent our filtering, and everything to lose, since they will have modified their message quite a lot.

That's the beauty of Bayesian filtering. It's personal. Only the individual can implement the filter, it's not something that will be done at the ISP level. So the spammers have no reason to try and circumvent it. Anyone using it will, most likely, not ever make a purchase or otherwise respond to SPAM.

This article actually makes a similar point to yours. Read it through -- I responded to his challenge at the end, with a similar (but longer-winded) version of the above. Granted, he has a lot of good ideas, but I don't think spammers will put that much into defeating filtering that only those who are seriously against SPAM will use anyway.

The spammer cannot adapr to you because s/he does not know the ruleset you are using to detect spam. Even a spammer running 1,000,000 valid emails through a filter would not work, because the filter adapts to the email you actually *receive*.

This sort of concept works if the core of people that you correspond with numbers in the single digit, and there is a common subject matter. That is often not the case and instead one corresponds with a wide range of people with a wide range of subject matter and writing styles. The idea that the dialect of the people that you correspond with is so dramatically distinct that it can be categorically recognized strikes me as, well, absolutely ridiculous.

Again related to the link I gave in another one, that guy wrote a reply in relation to people who claim that their own filters will be highly individualized and hence impervious to tricky spammers. Note that I don't know that guy and just came across his link while looking up this on Google.

I had a long winded reply regarding false positives and what they represent to even the best filtration (i.e. what happens when your filter is attuned to emails between you and your buddies, and suddenly a proposal comes in from an employer, or a partner, or a customer? This single lost email could be incredibly damaging) when I noticed this page that says it eloquently and thoroughly.

Irrelevant. "No Shirt No Shoes No Service" is not a statement of conditions for doing business. It is actually a statement of the law. It is illegal for public health and safety reasons to enter a store without shoes, due to the spreading of foot disease. "No shirt" is probably more a community standards thing, but it's still the law.

We didn't sign an agreement because regardless of the agreement, the law still binds. Technically, the store owner doesn't have a choice, they must evict a bare-footed customer, even if they agree with the customer not to.

Try again, perhaps this time without metaphors... concentrate on the real differences.

To play Devil's advocate, from a journalistic point of view, Wired's primary responsibility is to validate the source of the info. Once that is done, you can make a very good case that this is, at least potentially, the sort of thing that People Must Know, which overrides most other considerations.

The contents were probably awfully mundane, perhaps too much so to qualify for The People Must Know, but one could imagine at least in theory that they might have found something interesting in there.

There is precedent for this: For a big example, consider the Watergate scandal. The New York Times wasn't "supposed" to be in possession of that material, and they certainly weren't "supposed" to publish it, but The People Must Know overrode their reservations, and most of us would consider that the right decision based on the info they had at the time.

On the other hand, hacking into my email and telling the world about it would be unethical; there is no need for anybody to know what's in there, so they'd just be rumormongering.

What, you say this "The People Need To Know" is an awfully fuzzy criterion to be using? Damn straight! These ethical things are hard.

(Remember, I'm playing devil's advocate here; I don't believe it's black and white, but I do think there is a strong kernel of truth here.)