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The whole AT&T farce you mentioned did happen.

The guy(s) who "stole" the AT&T documents (E911 Document) was none other than Erik Bloodaxe and his fellow Legion of Doom members. Bloodaxe up until a couple years ago was also editor of Phrackmagazine.

The whole imbroglio surrounding the E911 document is mentioned in Bruce Sterlings book: The Hacker Crackdown: Law and disorder on the electronic frontier. Bruce Sterling placed this huge book on Project Gutenburg free for anyone to download. It is a good book and has a lot of info on the history of hacking, (pre script-kiddie days) as well as Operation Sundevil which was responsible for the confiscation of the computer systems of Steve Jackson Games, (GURPS RPGs) mainly because they had a BBS, and had Cyberpunk role playing game information on their boxes.

"I should say So, Massa Tom!" added the colored man. "I done did prognosticate dat some day de combustible material of which dat shed am composed would conflaggrate--"

This type of language and attitude is endemic in the Tom Swift series. I remember being shocked a couple years ago when I reread one of my old copies.

As an additional exercise, try and find a copy of Disney's "Song of the South" on VHS.

I host my Project Guttenburg E-Books on Gnutella as well as many shareware and freeware games spanning all the way back to the early 1980s. To my knowledge I do not have one single copyright violation in my shared folder.

As mentioned above, the work you specify is copyrighted because it is a translation of the origional. If you would like a copy of your own without copyright restrictions on it, you might goto Project Gutenberg and search for "Bible". I did and got 18 hits for copies in a few different languages, and a couple of different versions that are in the public domain. Enjoy!

The story is public domain and is freely available at project gutenberg.
Sindri Traustason
"It takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen"

Or even better, Project Gutenburg also has the illustrated version. I read Flatland for the first time in junior high, and I remember the wonder and mystery it evoked.

Flatland, a romance of many dimensions.

The server should be renamed "Fortunato."

Reading books on a PDA (a Palm in my case) came as a pleasant surprise. I started doing it because the web (Project Gutenberg) was the only place I could get hold of E.R. Burrough's Barsoom books, that I'd seen references to everywhere, but never read.

I really didn't think it would be convenient, but as JesseL writes, the screen isn't an issue. It's also very convenient to have a book around at all times. I'm currently reading Gummere's translation of the Beowulf epic, in preparation for some day tackling the real stuff :-)

Reading books on a PDA (a Palm in my case) came as a pleasant surprise. I started doing it because the web (Project Gutenberg) was the only place I could get hold of E.R. Burrough's Barsoom books, that I'd seen references to everywhere, but never read.

I really didn't think it would be convenient, but as JesseL writes, the screen isn't an issue. It's also very convenient to have a book around at all times. I'm currently reading Gummere's translation of the Beowulf epic, in preparation for some day tackling the real stuff :-)

How about PI to 1 million places? or in a zip. Gotta love Project Gutenburg

I find that Hogan Books (http://hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html) lists quite a lot of free books on the Web. The search engine makes it even more useful.

Many of the entries come from InformIT (http://www.informit.com/), which has a pretty good free library.

Then there's the Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) for Linux-specific things.

Of course there's also all the other documentation on the Net. Search engines are wonderful.

Not quite computer-related but also worth checking out are Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/), the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/index.html) and the UPenn Digital Library (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html ). Mostly classics and other things whose copyrights have expired, but you have a couple of new books here too. General reading material - bookworm fare. =)

Yes, I know, you were looking for paper copies, and a lot of interesting information isn't available online. But it's worth checking out anyway. =)

I find that Hogan Books (http://hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html) lists quite a lot of free books on the Web. The search engine makes it even more useful.

Many of the entries come from InformIT (http://www.informit.com/), which has a pretty good free library.

Then there's the Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) for Linux-specific things.

Of course there's also all the other documentation on the Net. Search engines are wonderful.

Not quite computer-related but also worth checking out are Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/), the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/index.html) and the UPenn Digital Library (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html ). Mostly classics and other things whose copyrights have expired, but you have a couple of new books here too. General reading material - bookworm fare. =)

Yes, I know, you were looking for paper copies, and a lot of interesting information isn't available online. But it's worth checking out anyway. =)

I think there is a theme building in this and several other Slashdot articles lately: you need to have common sense about your career choices.

Just like the guy last week who complained that his employer actually had the gall to try to enforce the intellectual property agreement that he signed, this guy didn't do his due diligence before hand.

It's a big nasty world out there. The last car dealer we went to in the bay area (Bob Lewis Volkswagon) tried to give us a starting price of $3,000.00 over MSRP. Abdominizers and other crappy products get sold to people like you and me, not just wrassin' watching folks in trailer parks. One of the good and bad things about the USA is that you can largely make your own mistakes.

I've made similar mistakes to this one. My 2nd job out of college was for a company that was taking over the regional office of another computer reseller. The deal got held up, and I spent two weeks in Cincinnati in a new apartment with no job. I take responsiblity for that mistake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an incredible essay on self-reliance. (I also mirrored the Project Gutenburg free text version on my site here.) I carry it on my Palm Pilot and refer to it often when I'm feeling ripped off, used, or abused. There are two attitudes you can take when something happens to you, either it happened to you and you were powerless to prevent it, or it happend to you because you created it. The latter position is a more powerful one, since it gives you control of the situation and the power to change it.

Here's the last paragraph of Emerson's essay, I think it's a good summary of what I'm trying to say.

"So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

- Twid

Maybe I will paypal them a few bucks. One buck from each of us would make for a pretty big bunch of bucks...

mailto:hart@pobox.com

or to make donations directly, see:
http://promo.net/pg/donation.html

Well, my library could consist of:

- books from project gutenburg
- free books, maybe from here or here
- technical books like this one and other technical documents.
- articles from Nupedia
- university research papers, a lot of which are on-line now.
- mirrors of websites

All free, no fees. A prediction: a readable ebook will drive publishing toward free books just as linux is driving software companies to open source. It will never be a complete transformation in either case, but it will shake things up for sure.

Long ago, there was an article on Slashdot about a free, high quality online university subsidized by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy. This was the missing link. There are already a few good free sources of information out there (Project Gutenberg, The Baen Library), but a comprehensive educational program available for free would provide a much more "equal opportunity." Has anyone heard anything from this, or is it vaporware?

I have recommended, and the consensus on the short-lived "gnupedia" mailing list is that this is a good recommendation, that the FSF instead sponsor a project to be called "Alexandria" -- a more general repository for free texts.

This sounds to me very much like the Gutenberg project, at least from this noe sentence from the article. Why is this just not a repeat of the same thing? RMS is going to start something up which is going to go in competition with a longstanding free project out there. The difference being, the Gutenberg project is more longstanding and much better known than Nupedia.

Yes, I realize that the Gutenberg project is mostly for "classic" texts who have passed into the public domain. However, I was under the impression that their mission could include current free texts. (I could be wrong.)

For the Gutenberg project, see: http://promo.net/pg

-Rob

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Amigori
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Books are a great alternative to video games.

There's also something nice about not having 30 cubic feet of space in a dorm room taken up by VHS tapes, cds, encyclopedia volumes, DVDs and other so called meatspace products. I doubt that you can accurately say that everyone or at least a critical number of people value a jewel case that's 5x the thickness of a cd taking up so much room. Trying to reduce the bulk of meatspace products?

• VHS? Try Hi8 instead; the tapes are much smaller, and the resolution is remarkably better.
• CD and DVD cases? There are CD wallets for that.
• Encyclopedia? Why bother? Britannica is already online and supported by ads.
• Mouse pad? Use a trackball.
• CD/DVD/etc? Try reading free books online. In fact, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells[?] is what led me to start collecting those blasted Precious Moments figurines, but that's another node.

Jesus fucking Christ on a popsicle stick

Let's analyze this. Jesus is commonly called Christ. Fscking oneself is another term for masturbation. Why would Jesus be shoving a Popsicle® stick up his ass?

Now, with that out of the way:
Besides, ink on dead tree isn't going anywhere. For long format fiction it's still a far better experience that etext

Especially because etext refers to books in public domain, especially those published by Project Gutenberg. eBook is the term for those proprietary, copy-controlled, encrypted-out-the-ass electronic texts of works still under copyright. And don't count on any more literature expiring into the public domain, as Disney buys 20 more years of copyright for everything every 20 years, effectively putting everything written on or after January 1, 1923, under perpetual copyright.

Now to address the other side of that: I know CRTs suck cock. That's why I do most of my reading on an LCD. Subpixel text rendering using individual color channels for finer anti-aliasing can make a good LCD look almost as good as paper.

Flatland, like most popular works of classic literature written before 1923, is available from Project Gutenberg. It's also available from Project Nodeberg (Everything's partial PG mirror) here.

Sadly, nothing written on or after January 1, 1923, will ever expire into the public domain because of atrocities like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Every 20 years, Disney buys another 20 years of copyright in every major jurisdiction.

why should an ad be there, I already pay to use the internet.

You pay to use an Internet connection; the advertising pays for the content on that connection. All content created on or after January 1923 (pretty much everything on the Web except Project Gutenberg) is under perpetual copyright; somebody needs to pay royalties for the content.

You proofread OCR'd text for Project Gutenberg using the raw scanned image to fix anything. You can do as little or as much as you want.

You're mixing trademarks and copyright. Disney will have the exclusive rights to Mickey AS A TRADEMARK forever - not even your grandgrandgrandchildren will be able to open a fast-fod chain named "Mickey Burgers" having the familiar three-circle mouse drawing as a logo, for instance.

On the other hand, everybody should be legally able to make copies of "Steamboat Willie" or "Snow White" and pass them around at will, or even at charge. That's copyright expiration, which has been unconstitutionally extended over and over. Works whose copyright DID expire can be found at Project Gutemberg (this is the same link as the article).

1. The real PG etext of Alice is available at ibiblio, as well as other places.
2. All PG etexts include an extensive license at the top of the file. This is not the GPL, though it was written at about the same time. It basically says that you can do what you want with the book, but must also provide plain text copies. AND, if you want to use the Project Gutenberg trademark, the whole header needs to stay intact.
3. The "Alice" that Adobe distributes appears to be in violation of the license. However, the book seems to have been produced by a separate party in Chicago. I didn't see other Project Gutenberg books at the Adobe site, but under the license they could use the text (which is public domain) and discard the header/license legitimately.
4. To the guy who offered a Perl script: I don't recall seeing this, and I'm the guy it should have gone to. Contact me if you're still interested.
5. Donations are a very slight problem because we just got a trust foundation started with 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status in the US. The problem is that not all states are officially tax exempt yet. See the license in one of today's books (like Short Stories by G. de Maupassant) for a list of states and where to donate. (We have a Web form for credit cards that's waiting for all states before going live. Sorry 'bout that).
6. XML for Project Gutenberg: I hope this will be in place by mid-2001. I am working with someone on a DTD, and my goal is to do conversion on the fly from XML to text, HTML & other formats. Ideas? Pls. get in touch.
7. For front-ends: the challenge is the irregular structure of documents (including the ever-changing header & lack of structured metadata). That's the main reason we don't distribute any on the official Web page: none seem to work properly (including header display) for the entire collection. I hope this is a problem that XML will solve.

• Greg

See: http://promo.net/pg/vol/pd.html

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While not current works, about 3k titles of 'great works' can be found at Project Gurenberg (http://promo.net/pg/)

There is a lot of good stuff there if you are interested in older works that have entered the public domain.

it's like we're back in the Dark Ages and I'm some sort of black magician

Dude, we are magicians. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." An appropriate reading selection might also be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .

Try this link.

"creating the first of a new kind of digital library."

I think Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg had this "new kind of library" very much in mind in 1971 when he started PG. I think that ibiblbibiblbiblio is a great site, it's just that it is not quite as groundbreaking as an idea as that.

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"creating the first of a new kind of digital library."

I think Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg had this "new kind of library" very much in mind in 1971 when he started PG. I think that ibiblbibiblbiblio is a great site, it's just that it is not quite as groundbreaking as an idea as that.

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At the moment, nothing can beat the sheer interactivity and functionality of pieces of paper bound in a cover. Whilst there is growth in the amount of online literature, the current state of play of the technology we use in browsing the net makes it a lot more convenient just to pick up a book.

Who do you think gets more "hits": Project Gutenberg or the Library of Congress? It's not the former I'm guessing...

Whilst we are hearing a lot about electronic books recently, the failure of companies to decide on a standard, and the failure of the technology to be as robust or as comfortable as books means that for the moment, "open publishing" will remain firmly a minority phenomenon.

Thanks for the refresher on Constitutional law -- that part you cite is one of the duties of Congress, among regulating interstate commerce, maintaining an army and navy, etc. It's been a long, long time since high-school civics class."The limited time" cited jogs my memory: Wasn't there a recent instance wherein a publisher or other entity sought and won a significant copyright extension on published works? I seem to remember that this apparently dashes any hope of seeing Project Gutenberg make available The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in our lifetimes.

I have an idea. Have Project Gutenberg distribute their official archives on Gnutella. Trying to censor audio and video is one thing, but try censoring harmless, useful, and loved books. Even the common joe should take offense to that.

"Big Brother, Inc. tries to stop 1984 from begin read" is alot worse for PR than "[Insert beloved band here] tries to prevent teenagers from stealing its livelyhood."

Allright, he says he is getting 76% of people who download his book to say they will pay. Assuming they all do, this is still not likely 76% of the people who downloaded his work in the real world. I'm not even going to get into people who downloaded it and then deciding it wasn't worth the money - let's assume those people are insignificant.

Without into details, I once worked on a reasonably popular website. I had a variety of ways to track what you seemed to go to, and how long you were there. But whenever my superiors pressed, I refused to give them an exact number of people who visited the site, nor any particular page, URL, or file. Why? Web servers do not count users. They simply count hits to a file.

Whenever you access a URL, your web browser may make one or two requests (depending on the version or edition) to access a file and determine its type. In addition, someone may start a download, stop it, resume it later, download it again (either from the same or another computer), etc. In addition, you may have one user behind a proxy or a hundred. The proxy may or may not make itself known.

Now you could create a complex system which noted if a particular IP address supported cookies, if a request seemed to go through a proxy, etc., to try and gain a more accurate count. Still, you are never going to come up with an exact figure. The different between counts of cookies, IP addresses, and hits in terms of bytes downloaded divided by bytes for the page(s) in question can vary by orders of magnitude.

So can Steven King say that exactly 76% of people have paid for his book? He can not. The actual number may be higher or lower (depending on how many illegal "mirrors" sprung up, and their access rates). If he really wanted to get his work online inexpensively, he should have just donated it to Project Gutenburg.

I can't decide if all this digital hoohah is making the world a better place or not. Certainly there is a considerable minority that stands to gain much from it -- I would include the Slashdot audience among that number. But there's a much larger majority that, if they feel any impact from it, it's only going to be indirectly -- at least for now.

Access to quick information keeps getting bandied about as the next big revolution, in the spirit of the space age, the industrial age, etc. I dunno, I guess. Certainly the current new wave of technological innovation [1] has had a massive impact on our economy. But are these changes good? Profits are up, salaries aren't. Job security is a relic. Stock holders are cashing in -- and more people are becomign stock holders -- but that leaves a couple of problems, like what about the rest of us that aren't in on the market. More importantly, what about the ones that are in the market -- if it crashes, as I'm sure it will sooner or later, where will these young workers with crap salaries and worthless stock options be? Our success is by no means assured.

But that's just the economic side of things. Things like water, electricity, and the telephone had benefits far beyond the economic. They enabled a whole new range of activities while making a large number of older ones simpler or even unnecessary (going to the well, etc). What does the info revolution offer to the average Joe? On one hand, he doesn't ever have to go to a library again if all the books are already out there. Why call your friends cross country when you can chat for free at your computer? Why, indeed, would you ever have to leave your home at all?

The digital age unquestionably brings great benefits, but it also brings great dangers. It's not unique in this (plumbing might have brought, say, cholera, and electricity of course brought electrocution) and I'm not yet sure how the good and bad sides balance out here. I think that won't be clear for several years to come. If we transform from a nation of couch potatos into a nation of desk potatos, that isn't necessarily an improvement. I am looking to see how things unfold over the coming years before forming an opinion on this matter...

[1] (Does anyone else hate using that word now? Is it just me?)

The book is available for free, via Project Gutenberg. Flatland, by Edwin Abbott

Meant to link this.

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Here's a link to Project Gutenberg. It's an excellent site. They've got lots of Shakespeare, for instance (his complete works, I would guess!). Also check out their note on what books you will find in Project Gutenberg.

Here's a link to Project Gutenberg. It's an excellent site. They've got lots of Shakespeare, for instance (his complete works, I would guess!). Also check out their note on what books you will find in Project Gutenberg.

At least it wasn't when I went to Washington five years ago. You could enter the building, which is very beautiful, and you could go on a guided tour, but what you could not do is what you'd expect to do in a normal library: get a book of the shelf, sit down somewhere, and read it. The stacks are very restricted.

So if you thought this guy had an elitist, exclusionary attitude before, now you know it's even worse than you thought!

Oh well, if these jokers won't digitize the public domain books in their collection, at least I will. I've got all of volume one of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea," and all of volume one and three hundred pages of volume two of Marx and Engels's Capital scanned in and cleaned up as ready-to-print pages. If I ever get caught up on my work I'll started cleaning up the OCR output files - this weekend I hope. Free free freeee! I love public domain books! Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head. --from Anthem by Ayn Rand

(I should note, I'm not an Objectivist, but I admire the way Ayn Rand shakes up the Establishment anyhow.)

Someone else mentioned that there was a 3 month waiting period by the company before release.

Does anyone know if the actual genome is publicly available somewhere? I was thinking of republishing it via Project Gutenberg (we've done the draft human genomes that have been released already).

• Greg

Just a quick request/plea/suggestion: if you find a typo in a Project Gutenberg etext, please email me the fix. Or, fix the text and email me the text! There are definite quality problems with stuff prior to 1994 especially....today, though, the etexts have higher quality standards and go through more proofreading before posting.

promo.net/pg for the listings; you can link to any of the 2500+ etexts from there. Thanks.

my email: gbnewby@ils.unc.edu

Have you checked out the site _at_all_? Perhaps you should read the instructions on how to make etexts where it goes over in detail how to correctly use a scanner and OCR to create one. Stick your foot in your mouth and start reading before spouting off!

Can we get him for a Slashdot Interview? Project Gutenberg comes up here from time to time. While I don't know whether there is general interest among Slashdot readers, I think Project Gutenberg qualifies as one of the earliest pioneers in free, online distribution.

You beat me to one of the issues: books. He referred to Andrew Carnegie and libraries in the original article. A university is going to need textbooks for classes and a library. While it is all well and good to say that lecturers will do it for recognition and posterity, there is no way to stock a library with an up-to-date, complete collection of relevant material for free. Some items can be obtained that way. An online university could mirror Project Gutenberg. I also heard yesterday that the Oxford English Dictionary is going online and that they are looking for institutions (such as libraries) to subscribe and then provide access to communities. He could make them an offer to pay to put them online for everyone.

Then there is the issue of up-to-date technical references and textbooks. There are going to be people willing to write material for free for a good cause. But making it complete, getting it reviewed for technical accuracy and keeping it up-to-date are a different issue. A good start might be to seek out good material that is already on the net on various subjects and offer the authors a permanent, stable home for it. That alone, with a really good index and search engine could be a fantastic asset.

Another idea that might attract some good free material would be to offer a service like Source Forge to people interested in creating free content. Give them free web space, backups, CVS trees, mailing lists, etc. for the project. Host mirrors for some of the open text formatting tools: (La)TeX, texinfo, DocBook, etc. and encourage authors to use one of them and link to the mirror so that users can download the software they need easily.

And, I second the motion to interview him. Maybe we can help him set the initial direction on some of this by asking some good questions. Whether his free online university succeeds or fails in the end, it is worth the effort. It will help answer the questions about what an online school can offer and what it needs to do to offer it.