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Slashback: DCS 1000, Dmitry, Lizardry
Please let the shock penetrate the numbness. sethbc writes: "Well, it looks like the House has passed the DOJ Appropriations bill, giving the DOJ authority to use Carnivore for surveillance. The Tech Law Journal outlines the provisions for using Carnivore. I'm just glad I still have public key encryption."
Doesn't "DCS 1000" have sort of a nice homey ring to it? Maybe it reminds you of your Brother. Remember, encrypt your public key encryption software, and keep a copy with the other munitions.
That bandwidth rate is a little ... unusual. David's McOwen's case has raised quote a stir. If you missed word of this the first time, McOwen is being sued, and threatened with jail time, for installing the distributed.net client.
polymorf points to this article at Van's Hardware Journal, which features links to an online petition at petitiononline containing the comments of over 1800 people, and to relevant sites at tacube and freemcowen.
Cleverly disguise your hidden attraction to the DMCA. fenix down writes: "Lawrence Lessig has written an excellent op-ed piece in the NY Times (yeah, yeah, gotta register) on Dmitri Sklyarov and the DMCA. It nicely summarizes the problems with the DMCA as well as the Sklyarov and Felten cases. The dead-tree version gives me hope that this will be read. Big, eye-catching cartoon, center page, right under an article by Ehud Barak."
And since (despite? because of) all the attention he's gotten, Dmitry's wife's husband is still in jail, zlern writes: "Pictures from the protest to Free Dmitry in San Francisco today are available at sf.freesklyarov.org. Looks like about 150 people. Have you sent letters to your congresscritters yet?"
Stubborn contributor Chris DiBona contributes a link to an interesting DMCA resource, his DMCA Declaration, noting that it already has nearly 10,000 signatures, and that if people haven't signed up yet, they should as it becomes more useful the more people sign on.
Burning, Green -- fyuze or reptile? In response to the recent discussion of the Reptile content syndication system, ikarus-fallen writes:
"I was particularly intrigued by the post on the Reptile project today, because I run and develop a similar project, fyuze. The idea behind fyuze is similar to the idea behind Reptile: automate the process of retrieving, organizing and sifting through data. This eliminates the need to hop from site to site to collect information, and provides a certain level of convenience. Add in features that make it possible to have the system automatically scan for content that matches a particular criteria, along with the ability to search arbitrarily, and you've got a great way to collect all the news you want, and quickly find all the latest reviews for, say, 'Planet of the Apes.'fyuze differs from Reptile significantly in that it is a web-based system, not a client P2P application, meaning there is no software to install, simply log on, create an account, and then re-logon from anywhere else. This means that (in the future) it will be possible to use fyuze via a cell phone, or PDA, or any other web enabled device, like the flat-screen mounted to your fridge.
To simply list a couple of features, fyuze allows users to add content/feeds to the system, it supports RDF/RSS as well as plain old HTML, it has a skinnable interface via CSS, it allows for real-time content collection and related intelligent caching mechanisms, and has an advanced (content can span multiple rows and columns) layout system.
The real-time collection mechanism allows for fyuze to retrieve user specific information from a site. This means that a weblog could provide a user with not only the latest posts, but also information on recent replies to that user's comments, status of pending posts, karma, etc.
fyuze is only about a month old, so you may find it's selection of content a little small, but many popular sites are available. Besides, users can add content, so if you run a site, add it!
For more info, it might be helpful to read the following k5 article: Quest for the Ultimate Homepage"
username: slashdot2000i
password: slashdot2000
I remember when America was the home of the free, and Russia had the opressive laws.
Way I figure it, that money could be better used in the social security fund, but since Shrub doesn't want it there, I'm going to use it another way to protect my future.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The MPAA, RIAA, and closed source software houses have their customers over a barrel. For many of us, going to the movies, buying or renting a DVD, getting a CD from your favorite band, or buying a computer game is a way of getting a source of entertaiment. Unfortunately, purchasing these products gives companies the ammunition they use to pass laws such as the DMCA. These companies can then use these laws to beat us (the consumers) over the head. Why do we let them continue? What can we, as consumers, do to keep our money from being used against us?
The SolutionA possible solution is something you can do every day, starting right now. Every DVD you buy, every game you purchase, every visit to a movie theater, every CD you buy, add $5 to the cost. In many cases, this amounts to between 10% (a $50 game) to 50% ($9.99 DVD) of the cost of the item you purchases. Given the way prices work, the original price from the manufacturer is about 50% of the price you pay, so a $50 game is sold initially for about $25. Once you pay licenses, royalties, production, etc. there probably is not much left over that goes to lobbyists or legal. Thus, you are giving a larger amount of money to defeat these laws than you are "giving" to get them enacted.
What do you do with that $5? Donate it to the organization of your choice. Currently, the Electronic Frontier Foundataionis in the forefront of these kinds of issues, but you can choose whomever you like.
What good will your $5 do? Simply put, the EFF needs money. Money to pay for lawyers, money to educate people why these laws are wrong, money to defend those accused of crimes that violate the first amendment of the US Constitution. Since it is effectively increasing the cost of DVDs, CDs, etc., it will also make you think twice about your entertainment choices and maybe even save you money over the long run.
Okay, I have $5. Now what? Save it up. Make a notation somewhere. At the end of the month, end of the quarter, whenever, add up the notations and send the appropriate amount of money to the organization of your choice. In many cases, the money you send is tax-deductible (consult your accontant blah blah)
e-mail me for more informationThe thing about congressional petitions is, they work if you pick the district of an important-enough congressman to target, especially if his seat isn't contested one and he has more leeway than others to take on new initiatives.
The nature of federal districting is that, while states with small populations have few seats in the House, the ratio of citizens/congressman in those states is larger than in others. But while the populations may be small, the political clout wielded by that congressman may be disproportionately large. Daschle is a bad example since he's a Senator, but it's not an anomoly that a politician from South Dakota can end up running the show.
All it takes is one congressman championing your cause, and you have your foot in the door. The nature of partisan horsetrading is that a single politician can get his hobbyhorse enacted in order to win his vote on other issues. Exon's Communications Decency Act didn't have broad political support, but it got inserted into the Telecommuinications Act of 1996 all the same, as part of such a deal. It's all the easier when the cause is one that has vocal public support and few proponents except among enforcement agencies. They listen to enforcement agencies, but they're elected by the people, so when push comes to shove, politicians will surprisingly side with the latter more than you'd think.
Unless I'm completely mistaken, part of the point about Carnivore getting overt funding was that they would now have to do detailed reports to the House Judiciary Committee on pretty much everything having to do with how the program gets used. While I agree that Carnivore itself sucks, at least this may mean that it isn't used as frequently and they do have to report to someone outside their own agency. Looked like fairly decent reporting too...here's the breakdown if you haven't checked the link:
I guess it at least makes me feel a little better that they have to report their use instead of just using it surreptitiously. Then again, I could be totally off base... I haven't followed previous Carnivore stories, so I don't know when, if or how it's been used so far.
~ Leilah
I for one am glad that so far most schemes have been so weak. I consider the whole scheme of needing "permission" from a machine to do what I will with my media extremely distasteful. If I have some new gadget that is entirely capable of playing a song I legally aquired then I should have every right to do that. Unfortunately, the difference between a second device I own and a device someone else owns is indistinguishable without some equally distasteful Orwellian technology.
I think there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of using encryption to publish things anyway. Encryption is a method of making a pattern of data a "secret". Once the data is decrypted, that layer of protection is removed and the only thing keeping the data secret is the discretion of the recipient. This may work when the two people involved mutually trust each other to keep the data secret, but unfortunately many people are even aware of a copyright holder's rights to be the sole source of reproduction and Napster and the issues surrounding it have made file sharing into a prepetual Boston Tea Party. Nearly all recipients in this scheme are untrustworthy of keeping anything from the publisher secret, whether out of ignorance or spite.
Ultimately, it's like trying to privately tell something (the same thing) to a significant proportion of the country, announce to the world that you're telling these people that secret, and expecting them not to tell the rest. Its human nature to want to share a cultural experience with others; it establishes a common frame of reference, and telling another to "buy your own" rather than giving them a copy (assuming they are not present to veiw it on your won equipment) is not a very nice way to establish that cultural bond.
Ok, enough pointless ranting for one night.
All of your reasons are good ones, but to the best of my knowledge the EFF and protesters aren't trying to turn Dmitry into a "poster-boy". As you suggest, they're trying very hard to get him released so he can go home, and at the moment the best way to go about that is to bring to light the inherent flaws in the DMCA. If Dmitry was a poster-boy, the protesters wouldn't be carrying signs saying "Free Dmitry" and citing the DMCA as the reason he's unjustly imprisoned, they'd be carrying signs that say "Repeal the DMCA" and citing Dmitry as a reason it's unjust.
Cheers,
levine
Just an interesting thought about making criminal the activity of reverse engineering.
I heard a saying once, "Locks are made to keep honest people out". The point here is that if I INSIST on getting in, the lock won't stop me.
The encryption algorithm used is the lock. The law "protects" me against a criminal by making it a crime to break and enter. I can put a $200000 quaduple deadbolt with solid steel reinforement, 20 armed guards, and an alarm system in place if I want to keep people out, or I can buy the cheap $20 padlock that can easily be cut by a bolt cutter. The crime to break in is the same. However, one of these methods is likely to stop that person from breaking in.
A weak encryption scheme is the same as using a cereal box lock as your sole form of protection. Granted, I'll have to break it to get in, and yes, I'll still be as criminally responsible if I do, but you made it extremely easy for me. The point is, you don't HAVE to protect yourself from honest people. Honest people aren't going to steal from you.
Those that WILL steal from you won't be stopped by something as trivial as a plastic lock. You're going to have to put something strong and solid there. You're going to have to PREVENT them from breaking in. And no law is going to do that, only something that is solid and unbreakable will.
If I decide to go around taking apart locks to see which ones I'll be able to break into, I should have that right, because a lock is only SECURE if I'm able to take it apart and still not know how to break it. Encryption is the same.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Man, now using that form of grammar in the NYTimes would grab any english major's attention. It had me thinking for a second, or thirty...
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
I've been wondering about this for a while, so I'm going to ask everyone (and nobody in particular): is Dmitry Skylarov a good choice as posterboy in the anti-DMCA fight? I'm beginning to think he's not, and here are my reasons, in no particular order:
1) Dmitry is not American. Now, I'm not American either, so I'm not knocking non-US citizens, but keep in mind that it's the attention and votes of the American people that matter in fixing the DMCA. They're naturally going to be more concerned about fellow Americans than somebody from a country which was their mortal enemy a decade or so ago.
2) Dmitry is a "hacker". I'm fully aware that this term is misused and twisted by the press, but it's still an issue we have to contend with. Dmitry is not some sweet old lady who could be your grandmother; he's a young guy with 'scary techie skills', and people will feel less sympathy for him because of that. Also, evil Russian Hacker has almost become a cliche, thanks to Hollywood and the rest of the media.
3) Dmitry was trying to make a profit. He wasn't just giving a talk--he was trying to sell his software. The software circumvented Adobe's eBook content access control. Selling circumvention devices is clearly against the DMCA. People are not going to be very sympathetic to a guy arrested for trying to make a profit by breaking the law, even if it is a stupid law.
4) Dmitry just wants to go home. I bet the poor guy really misses his family, doesn't give a shit about messed-up American laws, and just wants to be back on Russian soil. Is it really right for us to politicize his imprisonment if it's not the best thing for him? Sure, we should be trying to get him free, but, by turning this into war-on-DMCA, we guarantee that what might have otherwise been a low-profile case that quietly got dismissed becomes a landmark legal battle that could drag on for years.
What we really need is for an average Joe to get busted doing something that's clearly right, even if it is illegal under DMCA. Then we'll be able to prove how absurd and dangerous the law is to average Americans. By using Dmitry, we hurt his chances of going home, and we risk losing and setting a bad precedent. We must pick our battles carefully.
That is my humble opinion, folks...
Yep. Which is why RMS's short-short story "The Right to Read" projects a world where operating systems and development software are tightly controlled by the state, only available to licenced and bonded programmers.
When I first saw that story a few years ago, I though that was a crazy, way-out idea. Now, it's a clear extrapolation of present trends.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So I propose that the US and Russia have a good, old fashioned, prisoner exchange. Current coverage is also available from the NY Times.
As Lessig says, "Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America."
By LAWRENCE LESSIG
STANFORD, Calif.
Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail.
Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's copyright. What his program did was to enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book.
The problem from Adobe's perspective, however, is that the same software could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book otherwise readable only with Adobe's reader technology -- then sell that copy to others without the publisher's permission. That would be a copyright violation, and it is that possibility that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr. Sklyarov in jail -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.
Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.
Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough. Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.
America is essentially alone in this strategy of techno-lawmaking. Most nations in the world -- including, importantly for Mr. Sklyarov, Russia -- regulate copyright violations through copyright law, not through laws aimed at code writers. But what the Sklyarov case means is that this controversial experiment in the United States now essentially regulates the world. If you produce and distribute code that cracks technological protection systems, and that code can be accessed in the United States, then it's just a matter of time before our F.B.I. comes knocking at your door.
This is bad law and bad policy. It not only interferes with the legitimate use of copyrighted material, it undermines security more generally. Research into security and encryption depends upon the right to crack and report. Only if weaknesses can be discovered and described openly will they be fixed.
Increasingly, in the United States, this freedom has been lost. In April, for example, Edward Felten, a Princeton professor and encryption researcher, received a letter from recording industry lawyers warning him that a paper he was about to present at a conference -- it described the weaknesses of an encryption system -- could subject him to enforcement actions under the D.M.C.A.. Mr. Felten understood the threat and decided not to present his paper. Largely as a result of this experience, he is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on First Amendment grounds.
Authors have an important and legitimate interest in protecting their copyrights. The law should help authors where it can. But the law should not push its power beyond the protection of copyright, and the law should especially not criminalize activities that are central to research in encryption and security.
Adobe understands this. After extensive meetings with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and widespread protests on the Internet, at Adobe's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, in Moscow and elsewhere -- Adobe announced it did not think the prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov was conducive to the best interests of the parties involved or of the industry.
Yet Mr. Sklyarov still languishes in jail, puzzled, no doubt, about how a free society can jail someone for writing code that was legal where written, just because he comes to the United States and gives a report on encryption weaknesses.
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, is author of the forthcoming ``The Future of Ideas'' and a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation board.Mark Duell
Let's turn the tables on the Dmitry thing for just a sec. If I were to write an article about how communism sucks big hairy cock, while still living in the US, then travel to China (where saying such things is against the law) to give a speech on a related-but-legal topic, they could toss my ass in jail, and they would be "evil commies", right? The American people would freak, and the press would have a field day (see spy plane).
Why is it okay for us to do it to folks from other countries?
Remember, if you oppose the DMCA, then you really need to let your congressman/senator know about it! Here is a letter that I just sent to a senator from my State who chairs the Judiciary committee.
Senator Leahy,
I am writing today to raise my voice in protest against the unfortunate arrest and subsequent jailing of a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov. I have no doubts that you have at least heard of this issue. For the moment, let us ignore the unconstitutional nature of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (the law the Mr. Sklyarov has been accused of violating). The "violation" was the writing of a piece of software that removes the encryption from an Adobe E-book. Should this be illegal? Probably not. Is it? Yes. However, the crime occurred in the Soviet Union, not in the United States. I feel that I should add that the inability to back up an E-Book is actually a crime in the Soviet Union, and Sklyarov created software that circumvented this. I shudder to think what would happen if every citizen of the Unites States could be arrested in a foreign country for doing something considered perfectly legal in the U.S.
This sad case only underscores something that is very wrong with our country today; under the DMCA, a programmer can be arrested for simply writing a piece of software. This software does not have to be used illegally; simply the fact that it can be used illegally is enough to incriminate someone. If one applies this logic to other areas of the world, it is easy to see that this idea is patently ridiculous. A hunting rifle is not illegal because it could be used to commit a homicide. A locksmith's tools are not illegal because they could conceivably be used to break into somebody's home. Thus, I would argue that a piece of software should not be considered illegal based on only one possible use. Fair use rights are being overturned in order to give corporations far more control than copyright should allow. The fact is, these corporations are able to pay lobbyists and make large campaign contributions, while the average citizen, whose rights are being trampled upon, does not have the resources to defend himself. I strongly urge you to look at this inherently flawed piece of legislation, and join with the few other sane souls in the Senate who have finally seen the law for what it truly is.
As a life-long Vermonter and a constituent, a reply would be greatly valued. You most likely do not recall, but we have met several times in Washington years ago during a "Model Congress" outing from Vermont. At the time, I was impressed by your technical knowledge and awareness of issues surrounding the rapid growth of technology. I hope that the years have not changed this.
-------
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
The DOJ was finally allowed to install Carnivore.
David McOwen is going for installing the destributed.net client.
SOLUTION!
Install distributed.net on Carnivore.
Kalrand
-The Voice of Reason
The more relevant postscript is that he is being criminally prosecuted and faces more jail time than a typical rapist or murderer, for something that merited sacking at most.
He violated what is often perceived as a nuisance-level TOS provision in network administration, did exceed his authority in doing so, and got fired. (Even that may have been excessive, considering the tameness of the offense, but in these days of viruses and worms and such I can understand the knee-jerk overreaction.)
Now the State is going to crush him like a bug. Even if he prevails in trial he will be wiped out financially, his name dragged through the newspapers, and suffer years of uncertainty about his future. There is nothing whatsoever fair or just about this.
The sad thing is that there is little we can do about District Attorneys who violate all standards of reasonableness and humanity in this way. Near here a few years ago our DA launched an aggressive prosecution against a woman whose baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even her pediatrician testified for her, but she was poor and ill-spoken and the white middle-class jurists of the more affluent community next door convicted her of negligent homicide.
It's either a wonderful sign of how stable the US is, or a tragic sign of what sheep we've become, that none of these evil pieces of shit ever get assassinated.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Why doesn't anyone ever post links to nytimes with archives.nytimes.com, rather than www.nytimes.com, so you don't have to register at all?
A co-worker of mine believes that some organizations actually use weak protections intentionally so that they can gain revenue by suing those that break the protection.
There are many avenues out there for companies to find strong and effective means of encryption and protection. Undoubtably there are ethics-abiding companies who have started funding research (both academic and corporate) into this topic of protecting copyrighted works.
We can only hope that someday companies are able to look past their wallets and ask themselves if they are doing enough to protect the intellectual property of others. If a company fails to use effective means to protect a copyright, by all means individuals like Dimitry and Dr Felton should be allowed to break them and show them what not to do.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.