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The Internet-Have We Reached A Turning Point?
Pyromage asks: "Given all the lawsuits (DeCSS, the censorware ones, etc.) and all the laws (UCITA, DMCA) that are essentially impacting the net right now, do you see it being the end of the net as we know it? As cheesy as it sounds, depending on how these events turn out, I can see it as the beginning of regulation and the end of privacy & freedom online, or as a solid precedent guarding the rights of people on the net. Thoughts?" Interesting question. Have any of you actually thought about how these events, which are developing as we speak, will affect the network that we all know and love?
Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted! Film at 11!
*sings* "It's the end of the net as we know it... It's the end of the net as we know it... It's the end of the net as we know it... And I feeeel fiiiine...." All hail REM! -Gabe
A loss of freedom is the ultimate price we will pay unless more people stand up for their rights. The internet should be free- not supposed to be a crappy marketing exploit or intellectual property secured by the greedy. Within reason, it should be a tool which we all have access to- and if you post it, then you have the equal right to lose it. The internet is the only true democracy which exist in this world and it's a shame if legislation takes it away from us. I say that we should form a group with it's own new set of protocols, monitored by an elect committee which stands by non-profiteering- an open-source web project laid out by terms initially set by attorneys to guarantee rights and privacy within this web community- in which taking information from this web protocol for external use would be allowable, but non-profitable except for the committee to administer punitive damages. Is anyone in agreement with this?
I do. It is amazing what one can find in libraries. I am old school. Think older. I am no doubt the oldest person to ever post (maybe even read) Slashdot. I have been online for 20 years now (since I was 55). The net really has not changed much, though in some respects. I am not sure what BBS you visited...but I never got more than 50% signal. There were always people giving very bad advice, making very inaccurate statements and bitching way too much instead of unplugging their asses form their monitor and doing something. There was a protest of the DMCA in DC this week. 20 people showed up. I had a rally here against Matel. Again, about 20 showed up. Having been an activist all my life (and it was more unpopular in the 50's than now), I can say with alot of certainty, that though we are not apathetic, we are unmotivated and when we do protest, it is poorly thought out and executed. What good is a protest that angers the very ones we are trying to win over (think about the protest this am in Chicago...workers blocked rush hour traffic to make their case seen and heard. All they did was anger the very people-motorist they need on their side.) What has changed the net is not so much the corporations, but our reaction to their wanting to join our community. There was an above post that was not taken to kindly...but it bears repeating. We can proactively work with them to build a suitable net or we can rail against the wind. They are coming. Our bitching will not change this. Our work and effort can change the shape it forms.
I agree, if this goes through there might be a resurgence of dail up BBS, wireless networks. Not to mention there might be a a Literal underground network, I remember a issuse of 2600 where there was a article called Broad Band via the Earth, went into some specifics about experimentation with networking by using the earth's natural 36k freq for datatrans. Said it could provide something like 56K speeds depending on how many pipes and ground wires are around.
I pride myself on being an optimistic pragmatist. And we need to make sure that the regulations that will exist (unless politicians stop accepting corporate and holding fundraisers for executives) need to be shaped so that they don't stifle the small start-ups.
Optimism and pragmatism are both good qualities, and I share them. That is why I refuse to give ground on some of the more imporant Internet issues until it is clear that the issue has been lost. For example, I do not think that it is entirely inevitable that states and cities will be allowed to charge sales tax on purchases made from companies without some sort of physical presence in their jurisdiction. I also don't think that it is entirely inevitable that the federal government be able to enact some sort of federal sales tax on e-commerce.
Most importantly IMHO we should not allow the government to assume e-commerce is a whole new ball o' wax. It's still all about buying and selling. The fact that the buyer and seller need not be in the same physical location is the only thing that differentiates it from the same type of stuff that we have been doing for centuries. There are already tax laws for transactions that are carried out over state boundaries, why not simply use those? Thanks for the discussion.
What exactly leads you to this analysis? I think that it is ludicrous to think that any kind of legislation that specifically targets big business for higher taxes is likely to fly. Politics aside, why should successful businesses have to pay more taxes than less successful businesses?
Not too mention the fact that big business can afford lobbyists, fancy tax lawyers, etc., and small businesses can not.
These kind of regulations certainly would make it easier for startups, and I can see why you would hope that the Internet regulations lean that way. On the other hand there are plenty of people that want to make it as hard for new startups as possible :). The big businesses that you are invested in, and who you are sure will force regulation and taxes onto the Internet are among the people that do not want to make it easier for pesky new startups to pollute the waters.
Also remember that there are plenty of companies that like the fact that e-commerce is presently un-taxed, and there are also precedents for disallowing states to tax sales from businesses that don't have a presence in their state (catalogs). I would also imagine that a federal sales tax would be met with pretty heavy resistance from all sorts of people.
This does not necessarily mean that I don't believe that e-commerce will eventually be taxed, but there are all sorts of thorny issues. Part of the reason that legislators are waiting to decide these types of issues is that they would like to see the direction that e-commerce is going so that when the do start writing new tax laws they have some idea of how to do it intelligently.
We live in interesting times.
...have been removed.
For example, look at that total failiure, the war on drugs. Billions of dollars spent on attempting to stem the flow of drugs into this country by ignoring the demand for them and just trying to shut down the supply.
I'm sure if I spent 15 minutes with a history book, I could come up with a ton of bad policies which were enacted, enforced, and never repealed, because some bureaucratic twit couldn't be bothered to admit he'd been wrong.
InThane
This is an interesting question, comming at the same time as Mattel looks to be unable to overturn the GPL on CPhack, and I see that "deep hyperlinking" is allowed, these are good. if people are not given freedom they tend to rebel, in a big way, and there is always a company willing to help, for example Napster. I think regulation will come in, it will of course do good, and bad, hopefully it will leave flexibility to the current internet standards groups, and make the internet more internationalised.
:)
Yes, there will be taxes, there is no way you are going to stop that, but feel free to exlpain why there wont.
And, if, for some reason, a couple of governments do destroy a perfectly good working internet, there will always be BBS's, and packet radio, no, they can't stop me!
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
Man, I can clearly remember reading a copy of Wired back in 1994 or 1995 that talked about toaster-nets, which were simply people daisy-chaining connections together to share bandwidth to the net.
I read that while playing around on a NeXT box and thought about how kick-ass the future seemed where everything would be connected using a single global protocol.
I had so much optimism then. I still think that clearly people are using the Internet as a tool to re-shape governments and lives, but there is so much resistance to overcome it gets you down now and again.
All we want is a cheap, fast, unblocked, unfiltered connection from anyone to anyone, anywhere in the world with no laws, or regulations, or acceptable use policies, with no restrictions on content replication or modification.
Is it really too much to ask?
Actually, these lawsuits are irrelevent to me. The net as I knew it ended in 1993 when I first used NCSA Mosaic. Before that I happy used, telnet, ftp, email, uucp,and usenet for my unfettered internet experience. The web has only brought miserable hoards of newbies, merchants, and Hitler wannbees to my daily attention. Devil take you all!
What's the word on this type of legislation/restriction in Canada? I think that Canada has a large enough portion of "unused" (read not polluted by idiotic societal planning) land to accomodate a healthy portion of us.
Maybe Greg Brunet can house ~30 people.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
There are certain things worth fighting for. There are things worth going to prison for. Privacy is worth fighting for, but it's not worth going to prison for, to me. Your opinion may be different, that's fine, but don't expect most people to agree with you on that one, particularly when they have nothing to hide. And that's how they look at it! Why should they go to prison so someone else can trade kiddie-porn? It's just not going to happen. Nope. They just have to harrass the Backbone providers. They are businesses, they want to make money. They won't make any trouble. It's easier for them to go along than to try and fight.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
I'm his partner in this endeavor, you can check out the basics of the protocol at my web site: http://logan.datacurrent.com/dftp.html. It isn't very clean at the moment, but I hope to finish it this week over break...
At least a few of them must have made it since we did gain our independence.
I think you may have misunderstood the post.
Yep, but the misunderstanding has been moderated up by the oppressive liberatarian majority on this site. Ironic, no?
You already have crypto they can't break. Build it into more programs; hardwire liberty into the infrastructure and make them dependent on it. Freenet will be here soon, GNUtella and Jabber are already here - and I expect someone will soon invent an anonymous censor-proof public CVS so the coders can pick up the linux DVD project right where they left off. Keep designing, building, and using technologies that make their crap impossible.
They can rant, but they cannot prevent. That is the long and the short of it, the fact that they cannot wish away. In a increasingly globalized world, information, trade and freedom will simply route around any restriction.
The government didn't decide that *it* owned the airwaves, it decided that the people do and that the government should be the steward of the airwaves. Hence the Communications Act of '34 (I'm pretty sure it was '34).
The Federal Communications Commission exists (at least in theory) to control access to those airwaves pretty much the same way the Parks Service exists to control access to Public Parks, so that a finite resource can be fairly shared. Electromagnetic spectrum is like land, they ain't makin' any more.
Broadcasters and others (like cell phone companies) are given licenses to "operate in the public interest" at particular frequencies, within certain power levels, using a particular type of signal (Amplitude Modulation, Frequency Modulation, and some variations of those) for a particular purpose (radio, television, microwave links, amateur radio, and the list goes on and on).
Until recently access to a particular slice of spectrum depended upon holding one or more of these licenses.
Now, of course, the idiots currently in charge have been auctioning off some of this irreplacable spectrum, leading to the possibility of a company that can't qualify for a license still making money by leasing that bit of spectrum to someone who can get a license.
In my strongly held opinion the government should have done the leasing themselves, but that's a rant for another time.
Letting the government be the public's steward helps prevent one type of service from being disrupted by another. Would you want to be trying to reach the Coast Guard in an emergency only to have some record company owned radio station flooding any and all frequencies with whatever it was trying to sell this week? The FCC is there to prevent that. Before it was established the prevailing sentiment in many corners of government was to have it all under control of the military, so things aren't nearly as bad as they could be.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
For a moment there I thought you were going to suggest electing geeks as legislators and I was going to ask how many geeks know more than a fraction about all the other 90 million things legislative bodies have to deal with.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
pronoblem
1. It's going to be difficult to tax the internet very effectively for technical reasons. I think its more likely they will tax delivery systems such as FedEx and UPS.
2. It's going to be very difficult to regulate the internet effectively, again for technical reasons.
3. The main impetus for regulation will be to enforce taxation. If we pay close attention to both of these issues, we can probably forstall either one from happening.
4. The longer we delay, the harder it will be for governments to step in and change everything. The danger is greatest right now. As more people base life and business decisions on the current regime, it gets harder for the government to change things and step on all those toes.
Complain to the CEO of Mattel:
Jill E. Barad
Mattel, Inc.
333 Continental Boulevard
El Segundo, CA 90245-5012
Tell her your future is Barbie-less unless they rein in their lawyers on their Hot Wheels.
Then I went further.
I wrote to their competition and asked them if they could prove that their sites or their distributor's sites weren't on the "censored sites list"
To paraphrase Shakespeare: "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much..." Why are they so nervous about using their product to do good, unless they're using it to merely do well. By choking the competition.
I don't like secrecy. Its usually people doing things they're ashamed of.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If the people that had started the American Revolution had done the things they did
against the British government today in an effort to start over, they would either be
against the wall with a blindfold on or rotting in prison.
They, uh, were up against the wall, as well as rotting in prison.
I'm not advocating random violence or anarchic revolution, but I do believe that if the laws do not reflect the will of the people, and can not be made to do so, then we do not live in any soft of a democracy, representative or otherwise, and it is time to re-examine our governmental organization.
I think that's a pretty simple concept.
--
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
All the enlightened, open-minded, freedom-loving people would probably end up denounced as anarchists or kooks, while the more contented majority continues to digest reports about the dangers of the Internet.
Certainly not all of them - but what is the prevailing opinion of RMS? That he's a kook. And maybe he is, maybe unrestricted freedom and the protection thereof is just a kooky fuckin' idea. Do you have a problem with being denounced for the things in which you believe? I certainly do not. That's why they call em beliefs.
'm not kidding. I really don't see a lot of discontent out there, and what there is, often
lies within relatively single-issue groups that as often as not hate each other's guts and likely will never unite. The NARAL, the NRA, and NORML, for instance, don't typically defend each other, and my suspicion is that the intersection between the three is close to nil.
Look, lawmaking at the whim of corporations is not a historically new thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes is does not. It is not, however, on the charter for this particular US of A. If we, the big we, all of us, choose to accept it as the status quo and move forward, then that's all there is to it - our ability to rebel through legal action will be gradually reduced to zero, and then the only alternative will be violent revolution. This is a repeating pattern of human history.
Do people really believe that everyone is out to be nice? Do we really think that the USA is going to be here forever? That representative democracy is the final and ultimate form of human self-government? Come on, wake up. It's far from over, and things will change.
And so the internet, as I said, may or may not become a catalyst - it takes less than you might think to sway the balance from passive acceptance to bloodthirsty revolution. Give us one hungry winter, and it's all over.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I'm sure there aren't many people on /. who haven't thought about it - and if there are, no matter where you live, it's time to start.
Here in the US, at the very least, if everything does go wrong, we can always legally repeal laws that suck. Failing that, we can start killing people.
Will the internet be the catalyst for the next american revolution? The one where all the enlightened, open-minded, freedom loving people get real pissed off and say, "scrap this plutocratic bullshit festival, we're starting over!"
I hope so.
Here's to freedom, and to television, and to mp3s.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Freenet
Let's make regulation moot.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Actually, its all bull. Why do we believe it? They've got a gun in our face! We want to stay alive and happy, so we believe it. It all boils down to greed and there is no solution for it except for total self-anihilation. None of us want that, so we must fight to make things better, stop the opression, stop the brain washing.
Alot of people tell me that I'm going to get fucked with by the governement. This is true, and if you fight for your rights (because no-one else is going to), that you may have all your freedom taken away. I ask you this: What are you NOT willing to do protect your freedom?
I realize this is a bad place to voice my convictions, but unforunately, my pockets aren't loud enough for those who have the gun to hear. I consider my own life a small price to pay for freedom. You may take everything I own, rape and kill my family and everyone I know, my resolve will only be stronger, because I KNOW that I am RIGHT and I am FREE!
To those who are not willing to give their life, yet still value their freedom. Begin to think in a different way. Think about everything that is done by the government or a corporation and think, what will THAT do to increase their revenue. You'll start noticing that they do nothing which doesnt!
I Have DeCSS on one of my web sites (tho it is not publicly (sp?) linked to or mentioned anywhere on it) and on a friggin floppy disk and burned to an archive CD. Its fun to be a criminal again. memories...
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
Most companies litigate because they feel they have no other options -- whether it be that they are litigating out of fear, or out of legitimate concern is irrelevant. Eventually once they realize that there is nothing to fear from the Internet, they might slowly change their business philosophies from one of paranoia to one of "glasnost", which, IMHO, is probably the best thing that could be expected under the circumstances.
Gnutella is decentralized, and much harder (if possible at all) to firewall.
First there was the 'net. It was a fun place to hang out. Then came the Web (I hate that term - makes it sound like a different entity - it's just a cheesy protocol hooked up to port 80) and AOL, and the 'net was flooded with non-technical kids and business people. Suddenly a place where even an advertisment for a used bicycle was seen as `commercialism' became one big commercial and the geeks were pushed aside.
Now, an interesting thing is happening. The governing bodies are attempting to rehash the prohibition/gun legislation formulas and apply them to the internet. As history has shown us, the business people will suffer (oh no) and those who are willing to subvert the system will profit massively. Hackers get their 'net back.
Summary: start reading your RFCs. It's time to play.
Two things to realise about the Internet..
One is "Internet time" is extreamly fast.. 6 months is a lifetime.
The other is that the "online world" is still pritty young.
The Internet has not even reached "the dark ages" yet.
We (the whole human race) tend to assume the Internet as a socity have allready reached the 21 century. However socal develupment on the Internet has not yet reached this stage.
We have barbarian hords (crackers) and all form of socal strangness.
To make matters worse.. We are not just living in the Internet. The real world is trying to make the whole Internet match the fragment of real world they exist in.
You have people who think they can plop a kid and walk away and socity will rase it. They are horrifyed to find the Internet houses strange people all to willing to take on the job and corupt the child to there own whims.
Somehow thies people don't exist in the real world as far as they are conserned.
You have corprations who would put an end to anything that interfears with proffitability.
You have those who are are horrifyed to realise they can not roam about with total annonimity.
Government agentcys who think they should be able to put camras in your bathroom.
The socal norms were established long ago in the real world. We all know a camra in the bathroom is plain wrong and that if you behave rudely people will rember you. Busnesses are aware of the line as are consummers.
But on the internet people are not clear on the diffrences between an individual putting a webcam in his office and a boss doing the same.
For now many will have an idea of what rights they have on the Internet and others will violate same while exersising there own rights.
The Internet will change a great deal in the future... but this is importent.. The Internet is far from civilised...
The Internet.. is the Roam of the on-line world...
We are all barbarians at the gate...
I don't actually exist.
Or a project like freenet that someone else mentioned are where we will end up. A private network piggybacked over the existing internet where we can exist and develop our own culture.
I know it sounds cheesy but it seems the only way.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
-----
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
> Libertarians also support school vouchers because they beleive that school vouchers with
> privatize public education. The reality of the situation is that school vouchers will still
> require taxes period. ACtually, they will require bigger taxes. It's just plain silly for
> the libertaians to support school vouchers since there are real privitisation alternatives
> which do not require tax funding.
What libertarians are doing when they propose school vouchers is recognizing that they're going to pay taxes anyway - but they want to redirect the funds that come back from the government for educating their children in the way they want them educated.
If you pay taxes (including school district taxes), but you also have to pay tuition and fees and whatnot for your child to attend a private school, why the Hell are you paying school taxes? If you are paying into the kitty to educate your child, you should be able to choose what form that education takes!
People should either be able to spend their school tax money on educating their children the way they want (including stipends, food, texts, and supplies for homeschooling), or they should be able to opt out of the taxation altogether ("my kid attends West Highbrow Private Academy - why am I also paying for him to attend East Dumbfuck High School?").
> Specifically, require public and private school to design their schedule to allow students to mix
> and match classes from public and private schools.
Placing requirements of these kinds on private schools pretty much negates the whole idea of school privatization, wouldn't you agree? Also, there are definite problems with logistics.
> This would allow people who know how to teach one thing very well, like science, literature,
> religion, etc., to specilize without being forced to provide for all the students
> educational needs.
Then they'd have to provide transportation to and from all these institutions of learning - a logistics nightmare.
Why not privatize, and attract the best teachers for each subject that you can attract, and provide a good quality education to the kids whose parents are paying for their children to attend your school?
Public schools that provide poor quality education should have competition - there is no reason, nor need, for an educational monopoly. In the long run, monopoly in education hurts everyone worse than a Microsoft monopoly in the software world, and in an immeasurably fundamental way.
> It's really amazing that the libertarians are proposing school vouchers over this sort of
> reform (which is clearly more in-line with their plhiosophy).
Obviously, you are not terribly acquainted with libertarian philosophies in issues like these. I suppose that, in a strict sense, you've grokked the "free market" ideology of privatizing education, but you've come at it from the wrong direction.
Having a Catholic school teach religion, while a math school teaches mathematics, and a grammar school teaches English (heheh...), leads to far too much time spent in transit between these schools. Educational quality would actually suffer if this approach were taken.
Libertarians are pragmatists, as well. Their philosophical problems with public education as it exists cannot override the facts that, if they do not want to be thrown in jail or lose their property, they must give the money that the government demands at gunpoint for education. What they can do, and what they are doing, is proposing that this money be used in a way that the parents see fit, returning the power to choose (and ultimately part of the power of the free market) to the fore.
> Property is a more sticky issue then most libertarians realize since a lack of fair-use
> protections quickly degenerates into a form of slavery.
Any libertarian (with a small "L") worth his salt knows this. None that I know would disagree with the statement, "I bought this DVD movie, so I should be able to see its contents when, where, and how I choose."
> Anywho, I'm just saing that you should not assume that your fellow libertarians understand
> the issue as well as you do.
In general, libertarians (again, with the small "L") are the folks who have taken the time to ponder their beliefs - to have really thought them through before taking a stand. What your statements have shown me is that you do not understand the libertarian viewpoint on any of these issues in the slightest.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
> Although I suppose you could always say education could be better, the fact of the matter
> is that all the countries with "better" educational systems are far behind us in
> virtually every segment of technology, business, and finance.
Other countries have problems with their best and brightest coming to be educated at our universities, and then staying here because they like living here rather more than at home. While that's no skin off my nose (hey, I like foreigners pretty well... talk with 'em, and listen to their stories, and you'll like 'em, too), that's where a lot of our technology and whatnot comes from. Not a day goes by that IBM or someone doesn't come out with some newfangled revolutionary contraption that has at least two names attached to it that are difficult to pronounce - but they're coming out with innovations, so I don't care what country the researchers hail from.
> I went to public school and don't feel I was robbed of a good education
As did I, but schools were different even a decade ago than they are today. Even in the high school from which I graduated, I've recently heard of stupid games played by teachers and administrators (I cannot remember the nature of said games, at the moment) that disgusted me.
As I look back on it, I see the education that I got from that institution as having been worth less and less. I was never challenged in school, though I was in some of the tougher classes (until my Senior year, that is, when I spent most of my time in shop - a course of study that is paying me off in spades now, as I am rehabbing a house, and I still remember how to use a table saw I just bought). I played football, lifted weights, made good grades, scored 31 on the ACT, and didn't give a shit.
> on the contrary most of the people I've met who went to private school seem to have grown up in a
> fairyland vacuum where everyone is rich and white and polite
I've never even met anyone who went to school at a private school, honestly. I've met a couple people who went to magnet schools, and the stories they've told were scary enough (it wasn't unusual for someone to bring a gun to school, for people to sell drugs in the halls, etc. - but, then, it was a weird bunch of people where one girl came to school dressed only in a flag, so that would have made it sort of cool).
I've met people who were home schooled, and I must say that I was impressed with the results of that. When I have kids, I will certainly home school them. To do otherwise would be to deprive them of a proper education.
Problem is, when I do that, I'll be spending all the money I would otherwise spend for them to go to school, and spending the money for curriculum material and whatnot for them at home. I think my tax dollars that are devoted to education should be returned to me when I have children, for so long as I choose to home school them. I think all other parents should have that prerogative, as well. Were that the case, I'd have no problem paying a reasonable amount of taxes for education in general.
I realize that I don't live in a vacuum - hell, I'm rehabbing in a "disadvantaged" neighborhood and starting a community garden to get all the neighbors involved and get everyone working as a community. I do believe, though, that it should be I who makes the decisions about the education of my children, and who makes the decisions about how the money that I pay that should follow the child for his/her education rather than going to a local government monopoly for the indoctrination of my neigbhors' children.
> (Witness George W, running for president, unlike most other "youthful indescretion" drug
> users who are in jail).
I have no problem on a personal level with someone who wants to kill themselves with drugs (I don't want to pay for their rehabilitation or medical care, but it should be legal for them to kill themselves slowly with that crap).
That said, it does strike me as inherently skewed that this is the case. This is one reason that I won't vote for W. The other reasons are too numerous to list, but the biggest is that he is intellectually dishonest, and his stance on the issues (today) don't jibe with mine.
> And I don't buy that "competition" makes schools (or more importantly, education) better.
What, then, would you suggest?
The answer isn't dollars-per-student, because kids were getting a better education in the '50s for far less (constant) dollars than they get now.
The answer isn't student/teacher ratio - that ratio is "better" now than it was in the '50s and '60s, and yet the quality of education continues to decline.
Add to that all the crap Jon Katz writes about (which is real, by the way - a friend's mom is a nurse in a school district that is going to implement Mosaic 2000), and public schools get worse and worse.
> Public schools currently compete too much, IMHO. They waste half their time teaching to the
> standardized test (because that's what their funding is based on!) rather than educating.
This is a fundamental problem with public schools. I agree with you. The solution? Well, get rid of standardized tests. Colleges will have to work a little harder doing their own tests for screening potential students, but the onus is on them to do so, anyway.
> They compete with each other and other school districts for funding, and more importantly for
> the financial impact being the "best district/school in the state" has. A good school
> district brings companies (and thus $$$), a bad one makes employees reluctant to transfer there.
Right! Why do people move to "good school districts", then, when they could move to a bad one and, by "contributing" their dollars, help to improve it?
The answer: they want a good quality education for their children, and don't want to waste their time or their kids' time on the useless crap doled out by a bad school district. An education is too fundamental a thing to play "social experimentation" with.
The bad school district should, then, simply find itself without students and go away. To me, this sounds like a good plan. Good school districts will be able to pick up the slack from bad ones that close, since resources would follow the children, and they'll be hell bent to maintain a great quality education, since it is their reputation and the quality of their results that will keep new kids coming into their hallowed halls.
>> it's best if we're able to make those decisions for ourselves
> That's the logic I don't understand. Any major decision affects other people, therefore those
> other people shouldn't have any input on the decision?
No.
What I do inside my house, inside my yard, inside my car, at my place of business, is my own business.
How I choose to spend my own money, what I choose to buy, how I choose to while away my time, the things I eat and drink, the activities in which I participate, are my own affairs.
How I educate my children, what schools they attend (well, that's actually their decision), the values I transmit to them, are all my business, and I don't want you trying to help me make decisions about these things unless I ask you for help.
If you go sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong, don't be surprised if it gets bloodied. That's the nature of the beast.
If you're my neighbor, and I'm playing my music too loud, you'll have to come over and ask me to turn it down. Like as not, I'll be glad to honor your request - we all live there, and we all want as little friction as possible, because it makes life easier. If you try to force me to buy an electric car rather than an old pickup truck, though, we're going to have a fundamental disagreement - because what I drive is none of your damn business. Get it?
So long as I don't harm you, it shouldn't matter what I do. My right to swing my fists ends at the tip of your nose - as your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose.
> Quite frankly, I don't want the chemical plant owner "making the decision for himself" whether
> or not to dump his waste into the ground (and thus into the water table and our
> drinking/bathing water.
That is why we have "courts". If it is found that the chemical company has damaged your property or your health or your livelihood by dumping waste, or that it has damaged a "communal property", like an aquifer, then he is liable.
Ultimately, the chemical manufacturer will make the decision for himself as to whether or not to dump some chemicals, anyway, and the mere existence of regulations won't stop him. Regulations aren't magical, and neither is government. It is the enforcement of these regulations, and the civil and criminal liability that he is likely to face, that will keep him from dumping carelessly. He will act rationally, and not dump carelessly, or justice will surely find him.
> If you want to make the choice not to fund the public schools that you (and everyone else)
> benefit from, then no the choice is only yours insofar as you and the rest of the community (the
> electorate) can agree it's a good idea.
So, if the majority of people in my community agree that a voucher program is warranted, then it's a good idea? Hey, we agree!
If the voters in my community believe that vouchers are bad, well, I have a couple of choices. I can educate my children as I see fit anyway, paying taxes that I am coerced to pay, while dourly biting my lip to hold back a torrent of dissatisfaction, or I can move - depriving my community of all the rest of the benefits they derive from my presence.
> And don't kid yourself that this won't have religious repercussions. If 80% of the community
> sends their kids/vouchers to a Catholic school, then how the hell are the Jewish or Muslim kids
> gonna get the education they deserve without taxpayer-sponsored religious instruction that is
> contrary to their beliefs? If it's not profitable to make a non-religious school in an
> area, it won't get built.
So the kids are bussed or driven (by their caring parents) to a school slightly farther away. By the way, I know Jewish and Protestant kids who have attended Catholic schools (the education was superior to the rival public schools - imagine that!).
If there is enough demand in an area for a school that caters to a given community, then it will exist - the market will demand it, and someone will provide it, and they will do a good job, or someone else will do it better. Schools, contrary to popular belief, do not have to be the prison-like complexes currently being built to house the next crop of little inmates. Learning can take place in the living room.
> As someone who respects my rights (especially those so sensitive as to be enumerated in the
> Constitution) I find it disturbing that we're so eager to hand them all over in an eagerness to
> (maybe) save a few dollars.
First off, you have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of rights in relation to the Constitution. Your rights are not enumerated there - they are "naturally" yours (see Locke). The Bill of Rights lists specific rights that the framers and signers of the Constitution wanted legally protected from the oppressive tendencies of a tyrannical government (see society today).
What rights, specifically, are you losing by people using school vouchers? The Constitution doesn't set out a program for education, but only sets aside one section of land in each township for school use. It doesn't speak any more of education, to my knowledge (which may be a bit sketchy, I'll have to admit).
By making me pay taxes for something I'll never use, you are stealing directly from me, and that's an abrigation of my rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Locke actually penned this as Life, Liberty, and Property, but the founding fathers had to concede that not everyone could or would be a property owner - they were wise, though I think the Property clause should have remained).
Also, school vouchers are not about saving money. You'll spend the money in any case, whether sending your children to public schools, private schools, or schooling them at home. You should be able to choose what form that education takes, and since the money you pay in education-related taxes should also be for educating your children, you should be able to choose where and how to spend that money in pursuit of that lofty goal.
> Businesses have no responsibility to protect your speech or religion or privacy.
That is true. It is YOUR responsibility to do so. Freedom has attached to it a modicem of responsibility. It is when the ability to be responsible for your speech, religion, or privacy is taken from you, that a problem occurs.
Freedom and Responsibility are like Love and Marriage - you can't have one without the other.
> Private schools will have no issues with prayer at football games -- they can just kick you out
> if they don't like your attitude...
Unlikely. It would be economically unwise, and financially irresponsible, for them to do so.
Besides, that's what choice is all about. If you don't like the policies in a given school, send your kids elsewhere or teach them at home. That is your duty as a parent - to be responsible for the proper upbringing of your child, including his education.
If you cannot afford to send your kids to a private school, or to a church school, or to home school them, public school is your alternative. It just so happens that it is a poor alternative. If you could use the money that is being spent for your child to attend that public school anyway, by virtue of your mailing address, to educate your child in the best way you know how, then your child gets a better education and society is all the better for it. THAT is the crux of the voucher issue.
Choice is at stake, and it is choice for which I will fight.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
> You're paying for the same rteason that people wihtout kids pay school taxes -- no one lives in
> a vacuum. The kids that go to school are the adults, voters, employees, employers, and
> neighbors of tomorrow.
That's all well and good, but:
Given that I have children about whom I care,
Given that that caring includes a deep interest in the quality of their education,
Given that money is by no means in limitless supply,
If I'm paying for my child's education in taxes anyway, should I not be able to send my child to a private school that I trust to provide them with a solid education (which I will certainly supplement at home)?
Your argument about those who do not have children also paying taxes is by far the most meritous argument I've seen. But, that only serves to spread misery equally.
Given that you and I and our neighbors and friends and families will all pay taxes for education,
Given the fact that public education in this country leaves much to be desired,
Given that competition in the marketplace of education will make things better for the consumers (the kids who attend, and the parents who send them),
Given that a better-educated populus will make this country a more reasonable place to live,
Why not promote competition in schooling by using the tax money that everyone pays to give to children's parents for the education of their children?
The school vouchers advocated by many libertarians is an admission that they do not live in a vacuum, but rather that they will pay taxes like everyone else. What they want to do with the tax dollars otherwise wasted on public schools is to educate their children rather than paying a government monopoly to turn them into sheep.
Make no mistake: public schools are a travesty, and an utter waste of tax money.
School vouchers will see children whose parents give a rat's rectum about the education of their children (and that is, contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of parents) going to better educational institutions than they might otherwise have been able to attend because the parents aren't made of money.
Poorly run public schools that provide poor-quality education will be forced out of the market and will necessarily shut down. Yes, children whose parents don't care about their educations will lose a choice in which school to attend, but it was obviously a terrible choice to begin with, and the kids will end up better educated in a different school because the bad one is gone.
An honest question: what do you have against parents having a choice on where to send their children to school?
A thinly-veiled attempt to couch the issue in a class-warfare emotional quagmire: would you deny poor children a quality education by forcing them to attend substandard public schools, when allowing school vouchers would see them potentially reaching their fullest potential at a quality institution?
> This, ultimately is my greatest disagreement with pure libertarian thought -- that it never
> acknowledges the communal reality of existence in modern times...
Really? Seems to me that the school voucher issue doesn't fit with that notion of libertarian ideology. Also, when libertarians are trying to make things better for themselves and their families, the truth of the matter is, they'll make things better for you and for the rest of society in doing so. Making a stink about the degradation of the Fourth Amendment does, in fact, serve to help you, for instance.
It is also a fact that, no matter how large or small the community in which we live, we must each make choices that, for better or worse, affect our lives and the lives of those around us. Libertarian thought simply states that it's best if we're able to make those decisions for ourselves.
Not many people live on mountains in cabins with no electricity, running water, telephones, or contact with the outside world (you can be sure that there are some, but not many). I would never deny those who choose to live that way the freedom to do so - they've made a choice as to how they want to live their lives, and I want them to just knock themselves out doing so. Would you interfere in their lives "for their own good"?
Can you honestly say that more choice is a bad thing?
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
IIRC, the kid that coded DeCSS lives in Norway. Don't think you're out of jurisdiction anymore just because you live in another country.
Where to start...
First off, do I think the internet as we know it will die?
I think that's allready happened. I think that most people just haven't noticed yet. Sure, it's still useful, to a limited degree, but it's nowhere near as useful as it has been due to the really good information being replaced by mediocre stuff, or just litigated away.
Signal is low; noise is unacceptably high. Every corrupt shithead (I can't put this more politely) and their lobbyist wants to make it worse. It takes several times longer than it should to find anything useful, and this disgusts me.
So what am I going to do about it?
I've thought about starting another network for several months. Something that would have to be much smaller; something that would be a little more exclusive of the mainstream; something very much like I imagine arpanet being originally.
In concept this would be similar to fido, but based on UUCP. It would be free-form. In order to start a node, you'd just need to have somebody with a node that's allready connected, whom you could connect through.
Most likely, the network would be relay-type (almost deffinately UUCP), so that all you need is a phone line, and a computer that's idle some of the time. Anyone with a bit of savvy could set their computer up to accept interactive logins during certain times, and non-interactive (connections from other nodes) other times.
Yes, the network woulb be slow; yes, it would be limited to file transfer, email, and whatever-else-we-could-shove-through-UUCP (you'd be suprised...). The point is that the network would actually belong to the people who owned the nodes, and not to corporate babylon.
So that's my idea. Local hosts connect to other local machines via phone. Long-range connections can be handled via pgp/gpg/whatever-else-both-nodes-can-agree-on encrypted transmission via internet -- or not...
We'd be free to house whatever data we like on our nodes, and there would be little to worry about from lawmakers who are really too stuck on the internet to even think about anything else. There'd be no corporate presence, so anything that was there would be the because a person -- not some corporation -- thought it was important.
Will this work? I have no idea, myself. I'm willing to try it, but I've found no other people so far who share that willingness. Consider it an experiment. There would really be no obligation to anyone who'd want to try it -- at any rate, I encourage anyone who's interested to email me (protheus@seabrook.aurdev.com).
That's the only solution I've come up with. I certianly look forward to hearing from other people who've come up with solutions of their own, and I hope that at least one of them works, because, as I've said, I believe the internet's time as a hotbed of creativity and freedom is near over. We need to find a new way.
I couldn't agree more in principle.
However, the problem(s) would still arise. Just because the network is private ( ie, not publically accessible ) doesn't mean it isn't subject to the same laws. The only reason it wasn't subject to these laws previously ( in practice, it obviously was in principle ) was the fact that it reached a small proportion of the population, and outside of that population it was unknown and to all intents and purposes didn't exist.
All you'd end up with is an internet that is much smaller than the current Internet. BUT, with the much higher awareness factor now your 'new' internet would quickly grow/degenerate into the Internet as it is today.
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
"Public" in the sense that it is generally available to the public, not "Public" in the sense that it is government owned/operated.
Of course, you knew exactly what I meant anyway. Perhaps I should have said "The basic problem is that the Internet is now much more accessible to the general public, and is a much more widely available service"
And since you are nitpicking, read your penultimate paragraph and consider, for a moment, that there are in fact places outside the US...
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
As with Andy_R, much of this legislation being US-centric, doesn't really affect me too much at the moment, however, it does set a precedent and with much of the Internet being in the US, it will affect many people outside of the US in some ways.
Still, with reference to the original question, the internet that I knew and loved disappeared years ago when open servers started to be seen as a scourge rather than a service, insecure protocols were insecure because everyone one was pretty much honest, etc, etc, rant, rant...
The basic problem is that the Internet is now a universal ( -ish ) public service, and not, as was, a network used by a select few in University and such like, so there are now an incredible proportion of clueless users - the so called 'Endless septmeber'. It's not that these people are stupid, indeed, they may be very highly qualified in their field, but the Internet is not their field, they don't know the 'rules', so they play by their own...
-- I'm drinking myself to sleep again...
I think you may have misunderstood the post. I think that the "they" he was referring too was the corporations inverting heavily in the net. The reference to Libertarians, I think, was to indicate that the corporations were going to have things their way, opposite to what Libertarians would like. Then again I might be the one misunderstanding his post.
-- themenace
The endless law suits from america cant stop the internet simply because it belongs to everyone
not true. the internet as a physical object belongs to a handful of very large and powerful telecom companies.
it's true that there may be no traffic left on their backbones if they don't play nice; but strictly speaking, that doesn't prevent them from fucking the whole thing up, if they really want to.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
In the good old days of home satillite systems, you could watch anything you wanted to. For free.
That started to slowly change.
I expect the same here.
To bad too.
Of course, governments and corporations can adopt oppressive policies and make examples of a few people. This will force the information flow to go underground, but won't stop it very much where there is a demand.
The illicit drug trade is a good example. Drugs should be easier to stop because they are a physical quantity. But the ease of transport and consumer demand continues to overcome law enforcement.
My point is that while corporations can push for (and see passed) laws that are more and more restrictive, enforcement will be impossible without a totalitarian police state. This is something that could happen, but is in the long run unlikely. I hope. As much as the Judge in the Mattel case might like to think himself powerful, the fact is that he simply cannot control Usenet, PGP-encrypted attachments, #warez groups, and the myriad of other distribution channels available on the Net. For every "criminal" that they try to make an example of, there will be 100 script kiddies, et al., who will pop up and distribute these forbidden warez.
Oh, and my plant sprouted it's first leaf today! Hurrah!
-Rev.
If the broadband pipe was funded through taxes, then libertarians will agree with you. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "broadband pipes" though. If you mean access to a companies privately constructed backbone, I'll have to disagree.
You shouldn't disagree. I have a generally libertarian bent, but when it comes to "privately constructed" backbone and its regulation there is enough rampant statism already at work that I think libertarian concerns militate in the other direction.
Take the cable systems for example, or Ma Bell in another age. Each of these systems uses the public rights of way at spectacularly subsidized rates. Market value never comes into the franchise costs these folks pay. They built their monopolistic networks on the backs of the public by abusing government fiat.
So when it comes time for the public to require open access, (at market rates mind you... not free!) it is just a bit hard to take to hear these companies claim the protection of a free market. AT&T wouldn't know a free market if it hit them in the face!
If it weren't for the governments power of eminent domain under the constitution (brits - compulsory purchase)there would be no network. Sure we should privatize these functions, but by their nature and by their history, they must be regulated. In fact, in this case, without regulation dictating the use of the PUBLIC right of way and its contents, we actually have less freedom.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes "Who Keeps the Keepers Themselves" ~ Juvenal
Yea the regulation lives on but...
BEGIN RANT
When I lived in Maryland I lived about a block away from an establishment that served liquor. This establisment was across the street from an elementary school. There were times that I saw someone in a drunken stupor walk infront of the playground while the children were on recess. This is totally illegal. Part of the liquor license states that you cannot sell liquor within a certian distance of an evironment for children. Last I checked a elementary school/play ground is for children. What had happened was a break down in the system which was based around greed. But it is being fought and last I checked there is a good chance that the establisment is going to be fined big time (possibly putting it out of business) and its liquor license revoked.
Another part of the liquor license is to try to maintain acountability to the sellers of liquor so they don't sell to minors.
I know this is quickly moving off topic but... I do believe that you must be 21 to be able to drink. I've personally seen the results of alcoholisim on a family. In each case, and I've seen a lot, every person who is/was an alcholic started before the age of 21. I know this is just one demographic but before they were at an age to fully realize the action that they were partakeing in they were hurting themselves, their future and their family.
I believe that the current regulations (except for taxes) on liquor, basically in the form of a liquor license, is a very good thing. But we live in a corrupt society so there are going to be down falls. But without the regulation I know of too many lives that would be ruined.
END RANT
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
No, seriously.
Someone pointed out that one of the big problems here is that the politicos just don't understand anything except what they're spoon-fed by lobbyists. What we need to do is design our own spoon. (Take the Matrix 'there is no spoon' jokes elsewhere, kids.)
A lot of these groups create, effectively, a 'brief' on their points of view on the situation, with their research and information, and their spin on the issues. Politicians pay attention to these. We need to look into the possibility - no, the need to make up one of these briefs ourselves. Sure, we don't want to think about The Way Things Have Always Worked In Washington, but until there's an upsurge in net.awareness there as something other than a piracy and pr0n haven, that's not feasable.
What should we put into a brief like this? Certainly we need to put some of the exceptional discussions people have placed up about the DCMA, UCITA, filtering software, and the Bono act, summarized. We'd also need to start working on getting this together in a readable, hot-grits-free form. Sponsorship of it by, say, the EFF, for their political clout (I honestly don't know how much of it there is, but they've spoken before Congressional committees, so there has to be something) would also help.
Would anyone want to work with me on this? It's something we can do in our sidebar times. And it has the possibility to put another point of view into the process. And it can be the place where we start to mold things so that the Net doesn't become more than a place to sell stuff, but we keep Usenet, and Slashdot, and places like that.
ObBookOnThis: 'Trouble and her Friends', Melissa Scott.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
I've been on the Net since 1980. I remember when 300 baud was fast, and only universities had 1200. I've been on BBS since the dawn of time.
And the reality is that there will be governmental regulation. Too many corporations are spending way too much money for this not to happen.
We can either influence this debate, and keep these regulations to the minimum necessary, always fighting back against censorship and in favor of open access, or we can rail against the wind.
I choose to fight effectively.
Will in Seattle
I think that the "they" he was referring too was the corporations inverting heavily in the net. The reference to Libertarians, I think, was to indicate that the corporations were going to have things their way, opposite to what Libertarians would like.
Exactly. My point is the depiction of the reality as it will exist, not a slam against libertarians. I did predict (rightly) that I'd be flamed for posting the truth, and by libertarians. I pay attention to behaviour, not theory.
So, given that I believe that corporations will influence the debate - my point is that we need to proactively guide the debate, not let corporations define it for us.
One way is to realize that regulations and taxation will exist and then figure out how to craft these into slashdot-friendly forms. Because if we don't, the corporations will impose their vision of the future, not ours.
Will in Seattle
I refuse to give ground on some of the more imporant Internet issues until it is clear that the issue has been lost. For example, I do not think that it is entirely inevitable that states and cities will be allowed to charge sales tax on purchases made from companies without some sort of physical presence in their jurisdiction. I also don't think that it is entirely inevitable that the federal government be able to enact some sort of federal sales tax on e-commerce.
I could be wrong, but I'm still willing to bet that it will become based on the physical presence of the consumer or the domicile of the consumer, and possibly also the physical presence (optional) of the seller. I'm not saying there will be a federal sales tax, just that the feds will collect the taxes for the states, counties, and municipalities for a service charge. Which is what some of us call a tax.
There are already tax laws for transactions that are carried out over state boundaries, why not simply use those?
Because, as structured, they allow some players not to pay taxes for transactions. So, I expect the government will "fix" the problem.
Will in Seattle
until then, nobody can prevent me from publishing everything I want on a server in Europe.
The US will ensure that it's laws are enforced, no matter where in the world you are. You seem to think that the US does not have a long history of arresting people in other countries who break it's laws, spiriting them back to the US, and imprisoning them.
I don't agree with these actions, but I do believe they will happen.
Will in Seattle
What exactly leads you to this analysis? I think that it is ludicrous to think that any kind of legislation that specifically targets big business for higher taxes is likely to fly.
Sorry. Meant the lower tax rate of about 50 percent for e-commerce and catalog was the analysis. The 25 percent for small business was my idea of how it could be made even better, as was the idea that the first $50,000 be exempted to help out startups.
Will in Seattle
You mean like the 6.5% use tax on amounts over $700 spent online or outside of the state for Minnesotans? Or the 0.5% on top of that for residents of Minneapolis?
I think we're more likely to see some kind of national clearinghouse system, which allocates all such taxes and distributes the taxes collected. Some taxes will be found to be unconstitutional, some will be superceded by national or state taxes. There may be a maximum amount imposed, even, such as a 10% limit for total taxes. There will be a lot of fuss about the terms of it, probably lasting until about 2005. By 2010 it will all be transparent and noone will think much about it, just as most consumers have no idea where the money they pay at the pump goes.
Will in Seattle
Uh. how much of your taxes do you really think goses to infrastructure? Less than 5%. Your supporting social programs, bud.
Wrong. At the municipal and county levels, about half goes to courts, police, and jails. At state levels, about half to courts, police, jails, and eductation. Of course, I live in Washington State - your mileage may vary.
An interesting aside. I believe that New Hampshire will have no state, county, or municipal taxes, but only a national Net tax. I could be wrong, but think this is highly likely.
Will in Seattle
I'm not going to differentiate bricks and mortar from e-commerce. We have tax people who do things like that. The exact flavor I'm not predicting, just that it will be in the form I'm describing.
Yes, this means catalog sales will be taxed. Oh well.
I'm not arguing the right or the propriety of imposing taxes, I'm just saying the political deals will be made. And it will be feds, state, county, and municipality. They will determine the splits and the maximums.
Will in Seattle
If they do add a net sales tax, will they add a mail order tax as well? If not, I'll bet a lot of sites will offer a "Call our 800 number to order with no net tax" option, which means they will most likely add a mail order sales tax as well...
This is what the corporations pay lawyers for. And what the IRS will enforce. But I do beleive that there will exist a two-tier tax system, with full taxes on bricks and mortar and lower taxes (maybe half the rate) on both catalog and e-commerce sites.
I think they should just tax the companies, as they already do, instead of adding a whole new type of tax. Why make the system even more complex? Plus, it's already expensive for small business to sell on the net, do they really want to make it moreso?
That's a good belief, but not likely to continue for long. I still bet $10 that a system similar to the one I mention will exist by 2010. Your point about small business is good - I think that companies with sales below a million dollars should get a special lower tax rate (maybe a quarter of the bricks and mortar) and exemption for the first $50,000.
Again, this is not what I desire, but what my analysis indicates will happen.
Will in Seattle
I can see why you would hope that the Internet regulations lean that way. On the other hand there are plenty of people that want to make it as hard for new startups as possible :). The big businesses that you are invested in, and who you are sure will force regulation and taxes onto the Internet are among the people that do not want to make it easier for pesky new startups to pollute the waters.
I pride myself on being an optimistic pragmatist. And we need to make sure that the regulations that will exist (unless politicians stop accepting corporate and holding fundraisers for executives) need to be shaped so that they don't stifle the small start-ups.
As an example, my real estate agent said last night that her mom is doing a small e-commerce startup - I think as a society that we need to encourage such things. But if we pretend that nothing will end up happening, I believe we'll get cut out of the debate about the form of the eventual regulations.
Will in Seattle
1. It's going to be difficult to tax the internet very effectively for technical reasons. I think its more likely they will tax delivery systems such as FedEx and UPS.
Nope. A number of lead articles in Business 2.0 and various trade zines have explained that this is bogus. Many firms are already using software that can do this.
The point is that corporations don't want to do this.
2. It's going to be very difficult to regulate the internet effectively, again for technical reasons.
It is fairly simplistic to impose regulations on sections of the Net, especially the US portion or the EU portion. There are loopholes that one could use - this is where courts and jails come in. Which they will use. Whether that is right, is besides the point. The governments will still do it.
3. The main impetus for regulation will be to enforce taxation. If we pay close attention to both of these issues, we can probably forstall either one from happening
No, the main impeti are as follows:
A. to eliminate x-rated spam - waste of time
B. to eliminate Net fraud - partial waste of time
C. to enforce privacy rights (mostly by the EU, eventually by the US) - good use of time
D. to enforce taxation (by all governments) - note this is a minor reason and is not critical
4. The longer we delay, the harder it will be for governments to step in and change everything.
Sadly, this is bogus. Governments will impose order and control, whether you like it or not. If we are not part of the direction, the end result will be disasterously bad for us.
Will in Seattle
This question moves everything to a big point ! Theres nothing really new at the side of big corporations. For thousand years everyone ( you and me included ) are controled by few people that owns the ways to get us. Global movements aren't possible. Comunications are a far from to be good and exist, imagine Internet. Today, that people is trying to do the sam again, but they need to fight agains everyone in every part. Of course there are another countrys like here, in Brazil, but if USA or another bigone country actually sneezes, every government of small ( or big but poor ) countrys get a cold. Not because are fragile, but because are totally dependant. If we ( you and me included ) can turn this side, by the way remember some "real" tries like China Students some years ago, and show that a small stupid laws and few people who wants earn, stop evolution, and break freedom. This is the real battle victory. But one or two alone can solve that, this solution need us ( you and me included ). Okay ?
Stoner wrote
...we'd be as openly fascistic as China.
Uhhh, isn't china communist?
Do not assume that your intelegent take on Libertarian views is the majority. I've seen the CATO institute and Reason bitching about the WTO protests. Now I am opposed to protectionism, but the truth is the WTO regulates more then just protectionism. It regulates the political force one country can exert on another.. and this is a very bad thing.
Libertarians also support school vouchers because they beleive that school vouchers with privatize public education. The reality of the situation is that school vouchers will still require taxes period. ACtually, they will require bigger taxes. It's just plain silly for the libertaians to support school vouchers since there are real privitisation alternatives which do not require tax funding. Specifically, require public and private school to design their schedule to allow students to mix and match classes from public and private schools. This would allow people who know how to teach one thing very well, like science, literature, religion, etc., to specilize without being forced to provide for all the students educational needs. It's really amazing that the libertarians are proposing school vouchers over this sort of reform (which is clearly more in-line with their plhiosophy).
Simillarly, I have also seen many libertarians supporting stronger copyright protection (like the DCMA). Property is a more sticky issue then most libertarians realize since a lack of fair-use protections quickly degenerates into a form of slavery. Anywho, I'm just saing that you should not assume that your fellow libertarians understand the issue as well as you do.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If you want, I'll bet anyone $10 that there will be Net taxes (not on ISPs, but on sales and e-commerce) for municipal, county, and states, in existence by 2010.
:)
Is that $10 adjusted for inflation?
--GnrcMan--
You might not be anywhere that the legislation exists... but keep in mind that the vast majority of the services for the net ARE affected by these laws. YOU may not be directly affected, but you will surely feel the effect when any traffic you have to passes through the US, and suddenly DOES fall under the laws.
It kinda sucks, now, if you think about it. YOU may not be in the region affected, but your data almost CERTAINLY does pass through.
-DM
In their own words,
"Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship. Freenet is completely decentralized, meaning that there is no person, computer, or organisation in control of Freenet or essential to its operation. This means that Freenet cannot be attacked like centralized peer-to-peer systems such as Napster. Freenet also employs intelligent routing and caching meaning that it learns to route requests more efficiently, automatically mirrors popular data, makes network flooding almost impossible, and moves data to where it is in greatest demand. All of this makes it much more efficient and scalable than systems such as Gnutella. To become a part of Freenet all you need is a computer with an Internet connection and the capability to run a Freenet server. ..."
What are you waiting for? Go download a client! :-)
--
Peace, education, prosperity, and a clean environment:
find out how the free market does it right.
There are too many countries involved - the only thing that I can see happening is the rest of the world getting pissed off with the USA trying to make everyone abide by it's laws.
this idea reminds me of the book Idoru by William Gibson, where there was a secret "village" on the net that was "a killfile turned inside out" a private place where laws were inapplicable, sounds like a great idea to me.
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
Calling it "the beginning of regulation" is ridiculous. Clearly you haven't read Lessig's article yet.
As long as IP still works the same way, and the telcos aren't corrupted to the point where they start doing content filtering (VERY unlikely, as it runs counter to the decades of heavy FCC regulation), then no one can stop people from using the net however they want. Sure, the evil cartels can sue individual web sites, get injunctions at the drop of a hat, and completely trump individual liberties even in places like Norway (which still baffles me!). But that says more about our "justice" system than it does about the future of the net.
Even if the dying-industry cartels like RIAA totally corrupt our justice system (as if they haven't already) so they can knock down any web site they want to, what will they do when something like Freenet becomes widespread???
As long as IP remains the same, distributed publishing technologies like Napster and Freenet will continue to be possible. The more successful the cartels/courts are at suppressing speech on the web, the more motivation we will all have to adopt and improve these technologies.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Prohibition may have stopped at the Federal level, but its spirit lives on in a fairly warped way, with state liquor control boards and liquor licenses. Governments haven't exactly ignored the business from a regulatory perspective, especially when there's money to be made... if there's an angle here that benefits 'em, they'll probably check it out.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The prohibition on alcohol failed and was repealed. But the prohibition on drugs (and its associated "WAR on drugs") failed, but IS STILL IN EFFECT! We as a nation are paying vast sums of money to stop drug use. After all the years and all the dollars we are no closer than we were at the beginning of this prohibition. We (who pay taxes) pay a double toll, once for the toll of drug use, and again for the war against drug use.
...), but some of those costly attempts at control will remain in effect. And we (who pay taxes) will again pay a double toll. Once for the toll of the real problem, and again for the taxes to fight the next useless "War on porn", or "War on piracy", or "War against invasion of privacy".
And I want to make it clear to all of the future George "no-comment" Bush's, or the future Bill "I did not inhale" Clinton's, this war will not be successful.
So, it is very likely that many of the attempts at various controls or prohibitions on the net will also fail (porn, piracy, invasion of privacy, taxes
p.s. Does anybody else see that the "solutions" proposed for porn, piracy, and collection of taxes (that is to somehow log what everybody downloads or views) are at odds with the "solution" for invasion of privacy (that is to allow full anonymous surfing and downloading)?
The fact that no two snowflakes are identical should tell you something important about God's will.
Read this book. Code and other laws of cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig, ISBN 046503912X, covers this very important topic very well, and the future looks pretty grim. Must read. The only law book I ever read, and I enjoyed it. It is a call to action for all interested parties, unless we rally now, the future of privacy and the internet is gloomy indeed.
Taxes are also inevitable. They should be lower than for bricks and mortar, but they are necessary for cities, counties, and states to pay for basic services such as roads (used by UPS to deliver your goods), rail (ditto), airports (ditto), police (to arrest the fraud mongsters), jails (to lock up the Free Net activists in), and courts (to find them guilty and protect the monied interests from having their credit cards stolen). They should be really low for small business and startups, to encourage creation of new things, but not for big companies.
I have some problems with this. How are you going to differentiate a bricks-and-mortar company from a "net" company. In the long run, its like trying to differentiate between companies that operate with and without telephones.
Further, its a mistake to levy specific taxes on net transactions. If someone is making money, then that profit is already taxed. "Net" companies have to have a physical component somewhere. Nevermind that the delivery service also gets paid, and most likely has some warehouses, trucks in your locality. I pay a phone utility tax, the ISP I connect to pays local taxes. How about services that don't require any public infrastructure? If a sign a loan with a bank should that get taxed?
If your local town/state thinks its losing revenue, it should be asking itself why its local businesses can't sell to the rest of the world. Not how do I levy additional taxes my own residents.
I agree with trying to encourage startups, but the best way to do that is to not add yet another obstacle in their startup -- i.e. figuring out how to pay all these taxes to various different localities, or wading through tax laws to find out if my particular tranaction is taxed.
I think... I agree! I find prohibition to be a great example, or in any time of war you will find a resistance which exists underground. In the face of an adversary ppl seem to band together for a common cause. If things do change it will not remain that way forever...
All the posts I've seen on this topic (so far) seem to believe that the privacy threats only apply to the United States. While I realize it's fashionable to criticize our government (a fashion I indulge in), don't forget about the proposed French laws on anonymity, the wonderful RIP in Britain, the rules that apply to internet users in China and the crackdown on certain websites in Australia. The real reason that a decrease in freedom in the US matters is that, despite the efforts of certain chief executives, the US is still the most free country around.
Because what comes out of this whirlwind is beyond the means of anyone to predict. Who knows what will be the result of any 'butterfly flapping its wings'. Or any '800 pound gorilla' flexing its muscles, for that matter.
It's Freedom vs FUD - locked in epic struggle, and we're all putting our weight on one side or the other. The consequences of a victory by the forces of FUD is the potential for a techno-fascism that could make the Nazis look like boy scouts. For this reason, the forces of Freedom - read: us - do not have the luxury of waiting around to see what will happen - each in our individual way, we have to make it happen. This means taking what we've learned about creativity, cooperation, and viral distribution and re-inventing & re-engineering civilization from the ground up.
It seems obvious judging from the recent spate of "cyber-terror, kiddy porn, blah blah" hysteria in the (old) media that there is an organized effort afoot to ensure that the general population doesn't freak out too much as they outlaw freedom on the internet, and everywhere else...
... a phrase used by then-British PM Lloyd George, referring to his agreement with Hitler that the Nazis would only take Austria and the Sudetenland, and then they'd be satisfied. It was called Appeasement and it didn't work.
The best defense remains a good offence...
I think it will only affect US Netizens. These are all American institutes, imposing US regulations that don't affect anybody outside the US. I think some of you should take in account that that internet is a worldwide thing ...
So that's what was meant by 'The meek shall inherit the earth'
And how is that product you purchased delivered to you? The e-commerce fairy? Pollution will still occur. I do not know if the delivery trucks would be any less polluting.
Hmmm, the entire Internet was born of the US Department of Defense. I guess that point isn't relevant though.
I think that there is a real chance that the United States of America will end up irritating the rest of the world with their insistance on imposing US Law globally that the rest of the world will likely cut the US out of the net.
Alternatively there will be an international body, perhaps under the UN, which will deal with internet related legal issues.
What do others think about the concept that US law should not be applied to the global community?
Why doesn't a country interested in attracting internet business adopt a policy of no internet regulation (or very lightly regulated). This could very well create a huge market for jobs in that area to support the necessary technological infrastructure.
>This is the reality. If you want, I'll bet anyone $10 that there will be Net taxes (not on ISPs, but on sales and e-commerce) for municipal, county, and states, in existence by 2010
Sorry. It is already the case that you OWE the taxes. But, people choose to not answer that blank that says "did you buy anything you would owe sales tax for"
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
While back in the time of the Boston Tea party, it was their only way to get attention. They had absolutely no voice(vote) or legal method to resist. Fortunately there are plenty of legal methods for us to respond to them.
First of all, if their violations of fair use laws are really considered illegal, not just "you could argue they are illegal", than they should be taken to court over it.
Secondly, we need to enlighten the people. The internet is a powerful medium for informing people of issues. We should make use of it to do so.
--
Twivel
We will lose if we buy things that are designed to take away our fair use rights. Encrypted DVD's should have never got off the ground.
See my other post titled "The Lawsuits are NOT the issue".
Here it is
We need a legal method to get the word out. Sites like this, create .signatures that spread the word to your non-technical friends, etc.
I am very concerned that not only will the net be changed, but most of electronics and media will be as well. The DVD case is not the heart of the issue here, the issue is our freedom. Think about it from another perspective. If the MPAA had provided a *good* encryption algorithm, would we today even be worried about fair use? No! The problem is not necessarily with the reaction, it is with the public blindly accepting new technology without first considering the impact it has on their fair use rights. DVD's were on the path to domination, Their superior quality, features, multimedia and clarity was enticing enough for the MPAA to get us to forget about our fiar use rights. As consumers, we need to think more about the way we spend our money up front. We need to understand what we gain from purchasing products, as well as what we are losing. If we had known about our loss of fair use before this incident happened, then voted with our money, the DVD format would have been a bust and we would not be where we are today. We screwed ourselves, long before we were screwed by the MPAA lawsuits. -- Twivel
But then, US law is often immitated in other countries. Plus there's the fact that governments and corporations worldwide have an interest in limiting free speech on the internet.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
If that happens, I for one will be happy to spend five grand on a server and an OC-12 (or whatever is needed) to set up a "private server." On this server, you will be able to do what you please (as long as you don't tick me off) and also access the internet. Very similar to an ISP but I won't be making money off of it except for you rich people, who will set up slush funds for me.
IRC, Mail, Webserver, the whole works, totally private. Now of course, when asked about it, you will respond "Huh, never heard of that, good idea though." Maybe I am crazy, but there hasn't been anything yet that we havne't gotten around.
Sure this isn't totally realistic, but this way it can be scaled back to meet economic demads. Any feedback?
(I think my sig goes nicely with the two top moderated posts) I realize that I am late for moderation, but am I late to save the net?
If you want my respect, give it first...
If you don't want my respect, expect mine before you give it.
We're either going to see alot of people realizing the freedom they're about to lose and become involved, protest, and raise all kinds of hell, or Big Boys like Mattel and the MPAA are gonna walking all over us. The government won't help, 'cause the government agrees there should be internet regulation(at least to some extent). Take recent annoncements from Australia about internet content regulation as a indication of where things are going. It's a serious issue that is not to be taken lightly.
While it is true that the internet is not solely based in the US(I'm in Canada), it is an indication of things to come all over the world. There are very few countries who would not follow the US in their decisions. The internet is the economic platform of the future. If you want to do business with the US, you had better listen to the US, or the US will just filter you out.
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We're either going to see alot of people realizing the freedom they're about to lose and become involved, protest, and raise all kinds of hell, or Big Boys like Mattel and the MPAA are gonna walking all over us. The government won't help, 'cause the government agrees there should be internet regulation(at least to some extent). Take recent annoncements from Australia about internet content regulation as a indication of where things are going. It's a serious issue that is not to be taken lightly.
While it is true that the internet is not solely based in the US(I'm in Canada), it is an indication of things to come all over the world. There are very few countries who would not follow the US in their decisions. The internet is the economic platform of the future. If you want to do business with the US, you had better listen to the US, or the US will just filter you out.
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We are indeed at the moment when the political implications of the internet can't be ignored. There are many latent ambiguities in the US constitution regarding these new questions, so Americans won't be able to fall back on precedent. There will be a long process to establish the rules of this new world.
It is a mistake to assume that there is no jurisdiction on the internet. To handle extraterritorial jurisdiction issues we will simply see treaties. There will be holes, and underground sites, but these will be only as accessible as the underground in meatspace.
A major battleground will be code. New technologies and new controlling legislation will be in an evolutionary race. Decentralized services make things more free, centralized services allow more control.
If you're a hacker who wants to be on the side of freedom, build highly distributed architectures. Use the GPL. Build privacy protecting tools to keep pace with new privacy invading tools.
Felony? You gotta be kidding. A $100 civil forfeiture is hardly a felony, especially if it hasn't been enforced in forty years (and then only as a matter of politics).
"The best way to do mathematics is to be creatively lazy." -I. M. Isaacs
...network tenneling through the existing internet and make it a rule that in order to sign up you have to not be a lawyer?
-- SIGFPE
You talk about how taxes are essential. Let's discuss this further.
states to pay for basic services such as roads
Look at the piss poor condition of the roads. You really think they need MORE money? No, they need to manage it better.
rail (ditto)
Railroads are owned by railroad companies. They are not like telephone lines, or roads.
airports
Airports have landing fees. And often this is enough to keep them running.
police, jails, courts
(see roads)
You spoke about UPS. That's an example of how commercialization has IMPROVED the mail system. If your job depended on a package reaching it's destination by a certain time, would you really send it using the US Postal Service?
In many areas, commercialization of public services has improved those services.
How difficult can it be to block a certain protocol in a firewall? There are firewalls/proxies that block webpages containing specific words and sentences (parsing the damn thing!).
I think the fight should revolve around making people aware, not pirating or hacking through the system because that won't fix the root problem.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Geeks are put in a difficult position with these issues. Look at it this way.
How many polititions making these laws do you think have even a fraction of the Internet/tech related knowledge that you and I do? -- Probably none.
Okay, now how many Geeks do we have in places of politcal power? -- A minimal amount.
Now, how many people that you drag off the street can tell you, what all of DMCA, UCITA, Echelon, DeCSS, and maybe even RIAA and MPAA, mean? -- A handful at best.
Seeing a correllation?
Polititions don't make policy on their own. They rely on lobbyists, the public, and designated "experts" to guide them.
So if polititions don't have the knowledge to make decent decisions on their own, and they must rely on outside sources for information, and the public doesn't know what's going on, can we be surprised at some of the braindead laws we've seen be put in place?
That's why it's important to get meaningful and accurate information disseminated through the proper communication channels so that we get people in government making laws that are well balanced and proper.
It all boils down to making your voices heard and not relying on someone else to do it for you.
---------------------
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
But that's not just it. It's been dead since e-commerce. It's been dead since gopher became dead. (Remember gopher?) It's been dead since when our little network got overwhelmed by everybody in the world.
But that happened at different times to different people. To some, the internet might have died right at the start of the world wide web, when you could point-and-click the net. To others, it might be when companies really started getting on the 'net bandwagon. To others, it might be e-commerce.
And yet the internet is also alive. It dies, and it reinvents itself. To those who think that regulation can control the internet, go open up a hotbot (or any other bad search engine), and search for warez. Found some? Good. Now repeat to your self, there will always be people who won't be controlled.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
I think the regulations that we are seeing be attempted are a natural outgrowth of how John Q Public reacts to things it does not comprehend readily. The Internet is still a great unknown for most of the world - and for most parents/corporations/etc. Since they do not understand the dynamics of how it works, they want it broken down into controllable pieces. In other words, forced into a shape that they can understand.
The difference here is that the Internet can and has grown faster than any government could possibly control it - and that has frightened the public more. The only invention in recent history that has has nearly as much of an impact on societal culture is the TV - and even then what was broadcast was controlled by corporations.
With the internet - all that you need a computer and a phone line. Anyone can put their thoughts, ideas, code, whathave you out for the world to see, comment on, and respond to. Its a nearly uncontrollable maelstrom to the eyes of governmental agencies, and they are going to try and get a grip on it any way they can.
Most of their attempts are going to be completely ineffective as the internet crosses both state and country boundaries. Countries are going to have to reach a global consensus on many issues before any true, enforcable laws can actually take place.
IMHO, what we are seeing now are growing pains of governments. Where those growing pains will lead will depend on who ends up with the most influence on the public through the media. Right now that is companies like Mattel and M$, but don't forget that everyone loves the underdog, and that can be leveraged to get Linux and Open Source projects the exposure they need.
Check out Magic Firesheep!
The providers of the internet should have nothing to do with such restrictions. After all, there's still the issue of CD copy houses which don't need the internet at all... it's part of the same problem.
I agree that this strongly resembles the earliest stages of a colonizing process. This scheme of asserting rights over the "natives" and backing the assertion up with force has worked in Ireland, in Africa, in the Americas, ...(the list actually goes on quite a ways). The question is, can the result be any different here. If not, then go for the best accomodation to the monsters that is possible, as early as possible. But, perhaps this outcome isn't inevitable, perhaps this is more like a game of go than chess, where survival and percentage matter the most in the long run. Or perhaps the netizens can take a page from the fugitive criminal J.D. Rockefeller, who found a safe sanctuary in New Jersey through bribery. (I'm not advocating the bribery part, but the unassailable sanctuary part.)
To me, it seems that just the opposite it happening. More and more people are offering free information, products, software, and ideas across the web than they have before. Sure the established companies are balking at it. Did you expect them to roll over? The fact that many of these cases, like etoy, are being won, or at least settled in freedom's favor. I think this could be a turning point for the web, but a turn for the better.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I had my first online experience in late 1995, probably mid-October, while I was a student at a small community college in Virginia. At first, there were only a few of us who knew about this magic thing that could be found by clicking on something called "netscape navigator 1.1" on the library macintoshs. But, word spread.
I was amazed. Intrigued. Here at last was something that called to me. Here's where I found out that not only were there people like myself, but lots of them. My only regret looking back on those days is that I never took seriously the impact that this "internet" and "world wide web" would have. I missed the boat. Even a year ago I could probably have worked for any number of sites, but now even HTML programmers need a college degree.
And now, 4 1/2 years later, I count myself as a middle child. Not as smart as my older brothers and sisters (which would probably be about 90% of this community), yet almost infinitely wise when compared to my younger kin; people who never got past the forwarded/chain-email and chat room stage, or those who got online for the first time yesterday, or those who have been online but ask strange questions, or (last but not least) anyone still on AOL.
And it feels weird. When I got to North Carolina (where the university system's access was way faster than the CC in VA) I found out about UNIX and usenet and gopher and other fun things. and i liked them alot. But, i don't see why people bitch about them being dead. If you abandoned the newsgroups just because you didn't like to hit 'delete' when coming upon spam, then don't bitch about its current state.
if the core users of the net (pre 90's) were still interested in these things, they would still be around...right?
As for corporate/govt influence, well, think about it. There is virtually zero chance of really getting the business world offline or of preventing their influence from further dirtying up the cyberscape with banner ads and stupid websites. But, with gov't, people can make some change happen. Remember MADD? That was started by one mother.
so why don't we start up a group called GABBA (Geeks Against Business Banner Ads) or some such.
I don't, maybe it's my utter lack of sleep in the past week that's causing me to vent this way. Or, maybe I am just overstepping myself and talking out of my ass. After all, I am a spoiled brat who has never paid a dime for access.
The point that I am unable to get across here is that things change and that's just the way it is. If you don't like the Internet anymore, then follow the earlier suggestion of setting up new networks and connecting them the old fashioned way....
Or, throw a virtual brick through the virtual window of the latest DotComIPOStartUp to hit the streets. After all, the destruction of everything is the creation of something new......
sig not found
What's interesting to me is, how will corporations continue to make money? When, some decades from now, music, movies et al are distributed as pure data streams (I think CDs and DVDs will stick around, or something similar to them, for some time as people are so used to having a physical media representing a certain piece of information), what will keep someone from buying one copy of it, and distributing it all over the place? Where will the revenue come from?
I think that a lot of companies are going to be forced to completely restructure their thinking, and adapt to suit the new market, rather than rely on the government and laws to protect them against change.
Death of the 'net as we know it? Maybe so, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. :-)
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
It used to be that the net was controlled by academics and philanthopists like Tim Berners-Lee (The creator of http.) Netziens must unite to keep the internet free and clear of corporate/government control. We must prevent the bastardization of a free net into an ad-net. True, the net will evolve, but if you lose control, the corporations will exploit.
And yes, in Sweden, Germany, France and elsewhere, people are being hauled into court for expressing their political beliefs.
The only court cases of this kind that I have heard of here in Sweden would be some cases of nazis saying some not so very nice things, and according to swedish law, it's illegal to express hatred againsta certain group of people (like jews,colored,etc.)
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Taxes are also inevitable. They should be lower than for bricks and mortar, but they are necessary for cities, counties, and states to pay for basic services such as roads (used by UPS to deliver your goods), rail (ditto), airports (ditto),...
If there is a tax, then there could be a tax break for buying online because you don't have to drive your car to shop, thereby polluting the air.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Like the sewer system under the city, some people can tunnel together a network that can be used by those who do not want every damn packet they send traced.
There will be ingress and egress ports, just like those manholes -- what goes in you do not know where comes out.
Should there be an organized effort for this after IP6 is put into effect, I would be willing to do tunneling with my router between two access providers.
You can bet that IP6 is going to change things a lot. It is your foundation. Want to make it right? Get involved.
I have no doubt that the net will be the next to be regulated. The government is scared shitless about the 'free_flow' of information. They have to choose sneaky ways to legislate our freedoms away, because remember we are the "land of the free". If they were open about it we'd be as openly fascistic as China. I think that they actually believe American's still believe they live in a democracy. ya right. The fortunate thing for us is that we're the ones who have the power. Just like Neal Stephenson talks about the Morlocks and the Eloi, we are the elite class who understands the technology. Don't forget politicians are usually business majors or lawyers. They have NO CLUE about these things we hold so dear. They can make laws until the cows come home, but they can't prevent _us_ from always being one step ahead of those laws. At least I hope not.
Now that all Americans scared about the 22 % I can tell you the secret: The tax is NOT paid on every step the goods get closer to the consumer. Instead, the VAT is paid for the "value added", that is, companies can deduct the tax THEY paid in the goods they bought from the tax they pay for the merchandise they sell. The system is the same everywhere in the EU.
And about the opinion part: I think taxes are good, paying taxes is right and the consumption is just another place to collect taxes.
I agree with you. The way in which social (or scientific) revolutions really come about is that FIRST people (especially the most insightful, knowledgable, or creative persons) withdraw their participation from institutions of power, THEN they begin to participate in "work-around" communities. Finally, the communities in which meaningful work or other social interactions occur become themselves institutionalized.
The difference between communities (which are generally functional, if only for purposes of social interaction), and institutions (generally dysfunctional, to an extent normally increasing over time) is that any institution's main function is simply perpetuating itself (as a "legal" or recognized entity). But evolution (at least in non-isolated, multi-cultural societies) is the norm for social as well as biological organisms... "legal," frozen institutions almost have to become badly adapted to changing social circumstances because of this.
This analysis applies as much to tax codes (or other forms of support for necessary collective enterprises) as to scientific paradigms, as far as I can tell.
- Andy R.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Thousands of people have mentioned it here, but I'll say it anyway: Have a look at FreeNet! It's purpose is the same, it's code is almost production quality and I'm sure they could use some of your ideas for future versions (and you could surely use some of theirs). And, most of all, I'd personally love to see these two efforts joined together.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
Sorry, I didn't want to shout at you. It was a typeo (B instead of BR...)
And, yes, I'll use the Preview button next time.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
So the USA is the place where your freedom is protected best? I guess that's why they have that non-US section in debian or why you're not allowed to compile OpenSSL in the US with the same compiler options you can use elsewhere?
Try again.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
Although I haven't been on the net for long, from what I know the internet has always been in constant state of change. And I think it always will be (at least for some years to come).
And, btw, the internet is also EMail, ICQ, IRC, Napster...
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
Perhaps "open standards" would be more precise in this case. The internet would never have caught on like this if IPv4 had been owned and exploited by some corporation.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
The vast majority of us were never doing big stuff, maybe some warez, porn, but no scams, etc. These laws make it riskier to even engage in questionable activity. Sure, morally, d/ling warez is wrong, but when I have only two warez progs, HOW immoral is it? I guess if you are a sinless jesus then you agree with all the laws and regulations, but must people won't lose sleep over a little warez or porn. These laws put the average net joe in trouble when he makes an illegal copy of any software, no matter how trivial. To me, it seems like the regulation will continue until the net is like the real world. But if we look at history, we see that the real world has only gotten more authoritarian over the centuries. Expect the same for the net. Thanks, Travis forkspoon@hotmail.com
Does anyone else remember a time when the net was for people who knew what they were doing, and not full of the average idiot who can barely figure out how to turn a PC on?
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I have to agree. The "Internet as [I knew] it" is already dead.
Used to be, USENET was 50% signal (with the other 50% being the actual questions)
And the net was a place where there were useful sites, focused on information, not animation
Now USENET is 60% spam, and 35% noise. Similarly, the vast majority of websites think the most important component of a website is to have a flash/shockwave/javascript animated clock. What? You wanted actual useful information? Better try somewhere else.
That was a different time. The media would jump over anything remotely close to the government's actions during the Prohibition. There will be isolated insidents but as the press converges on them they will subside.
Your response proves a point - one that I don't much like.
For about fifteen years now we have had an unrelenting "war on drugs". Only in the last year or so have I seen anything in the media that indicates that the war is lost and that the overall effect on our society has been incredibly bad - and that maybe we should try something else.
The list of horror stories, ranging from government confiscation of innocent peoples' money to no-knock raids that kill the occupants of the wrong house could fill this entire thread.
I don't really want to debate drugs themselves, merely to point out that the media will protect our rights mostly when it is safe and convenient.
But all of this has been going on right in front of your face, so is there some kind of selective attention going on here?
Like:
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
This is more like the fifth turning point in the history of the Internet. It's not the same as it was 2 years ago, or 4, or 6, etc...
That's the nature of this beast, constant evolution. It won't be the same network we all know and love 2 years from now, and some will love the changes, while others will hate them.
OK, it is true that today's laws are certainly encroaching on the freedom of the internet. Some of this is good, I want to be able to avoid fraudelent merchant. Some of this is bad, I don't want more taxes on goods that I purchase.
What doesn't make sense to me is that this will circumvent freedoms. The internet with it's routable protocols, and today's easy access to relatively high power computing is not going away. If something should be free we'll route around the roadblocks imposed by government and corporations. Data havens will spring up. Clusters of people will create alternative networks. That is the power and beauty of the internet and cyberspace. We are only limited by our imagination.
As long as we have open source, cheap computing, and access to reliable cabling we'll always be as free as we want to be.
BTW - We all need to make our respective elected officials aware of these important issues so giant global companies aren't the only voices being heard.
timbu
I don't know anything about the Gnutella protocol, but I know napster's has some critical weaknesses, i.e.
a) non-anonymity
b) easy to firewall
c) regularly requesting data updates, making it easy for sysadmins to notice and giving them reasons to firewall it off apart from litigation
d) centralized
I'm sure I could list some more, if I tried.
Anyways, there's Gnutella, which I haven't read about, and the project I'm currently working on (antioch) (posted below).
- Rei
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
I think I understand now... so, what you're saying is, the Geeks will inherit the Earth?
- Rei
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
I'm in the middle of the CyberPatrol / CPHack / Peacefire issue - square in the middle. If everyone on /. who sympathises with us were to get involved we'd have the problem licked!
"Everything works if you let it" - The Flying Mouse
I think that if it gets to the point where this goes crazy...the comp. geeks will unite to use a different protocol or something. kinda the evolution of the net. more regulation just causes more underground. more underground...means more people joining in. and the laws will be realized as stupid. kinda like prohibition...they tried it...and people went underground soo much the underground was too big to cover. so they gave up realizing it was stupid. --- my analysis of history can suck. so don't kill me too bad. just my $.02
Actually no fee would be needed, if everything was created out of nothing so to speak, then the plans to make the car could be "open source" we would have our whole open source software movement apply to almost everything!! Since everything would be free then work as we know it would not be needed, so instead of going to work and not necessarily doing what you like you could instead spend your days tinkering with your car designs, or your software, or whatever you are interested in. It would rid us of this whole capitalist culture we are living it right now, and things would be done the right way.
Lets create a new internet!
There's no reason that you couldn't set up your own private network.
Local calls are becoming free in more and more places, allowing free short distance communications. This allows us to connect several of these private networks together. If we want to connect more networks over larger distances, then we can route packets across the internet.
See. Easy. Its just a matter of getting enough people with their own networks to cooperate.
Yes. me.
People pass regulations on the Internet like they see trees instead of a forest. Regulations and guidelines are being set so frequently and so haphazardly that no one's been able to take the time and examine the overall impact of these laws and lawsuits. At this rate, we're going to end up with a restricted, neutered internet that doesn't remotely resemble the way it started.
We're worrying over the position of one brick at a time, without realizing that removing all the bricks will make the wall fall down.
But that's the nature of commerce, really. People worry about where there money is going, and that means they'll work overtime to ensure that their venture stays profitable. One could say that e-commerce is ruining the Internet as we know it.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Without popular support, we will lose. We need to motivate the public and let them see our point of view.
Thinking is one of hardest types of work.
Like all turning points, someones going to be responsible which direction the Internet goes in. But who will it be? Most of the people that are on the Internet are uneducated about intellectual property laws and all the issues on the net. A majority of the average computer users think things like Amazon.coms patents are a good thing. They are still thinking of the old forms business. They don't understand it when someone with a conscious understand of the information age, speaks to them of things like freedom of information. They think its just the idea of bunch of zealotus hackers.
The power of the masses just isn't going to work if most of the mass doesn't know whats going on. Right now the only people with the power are the large corperations with the money to do what they wish. So how does the other side compete with this? Well I think people are slowly starting to understand just what the capabilities of the Internet are, and how all these future laws could restrict them and degenerate the Internet. People should realize this is where the real turning point is. If enough people were educated of the Internets capabilities and how they might be taken away, then they would be able to take the Internet back from monetary motivated corporations and uneducated legistlators.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
So, the "geek" internet is under attack by the "suits". The suits want to make more money, if that's at all possible, by lulling us all into complacent consumerism. Now, the internet isn't a passive medium, it's not even a single medium, it's more of a delivery system. The web is a new medium that happens to be close to what the suits know, TV and print.
Fine, when geeks in the 70s and 80s got bored with TV and pop media they took up BBS's and other pre-puclic-internet networks. These "connected" mediums eventually evolved, migrated, whatever, into the internet. Business FINALLY caught on once it got that big. They brought their laws, which are meant to facilitate the interest of business with people secondary, everyone knows that. We live in an oligarky, get used to it. The smart peasants discovered a way of communicating without the powers that be, business, knowing. It might as well have been a trade route in the 17th century to the orient. Thing is, geeks are like the guides that know the way. We are highly skilled woodsmen and those prissy aristocrats can't do anything that can affect us. We are masters of this domain (no scienfeld inuendo intented) and will be for a long time to come. We can also exodus this place any time we want, but do you want to? Thought as much.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Day by day I'm noticing something that pisses me off. The internet, actually computing in general, is becoming trendy ...
Now what are computer nerds supposed to do now that everyone is trying to fit into our clique? There is a new day dawning, and I don't think I like it. I'm sure it'll pass (my hatred towards computer trendiness, that is).
Long signatures suck.
Coroperations want the control over things that they are used to. It used to be that they just natuarly could keep one person from spreading software and music to anyone in the world. It was just naturaly that way, because nobody has the time or money to do it. But now its natural for anyone on the internet to do that. Obviously, a change that big is going to scare a lot of people. This much just about everyone knows already.
We are at a turning point because we are at the point where enough people and coroperations are on the Internet that it creates a stir. Its hit a critical mass. From here, we, as a society (both on and off the net) have to decide if we want things on the net to stay the same, or if we want to control things. The sad part is that many people will decide to apply laws to the net without ever expereincing it for anything more then a few hours at most.
Regulation isn't bad in itself if its well thought out. Just yesterday on Slashdot there was a story posted (you can see it here). On regulating the Internet. This article showed that regulation of AT&T in the '80s helped the net to grow. This is because if AT&T wasn't a government controled monopoly, it wouldn't have allowed for small ISPs to attach their modems to the phone lines, and acsess to the internet would have been controled by AT&T. Thus, careful regulation helped the growth of the Internet.
But things like the DMCA and the UCITA show very little careful thought. Regulation in itself is not bad; poorly thought out regulation is bad.
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Not a typewriter
Appropriate Tom Toles cartoon
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share and enjoy
Well...correct me if I'm wrong...but lets say we do create a GeekNet (whatever u wann call it) and before anyone tries to access it we put up a main page that says...to access this net you have to be at least 150 years old and reside on the planet mars (something impossilbe/stupid)...I've seen warez/underground sites that have this as their disclaimer....now if let's say the MPAA went into our site illegally because they don't reside on mars......can they still sue us? Why not put the DeCCS code (whatever u want) behind one of these sites.....talk to a lawyer....they'll be able to come up with something.....now will this work or not?
Why win9x really sucks
until the fcc starts regulating sockets like they regulate wavelengths, the internet will survive... the web'll remain the waste of resources it's been for years, but we'll find some way of sneaking in our rights... time for underweb, floating around port 24080...
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
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I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
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The corporates that will survive will be the ones that learn to accept and embrace this. The other ones with suffer long agony and eventually be acquired.
The governments will change, with politicians learning to embrace the net and to do what they're damned well told for once.
I think it will certainly change. Hasn't it already? Compare the Internet of the early '90's to the "Internet" of today (which is pretty much just the WWW, UseNet is dying, gopher is gone, etc.). As it becomes more corporate, there's bound to be more lawyer nonsense getting thrown about. Eventually it will be indistinguishable from television, with ads being rammed down your throat before you're allowed access to a site, etc.
Everybody who works with computers knows what a pain in the ass it can be to upgrade to a new version of the software. The interface may change, so you get confused users. You have new bugs and new hardware compatibility issues, etc, etc. And of course with an OS, it's even worse. Lots of companies spend alot of money and time preparing for upgrades to major applications packages.
...
Now, imagine a world in which upgrades happen, not when the IT manager or even the company president says they do, but when the software publisher says they do.
Take a minute to finish screaming.
OK, all better now? If UCITA becomes the law of the land (which is an issue unto itself) and companies like M$ start selling temporary licences, I think that at least some companies will have enough clue to realize that selling software that doesn't expire and doesn't force upgrades will give them an overwhelming competitive advantage in the long run.
As far as the private user goes, I'll vote with my bucks: I'll buy software that doesn't expire, or I'll get hacks of the stuff that does.
Don't misunderstand: UCITA is evil and we should fight it tooth and nail. If it becomes widespread, it will be a Very Bad Thing. But it won't be the end of the world, and it will probably fall by the wayside after a few years.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
The beauty of a democracy is that, in a situation such as this, if it turns out to be against the will of the general populace, the populace shall vote into office the right people to make it work properly. If it turns out that the internet becomes highly regulated, then the case must be true that there is not enough real desire among the people for it to be otherwise. Of course, this only applies to individual nations, but at the present time its the best we can do. Write your congressman, write the members of the courts deciding this factor, because it is not merely a case of law, this is a case of public desires. If the petty whiners who want censorship and regulation to be the law win, then must the working class of the computing public throw their weight around in the political arena. Users of the Internet Unite!
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Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
well said, they're new at this though. I think things will get better once the dinosaurs in grey suits that are behind the wheel retire.
It may be the new economy but it's the still the same guys who were driving the old economy.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
so we start our OWN NET.
seriously, the hacker/geek philosophy will live on. if the internet becomes some heavily controlled corperate bitch, we will start a new one. oh, and we will make it REALLY complicated, so that the free exchange of ideas and information can still exist but grandma won't be buying denture-bond on it.
ever heard of BBS?
we could always to back to some form of that, even. that is where there was FREEDOM!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The net is impacting the world. These lawsuits and laws are just a pathetic conter-reaction.
The net has been changing since it was created, and that is why I like it. The net as we know it (do we really know it in the same way?) will continue. But the net got enough room for everyone, to let them define the net, just as they want to. Whether they are into Business, Censorship or BDSM.
Actually, some states already have what they call a "use tax" which is supposed to be paid on any item bought out of state and brought in. Virginia is one; I believe there are others (based on a /. discussion of this a few months ago).
In VA, there is an extra form in the income tax packet where you are supposed to declare 4.5% (the state sales tax rate) of the value of any goods bought and brought in-state upon which VA state sales tax were not collected. This applies equally for mail, telephone, internet, smoke signal or any other transaction method.
Now as you might imagine, compliance is pretty low, but one day, the ability for the state to monitor credit card transactions will likely be implemented and then the piper will get paid by all.
It seems to me to be unconstitutional, violating the clause preventing tarriffs on interstate commerce, but the government (at every level) seems to increasingly view the constitution as a hindrance to be routed around, and somehow they justify this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, this "use tax" is one of those things (like draconian speed law enforcement) that the majority probably find quite aggravating and repressive, but are afraid to speak out against, because they will either be labled "politically incorrect" (depriving "the children" of safety or good schools, or whatever), or targeted by the powers to be set-up and harrassed.
Sure, bitch about the state police, get pulled over every week and get shaken down, or bitch about taxes and get audited every year.
The systematic criminalization of the citizenry is a fundamental tactic for the lawyers that *really* make up the government to use to wield more and more power.
{/rant} Sorry, but somehow my hot button got nudged.
Sarge
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
I say that as long as the internet was built upon the foundation of open speech/source/whatever, that it will continue to remain that way. You can't just tell people to forget about freedom, and you can't do the same when it comes down to internet basics. And even if the bigwigs decide to regulate something, we as a community have shown that there will always been a way around the new hurdle.
I don't think that any one thing can be *stopped* more than temporarily suppressed.
But's that may just be me...
-bugbbq
I keep thinking that something like a "Net Out" would possibly get people's attention. Pick a day (the anniversary of some idiot piece of legislation, so that everyone could agree) and on that day, avoid the net. Avoid answering questions about the net. Avoid fixing anyone's access to their email, etc. Stall your friends and relatives, and your boss if possible. Take the day off, if it's feasible. All people who really care about this avoid in all possible ways the advancement or maintenance of the net.
In the total absence of any kind of net census, I have no idea if that would work, but at the very least no site would get slashdotted on that day . . .
There's no need to sue everyone on the planet. They simply have to control AOL and Microsoft and they've got control of about 90% of it. Or, more easily, the can just wait for the transfer upgrade to broad band and control that. The internet is centralized, they can control it if they wish. But, there's no need. Has anyone seen anything in the "non-geek" news that reported the cphack situation as anything besides two guys corrupting innocent children? How about DeCSS, heard anything about that didn't have the word "pirate" plastered all over it? Do normal people even know what the hell DMCA is? The content is already controlled, not by the government, but by the coporations. It's already happening. If CNN and Fox News report it some way, the majority will believe exactly what they say, and the majority rules in a democracy. They could make up a story and people would most likely believe it. They already blatently twist the facts, why not get rid of the facts all together? The point is, the government is not what we have to fear. They don't understand this very well themselves. We have to worry about the giant coporations who can lobby and use their force of the many against the few to influence our government in the direction that the coporations want. Who's a judge going to believe, a large coporation that has spent very much time and money making products realted to the computer industry and paying for the best lawyers it can find, or a group of geeks who talk about things he/she can't understand half the time, and spout something about philosophical implications the rest of time? Take your guess...
If you want, I'll bet anyone $10 that there will be Net taxes (not on ISPs, but on sales and e-commerce) for municipal, county, and states, in existence by 2010.
I don't really get the push towards net taxes. If you own a business and you sell a product, you owe taxes to both the US government and your state government. It doesn't matter if you sell your product in the mall or over the internet. Uncle Sam and your state are already getting a cut.
Now, you aren't paying state sales taxes if you buy over the internet (as long as you buy from a different state), but you don't pay sales tax on mail order catalog purchases, either. So why add a net sales tax? And who would get the sales tax? The state that the business is in or the state the customer is in, or both? If there are "municipal, county, and state" taxes, it's even more complicated...
If they do add a net sales tax, will they add a mail order tax as well? If not, I'll bet a lot of sites will offer a "Call our 800 number to order with no net tax" option, which means they will most likely add a mail order sales tax as well...
I think they should just tax the companies, as they already do, instead of adding a whole new type of tax. Why make the system even more complex? Plus, it's already expensive for small business to sell on the net, do they really want to make it moreso?
Josh Sisk
There is a storm right now, but it will probably blow over without the internet even noticing.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
1. I've envisioned a network of servers interconnected into a general "cloud" of storage, not physically centralized anywhere. Each server would act as a relay/storage node.
2. Nodes of the cloud would create unique public/private key pairs with which to initiate encrypted communications with a select peer group. The private key would remain in RAM, never stored on a disk, and never transmitted to anything (in case of wiretapping/eavesdropping). This way, if the machine is brought down for any reason, the private key is eliminated, and the contents of the local storage area are safely encrypted with no possibility of reclaiming the private key (i.e. the storage effectively self-destructs)
3. A node should allocate a user-selectable pool of local storage to be used by the cloud for anonymous storage - i.e. encrypted packets of data that form a part of a file (but never the whole file, only several random packets from it). The packets would be encrypted as outlined above, and would be redundantly stored on one to several peer computers (I'm not sure what algorithm would work here, but the goal would be to ensure that if any one machine went down, others would "fill in" the gap and re-distribute redundant packets to peers to make up for the loss - like water filling back in if you remove a cup of it from a lake).
4. When you submit a file, it's torn up into packets, which are encrypted with peers' public keys and send out (redundantly) into the cloud. Periodically, servers would swap packets and otherwise "shuffle" their storage to ensure entropy in the system.
5. Some of the encrypted packets exchanged by servers would include directory information, indicating a unique serial number that tags a particular submitted file (these would be generated when you submit, using some unique physical tag like a one-way hash of an ethernet card MAC address in combination with some other stuff - TBD). All encrypted packets floating around would be so tagged, and have a sequence number as well.
6. A particular node would in this way slowly build up a directory (encrypted and stored in the cache, which again, becomes unreadable if the machine goes down) of available content that could be requested of the cloud, by virtue of the directory fragments being circulated. If the machine is downed, the cache would be lost, and the process would start over once it's started again. Note that the directory fragments would not include any information regarding physical machines the files are stored on. You could probably implement some kind of distributed search capability to ask peers up to a certain hop count if they know of any specifically requested content that's not listed in the local directory, but that's tangential.
7. In any case, Once a user has identified a file (and therefore serial number) to be "downloaded" from the cloud, request packets (again, encrypted) begin filtering out to the nodes, with a list of yet-undelivered packets (which, at first transmission, would be the entire list). As each server gets the list, it would check it's own local storage. If it had a yet-undelivered packet, it would route it back, and delete the packet from the request list. Once the server is done with the packet-request list, it would split it up, and send it out to two of its peers. In this way, eventually you would have single-packet requests floating around until a server finally finds that packet in its local storage (and of course, you could add some kind of Time-To-Live to the request packet to avoid perpetually unanswered requests from littering the cloud).
8. As packets begin showing up at the requesting machine, it decrypts them and aggregates them until the file, in its entirety, is created locally.
9. To allow for the group-aging of content (i.e. to flush the cloud of old stuff) you could have individual server admins specify conditions under which file fragments would be accepted for local storage. You could also locally "delete" a file from your server, in that you could create a blacklist of serial numbers that you will no longer allow to occupy local storage on your machine (this could be persistent (i.e. outside of encrypted storage, thus able to survive a restart), as it's simply a list of ID numbers, and not content itself.) You may also create limitations on the age of a file you would accept, the type of file, etc. However, you could never effect whether another server chose to allow fragments from a particular file to reside in its local storage. In this way, no one (at any level of priviledge, even the original submitter of the file) could centrally delete any file explicitly (say, under duress). So, files never delete, they just "fade away" in the sense that over time enough servers would deny them that they would simply not take up room on anybody's drive, and your local directory/search functions could use the blacklist to effectively shield the files from your eyes forevermore. Some kind of cloud-wide time limit may be appropriate to ultimately kill old content outright (after a couple of years) so the blacklists don't become huge. Also, if files got erroneously timed out after such a long time, if anyone still cared they could re-submit it into the cloud. Timing out content could also eliminate "orphaned" file fragments and other random quirks in the cloud.
Correctly implemented, this seems to provide a pretty airtight method for distributing files in a way as to make their physical locations at any given time impossible to determine, and also make it impossible for any party to specifically prevent content from appearing in the cloud or being deleted from the cloud. Also, as long as the encryption strength kept ahead of cracking techniques, eavesdroppers would also be kept at bay.
What do people think?
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
Taxes are also inevitable. They should be lower than for bricks and mortar, but they are necessary for cities, counties, and states to pay for basic services such as roads (used by UPS to deliver your goods), rail (ditto), airports (ditto), police (to arrest the fraud mongsters), jails (to lock up the Free Net activists in), and courts (to find them guilty and protect the monied interests from having their credit cards stolen).
Uh. how much of your taxes do you really think goses to infrastructure? Less than 5%. Your supporting social programs, bud.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler
I'm not sure who the collective "we" is, but sure, most of these laws will end the 'net's reign as a sort of lawless, or maybe more accurately self-policed, wild-wild west. But anyone who didn't think this would happen was being naive. There's too much money involved. And to those people that think these are issues that only affect the USA, you're being naive as well. With the global economy becoming more and more important, the US has enough power to force nearly every country that wants to do business with us to respect certain laws of ours. We're the schoolyard bullies, and if you don't follow our rules, we'll kick you out of the sandbox. Ultimately, no amount of legislation can impede individual thoughts; however, it can affect how you share or present them. It's effectively forced every Internet page to follow the rules of journalism and think about issues of libel and being held accountable for your own actions. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. Freedom of speech has never meant a freedom to say whatever you want; there have always been limitations. As for some of the issues, I'm not entirely up to speed on all of them, but as someone that creates intellectual property, I have a somewhat difficult time with programs like Napster. If I create something that I feel people might want to purchase, I'd hate to think anyone can just pass it around. As an example, if you own a website that depends on ad revenue for income, would you be happy with a software program that allowed people to share their favorite website pages with people, depriving you of the ad views?
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"My life is a patio of fun."
there are a couple of problems with total control thing
1) there are other countries, with different laws & consitutions. What is illegal in the states may not be illegal in Canada, or Switzerland or Cuba (note those last two)
2) Certain nations will have a vested interest in being the place where there is no censorship or taxes. Nobody has ever made Swizerland or the Grand Cayman Islands change thier banking laws.
3) this field tradionaly outstrips the laws attempting to govern it. Mostly becuase the prosses to detect a need, write a law, and enforce it, find out if the law is legal, appeal etc takes years. If any body doubts this check out the RCMP trying to bust US satalite dish owners in Canada, it has been going on for years & the first case has not hit the courts yet.
4) NO and I mean NO system does not exist that cannot be hacked. You set it up, somebody is going to bypass it or bring it down or just plain ignore it.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
I think the internet should be free and privacy should be left up to those who want. if you cant learn to take care of yourself, you dont belong out there. My main dispute is with the DeCSS lawsuit. somebody found a way to break their security and they decided to sue those who made the program. This simply shows them that their security sucks and that they need to make it better. That would be too hard though so lets try to get rid of the program, but they can never do that as their are mirrors for it everywhere. ITs as if they put it out there with no protection at all because they are too lazy to think up something else. If you want your damn security you have to work for it damn it!!! The internet is slowly turning into everything i hate about this country. sueing over every little thing. The RIAA and MPAA are like ambulence chasers and i wish we could get rid of all of them. the more you bring the subject up the more it gets around so they are creating their own destruction. I wish they would all just go away. remember when warez were big on the internet, but not many people had them. Then articles show up everywhere and now everyone pirates and everyone has mp3s and blah blah blah. Its simply annoying and i wish their was some way we could just take it back
People always miss the point completely. Freedom of speech can only exist when the government lacks the capacity to judge. Once government gets a toe through the doorway it is all over. Usually the old saw about screaming fire in a crowded theatre is mentioned. The real answer is that unless a man can scream fire in a crowded theatre without fear of criminal or civil consequences, all freedom is shot forever. It's all or nothing. A girl can't be a little bit pregnant. Freedom is pure.
...that these laws only affect the United States of America. The USA does not an Internet make...
I don't like fish. Reverse the fish to e-mail.
This is the dawn of the age of freedom.
The regulations come not as a surprise but a nuisance. How can you regulate a piece of machinery which involves intangible articles and try to implement tangible regulations/restrictions to them.
The tangible and intangible are two separate worlds. The rules from one can not apply to the rules for the other.
My great concern is that, and I have considered this myself, there will be branching or splitting.
Maybe some division of sorts. On one side will be the mainstream consumer user who doesn't know the difference between a satellite and a land line and other side will be us. But then they can monitor 'us' too.
The lawmakers and "thinktanks" are not concerned with the technological aspect of all this lawmaking. They are focusing and aiming at other goals, like making strides in ammendment issues. They do this, and disregard technical issues, even if it means innocent users will be found guilty of crimes. The frightening part of all this is that whatever decisions are made now, can be used as a reference in future court cases where indivuals may be sentenced to jail time.
My Questions:
Who does the regulation protect?
Who has the most to gain from the regulation?
Who will suffer at the hand of the regulation?
What is the last thing the people with a lot to gain want as an outcome? Even if they stand to win...
(a boycott, loss of sales, cries of outrage from the general public, mainstream bad publicity)
Does it affect a middleperson situation?
-Think of all the middlepeople that are being scratched out in different industries - insurance, music, commissioned salepeople (a new breed of online commissions to be made)
Here is something else I just wanted to mention about this MPAA... I just wonder how much more money in sales the movies would have made if the Internet wasn't so popular.
The RIAA and the MPAA have had a lot of persuasion in the past. They only know what they know. They are not moving forward. They could offer a world of wonderful things involving computers, but they are not interested in change.
One final question - Are we really Free?
-marcia wilbur
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (A. A. Milne)
Well, taxes are normally paid for the upkeep of services. What has the government done for your internet access lately?
;) taxes if it went toward the development and extension of the internet infrastructure.
I wouldn't mind paying (some/little
RE Management: anyone can manage but leadership is truly rare.
Your argument is well thought out, but you forgot something of key importance; The very cables and lines that make up the internet are privately owned by numerous companies. These are the roads and rails of the net and are not government-owned like their counterparts in the brick and mortar world. Companies sell usage of these lines to us already in the form of ISP fees. I suppose that's our internet "tax" right there if you'd rather not call it a fee.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Of course, the Australian govenment isn't exactly afraid of scaremongering to get stupid laws passed. When the Internet Cencorship bill was being passed we had politicians who had obviously had minimal contact with the internet saying things like 'I don't want my kids surfing the net and stumbling across objectionable material' (sic) as if it was just like channel surfing. The general populace does tend to believe the leaders of their country and take most of what they say as gospel so, when the pollies come out with this kind of drivel, Jo Average swallows it and thus stupid laws gain some popular support. If the government of any country is going to try to pass laws concerning the internet they really need to have people who actually *know* what they're talking about to advise them and show the lawmakers the realities of what they're trying to regulate. Until this happens we're going to see stupid laws popping up all over the place.
So damn witty, they only let me use half.
The government can this filter/that blackbox whatever much they want, we can still develop things like ANTIOCH, go outside of 'the internet' and the phone systems and do whatever we want. Hell, we could even go back to using types of computers with protocols, interfaces and formats so antiquated they would have no idea what kind of data we were sending.
And I wonder, is this a documented case of this Mitnik guy or just some vaguely remembered anecdote? Because it's pretty damn hard to lock somebody up for four years without trial or bail for stealing commercial secrets. Maybe military secrets? That I could see. But I've seen cases like this and not even the majorest of major corporations can get that kind of preferential treatment.
Now how did this guy manage to score a 2, with all the stuff he pulled out of his ass? Lincoln did not usurp any states' rights--as I recall those states had voluntarily seceeded, which is not allowed for in the constitution--the constitution of a union which they had voluntarily joined, knowing it had no concessions for secession. From the standpoint of the union they had not seceeded, but were firing their guns at the union forces. This was before slavery was declared illegal that the confederacy began shooting, and they shot first.
NSA only monitors international communications. They do not have clearance or mandate to investigate or monitor domestic communications, nor are they allowed to have other countries' agencies do it for them. That kind of thing is carried out by the FBI, usually, or possibly the CIA.
You seem to think there is nothing more important in life than business, making money and a living and getting what you want materially. Well, that's fine for you but there are those of us who don't look at life that way. I would gladly go to jail for 4 to 6 years if government wanted to put a box on my connection. And I know the next guy down the line would be saying "look at that guy, look at his sacrifice" and figure it was really important, and while some would take the box, others would follow my example or stand out in their own way. And what would the government do, arrest the whole country? Remember, our government stays in power by mind control by getting a majority of people to think it represents them, and when it comes to trying to arrest a majority of citizens to stay in power because they realize a law is bogus and are protesting, it can't be maintained. You can call us clueless students, but antimaterialistic sacrifices can be powerful movers of people--don't you remember the civil rights movement? Or did that never happen, and I'm just making the entire movement up because I'm a clueless student? Did Ghandi never drive the British out of India with hunger stirkes? Jesus did the same type of thing and the majority of the "civilized" world converted to worshiping him for it. So who needs a reality check now?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Just as Usenet has been superceded by the web as the preferred information delivery protocol, the web's place amongst protocols in bound to change and be more defined. I see this change as leading towards FreeNet. Of course http will still be the premier Internet protocol in use. However, as more and more of these intellectual property skirmishes appear, it will make sense to host anything "controversial" on FreeNet to avoid any restriction of information - which is what the Internet was designed for, but now has become a business zone. Check out FreeNet and help make it work. http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
"We're going to see legal disobedience on a large scale, on the basis of what comes naturally. You can't fight that , no matter how many laws you make. Even then, smart people will find a way - they always have and always will." Before the printing press was invented, when only governments, the wealthy, and organized religions owned and copied written works by hand, and were able to read them, "media" was tightly controlled and still the People rebelled against injustice in song and story and more rarely in writing (who could read!) as well as battle. Now that The People live in some form, however globally distant from one another, of the United Corporate Statz of Gates it behooves you fortunate rebels to continue to hold educating the rest of us, not versed in open source code, as key to all of us surviving in a better world. The name of the game is "public domain." When artists and scientists begin to offer free access to music, film, books, patents, etc (knowledge) with the same spirit that drives the contributors of Slashdot.org, etc. you can die knowing it was worthwhile. Please don't despair, even us newbies who only just discovered what OS stands for (!!!) know this is the greatest "voice" of the People ever to sound in history. Love, nun51
Is it the end of the net as we know it? Emphatically, yes. Hackerdom and geeklings are now fighting a rear-guard action against the likes of congress, corporations, and the public. They were too busy coding to notice the world had passed them by.
When clipper came out, it should have set off a major counteroffensive and propaganda campaign. The CDA should have been anticipated, and countervened by a ban on internet regulation ahead of time. The actions in the DeCSS would have been easily predicted by someone with political experience. Strategy should have been hashed out before the release of the code. Don't even get me started about how hackers have failed to educate the public about the actual virus threat (no "electronic pearl harbor" is coming, but have we gotten this message out?). Let's not talk about the image of geekdom after the 3 days of DDoS fame.
A bunch of kids with a fascination for technology cobbled the internet together, built it into an excellent working medium, and let it go. It was foolishly assumed that the net would have to be free, that no one could even *attempt* to regulate it. The lack of political experience and the absence of tactical or strategic acumen have left the geeks exactly where they love to be: slaving over the code in the basement.
Sorry, boys and girls. Decisions are made in the front office, and in congress. You lost your chance to shape and control the internet when you failed to anticipate the actions of your enemies.
At this point, privacy and freedom, as envisioned in the "information wants to be free" bromide, are extinct. A protracted electronic guerilla campaign might stand a chance of ressurecting it, but I doubt many of you have thought of the strategy and tactics necessary to carry out such an exercise.
As long as politicians and corporations can claim the public spotlight and control their image, we are fighting a losing, rear-guard action. We have been since the CDA was first proposed. No one understood this then (we beat them away, the net is now free forever!), and no one gets this now.
Oh, well. I guess that's what you get when you spend too much time playing DOOM and not enough reading Clausewitz, Sun-Tsu, Zedong, and Musashi.
At least you can still get rich by starting a dotcom.com.
When the europeans came they introduced private ownership and fenced off the land, preventing the free migration of animals and natives. They brought with them their own laws and the power to enforce them upon the natives. The internet is in a similar situation. Corporations (Europeans) and their lawyers (sheriffs) are imposing laws on the previous inhabitants (Indians) of the internet, with no regard to the existing culture and ethics of the Indians. Current 'raiding parties' on Corp and GOv servers will be no more effective than the battles the Indians fought. An occasional 'Little Big Horn' means nothing. Even if the Indians and destroyed the Columbus on the beach, the differences in technology and customs between the the two cultures would have eventually led to a permanent 'beach head' and the same result. I don't know how far this analogy can be carried but the similarities are striking. It scares me. If cphack guys can be made to give up the fight so easily, even with ACLU support, this will only embolden the other suits to make other attacks.
There's a third option: we can leave the sandbox to them and go find ourselves a new one. Then they can pour all the mud they want in it, and it won't be our problem.
Ahh, wishful thinking, I suppose.
-Mars
"I'll bet anyone $10 that there will be Net taxes . . . for municipal, county, and states, in existance by 2010."
You mean like the 6.5% use tax on amounts over $700 spent online or outside of the state for Minnesotans? Or the 0.5% on top of that for residents of Minneapolis? They don't have a great way to be sure they are collecting it, but Minnesota already tries to collect it. This year's tax instructions carried a thinly veiled threat that if you don't file and pay the tax, and they find out, you'll be penalized. How they'll find out, I don't know, but they want to.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I used to think this way, until something happened a few years ago. There was this guy, Mitnik I think his name was. He broke into some commercial networks and obtained some secrets. They put his ass in jail and held him there without trial or bail for over 4 years.
Last time I read the U.S. constitution that isn't supposed to happen. But it did. He had lawyers... so what! They couldn't help him.
Ever since Lincoln completely usurped state's rights in the civil war the Federal Government has had complete control of a large part of the lives of U.S. citizens. Take a look at this latest census form if you don't believe me...Privacy has gone out the window. It is a FELONY to NOT answer these questions. Of course they won't use any of this information.
My point is that if Da Man shows up and says I have to put 'this filter' or 'that black box' on my internet connection, and "Oh By The Way! Here's the invoice for said equipment and you've also got to put in a special phone line just for our use so we don't have to 'bother' you when we want access!"
I don't have a choice. I do it or they put me out of business if I'm lucky. If I'm unlucky they hold me in jail for 4-6 years without trial or bail. Next ISP owner says, "Sure, stick it right there on the rack! I don't wanna end up like Robbie!"
MOST people (in the U.S. at least...) get ISP access through commercial entities which are completely at the mercy of this stuff, cause we're accountable.
You clueless students need to go cash a reality check if you think the Government CAN'T do just what you're worried about. If there's enough popular sentiment to "protect our kids!!!" they'll do any damned thing they want.
Also if you think the government (NSA) doesn't already have the full cooperation of backbone providers and telcos in monitoring ANYTHING THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE... Come to my website I've got some oceanfront property in Kansas for sale.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
Lots of groups do agree (I'm not a member of any, no need for any goverment visits at my house) and they are either persecuted by the government or investigated and imprisioned.
This is most certainly the end of the world^H^H^H^H^Hnet as we know it. This is because we are reactive and not proactive. Little by little, year by year our rights are taken away. The net just happens to be one of the most visible places this is happening right now.
/was/, given How [D]ARPA was no longer in charge of it ) would be entirely out of reach of any governmental control. Sure, we might loose the high speeds, the nifty graphics, the e-commerce sites, yadda yadda, but the FREE EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION would still be there.
/not/ about copyrights, patents, Movies, or even Operation Systems. It is about the natural right of our thoughts and ideas to be dissemnted to however many people we want. The idea of a seperate network appeals to me, maybe I'm sounding "old fasioned" or even "nostaligic" but I miss the days before "The Web" where USENET ruled and the command line was king. We IDEAS and not IMAGES were what was absorbed. Why not go back to that?
What we really need to do is start being proactive, the protest in Washington was a good start...but it was TWO YEARS after the law passed, we need to be getting on top of these things quicker. We need a good clearing house of information. A YRO newsletter or something similar would probably do the trick. But even why they are attempting to attack the freedom that has been the Internet.
Don't forget that this wonderful network of networks was formed on Open Standards. What is too stop us from hooking up just our computers with TCP/IP and forming the GeekNET? Why...nothing of course, and it would be out of touch from Government Regulations. A PRIVATELY funded network ( And to be honest I thought that was what the internet
This wonderful thing that we all have access to is
Ah well, I'm rambling now so I'll go, but I'll leave with this last thought: The Internet is in many ways an organic being, with that there is bound to be change, and eventually it will die. What we need is to produce offspring to ensure it's existince. And with that I am out.
Sgt Pepper
I highly recommend reading "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" for an intelligent, and at times disheartening, look at the issues involved here. It really comes down to political action if some of the nasty things coming down the pike are to be avoided. In the early days the internet wasn't on the political radar screen, and the people building it made some sensible decisions that gave us the freedom we enjoyed until recently.
Now though, the big money is involved so the politicians are all over the issue "like Oprah on a baked ham" (Simpsons). If we don't stand up and be counted then soon "protecting the children", otherwise known as making the web safe for big business, will put an end to what we've come to love.
development.lombardi.com
So why bother? Because companies (Microsoft especially) don't want to sell you a single copy of something. You might be happy with it, not buy another copy and cut off their revenue stream. (they fight this by releasing new versions and leaving the old ones unsupported) And they certainly don't want to give you free bug fixes because they don't make money from those either. This is why UCITA is such a big deal for them - and if a few measly consumer rights are trampled in the process, that's not their problem.
Again, pardon me if I'm restating the obvious. But if we're going to fight these stupid laws we need to understand their original goal as well as the detrimental side effects they have on the rest of us.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
First, the World Wide Web is part of the internet but not the whole internet mind you. Second, corporate interest in the internet as a whole has been a fairly annoying thing. Sure, people have gotten rich and such. However, spam, junk mail posting and corporate entities throwing their weight around in terms of copyright law have negated much of the benefits in my opinion of the promise of e-commerce and the money of old companies coming into the digital world.
However, like I said before, the web is not the entire internet. The backbone of the network has not been copyrighted. Once the geeks have all gone home and finally gotten tired of pop-up porno ads, junk postings in their USENET groups and spam in their dozen or so email addresses, we will create a new space just as lawless and wild as the web use to be. Maybe I am not imaginative enough but I doubt there are few of us out there that will see the nature of the next step in computing, networking and sharing information over the internet but it will come.
I remember that the mere idea of the internet seemed mind-boggling to me as a sat back dialing into my BBS at 2400 baud. Technology will move faster than the corporations and every new space will have a moment to breath before being consumed by money.
Look for the open spaces to breath. That is the only advice I can give.
ACK
It's not necessarily the same guy. I too think, contrary to Kaa's unique viewpoint, that most people here would agree the concept of IP is not natural in the same way as ownership of material objects. For the simple reason that there can be only one instance of a particular material object whereas information can be distributed without depriving the original owner of it. Kaa's post was just a troll and insults people's intelligence. It's no wonder that someone got angry about it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Internet Regulation by the US...will end up like the Prohibition. The Prohibition was canceled shortly after it was enacted because it was seriously flawed.
You may well be right, but if so, that is hardly good news. Prohibition was in force for something like ten years. Hundreds if not thousands were killed, either by government thugs (coast guard, police, FBI) or gangsters (nongovernment thugs), and hundreds if not thousands more were imprisoned, lost their homes, and so forth. Not to mention the social ramifications (higher rates of alcoholism due to the near absence of low-alcoholic content beverages such as beer and whine coupled with the plethora of more profitable high-alcoholic content moonshine liquors of various types, and the emergence of an organized crime syndicate financed from profits made possible by the criminalization of alcohol which we still have with us today, 70 years later).
How many of us will lose our homes, our livelihoods, our freedoms, and even our lives, before this "regulation is slowly lifted?" How many evil, destructive policies will be enacted, how many evil, destructive people and organizations will benefit financially, gaining even more power, before it is over.
Finally, with the full-scale assualt on nearly every aspect of our democracy and our constitutional rights, how do you know the mechanisms will even still be in place for the situation to correct itself at all? Just because the United States has flirted with constitutional disaster before and had the good fortune to emerge relatively intact, doesn't mean we'll be so lucky again.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
01/29/1999
$1,000
Gore, Al
09/14/1999
$1,000
Gore, Al
09/30/1999
$1,000
McCain, John
10/21/1999
$1,000
Bush, George W
The only guy of any consequence not on the list is Bradley. This guy doesn't care WHO wins, he just wants to try and make sure he has a little leverage, albeit small, on the guy who wins.
*sigh*
Shoot a black man.. go to jail for murder.
Shoot a black man, calling him "nigger" while you do it.. go to jail for committing the "hate crime" of murder, with a longer sentence.
Simply uttering the word "nigger" in that case, made the crime "more severe". The speech brought about additional punishment.
Is it any wonder that the US has the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world?
You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of 3rd-party web annotations, like Third Voice. We need something like Third Voice for Real Life stuff. Maybe some day when someone is walking down the isle of a store while wearing their cybergoggles, warning messages from third parties will pop up whenever they look at SDMI products. :-)
Actually, we also need something like Third Voice, but with an open and documented protocol (so that it can be implemented on all platforms), collaborative filtering so you can skip over whatever B1FF says, and enabled by default on all web browsers. Hm...
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Given the fact that public education in this country leaves much to be desired, Given that competition in the marketplace of education will make things better for the consumers
You've got about 10 paragraphs of "givens" that I don't agree are "given".
Although I suppose you could always say education could be better, the fact of the matter is that all the countries with "better" educational systems are far behind us in virtually every segment of technology, business, and finance. All the standardized tests can show that people in the US are poorly educated, but the empirical evidence seems to indicate that we're doing just fine.
I went to public school and don't feel I was robbed of a good education, on the contrary most of the people I've met who went to private school seem to have grown up in a fairyland vacuum where everyone is rich and white and polite. Where every transgression is forgiven as a childish prank (Witness George W, running for president, unlike most other "youthful indescretion" drug users who are in jail).
And I don't buy that "competition" makes schools (or more importantly, education) better. Public schools currently compete too much, IMHO. They waste half their time teaching to the standardized test (because that's what their funding is based on!) rather than educating. They compete with each other and other school districts for funding, and more importantly for the financial impact being the "best district/school in the state" has. A good school district brings companies (and thus $$$), a bad one makes employees reluctant to transfer there.
It is also a fact that, no matter how large or small the community in which we live, we must each make choices that, for better or worse, affect our lives and the lives of those around us. Libertarian thought simply states that it's best if we're able to make those decisions for ourselves
That's the logic I don't understand. Any major decision affects other people, therefore those other people shouldn't have any input on the decision?
Quite frankly, I don't want the chemical plant owner "making the decision for himself" whether or not to dump his waste into the ground (and thus into the water table and our drinking/bathing water.
If you want to "make the decision for yourself" to send your kid to catholic school, or to get more insurance or to buy a house or have sex with an inflatable woman, knock yourself out.
If you want to make the choice not to fund the public schools that you (and everyone else) benefit from, then no the choice is only yours insofar as you and the rest of the community (the electorate) can agree it's a good idea.
And don't kid yourself that this won't have religious repercussions. If 80% of the community sends their kids/vouchers to a Catholic school, then how the hell are the Jewish or Muslim kids gonna get the education they deserve without taxpayer-sponsored religious instruction that is contrary to their beliefs? If it's not profitable to make a non-religious school in an area, it won't get built.
As someone who respects my rights (especially those so sensitive as to be enumerated in the Constitution) I find it disturbing that we're so eager to hand them all over in an eagerness to (maybe) save a few dollars. Businesses have no responsibility to protect your speech or religion or privacy. Private schools will have no issues with prayer at football games -- they can just kick you out if they don't like your attitude...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If you pay taxes (including school district taxes), but you also have to pay tuition and fees and whatnot for your child to attend a private school, why the Hell are you paying school taxes?
You're paying for the same rteason that people wihtout kids pay school taxes -- no one lives in a vacuum. The kids that go to school are the adults, voters, employees, employers, and neighbors of tomorrow.
This, ultimately is my greatest disagreement with pure libertarian thought -- that it never acknowledges the communal reality of existence in modern times...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Good post!
But you assume there is only one law applicable to the net, the US one. But that's not true. The net may not be regulated all over, at least enless the US is able to confine the EU to regulate the same. And that will never happen. The EU allready does things just to do the opposite of the US... And how much the companies of the US successes to regulate it there (Not taxes, but regulations (regulations on what you are able to say and do online)), there will allways be oversea-sites running providing free infomation. The only risk is if you start to censor yourself with some blocking software... And if you do, that is a proof of the US being equal to China.
-- One party system, two party system -- what's the difference? Where did all the other parties go?
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
If it weren't for the governments power of eminent domain under the constitution (brits - compulsory purchase)there would be no network.
Ah, so they were indeed funded by the tax coffers. They weren't privately created. My point still stands...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I've seen the CATO institute and Reason bitching about the WTO protests.
I haven't read every CATO and Reason article out there on the subject, but the ones I have read bitched about the "protest" and did not argue in favor of the WTO itself. A lot of those protestors wanted to replace the oppressive WTO with schemes even more oppressive.
Libertarians also support school vouchers because they beleive that school vouchers with privatize public education.
Some libertarians support school vouchers. A lot support tuition credits instead. Unfortunately, with vouchers you get the benefit of Republicans as allies and a lot of press coverage. With credits you're on your own.
Simillarly, I have also seen many libertarians supporting stronger copyright protection (like the DCMA).
I've found libertarians to be split on the issue of information as property. Some are completely against it (see the GNU pages for an example) while others take the opposite extreme that all information must be protected with the utmost of vigilance. Most will take the middle ground the ones own works are ones own property, but also that holders of copies of those works have property rights as well.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Firstly, because the "Internet" is != "The US" and any restrictions placed solely on US internet providers will simply create a market outside the US for services.
And besides.. regulating the internet is like herding cats.
Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted!
:-)
Film at eleven.
*yawn* This again? The Internet has been changing and evolving since it was created. It will continue to do so, likely forever. Yet, for some reason, people drag out these doom-and-gloom, the-world-as-we-know-it-is-going-to-end prophecies on a regular basis.
Wake me up when some real news breaks.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The endless law suits from america cant stop the internet simply because it belongs to everyone - and i really doubt they can employ enough lawyers to sue everyone on the planet :o)
The various people sueing like there is no tomorrow are doing just that - doing whatever they can to survive. I believe those companies will die out very quickly unless they embrace, not attack the internet
You may well be right, but if so, that is hardly good news.
I never claimed it was good news.
Hundreds if not thousands were killed, either by government thugs (coast guard, police, FBI) or gangsters (nongovernment thugs), and hundreds if not thousands more were imprisoned, lost their homes, and so forth.
That was a different time. The media would jump over anything remotely close to the government's actions during the Prohibition. There will be isolated insidents but as the press converges on them they will subside. And you cannot say that the media is controled by the government. It is controled by money hungry mega-monopoly corporations. For them money = number of viewers. The easiest way to get a high number of viewers is to put the worst light on the government as possible.
Things may change though and very soon all our rights may be striped from us. I feel that this will not happen but objectively I cannot discount this fact. So I will continue to vote and do my best to be involved with the UCITA and DMCA.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Taking the laws one at a time
DMCA: a biggie. This could have serious implications by "closing" standards. I think that, in the long run, it has overreached itself, and will be ruled unconstitutional (or at least parts of it) because effectively indefinitely extends copyright. In the short run it'll be bad.
UCITA: even worse. Every time I read about it I cannot believe it. Worse, I can't see what can stop it legally if it is enacted. The best that could be hoped for is that big business realises that it is terrible, and stops it. Unlikely.
DeCSS. A corker, as they are trying to enforce "no reverse engineering" where it is legal to reverse engineer.
Privacy - sorry guys, we're all statistics. Even if you use PGP you will be targetted as "that 1.8% of people who use PGP - try to sell them techy toys." Rights on the net - there are none. The net is a commercial entity: you have no right to free speech (no ISP is bound to have you, no company has to sell you connectivity), no right to privacy. Equally "they" have no rights either - use encryption, block banner ads, lie on surveys.
Remember - they (the denizens of the commercial net) are only in it for the money. All you can do is make behaviour that you find unacceptable unprofitable for them. The net is going to be a great social engineering experiment. We'll find out whose money talks the loudest - those that spend it or those that take it.
The end of the net as we know it? It's always the end of the net as we know it. Best we make tomorrow's net a better place.
Depends on the "we" you're talking about. We passed some of the crossroads a long time ago.
I've been on the net for almost 15 years, and it's WAY different now than it was then. Not long after I got on the net, usenet started taking off. I remember being able to read ALL of the messages in ALL of the newsgroups I cared about every day without kill files, threading or anything of the sort. Now, usenet is quickly becoming a repository for spam and illegal distribution of copyrighted material (mp3s, jpgs, warez, etc). Slashdot did a story not too long ago about whether usenet is dead yet.
I remember thinking how cool WAIS was, and how useless and redundant gopher was. I remember using beta versions of Mosaic, and thinking how useful it might be. I remember thinking how cool it was that there were more people on the net. I remember thinking how cool it was the first time I saw a URL in an ad.
I now spend a lot of time thinking how lame it is that there are more people on the net, and how cool it is to see an ad without a URL...
the signal to noise ratio of the net in general has gone down over time. for a while, it was worth a little more noise to get a little more signal, but we have long since past the point where the ratio is very tolerable. hopefully, someone will come out with some neat new technology to allow us to filter through the cruft better...until someone figures out how to abuse that too.
sigh,
Michael
Who cares if they're in place when they work so poorly as they do?
Look at drug prohibition, for example. Started as a racist gig -- instead of fighting the black people directly, just force them all to be criminals -- and who's out there fighting against that injustice? Hmm. Anyone who does, swiftly gets branded a criminal. Or a joke. Many of us remember when the word "hacker" was primarily praise.
Is there a ray of light coming from the Internet? Perhaps. It's a good lever for the best our society has to offer, not just the worst.
We always at a turning point because the Internet is still evolving/changing rapidly. Only things that do not move cannot turn.
There is nothing particularly special about this moment in time.
True, the various authorities [control addicts] have been awaking, but there are also lots more `net users who enjoy the freedom they find here.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't fight the straightjackets that others would like to fit us in. Of course we should. This isn't the first time, nor will it be the last. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Both are extremely consumerism oriented, however, I think there are some appreciable differences:
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Where it really went wrong was when the web was started up.. I long for the days of archie, telnet, ftp ad gopher.. no netscape, ie, and all that..those were the days..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Hey infodragon.
I have to take issue with your statement that the media would jump all over anything remotely close to the government's actions during prohibition.
Here in the US we are currently undergoing a period of prohibition. The drug warriors are all up on their high-horses riding down your rights. Your rights have been, and are currently being, eroded very seriously in the name of the war on drugs.
The media has chosen to ignore these abuses quite handily. No TV station has yet had the balls to stand up and say that seizure of property on the suspicion that drug money may have been involved AND placing the burden of proof to reclaim the property on the person from whom it was seized is wrong. It's pretty clearly wrong, the Founding Fathers would have had fits over it, but our media does not have the stones to say it.
That is only one example.
Now if anyone knows why the media is so quiet on the subject I'd love to hear it. I'm really quite perplexed myself. I've figured the media as corporate stooges for ages, but I can't for the life of me figure out why corporate money wants our property rights eroded in this way? What are they getting?
Absimiliard
--------------------------------------
All sigs are lame, but mine is the lamest!
.. that any tyranny does not stand over time. Yes, the companies and other interests that control things through force of money can slowly leech away the rights of people, but eventually people will notice what is going on. Taking away the right to reproduce something /you/ own for /your own/ enjoyment is something that affects anyone who can afford a player and content.
Once people unite against corporations, things will change. We shall use all peaceful means to overcome tyranny, and succeed.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...neither is big business or government. A lot of our international posters keep saying "DMCA, UCITA, etc. doesn't apply to me" and they're right. However, these laws didn't just pop up out of nowhere. I think it was inevitable that once the internet grew beyond novelty and into something useful (and therefore *worth* something) that corporations and government would want to control it.
Your country doesn't have to "follow the US lead" -- once the Net becomes something of real value in your country there will be a company or government agency there ready to claim control of it. The natural impulse of any organization is to grow and accrete more power. The problem has only surfaced in the US first because the Net has moved beyond novelty here and into the daily lives of many more people.
The US has its own spate of stupid laws, but we've already seen stupid laws passed in otherwise democratic places like Australia. Yes, RIAA and MPAA both end in "Association of America", but don't you think that companies like BMG will move to protect their interests when the time comes? (And right now they can sit back as the RIAA fights most of their battles for them.) In places where there is already strong control of existing media, it will be a natural to extend this to the Internet. Even though we all know how difficult this is technically, if something is illegal it still gives the government a pretext to arrest people they don't like.
Like I said, the impulse is everywhere, lying just under the surface. You won't end up with America's stupid laws -- you'll have a whole set of your own unless you watch out. Even if your country happens to be highly enlightened and all your personal liberties are preserved, if other countries around you are not, then it won't be much of a "World Wide" web, will it?
One last comment: corporations making fortune selling things online was not what the internet used to be about...so I fail to see how the argument of preserving the internet as it was should apply here...
You're right. E-commerce is nice and convenient, but it certainly hasn't changed my life.
The best thing about the internet is the unlimited free flow of ideas, and that really can't be stopped, just by the nature of how the hardware works. You can implement all the filters you want, but people will find a way to get the information somehow. It's like trying to clean up a huge oil spill with paper towels, from the point of view of those who want to control the internet. Even the Chinese seem to be letting in some sites that are questionable to their governments' ideals...it's impossible to find them all anyway.
We haven't really reached a point where the international nature of the internet actually puts any governments' power at risk, but that day may come, in a form I can't really think of today. Maybe then we'll see mandatory government filtering of, say, an entire country's domain.
I think the real risk is not Orwellian type threats (not in the near future anyway), but the type of thing we've always seen: limiting people's ability to "break the law", and thus prevent large scale "disobediance", limiting activity to a relatively small group of people. If no one knows about you and your cause, your free speech rights don't bother the government or any other institution.
On the upside, we've all seen the limited success of "controlling" mp3s by the RIAA, etc. It really can't be done. So I'm pretty optimistic about our future. We just need to keep in mind it's not the technology that changes things, it's how we use it.
Is This The End of The Internet As We Know It? Again???
My first thought is, 'no of course not--don't be stupid!' My second though is a bit more uncertain.
I've always figured that as new aspects of the internet come about, they'll be more and more regulated. The web is already far more regulated than the more basic, primitive, and older aspects. (IRC, usenet, etc.) Usenet, for instance, is so fundamentally unregulable that it's pretty much free of danger as long as it sticks around.
But then I look at the things that _have_ fallen by the wayside over the years, anon.penet.fi being a big one. The idea that an ISP is fundamentally not responsible for user content is another (especially with most service moving from academic to commercial providers) The lack of international laws to deal with abuse, and as a result, the 'vigilante justice' that's been working fairly well up until now.
Things are changing. Things are changing RIGHT NOW more than I would have expected possible four years ago. Companies, lawmakers, and meddlers won't rest until they get control over things again, to their satisfaction. I don't know how it's going to happen but already control that seemed impossible is starting to appear (and freedom that seemed inevitable is starting to falter).
Death of the internet? Never. It's already so entrenched that in one form or another, it's going to be as ubiquitous as electricity and running water is today. (and yes, neither of those are universal) However, death of the internet as an informal, loosely regulated, anarchistic world may be starting to come about.
Pity. The worst thing is, aside from keeping 'talk' and IRC clients alive, I can't see any way of stopping it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This is a list of the people who've gotten cash from Jack Valenti (MPAA). The MPAA contributed 4000 this year, which is small when compaired to the studio's make the top soft money lists. Many of law makers listed are on the Judiciary Committee.
These are only for the 2000 elections. In the previous election he made over 32 donations.
Source: www.opensecrets.org
Valenti, Jack
Washington, DC 20005
Motion Picture Association
01/29/1999
$1,000
Gore, Al
03/10/1999
$500
Frost, Martin
06/10/1999
$500
Watts, J C
09/07/1999
$250
Restore America PAC
03/01/1999
$500
Lofgren, Zoe
08/04/1999
$1,000
Hatch, Orrin G
08/17/1999
$1,000
Democratic Leader's Victory Fund 2000
06/07/1999
$500
Casey, Patrick Raymond
03/10/1999
$500
Lone Star Fund
06/23/1999
$500
Clyburn, James E
10/07/1999
$1,000
Hyde, Henry J
10/07/1999
$1,000
Hyde, Henry J
05/26/1999
$1,000
Conyers, John Jr
09/14/1999
$1,000
Gore, Al
09/30/1999
$1,000
McCain, John
10/21/1999
$1,000
Bush, George W
Beyond that there is the attempt to regulate content residing outside the US (or your country of choice) by holding the big ISP and backbone hosts responsible for the content they allow users to view. This can have the effect of chopping the `Net up into national nets. Multinational companies and national governments aren't going to care if the objectional material is only available on-line in Lower-Outbackastani.
And beyond that is the arm-twisting the US does to other governments to get them to echo the US legal directions. Plus mutual backscratching between governments where country A regulates something they don't care about one way or another but contry B does, just to get country B to regulate something they way country A feels it should be.
Consider the sate of radio in its early, unregulated days. A few people thought that it would have the same sort of impact the many here feel the Net has. Radio was regualted in the US as a "limited resource" (available frequencies), but in other countries other reasosns were given. (The UK and licenses for radios and TVs). Public decency, protecting against "insurrectionist" talk, halting the spreading of illegal and dangerous information (US Senate bill 486) - the list goes on. All of these are reasons for governments to attempt to regulate and control the Net.
Now, if a IP packet modem that used the unregualted spread spectrum bands were to be marketed, and come into common use, one could see the appearance of an alternative backbone within populated areas of land masses. Everyone passes others packets on down the line, in a distributed web-like network arather than the current trunk and branches. Much harder to apply pressure to the backbone when it's a large number of small sites all over the place.
Us geeks could always use a tunneling protocol over the net. Or special pages that require decryption plug-in which will ask for the average flying speed of an unladened European swallow, or for the name of the CPM debugger, before granting access.
The only reason why the CPHack, DeCSS, and my case have been issues is because non-geeks find out and have access to that information.
Fight Spammers!
I think we are already at a definite turning point. Most of it is brought about by greed. at first the web was a wonderful place, a free speech playground. Now that E-Commerce has come to the web or freedom of speech is deteriorating. For instance NBC is threatening 2600 with a lawsuit for owning the Domain fucknbc.com because of trademark infringement. I doubt anyone has gone to this site thinking it was NBC. Clearly these companies will try to regulate the net more and more in hopes to "protect their companies" And of course the previously mentioned Mattel, DeCSS, etc. second point is now the government will see companies making money tax free so it will have to find a way to take it's share, like it or not, it's coming. Also france no longer allows anonymous web pages, what countries are next. Great FireWall of USA??? Maybe it's time we find a way to deal with these issues. obviously we can't kick ecommerce off the net, 2 wrongs don't make a right, and most companies aren't jerks like the above mentioned. So how do we keep them from ruining it for everone without dropping to their level. I seriously think we need to address this before it snowballs into something no one can control. I hate watching our freedom of speech float away. It scares me to think my childern my someday just see the web as a virtual mall and not the biggest collection of ideas, facts, opinions and information ever invented.
To many transactions are made over the net for the law not to regulate. Consumer protection is one of the many issues I see here. Taxation is another thing, but governments have always found new ways to make money... for those of you who own cell phones you pay a tax for the right to use the airwaves because the government decided it owned them ... nice isn't it ?
So what about the internet ? Why would anything be different ?
Taxation of sale transactions over the internet will be a reality as the economy moves more into ecommerce ... and it has to be that way. The government will face loss of revenus if it doesnt to that and will have to raise taxes in one way or the other.... the only democratic and socialy responsive way to do it is to tax thoses transactions otherwise (if the government has to raise the income tax)you place the burden over the whole population and allow a certain class of people to escape their contribution to society.
As for the many who disagree with my point of view I think you should look at the issue as more of a society problem and stop hiding behin the idealism of a free internet.
One last comment: corporations making fortune selling things online was not what the internet used to be about...so I fail to see how the argument of preserving the internet as it was should apply here...
Imagination is more important than knowledge. --- Albert Einstein
Yes, but it's NOT staying the same. The clock is already ticking.
Imagine this: The FBI sets up a "Reichstag Fire", and tells Congress that they NEED to be able to track IP addresses in real-time.
The idiots on the IPv6 commitee have handed them the solution on a silver platter. All Congress has to do is pass a law which not only mandates that all ISP's use IPv6, but that they also provide the mechanisms to allow the FBI to track these connections, and listen in, if possible, in real time.
Think it can't happen? You'd be wrong. Congress just gave the telco's over $200 million to do something similar with digital phone connections; after passing a similar law back in the mid 90's.
There's nothing to stop them from doing it with IPv6; though the ISP's would bitch and moan as loudly as the phone companies, until they got enough money to do this.
So soon you'll be able to kiss your internet anonimity goodbye.
Gee, if you think libertarians are going to flame you for your "truth", then you don't understand libertarians. I'll go one better, I'll flame you for your inane assumptions about libertarians:
they will zealously defend their interests, through the creation of regulations and laws.
Libertarians are against regulations and laws that infringe upon life, liberty and property. We will agree with you on this one.
They will demand the regulation of the Net, they will insist on laws, and it will happen.
Libertarians are against the regulation of the net. The only laws applying to it should be for the express purpose of guaranteeing peoples rights to life, liberty and property. Including the property rights of Free Software.
Taxes are also inevitable.
Libertarians are against taxes. Some are against them completely. Others will relent to basic and necessary taxation. But you do make a statement that libertarians will take issue with: hey should be really low for small business and startups...but not for big companies. Actually, beyond the mischaracterization of libertarians, this is one of the few things in your post I disagree with. Everyone must be treated equally.
such as requiring open access to broadband pipes.
If the broadband pipe was funded through taxes, then libertarians will agree with you. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "broadband pipes" though. If you mean access to a companies privately constructed backbone, I'll have to disagree.
Overall, you don't have any disagreements with libertarians. It's a shame that you think them hostile to freedom.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
People have an innate preference to share with others when it benefits them.
People have an innate preference to do all kind of stuff when it benefits them. I don't see what's so special about sharing (in this context).
I think I have a much lower opinion of human nature than you do.
IMHO, people follow their instincts. Most intellectual property laws follow against people's instincts
Don't mistake your instincts for the people's instincts. You are not typical at all and your viewpoint is the minority viewpoint. I may not agree with specific IP laws, but I think that at least the concept of IP follows natural instincts pretty well (besides, I can derive most of IP from the freedom of contract).
So, in the end, producing Intellectual Property isn't going to make any money. All jobs will be service jobs
Oh, yeah? That's a major reality check failure. Maybe you'd like the world to work this way (though I can't imagine why), but it's not going to happen.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I agree that there will be a turning point - but in our favor.
People have an innate preference to share with others when it benefits them. This is why Free Software works, and why programs like Napster and other file sharing protocols work. Same cause, although different legalitiy...
IMHO, people follow their instincts. Most intellectual property laws follow against people's instincts, and the only think that protected them in the past was the copying cost (ie for books and movies that cost a lot to copy on paper and film).
We're going to see legal disobedience on a large scale, on the basis of what comes naturally. You can't fight that , no matter how many laws you make. Even then, smart people will find a way - they always have and always will.
So, in the end, producing Intellectual Property isn't going to make any money. All jobs will be service jobs - people are paid to create for a specific purpose or situation (like doctors and scientists and sysadmins are paid today).
We're going to win. It's just a matter of time.
-BBK
will end up like the Prohibition. The Prohibition was canceled shortly after it was enacted because it was seriously flawed. It looked good on paper but just didn't stand up to what was reality. I have a bad feeling that some BAD internet/digital/infomation laws are going to be passed by the US government. The US is going to hurt economically in a serious way once the regulation is in place. It will take a while but the regulation will be slowly lifted to allow for economic growth. Just like crypto regulation is slowly being lifted now.
I wish it wasn't so but the powers that be don't understand anything about the ramifications of regulating anything tech let alone something the US doesn't own.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I agre with a lot of this. However, it can happen in a positive way or a bad way.
/. is barely a start. The key is to talk about these issues to others in an intelligent manner. and by Intelligent, I mean using reason and not a loud voice and a bunch of four letter words. Even i get sick of hearing things like "fucking big business is screwing us again."
The good way is for business to regulate themselves and spend a few bucks working to prevent themselves from being riped off instead of spending a lot of bucks lobbying congressmen and other legislators. An example of this is would be like with napster or decss. Instead of trying to sue everyone who has anything to do with the software why not give people an incentive to go buy the movies / albums? Why not make it easy for everyone to watch DVD's on their computers? Wouldnt the money spent on this lawsuit be better spent developing software to do this very thing? And if a 17 (?) year olf guy in norway can do it, how hardwould it be for techs at Sony?
As far as music goes, why not lower the price of CD's? I mena i cant think of an album out there right now that's woth 16-18 bucks when i really only want one song. Of course Im gonna fire up Napster and go get that one song. Of course Im stilll tryign to figure out why downloadign a song from napster is bad and yet recording it from the radio is ok.
Of course the only way to ensure this happens in a positive way is to speak out. And posing at
They're not realy out to screw anyone, they just trying to make a bunch of money, and the only way to make sure they dont do this at our expense is to stand up against them in a resonable manner and with *lots* of people behind you. And, the only way to get people behind you is to reason with them and explain all the facts in a clear mannner.
After all, aren't the best decisions made when people have the best information in front of them.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
For a while, the internet was ruled by geeks and corporations could not stop us.
Now, corporations have taken control (and on occassion rightly so).
What is happening, is that regular media, and non-geeks have been paying attention and realizing what is going on. They realize that this actually effects them, and not just some geek's problem.
What has happened with the Mattel/MSI/CyberPatrol issue here, is that it had become more mainstream. People are waking up and realizing that some company abusing up a little guy, is not just some crackpot or some hacker. But they are starting to realize that they might be next.
Things will turn when the press will actually print the truth, and not rehash company press releases. Or is that what people not on the net complain about too? :)
Fight Spammers!
How is the UCITA different from a license file that is needed to run Matlab, SAS, Mathematica, etc.? These can be computer specific and expire after a certain amount of time. The fact that the program checks for its license on another computer is no different from how Matlab works (with a license server). I see no problem with a software vendor making licenses for a specific computer. Also, isn't this how digital satelite works?
I'm not looking to change opinions, but an informed response that can tell me how UCITA will affect me: I use Linux at home, Netscrape 4.7, StarOffice, Sybase, Apache, some inetd stuff--all of which I have a license to use already. I read EULAs (believe it or not) and avoid programs which have agreements I don't like. I don't install the software to reverse-engineer a copy of it, but try to write one that does what I want it to.
As for the rest of the discussion.. everyday is a turning point in cyberspace. Remember the good old days, just last decade when only college types had access and there was no slashdot? With every innovation comes problems. More people are online (innovation) meaning that the courts are now getting involved (problem). Growing pains is what this is called. Solving them will provide more innovation causing more problems. I personally like challenges and innovation.
Just remember whose livelihood you may be tampering with when you misunderstand the word free (ie B*ll G*t*s always gets paid, but junior coder may loose a job). If you don't like a particular practice of a member of the internet community, boycott. You may find yourself in the majority and win or you may find yourself in the minority (like most of us here on slashdot) and have to suck it up.
What we are seeing is restriction of absolute freedom in certain areas in exchange for higher profitability for certain entities. These businesses, governments, and special interest groups have their own requirements for their ideal web. Needless to say different peoples' ideals are quite different. As different groups attempt to determine what strength they have in this medium and new area of both our cultures and our laws, they will push the boundaries. The same behaviors have occurred every time a new frontier crops up.
Is the time of the Mecca of absulute privacy and freedom over? It never really existed, honestly. We have always used real information about people on the net. If you want to be listened to seriously, you often have to let people know who you really are. You can lie convincingly, and that was just as good. The same principle applies now. Certain information is required and certain freedoms are limited to use many new aspects of the internet. This has been happening from Day One, but now corporations are doing it through lawsuits instead of individuals killfiling you on usenet. All we are seeing is the reactions changing according to the perceived severity of the situation from the "aggrieved" party's side. If you can lie convincingly in the new ways, it is still just as good as real information and privacy.
Like all frontiers, the web will continue to "civilize" as more people seek to get rich, put in the hard work, make it their home, and proceed from the founder generation to the ones that take this frontier for granted. Things will change, but barring an international action of draconian nature, freedom and privacy will remain. Our perceptions of them are what will change.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Actually, my main project that I am currently involved in is just like that. I, and another student, have gotten approval to make an anonymous, decentralized content distribution system for near our entire grade this quarter at Rose in one of our classes. Its tentatively named 'Antioch' - "the ANonymous Transfer Interface Of antioCH". Currently, the protocol is only mostly defined, and the code is still skeletal, the initialization functions currently being debugged (the quarter did just start after all).
:)
Basic protocol design:
Client sends out a broadcast regexp request to match. Servers respond (within reason) with all matching requests. Certain file extensions (implemented as loadable extension modules) can load up part of the file into memory for regexp matching as well (such as an id3 tag for mp3).
Client queries the servers which contain what it wants, for configuration compatability (in case a server has such strict security opts turned on that it won't allow you to connect, etc) and free bandwidth. The most efficient path is chosen.
A person who has a client has a server running at the same time. In their default configuration, they are encouraged to link to their friends that are outside the current network - preferably, way far away. When a client doesn't find what it wants, it will start following links on other people's systems - within reason. It won't trace very far in, and only will follow links on very idle systems. This is due to the nature of obscuring the destination. Each client on a net, when accessing a link on another computer, gets not an IP and port, but a number to refer to the link - they can't see where they're going. The relevant information gets sent to the computer with the link, which correspondingly forwards it (redoing encryption if mandated by either side of the connection). Links an be nested within each other - for example, a packet could go to XXX.XXX.XXX.21, link 3, XXX.XXX.131.42, link 1, XXX.XXX.XXX.101, and then stop there and download.
The user doesn't tell it where to search; the client keeps bookmarks of where the user has been finding things and prefers to use those links, subject to bandwidth and cpu constraints of the servers along the way. However, in 3, university-scale hops, you could get nearly anywhere in the nation, in theory. And have no clue where you're going to. (and, the only way to figure out where you're going to is confiscation of every hard drive along the way, I.e. completely infeasable for a recording industry/motion picture industry/other large corporate entity crackdown)
Additionally, I've worked out how to a) make the packets appear to be from the wrong computer, b) have the destination address be to the wrong computer, c) have both computers randomly rearrange ports at regular intervals, and d) have no recognisable contents in the packet that would give it away as being from an antioch system, and all the while having it function normally.
Note, that a) and b) require the program be run as root, b) and d) require extra cpu, and c) either require a supplied service info daemon on both ends, or on the end(s) which doesn't have one, more cpu and have to be run as root. Again, that will be configuration dependant; most people will probably choose to stick to the default configuration.
Planned encryption is GPG, or a rouch variant of it, but its support has not been implemented in our currently skeletal code.
All in all, it should be virtually impossible to firewall or track down. In fact, it should be possible, running as root, to even ensure anonymity over the local subnet, but that part of the protocol is still tentative and probably won't be implemented till after our first beta release.
Anyways, I just thought I'd share
- Rei
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
Okay, so we are looking at ourselves and it looks like all we can do any more is get in trouble. Face it, DeCSS got yanked, Mattel is being stupid, Amazon has some butt-head patent, and eToys showed the world what it thought about art. Things just don't look nice at all.
But, take a step back and look really hard. Know what I see? I see a bunch of corporate types who are doing nothing but making total asses out of themselves. In all of the above cases, only one did the internet come out on top. Why? Because we raised such a stink that there was nothing else that the money grubbers could do but to give in.
Things still are not over on the DeCSS front, nor the MP3 front, nor the Mattel front. We are being monkey wrenches in their corporate culture - a culture that says "money is all that counts!" and "you have no rights if it costs me a buck!" We are being attacked and we are fighting back. And ya know what? They are paying attention.
We are being told that we can't do stuff that has been done for years (reverse engineering). How are they going to stop us from doing that? They are going to have about as much success in keeping your typical hacker from doing any sort of RE as President Regan had with the moral majority type Meese Police laws back in the 80s.
I don't know about anyone else, but I personally have so much time on my hands to further monkey wrench corporate america that it is not even funny - and what is great is I never have to leave my house to do it. And neither does anyone else. Simply keep doing what you are doing. Keep coming up with great software like we are. Let them spend all their money and effort playing their little SLAP games.
This reminds me of an episode of Andy Griffith that I saw the other day. Barney Fife went to tell some road side vendors they were going to have to move. They were both bigger than he was and were very intimidating. He said something that we should all keep in mind: "You two may be bigger than I am, but just remember something - this badge represents a lot of people who are are bigger than the both of you."
And we are. You and I outnumber Mattel like crazy.
We outnumber Amazon, eToys, and the RIAA. It is time for every one of us to either put up or shut up. It is simple as that.
OK, I'm sure I'll get flamed by all the Libertarians, but I'm going to tell you the truth.
First of all, grok this: there is too much money invested in the Net by big players and too many newbies who think they actually have privacy on the Net. I own shares in a number of corporations which are investing heavily in the Net, and they will zealously defend their interests, through the creation of regulations and laws. This is a done deal. One can complain about it, but it will happen.
Secondly, the growth of the Net implies the existence of many more clueless newbies. They will demand the regulation of the Net, they will insist on laws, and it will happen. We can shape this debate or we can fight the valiant fight against it and lose. And we will lose if we choose to fight instead of mold it in a better form.
Taxes are also inevitable. They should be lower than for bricks and mortar, but they are necessary for cities, counties, and states to pay for basic services such as roads (used by UPS to deliver your goods), rail (ditto), airports (ditto), police (to arrest the fraud mongsters), jails (to lock up the Free Net activists in), and courts (to find them guilty and protect the monied interests from having their credit cards stolen). They should be really low for small business and startups, to encourage creation of new things, but not for big companies.
This is the reality. If you want, I'll bet anyone $10 that there will be Net taxes (not on ISPs, but on sales and e-commerce) for municipal, county, and states, in existence by 2010. And there will be regulations.
We can help ensure that only the good regulations survive - such as requiring open access to broadband pipes. Or we can rail against the wind and lose.
Will in Seattle