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Taming the Web
Thomas writes: "A story on Technology Review outlines the closer-to-reality-than-you-think fact that Internet regulations are right around the corner. It points out three false hopes held by web 'libertarians.' 1. the web is too international to control. 2. the net is too interconnected to fence in. 3. the net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This is a good read." Bingo.
#3 relies on hardware measures. I'll buy no hardware with such, and if it comes down to no new hardware for sake of avoiding such, they'll be prying stuff from a lot of cold dead fingers.
And another point is the assumption that "the internet" is always going to be the primary way of connecting computers. Other technologies and channels outside of the net will emerge for communication. Laws will have to be written to explicitly regulate all communications between computers to encompass these additional channels which would require obviously draconian measures. Such laws have to be covertly applied and broad measures like that would be too obvious.
I think Napster's experience disproves this theorem. A better way of stating it might be "The more money is behind an endeavor the better, generally, that endeavor does. A riddle: what's the functional difference between truth and marketing dollars?
Sadly,
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Of course not! I would never read Slashdot's articles, I'm not such a loser!
Wasn't the internet designed from the beginning so that if the west coast is wiped out by nucleur war, that the east coast will still be connected? So they are saying that lawyers are more powerful then a megaton explosion? What everyone is missing is that this is a free society, if you hire a lawyer against me, I will hire a lawyer against you. Do you think there is a lawyer that won't defend someone for the money alone? Even Jeffery Dahmer had a lawyer and he ate people!
Only if you are Jesse Ventura. ;)
For those who didn't know, he was on Leno last night talking about how he never gets tickets now that he is governer.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Paddy and his two friends are talking at work. His first friend says: "I think my wife is having an affair with the electrician. The other day I came home and found wire cutters under our bed and they weren't mine."
His second friend says:"I think my wife is having an affair with the plumber the other day I found a wrench under the bed and it wasn't mine."
Paddy says:"I think my wife is having an affair with a horse."
Both his friends look at him with utter disbelief.
"No I'm serious. The other day I came home and found a jockey under our bed."
OK, read the article. Yes, it's true, but it's also false.
First, my creds are longer than I care to think about, back in the dawn of time. And, no, I don't hack any longer, but all I'll say is, if I had, the statute of limitations is up.
Myth #1 The Net is too International to be Controlled
The Net, the totality of the Internet, is. The Web, the channel that our browsers serve up http and https and suchlike, is affected by our ISPs. We can still use TCP/IP and backchannel, go thru various ports - this part is still wild and wooly. Or we can stay safe inside AOL and MSN and their versions and it's controlled. It's like the Wild West - when you come into Dodge, they take your guns at the city limits. If you stick to the patrolled routes, it's fairly safe; if you wander off into the badlands, it's not.
Myth #2 The Net is to Interconnected to Control
See above. While you can route around censorship and damage, this requires active or passive participation by someone. So long as bastions of freedom exist, so long as encyrpted channels go through, this will continue to exist. But the rest can be partially controlled.
Myth #3 The Net is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
So long as we reward hackers with publicity and teens have very little to lose and don't care about it, this will always be true. If they suddenly fear being caught, it will increase some people's activity and scare off others. So, this is mostly true.
But, in sum, it all comes down to this:
The Net is the Perception, Not the Reality.
So long as people believe in the above tenets, it will self-perpetuate. If they lose faith, it will change. Just as the founders of America believed in press freedom but favored other restrictions - remember the 50s, that teen gang era, eventually followed by the 80s.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
One day there were four nuns in line for confessional.
The first nun said, "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned."
He asked how.
She said "I saw a man's private part." He told her to wash her eyes with holy water.
The second nun comes in and says, "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned."
He asked how.
"I touched a man's private parts." He told her to wash her hands in holy water.
Then he heard the third and fourth nun fighting. He asked why they were fighting.
The fourth nun said, "I'm not going to wash my mouth in the holy water if she is going to sit in it."
The American people are as bought and paid for as the government, so to say that the government somehow doesn't represent the people is a convenient excuse to dismiss your civil responsibility. Believe me, when there's a large public outcry, the government will listen.
Corporate control of the Internet may very well happen, but don't let your experience of corporate control over your lifetime lead you into false assumptions. The greater a controlling power becomes, the more unstable it becomes until it topples. That is the really real truism of history.
"So... you were given a number at birth? I wasn't."
Maybe you didn't notice...crying and wet and all...
"I do currently have a number of numbers that uniquely identify me or my possessions, but certainly no supreme ID tag."
Gee...sure sounds like one though,don't it...but that's ok-you say it's not,so it's not...reminds me of a river next to some pyramids...
"See, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can actually take on the government through physical violence. My weapon is my mind."
Not to downplay the importance of 'the mind',but:
after all the talking's past,
after all the lawyers have been hired,
after all the sensibilities have been played on,
after everyone says 'it's not so bad',
and after you stand up and say 'I will not live as a slave!!"
you better have something to back up your convictions other than witty banter..
Officer(just following orders):"ON THE GROUND TERRORIST!!!"
You:"I'm not a terrorist,I am a free man,The principles of--"
BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!!!
Officer(looking down at your bullet-riddled body):"Damn lippy terrorists..."
Well I'll worry about gov't regulation after they win the war on drugs...until then this is just FUD.
Showing the flaws in the first few P2P apps is certainly no proof that P2P is controllable. They've already worked their way around last year's P2P problems, and they'll do it again when some organization tries to regulate them again. The technology is in its infancy, yet regulatory efforts are and always will be playing catch-up.
As for hardware control, I really have no idea how we'll get around it. We'll worry about that when/if it happens, but it'll just get steam-rolled like any other regulatory efforts.
If James and Lars need to go back to pumping gas, so be it. The demise of the record industry certainly won't be the demise of music.
No, not "Bingo" -- try "Bimbo".
Point 1 and 2 are irrelavent -- while the article threw up a couple of examples that seem depressing, they miss the fact that it's really #3 that makes the whole mish-mash go 'round.
A dedicated and motivated hacker will always be able to engineer around limitations in onternational politics or bandwidth. It's what makes us love hackers so much.
The point about hardware not being crackable is ridiculous -- if the content is going to be read, listened to or watched, it has to go analog for a bit -- and at that point it is vulnerable. All it takes is one guy to re-record, transcribe, copy or what have you, and a "free" version is in the wild.
Are Gnutella packets suceptible because of their headers? No biggie -- encrypt the headers, mutate the headers, whatever. It's a Whack-a-Mole game that can't be won.
Ignore #1 and #2 -- it's #3 that will keep the other problems from encroaching.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Fallacious agrument #1: "Swaptor Isn't Too International to Be Controlled" == "The Internet Isn't Too International to Be Controlled". Following this kind of argument, 4 is not even because 3 is not even and they're both numbers. As a side note, am I the only one that hasn't heard of Swaptor?
Fallacious agrument #2: "Gnutella uses a bandwidth-inefficient protocol" == "The Internet isn't very interconnected". There's nothing impossible about efficient true P2P. If Gnutella isn't it, that's Gnutella's problem. This is actually the same fallacy type as #1.
Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.
Honestly, do journalists not have to take a critical thinking course at some point? For that matter, do editors no longer edit? While the main focus of the article (the Internet ain't as free as some people assert) is probably true, the lack of a single cogent argument in a three "page" article is horrifying
To say that "information wants to be free" is obviously just stupid. Information doesn't want anything and freedom is an entirely relative concept. I think it is accurate, however, to say that it is in the nature of information to transgress artifical boundaries. The only way to put an artificial boundary on information, such as encryption and anti-copying features, is to make it less and less like information. So that, for example, it can only be read by one type of machine. So that it is gobbledy-gook if replicated. So that it can only be accessed, as information, in a degraded form.
And herein lies the issue. The problem with this article it's headline says, hey, the internet CAN be controlled but the content says, hey, you little scamps aren't gonna get away with trading illegal music files forever! The problem with this approach is that it ignores two very important considerations.
Napster got what they deserved because they nakedly offered their service as a way for people to swap copies of proprietary copyrighted information. The problem with taking up this lost cause is that the much more valid issue and argument, whether individuals in more or less free country X should have the right to share information freely, anonymously, and without that information being inspected by any authority without appropriate legal permission, with each individual's innocence presumed as the starting point for investigation, is lost in the shuffle. Stop using the freaking Napster example and keep the issue to protecting private communication, period. People who are creating file-sharing functionality need to back far off of the whole issue of copyrighted material, which is a trap and a lost cause, and fight for their right to empower individuals to share information privately via the net. Let individuals who want to figure out how to use the code to pirate music. Tangling the two issues up from the outset just weakens the case for individual privacy and freedom of expression.
The other huge, massively important isssue that gets missed entirely is that protected content issued by massive media conglomerates is not some kind of naturally occuring resource that we're all fighting over a way to tap into, via the legal industry pipe or some bootleg bunghole. Focusing on the sharing of other people's protected content completely ignores the potential power of the internet to give artists an international audience for works they choose to create on their own and maintain the rights to. The novel Angry Young Spaceman is available at the nomediakings.org website in an unencrypted, free digital format. And guess what - I'm going to buy the damn thing anyway because paper books are useful. CDs are useful because I don't have an MP3 player in my car. The fact that music sales might increase in the face of something like Napster is not a call for the RIAA to back uncontrolled file swapping - the mantality of these people will always be that if you're giving it away for free you're just losing the money you could get from selling. What it is is a call to musicians that they don't need the RIAA or any of the fat cats they represent anymore to make music. Book writers can self publish with economics close to those that large scale publishers enjoy - and there's so much skim between the artist and the book consumer that the minor difference in publishing cost can be completely ignored. A major motion picture is out of the league of the individual for the time being, but computers are bringing something like a featurette cartoon into the realms of a lot more individuals. Anyone can own what amounts to a professional digital recording studio for less than 10K (Imagine a world -its already here - where 10 bands can get together and buy into a studio for a grand apiece) and ANYONE can farm out CD production for the vicinity of a buck a pop.
We're all a fine bunch of suckling pigs at the consumer teat if we can't see where we REALLY need to fight for freedom in the internet. Fuck their copyrighted, scrambled, diminished-value content. Do it yourself!
Carriers know what traffic pays their bills, they have logs of all the protocols that they can muster. They analise them and then try to cash in on those services.
I think in this story the author is confusing copyright theft and freedom.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
anyone who's been following the news for longer than a day or two realizes that the internet is moving towards regulation
But that's not the point addressed by the article. The question is whether the regulation will be effective.
The article was missing a few clues on this. The bit about why offshore businesses cannot avoid US law ('even if offshore firms are legal in their home bases, their owners have to be willing to not come back to the United States.') seems to assume that the world is populated entirely by US residents. I'm not sure which planet they're talking about, but it certainly isn't Earth.
There's a conflict between the people who want to control our lives, and those of us who don't want to be controlled. The outcome is still unclear. The article added nothing.
The only problem with that plan is that by then the laws will be in place that restrict or direct Earthlink and the like to follow strict standards. Earthlink would have to break the law in order to comply with your idea. That's something that they won't do.
They would far prefer to have hundreds of thousands of pissed off CUSTOMERS, than be put out of business by the Feds, have their CEO in the pokie and have NO customers. While I like your idea, it'll never fly.
You do realize Technology Review is MITs magazine, and since the word hacker was coined at MIT i think they can use it anyway they want, and if you read the whole article you would realize they used it correctly. Ok before you get your panties in a twist and make some silly post like that check yourself. Telling MIT how to use the word hacker is very foolish and kinda pathetic.
So... you were given a number at birth? A lot of babies have SIN/SSN from birth now. This is for tax purposes (maximum gift amounts per year per person that can be given tax free) and health benifits (many insurance companies require unique SSN before they will issue benifts)
You can crack hardware faster than you can say "Cue Cat". In fact, hardware-based software locks have been cracked since they exist; hardware based satellite-channel encryption schemes are also cracked routinely, and the hardware-based copy protecion scheme for the PS was cracked also very easily. Thing is, it's enough that a single person is able to crack something, to make it available anywhere on the net.
In fact, there's not a clear difference between hardware and software. "Hardware" protection schemes are usually based on FPGAs or EPROMs, which, in fact, are "somewhat hardwired" versions of software
All in all, I don't agree with the article; I would say all the myths still hold
It's just a BloJJ
A 60 year old woman came home one day and heard strange noises in her bedroom. She opened the door and discovered her 40 year old daughter playing with a vibrator.
"What are you doing?" asked the mother.
"Mom, I'm 40 years old and look at me. I'm ugly. I'll never get married, so this is pretty much my husband." The mother walked out of the room, shaking her head.
The next day, the father came home and heard noises in the bedroom and upon entering the room, found his daughter using the vibrator.
"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.
His daughter replied, "I already told Mom. I'm 40 years old now and ugly. I will never get married, so this is as close as I'll ever get to a husband." The father walked out of the room shaking his head.
The next day, the mother came home to find her husband with a beer in one hand and the vibrator in the other, watching a football game on TV. "What on earth are you doing?" she cried.
The husband replied, "What does it look like I'm going? I'm having a beer and watching football with my son-in-law!"
As long as you don't own the pipes, you can't rely on being able to pump anything you want through them. The bad news is that with many smaller ISPs having been failed, abandoned, and made obsolete by the bigger/higher bandwidth players, many of us don't even have the ability to vote with dollars, except to forego Internet connection entirely. As if.
So it's not as easy as switching providers. And unless you live in a cell block or a row house, connecting your system via your own pipes isn't much of an option. Okay, not even in the cell block. Maybe wireless technologies will help ameliorate this, but at the moment, I wouldn't want to transmit anything to my buddies using the high-speed wireless data transmission technologies readily available to me.
But I disagree that geeks should stop fighting "rules" and restrictive legislation out of fear of causing a clamp-down effect. Those who are skilled and interested should work toward sensible legislation (if such a thing exists). The demise of technocrat.net is one indication to me that such skills are rare in the geek community. The average R&D meeting is another such indication.
I have more hope that as geeks continue to occupy influential positions in Corporate America and other industrialized nations, that the geek ethic will get a voice that matters to someone besides geeks. With due respect to Richard Stallman, the CTO at any company I've worked for has far more influence on the corporate direction - and the limits of corporate expectations - than any outside voice.
But hey, I could be wrong, and I'm sure I'll find doubleplusgood travel arrangements on WorldOnline2010 (a wholly-owned subsidiary of AOL/Time-Warner/Daimler-Chrysler/Philip Morris/Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati).
Perhaps we should have more use of Linux in routing hardware, as it both runs on commodity hardware like the x86 architecture and it is blazing fast in its networking code. Surely it is nicer in the operating system market to be able to use an OS such as Linux that is unencumbered by patents, battles over which mega-corp controls the desktop icons, and is not controlled by one single entity.
After all, no one ever got fired for replacing Cisco with Linux on x86, as I still have my job and the data center has never been better ever since we stopped shelling out huge amounts of cash for expensive Cisco hardware and expensive routing software.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Your probably just trolling, but here goes anyway:
The internet has been around for more than two decades...
It's been around for 2 decades, but has only recently been recognized as something more than the worlds largest geek toy, largely ignored by the rest of the world. Big business on the Internet is still in its infancy, but you'd better believe that if it continues to grow like it has, laws and regulations will follow.
The internet stretches across national boundaries
Read the article, they actually address this argument. It doesn't matter if I setup a Napster server in Timbuktu if the RIAA can cut off my one-and-only access point to the outside world.
Now that we have web servers in space
Show me a timeframe for getting a robust, stable, viable Net Sanctuary Space Station, and I'll show you an Internet that has long since been beaten down by Evil Big Business (tm).
Wow, I never realized the "Pool Man" industry was just a cover for a vast homosexual underground! So what's it like to fuck his pool man, anyway?
And exactly what is the alternative to letting the Internet have it's chance again?
>As a programmer I see no reason why you >couldn't design a system with traffic >indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN Will only a savvy, elite group be able to use such systems, or will they be usable by the general public for general purposes?
As long as I can connect two computers together, the internet will exist...
For me, it started with a null modem serial cable strung between two TRS-80 Color Computers, so that I could "share" the single floppy drive I had.
I quickly moved to a 300 baud modem - and I suddenly had a whole new world at my fingertips.
Later came a 2400 baud modem, a 14.4, a 28.8. BBS's all over town - the city - Fidonet - across America, and in some cases, around the world.
I messed around with connections over telephone wire, building funky parallel port bit-bangers, to create a po-man's networking system.
Now I have a personal network inside my house - cobbled together from parts and pieces the corps didn't want - picked off the scrap pile of electronic hubris...
I hear talk of 802.11 - lasercomm - radiocomm - it is in the air. Hackers will do it. Fidonet will be recreated.
What are they to do? Regulate radio - oops, they already do! Regulate 2.4GHz - yep, that will come. Regulate sell of lasers? That could happen, too. Regulate light making devices? Perhaps.
Maybe I will then hack together a system that only transmits/recieves during the daytime, using mirrors to reflect the sun over long distances, to be received and converted using homemade selenium photocells (and yes - I know how to make them). Regulate mirrors?
Then I will stand on the roof of my house - and shout to the heavens, and my friend beyond, who will relay my message. It may be slow - but to shut me up, you will have to kill me.
KILL ME, DAMMIT! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND, YOU GODDAMN FUCKING CORPORATE GOVERNMENT MACHINE?!
/end...fucking...rant>
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Did you even bother to read the article? GEEZ, what a maroon!
Even if you believed that Freenet has *no* userbase, and that it is still so incomplete that nobody can use it, the simple fact that it exists and he doesn't (can't?) present a way to shut it down, refutes his argument. As has been pointed out elsewhere, even if ISPs placed restrictions on usable ports, Freenet can easily be persuaded to tunnel over other ports.
Of course, you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story...
why use a test track? Just a residential street will do.
And when the law says that you can't use this or that encryption, what are you gonna do?
Worse yet, when the law says that internet traffic can run only on ports x,y and z, and that all core routers will block all other types of traffic, what are you gonna do?
Wake up, it's already happening.
Our html coders know how to make a series of links between a sequence webpages.
He comments that hackers won't be able to come and sodder a hardware workaround... Well he is absolutely and blatantly wrong. for $6 I can have the kid next door modchip my PS1. most of that money pays him for the sodder.
For the PS2 I can go to my local game store, and for $30 (most for the warranty on the chip) they will do it. THAT is convenience.
Hackers will break through any hardware lock as easily as software locks. Why? Because unlimited free time will always beat limited paid time.
skye
Even though this was a device that only connected to the Gemstar severs via a modem.
So, you know. Guess the author was right. Can't stop technology and regulation.
Sigh.
How about we build a P2P protocol that disguises all the data as spam.
Either we can use P2P or SPAM becomes a contol control mechanism and sending it becomes illegal.
Win win surely?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Not neccesarily maybe the fact is that the underlying network is owned by a corp that wants to control all bandwidth. Maybe some people are sick and tired of the nooses around there necks that stop them from doing legal net activities without being charged unfair fees.
By the way this is already being done in Australia using wireless nets because of the problems I just described. It is still the Internet but it is no longer controlled by a corporation that's only considerations are it's stock price.
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
http://kludge.psc.edu/~ksulliva/rfc-april1/rfc3093 .txt
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The Lone Ranger and Tonto were riding on the range one day. The two came to a stop, where Tonto jumped off his horse and put his head on the ground to listen to see if anyone was coming. After a few seconds he rose and said, "Buffalo come."
The Lone Ranger was amazed and proclaimed "Damn you Indians are smart, how the hell did you know there were buffaloes coming?"
Tonto replied, "Face sticky."
Well considering that using the word hacker when you mean cracker is a classic sign of a clueless journalists, and articles that are not supposed to be informative, but are instead supposed to invoke fear, anger, and a general statist attitude regarding every other issue facing the world, I will read this some other time. :-)
The result, in Ballon's view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios and labels and publishers will send over lists of things to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella. Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're drastically shrinking the pool of available users."
:)
While people will put up with crappy service and high bills, if you take away their MP3s and porn, they will take their business elsewhere. If AOL and MSN started blocking MP3 trading, and Earthlink ran another round of "We don't spy on you or control you" commercials, they'd grab huge chunks of their competitors' former customers.
Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.
That's because it's harder to leave your country than it is to switch ISPs. Well, maybe only slightly harder.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This story just brings up the problems and issues written about by Lawrence Lessig in Code. This primarily revolved around the notion that unless the users (hackers, lusers, slashdotters, everyone) take an active part in how the laws and code are shaped then big business and government will do it form them.
Jessica Litman's excellent book,Digital Copyright, details how copyright law was shaped without the users being present. Sort of a glimpse into what could happen to the Internet
Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies goes into depth concerning how techonological solutions are permanent (which I think refutes some of the article's notion concerning Myth #3).
What is needed is involvement at any level we can afford. The more that users are involved in any endeavor that involves them the better, generally, that endeavor does.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, that's not true. Unless you, and you alone, are the only person required to make that link, and you control all of the technology required to do it, you rely on someone else. It might be an ISP. It might be a telephone company. It might be the guy who laid the trans-Atlantic cables. But you rely on someone. That someone can stop you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Freenet uses encryption, but an ISP can still look at it and say, "Hey, there's freenet!" ... going through SSL would additionally obscure the fact that it's Freenet.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
It looks like the info-war will soon resemble the drug war.
So the government will spend billions filling our prisons with pastey faced geeks, while military-grade crypto and mp3 cd-r's will be available for $5 on any street corner? Good plan...
For example, in the long run for every "shield" there will be a "sword" that will be effective against it
While empirically this has generally been the case in the past, I fail to really see any absolute "law" of the universe that says it will necessarily always be this way. I don't personally believe that it is always going to be that way, unless you can show me the proof of the reasoning that says it will. I think that at some stage within the next 100 years, technological capability is going to overtake our ability to directly use it. (Some people would call this the "singularity", but I don't completely believe in that as it is usually described). For thousands of years, it was just "conventional wisdom" or "general knowledge" (or whatever you want to call it) that man could not fly. Then, suddenly, it was no longer true, and after a brief period of mental adjustment, it is now completely normal and natural that man regularly flies. Its just an example, but I think this is the same .. many people just accept as "general knowledge" that "for every 'shield' there will be a 'sword' that will be effective against it" .. I fully expect that sooner or later, that is suddenly going to change. Another example of this type of thing, over a shorter time span, it used to be the case that the very idea of an email client automatically executing binary code "hidden" within an email was an insanely stupid idea, and nobody in their right minds would even have thought to suggest that email clients *should* be this way. Suddenly, that changed, and now everyone has gotten used to the idea.
Generally I see it as not only possibly, but likely, that sooner or later technology will bring us *effectively* unlimited bandwidth and processing power (if its possible under the laws of physics, man will get round to figuring it out, and I suspect that it is possible under the laws of physics), and at that stage it would become quite possible that large volumes of traffic could be analysed and possibly blocked with at most one or two milliseconds delay. (Its just an example .. but extremely few people would find their work obstructed by 2 ms delay).
That is the classic gambit of the troll: accuse the other person of trolling. I can't believe the moderators fell for it and modded you up.
No. I don't think you're missing anything.
The very essence of P2P is that the questionable data is decentralized, and therefore immune to an ISP simply "pulling the plug" on it. Gnutella, for example, is just a protocol which allows for the query, request for, and sending of files to users. Like you said, the only way to stop it is to block those packets or to disallow traffic to port 6346, which is what my Gnotella client uses. And if they do that, then people will simply change the protocol and client/server apps slightly to get around it. The downfall of those attempting to regulate things like this is that what they do will ALWAYS BE REACTIVE IN NATURE.
Just my thoughts.
You should have said it was less vulnerable rather than not vulnerable. You seem to be assuming that the recording industry would invest the billions of dollars it would take to develop a strong encryption system which would be invulnerable. They would have to develop a secure watermarking scheme which was backwards compatable before they could approach encrypting it in the hardware. I am not so sure that this is possible. (How does a CD-ROM drive know when to encrypt?)
OK, if you can run a line out fo your stereo into your sound card and record it, you can get all the same music at nearly the same quality (almost).
About DVD software.... So I have a high-res output from my Video card. So I have multimonitor support. Suppose someone makes a card, indended for diagnostic purposes which allows me to feed SVGA input directly into a movie file on my hard drive. Soch a card would have all sorts of uses (Affirmative Defence under DMCA) which would have nothing to do with DVDs...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Absolutely right. Touche.
This
No government has ever managed to regulate anything with absolute certainty. People speed all the time, despite the presence of Police on the streets. Banks, convenience stores, and houses are robbed daily. Tax fraud goes uncaught. Illegal drugs are trafficed in huge numbers. Murderers, rapists, and child abusers get away with it.
The only difference between breaking laws in "meatspace" (which, btw, I never hear anyone use except stupid authors like this guy) and breaking laws on the web is that it's a lot easier to spread the tools for breaking laws on the web than it is in the real world. And despite what some foolish authors may think, hardware protection can be and has been cracked (see: Playstation). And, like in the real world, the more people who feel that a law is unjust, the less success there will be in enforcing it (see: War on Drugs).
It will be harder for 'them' to just focus on the mainstream consumer market when they want to do a little hardware programming, since the slowdown in computer purchasing (lately) would make a solution like that a little harder to realize, as one would have to get its customers to get a firmware or something along those lines. An easier solution (heh, well, mebbe not) would be to implement something like that in all the routers/servers, but again, one would have to wait awhile until everyone needed a new router, and I don't think the Apache folks will be building anything like that into their software anytime soon either ;P
you a winna , ha ha ha
Hey, you think your house is cool?
phunny?
that is different from funny, right?
Laws in a country that makes people who act legally in their countries,all of a sudden become criminals to be arrested in the USA just go too far.But that's what people get for not reacting and being active to voice their opinions.As long as the people have a government for the people ,by the corporations for the corporations,things will only get worse.
You can't expect that anything will be voted that
will be in the public's interrest.Look at the latest White House decisions.Corp's 10 People 0 .Even drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge has been permitted by the President
of the people for the corporations ,and the heck with the people who elected me Bush.
What is really needed is a tidal wave in politics,where people will get back what should have been theirs al along.
The control of politicians.
I elect a guy ..i pay him a salary to solve problems for me.
Not to cause me some or delay solving them.
Not to be the puppet of a few companies that paid him his campaign secretary.
And as long as it's the way the campaings work ,we'll keep being ruled by corporations and their representatives,be at the mercy of private laws and laws made to control us.
The net free of control ? maybe not but then again who is going to stand up and try to get elected to change things at next election ?
: )
And strawberry shishah tastes oh so good.
skye
Go back to Canada where you came from, you dirty fuck.
A husband feeling a bit horny goes to the bathroom and returns with 4 aspirin and a glass of water for his wife.
He says, "Here honey, here are some aspirin and a some water."
She replied, "but honey I do not have a headache!"
He replied, "Thank God!"
Female Prison Rape in NY
But that's not nearly as significant. When the goal is to get Pandora's box open, nobody cares much in the long term when someone manages to keep it closed for a few extra minutes.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
"A growing number of internet users are setting up lans based entirely on wireless networks, using wireless protocols. Other users are setting up infrared shots. IR shots were very popular in a dorm I visited once that 'prohbited' unauthorized computer LANS. If the RA couldn't see cable, there was no LAN, despite the fact that a massive amount of file-sharing and gaming was going on behind his back." I was not aware that some schools don't allow LANs in the dorms. What is the reasoning behind this rule? I assume that the computers are owned by the students, not the school. Since a LAN is not using any school resources (aside from electricity), I'm perplexed at how they justify such a rule.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
The claim that international rogue commercial elements (corporations of concern) is irrelevant is a little disingeneous as the real point is that any place which requires large-scale infrastructure will usually be located in a developed country (techs who operate multi-million dollar backbones and data centres don't get born in Siberia) which usually is reachable from other developed countries, either legally, cutting cables or last resort of nuking them back to the stone age. Economically this is the basic barrier to entry which doesn't work in the early stages of a technology paradigm shift (did the telcos see the ISPs taking off?). If someone combines the equivalent of napster with individual wireless (as compared to cell-towers), are you going to have the BSA confiscating every antenna or PDA they see?
... if you're betting on a proprietary technology and are willing to put the marketing dollars behind it, then at best hackers are a semi-persistant nuisance (as evidenced by the European satellite TV). However, studies have also shown that economic growth is highly dependent on exogeneous factors, primarily technology. Hackers, as free agents, can scratch their own itches as they have both the talent (probably) and time (hopefully) creating new applications where people didn't realise they would want that product/service/etc. Did anyone have a focus group to discover Hypercard or Visicalc? Would Counterstrike have been supported in a corporate lab? Would the next RMS introduce a philosophy or Linus-to-be implement casually an idea which changes how you live? While the individual footprint of hackers may be neglibible, the feet of a thousand penguins can lead to surprising destinations.
The second claim of the network being resilient is actually a two edged sword, bringing social intrusion of foreign laws, spam and generally lower signal-noise ratios. As more devices/software interact in increasigly complicated ways, predictability is going to appeal to consumers which means the path of least resistence will be followed. As other people have discovered, frankly there's not much interest in communicating with clueless dweebs outside professional or social circles which means that ultimately the human network is self-limiting. I believe the statistic is that we can keep track of ~200 odd names/faces.
The claim that the hackers is irrelevant is only true if you consider life from a VC point of view
LL
Sure... most of us would raise hell. But if they withstood? Then we're the ones who get screwed.
Think about it.
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
dont believe everything you have heard about morpheus (the p2p stack was actually built by fasttrack http://www.fasttrack.nu/ btw). i was intrigued by the "encryption" but even if they are encrypting the transfer session, what is the point if you are broadcasting all the shares (port 1214)? when are people going to fix this?
not that it is that good or anything...
i think the point trying to be made was that encrypted p2p networks over a 'policed' internet would still allow some bypass over the control. Let alone other standards that would emerge from such actions.
Maybe a very dangerous comparison, but lets look at something everybody is against (or should be); child pornography. Its illegal in (as far as i know) every country, its monitored by special intrest groups, its actively prosecuted, but its still here. also on the net. Is there any way this could be prevented by using more active filtering techniques ? extremely doubtfull. No single filtering mechanism i have used or have been demonstrated is waterproof. Not to mention the extreme processing power that would be needed to filter complete countries. Which ofcourse would allways be bypassed if some network protocol was abused that would be filtered in a different way. (and godforbid i hope we will never be stuck with port 80 for everything) Would less anonimity prevent this from happening ? No bigger motivation then human perversion, so people would find other ways, like logging on to public systems, hopping free internet providers, borrowing the neighbours phone line, or name a few other ways.
To put this into perspective of the atricle again.. :( )
The internet is more then the US. Even though many countries signed the Den Haag treaty, not many are enforcing it. There are bigger problems in most countries then the loss of money for some foreign record companies. Let alone sue their occupants for listening to the latest Britney Spears. (I don't have my own country.. Yet
If there's demand, there's a profit to be made, and somebody will jump in. Though the thought of organised crime running 'illegal' unfiltered internet seems a bit to farfetched for me yet.
A globally controlled internet would have global rules. If not the whole discussion is useless anyway. That would mean (besides intelectual property issues) that countries will have to agree what is deemed illegal. Documents on China and the way its government acts ? Soft porn ? Christian material? (as it is a quite some muslim countries) Nazi material (as it is in a lot of european countries) hacking tools (as it seems to be in the US, depending on what it is) Cryptography tools .
anything you can think of actually..
For an agreement on such scale, there would be so many compromises and understanding that it might even bring world peace..
Thats about the only thing i would trade in for a free internet anyway.
Sentry23
Yeah? How? Please elaborate... I'm really interested.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
All I want from my ISP is a pipe, fixed IP address and fixed monthly charge.
Is it morally right for large companies to stop me from publishing things, because someone else might use the same tools to violate their precious copyrights?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I think this kind of thing would be pretty hard to police.
>The only thing I can think of is that your ISP doesn't allow any initial SYN packets through to you. This would make you only capable of being a client
permit tcp any any established would certainly be a bummer; however, most dsl/cable modem users already have their capacity to be a server kneecapped via asychronous connection speeds. 640k downstream vs 128k upstream. makes it easier to keep the users as passive recipients of "content"; public participation is actively discouraged.
The best way to counterbalance Big Money's inevitable, even understandable, efforts to shape the Net into an environment of its liking is through the untidy, squabbling process of democratic governance--the exact process rejected by those who place their faith in the endless ability of anonymous hackers to circumvent any controls. An important step toward creating the kind of online future we want is to abandon the persistent myth that information wants to be free.
Phuk information. People want to be free, which is why there are things like P2P and hackers. But this isn't about hackers or techies or information -- it's about the freedom of people to live and learn without kissing the ass of some jerk with money every time they log on.
This article makes a good point about the "cold, hard reality" of things like the unregulated nature of the Internet, and it looks forward to the point when the Bad Guys will inevitably try to stuff a sock in human freedom in the interest of their Dolla (inevitable, yes, but screw "understandable"; these are assholes, nothing more), but it completely ignores what happens next, or indeed, even that anything does.
Are we going to roll over and be regulated, then? Come on! Information doesn't *want* anything. Information is wanted, and every two-legged hominid on this planet knows that the Truth Will Set You Free. We are bound to seek truth, even when it kills us. It's part of the human condition, okay?? So eventually the Empire is going to use hardware rigging to try and stop us trading Information without first forking over that Dolla -- so what? Is that somehow more remarkable then when, say, all the water in an African nation is suddenly "privatized" and no-one can drink without forking over the Dolla? Is anything they might do to the 'Net somehow more impossible to circumvent than any other evil perpetrated by a small group of greedy fatcats? I think not. If humanity can rise up against things like religious persecution, slavery, and war, why would they be put down by a copy-protected hard drive??
And while I agree that sitting back and thinking you're safe from the world's tyrants isn't a smart idea for anyone, much less those of us who want to earn freedom, online or elsewhere, I do think it's absurd to contrast the way the 'Net works with democracy. Oh, what, so Capitalism is Democracy now and the 'Net is full of Anarchists?? Don't be ridiculous. The Internet is the most democratic thing we've managed to do yet, as a human race, and it will remain so until some asshole manages to put it in a cage and charge admission, at which point the people will come up with something else. That's Democracy; the people finding ways to communicate and learn and be free in spite of the obstacles. There will always be obstacles, and I guess most of those obstacles will probably almost always stem from a few jerks who don't care what happens to anybody or anything, as long as they can have more than they need. Hopefully, one day they get what they deserve; in the meantime, I and I will always be looking for the hack.
Charlie was a chemist
But Charlie is no more
What Charlie thought was H2O
Was H2S04!
"My weapon is my mind"
Yeah, throw that at them and they`re going to get all soggy and horrible.
In many ways, yes. We've got asset forfeiture, loss of privacy, roadblocks, warrantless searches, profiling, and a host of other abuses of power. Yet they have all failed to stop either the supply or demand of drugs. They have also created substantial opposition to the drug war, as more and more people start to realize that it cannot be prosecuted without violating the rights of the law-abiding. A "war on hackers" fought along similar lines would be even less effective, since information is easier to conceal and deliver than narcotics.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
How about using Big Brother's tools against him? What if Sally the FBI agent got her little picture posted on the net along with a full description of what she did. For that matter, a Distrust index can be maintained for organizations such as ISPs and other businesses as well. I wonder how long it would it would take for all the corporate stooges to run of out spies if they wind up in OUR law enforcement databases. Since Sally probably isn't operating under her own name, we'll use their facial ID technology as well. If there is reason to suspect police statery in a given situation then we can insist the other party supply enough information to compare them to the Web of Distrust. For optimum efficiency, this should part of the overall web of trust.
To control slander, we can assign greater or lesser weight to any particular "indictment". If Sally get four people sent to jail then her name should be black indeed. Oh yeah, there should be major bonus points for the one who gets Sally's e-mail, address, and phone number into the web. The disincentive for Sally or any other police statist to keep up what she is doing is obvious.
They sure can't raise MORAL objections to it; it isn't as though I'm not proposing using their exact methods back on them. Pot, kettle, black you know.
I agree completely. I'm not saying that "the net is virtually uncontrollable" should be our main political argument, only that it's true. Furthermore, it is in our best interests to persuade our adversaries that it's true. The MPAA believed that CSS could stop all "unauthorized" use, and they're probably now hard at work on a "secure" successor. If they realized that their goal is impossible, they might start offering features that increased value rather than removing it. Until that happens however, we definitely need to oppose government assaults on freedom. Write your congresscritters, donate to the EFF, and spread the word about consumer-hostile laws like the DMCA.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
You can get a good idea by taking your car to a test track and seeing how fast you can get it up to. Isn't that what everyone does when they get a new car?
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
How I despise control freaks. Yes, I'm sure they will pass regulations. There's no good reason. There aren't even any justifications that will stand up under scrutiny. But they'll pass the *** laws anyway just because that's the kind of people they are. These people are one of the better arguments against gun control. (Also, of course, in a more dispersed form, one of the better arguments in favor of gun control.)
Vile, intrusive, busybodies. And that's being kind about them. If everyone of them just happened to get larangitis for a year or so the world would be a much nicer place. If they also got carpal tunnel, then it would be even nicer. They don't seem to serve any socially useful purpose at all, and they are certainly vastly unpleasant to a large number of individuals.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not again?!
How about this, there are only 2 providers, provider 'A' filters inbound connections or doesn't allow them at all. Provider 'B' does allow inbound connections, all the customers that care about inbound connections go to provider B. A relative askes the customer of the more open provider which provider to go to, they say to go to provider 'B'. Then that relative is in work/school/social setting and says "my son says we should use company B, because company A is too hard to work with", now more customers for company B. Which is more profitable?
How would it hurt big business?
It is my opinion that consumer copyright infringement tends to hurt content makers more than it hurts big business. Take a look at Microsoft, for instance. While they certainly benefit from copyright law, they also benefit from consumer copyright infringement. I have heard of people who buy computers, preinstalled with Windows, and never pay for software again. They "steal" games, mp3s, whatever it is they use the computer for. People's budgets are not unlimited, and most people's entertainment/computer related budget quite limited. These dollars people are saving not buying CDs are going to the ISPs. The dollars people save not buying computer games go to Microsoft and Dell.
Consumer copyright infringement instead tends to hurt the little guys, who can't team up with computer manufacturers to bundle their products in. Sure, it's hurting the RIAA, but to the benefit of Microsoft and AOL.
Take away mp3s and fewer people will use the internet, and many more will be unwilling to pay as much to use the internet.
All of this would make it sound like I am defending copyright law, but I do not, for reasons which I'm not getting into in this comment.
Your point about tunneling over mail/MSN is a good one, but here's a possible flipside. You can tunnel your traffic to your best friend, and I'll tentatively grant that in the 'tunneling arms race' you stay one step ahead of 'tunneling detectors'. But what if you want to share information with people you don't know? How can you publish your willingness to share information without exposing yourself to a sting operation?
Tunnelling only gets us to the position we're in now with gnutella/freenet/etc. Instead of IP addresses, you have email/IM addresses. This has both the advantages and disadvantages of being a static address, but it is fairly easy to maintain psudonymity to whatever extent your service provider allows. Gnutella/freenet/etc die three days after congress passes a law deeming their use illegal. The first day they send infringement letters to everyone using it (with the help of the ISPs). The second day they arrest two or three token offenders. The third day the news reports the arrest and all the rest of the offenders stop. Tunelling can't protect against sting operations combined with making the actual software illegal, but the only disadvantage tunnelling over MSN Messenger has over using TCP/IP is that there is only a single ISP which needs to be subpeonaed. Tunnelling through email does not have this restriction, and with anonymous remailers can even be one way anonymous.
I really believe the cat is out of the bag on this one. As long as there is any type of automatable communication you can tunnel arbitrary data through it. I'm not saying one should sit back and relax though. Maximum effort should be put into keeping what methods of communication we have, and extending new ones.
Maybe not now, but your viewpoint has an astounding lack of forward thinking. Try to imagine for a moment what sort of technologies might become available in the next 20 to 50 years. Yes I know most people consider 20+ years in the future to be "forever" (hence, y2k), but its really just around the corner.
"Someone who does this is obviously interested in illegal activities. So we have to make it illegal to build networks that are not under the supervision of a trusted provider."
Claus
or 'cuarto'
whatever.
damn spics and thier crazy language...
Are you gay?
Connect this with the fact the general purpose PC may be dying, and what you have is a pretty grim vision of the future... we'll all be just connected to a shinyhappy ad-laden corporate network through ATM-like dumb terminals. :-/
Beside which some of us are a lot more handy with a soldering iron than a compiler. Or like I always say: You ain't hacking till you break out the soldering iron.
Do you know how PGP works? It's called the web of trust. Similar to that 7 degrees of separation theory. Sure, Bobby might not know Sally, but to verify who Sally is would not be difficult. Furthermore, if we were in such a situation as described, no one would trust anyone else explicitly anyways. And, yes, it will always be possible to break into a web of trust, but it need not be easy. I can always say that you need 4 ultimatly trusted signatures for me to believe who you are. Or 10, or 100. A speakeasy worked in a similar manner. Some of them got busted, many didn't. But, if things head in that direction, you can be sure that ideas like the speakeasy will resurrect and become prominant.
A Texan went to Chicago and thought he would buy a new "city" outfit. He went into Marshall Fields and when asked by a sweet young woman if she could help him, answered, "Yes ma'am, ya see, I'm from Texas and I want to buy a complete outfit." Well, her eyes lit up as she asked, "Where would you like to start?"
... tall, ma'am."
... double D."
... 38," he replied.
... is there anything else I can do for you?"
"Well ma'am, how about a suit?"
"Yes sir, what size?"
"Size 53
"Wow, that's really big."
"Yes ma'am, they really grow them big in Texas."
"What's next?" she asked.
He replied, "How about some shoes."
"What size?"
"Size 15
"Wow, that's really big!"
"Yes ma'am, they really grow them big in Texas."
"What's next?"
"Well, I reckon I'll need a shirt."
"Yes sir, what size?"
"Nineteen and a half
"Wow, that's really big!"
"Yes ma'am, they really grow them big in Texas."
She virtually glowed as she asked, "Whew
"No ma'am , I reckon that will be all."
Well she tallied up his bill while the Texan was counting out his money. She asked, "Sir could I ask you a question?"
"Yes ma'am, I already know what it is and the answer is four inches."
She is astonished and blurts out, "Why, my boyfriend is bigger than that!"
Without so much as a stutter, the Texan replied, "Across ma'am"
But your missing something. In America we don't like to actually solve problems... only fix symptoms...
:P
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
"Even if Freenet does not end up in the crowded graveyard of vaporware, Internet service providers can always pull the plug--treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services. " This statement doesn't seem to make any sense. Unlike Usenet, use of Freenet doesn't require your ISP to run a centralised server for support. I assume the writer of the article means that ISPs don't allow use of telnet to check mail via pine, etc, so the same applies. The only way an ISP could feasibly block use of Freenet that I see is to drop packets that look like Freenet packets. But that doesn't seem to be what the writer implies. Is there an interpretation of this that I'm missing?
I was not aware that some schools don't allow LANs in the dorms. What is the reasoning behind this rule? I assume that the computers are owned by the students, not the school. Since a LAN is not using any school resources (aside from electricity), I'm perplexed at how they justify such a rule.
The school I'm talking about is West Texas A&M University, a private university outside of Amarillo, TX, that later merged with Texas A&M.
Now, as far as I know, there was nothing in the school rules that particularly forbid student-administered private lans. There were the usual 'Thou Shalt Nots' in the rules. Thou shalt not collaborate on programming projects, Thou shalt not copy software, Thou shalt not do anything to make the heavies come down on our school, etc... Now, the real issue here, I'm certain, was the fact that the small campus LAN was administered entirely by (and this is only my second hand knowledge, feel free to correct me if you know better) teachers and contracted computer administrators. Students were neither encouraged to have any part in the administration of the facilities, and when they did try to take part, excuses were found to get rid of them because they invariably opened up 'security risks'. One individual caused waves by allowing other students to access Windows 3.11 FTP in the open access lab. Another caused waves by daring to install a Linux-based webserver. ("We simply can't allow something so insecure as Linux to run when we have guarantees from Microsoft on the security of Windows NT").
As the price of networking hardware began to drop, student Lans based on Windows 95 and Linux began to emerge, usually communicating to the rest of the world via dial-up ISP accounts. Cat5 ran all over the dorms, through hand punched holes in the walls, and through the hallways. This, I'm certain, was the problem for the RA's. When they complained about their dorms' residents' refusal to take down their network cable, the school administration responded by handing it over to the CIS department. CIS realized that there were LANs on the campus that they did not adminster, and the school rules were quickly ammended to address this. 'Thou shalt have no LAN which is not directly administerd by CIS.' So the students had to take down their cables, but CIS was suddenly obligated to provide dorm-wide internet access, and installed RJ45 data jacks to most of the dorms, making a larger mess than the RA's were complaning about.
Now, before the mass installation, a lot of the students I know who had been forced to take down their own Cat5 almost instantly replaced it with a series of IR receivers. They ran about $120 apeice at the time, but that was a pretty small 'initiation fee' for those who wanted a spot on the LAN for multiplayer DOOM and file-sharing. With the installation of the data jacks in all the rooms, students were able to set up IP masquerading networks, and have unfettered, private, but slow internet access to the world through WTAMU's T1 to Sprint.
WTAMU students and alumni feel free to correct me if you know this sequence of events better than I, since I got this second hand.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What we need to do is to take a killfile, and turn it inside out.
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
It doesn't matter what encryption scheme they use, there will always be a way to get at the data. It's impossible to hide it completely. The problem is that a very small percentage of computer users, and then again a very small percentage of those have the skills and sohpistication to get at that data. The common computer user would be helpless. Which is all that really needs to happen in the eyes of the corporations, if less than one percent of cd buyers can get at the information the situation becomes much easier to control.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
-
Prologue
The author goes on to talk about this wonderful app, BearShare, that created a whole content network. The problem is that he's wrong; the network is Gnutella, and Bearshare is just one of it's clients. The author makes that same mistake many times over in his work. He also states that people can download free tracking tools, like Traceroute and Sniffer. Traceroute is part of the TCP/IP stack, everybody's got it damn near, comes with TCP/IP! There IS no app called `Sniffer` -- there are apps that *are* sniffers, they're a class of product.
I was pissed off to begin with that this dick decided to write about what was and was not possible on the net without having a firm understanding of the technology.. but his conclusions bothered me even more.
-
Myth 1: The internet is too international to be controlled
His refutation states that small countries often don't have the data pipes necessary to handle the kinds of traffic that Napster was capable of. This is a fine point but it mistakes reality. The internet isn't about having a central storing place for illegal media, it's about decentralization and distribution. If one off-shore spot has something that you can lay your hands on, and then you give it to someone else, who gives it to someone else, you've effectively perpetuated the free flow of that information or media. Theft, piracy, whatever - I'm not talking moral implications here, I'm strictly refuting this idiot's arguments.
There doesn't have to be a huge high-speed network where we can get things. There needs only be one spot to do it, someplace. And it can be slow. After that we'll pass media on disks and CDROMs if we have to, just like we did back in the BBS days. Offshore depots will provide the software and music; stateside servers, with hidden existances and secured access, will spread the content throughout the US. It'll work just like the old speakeasys did, and if this man thinks such a system impractical, it's only because he never BBS'd in his life. I haven't paid for software since 1994 or so. The web wasn't living until Netscape 3 was released -- in 1996. So where'd I get my pirated software, with no Internet to leverage?
The author then makes a second refutation where he states that there are laws that will allow a country to prosecute a website for violating it's internal laws if that site can be accessed by the country in question. Thus, imagine a nation where kiddie porn's legal. If someone in the US is capable of accessing their site, they can be sued under US law, and potentially imprisoned.
That's cute and impractical to implement and will never work, because what happens in China, where sites promoting democracy are blocked by the government? All they need do is turn off their blocking, and they can begin imprisoning US citizens who post pro-democracy websites and don't secure them so that chinese viewers can't reach them.
This kind of treaty requires ratification and international agreements to have any impact at all. Past that, it's a phantom, a smokescreen. Since buy-in of that magnitude would create *hairy* international incidents related to political websites, I don't think it will ever come to pass. The author's grasping at straws. Sorry.
-
Myth 2: The net is too interconnected to control
His refutation starts out by stating that Gnutella is no longer decentralized and is reliant on big reflector clusters and backbone systems. That's bullshit. Those are extensions to Gnutella. The system itself will still operate so long as two machines out there can find one another, through any means. The bells and whistles just make it a nicer place to work, but they are by no means requisite for Gnutella's ongoing operations.
Next, he skips into claiming that Gnutella can't handle it's traffic. Look, I'm sorry if you're still stuck on a 56k modem. Too bad. Stop trying to pirate 640M ISOs; maybe then you won't bitch about your connection speeds. People who participate in Gnutella know there's a bandwidth hit that goes with it -- it's the nature of the beast. Oh well. This is not something that kills Gnutella's usefulness.
Next, he goes on to claim that digital file tagging will be the death of these apps, which is also bullshit, because for every tag they create, we find a way around it. Big deal. This bitch is acting as a mouthpiece for all things DMCA.
-
Myth 3: The net is too filled with hackers to control
I love how this prick leads off with an example - SDMI being snapped into bits - and then tries to contradict himself. He goes on and on about how hardware modifications will be the death of all forms of piracy, specifically with regards to music.
I laugh at his ignorance.
First off, if people want to copy things, they simply won't buy hardware that lacks that capability. I won't purchase a CDROM that obeys Macrovision's laws. I bought a DVD player that I could turn off Macrovision and Regional Encoding on. That's the funny thing about how alternatives work in a capitalist society; if you have money, alternatives will appear for you.
Let me give a perfect example of a case where hardware copy protection was the de facto standard, and it failed. I'm referring to the Sony Playstation. While the CDROMs used in a Playstation were nonstandard, it was relatively trivial to burn an ISO image of the disc and thereby make duplicate after duplicate with nary a concern. The real problem was that a Playstation refused to play burned CDs.
Well, clever hardware hackers created a device known as the Mod Chip. You spent $20 for one, cracked open your Playstation's case, and followed the printed instructions to solder the chip onto the board. Ta da! Now your Playstation can handle burned games.
Hardware modifications are no less likely to propogate than software ones are. They're less likely to be undertaken by those not committed to piracy, but if people want free music (and want to scream *FUCK THE RIAA* in bold style), they will resort to more drastic measures than bitching and/or whining a lot about the unfairness of it all.
This author mistakes the commitment of digital libertarians. We will keep the internet free by any means necessary.
But this time, no corporations, OK? A network of computers run by free, independent people might actually be able to retain most of its freedom for a little while longer...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Not only that but an information war waged by a goverment of a country with a free press has to be careful not to tread on that press. There's nothing like a free speach crack down to publisize an issue.
I think part of the reason is we're mourning the loss of Internet as a place of exploration, where you can be a commando, a spy, Robin Hood, the President, and an accomplished student of the arts of net all at once. If this is really true, then we should be trying to preserve the feeling of the place, without trying to disobey laws just because they're there.
I couldn't agree more with the author - we should be proactive instead of whiny. Time join EFF, join someone, anyone, rather than just posting 30000 insipid comments to bulletin board.
The comments on gnutella hackers creating cache servers to speed things up is a point well made by the article. He concedes the point that hackers will always find a way to hack a systems to their own needs, whether it be software or hardware. The important part is that if the RIAA keeps a server or a company in its sights, then the fight is not over. As long as they can threaten an ISP with a lawsuit for allowing MP3s to pass over their network, then the fight is not over. I have seen posts that more or less read, "if they block napster, i will find another way." I don't doubt that you will, but I DO DOUBT that Joe in accounting will. Joe was downloading 5-10MB of MP3s a day off of Napster, but since it was blocked, he has not taken the time to find another way. RIAA also doubts that Joe will. They don't have to stop ALL MP3 trading to claim victory, they only have to stop MOST of it.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Cool. So now, your speakers are a "circumvention device" ;)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The international nature of the Internet is really just a red herring. The real important point is the 'net is too hetrogenous to control. Too many different protocols, laws and locations are involved. The proof of this is that even though nearly all countries with significan Internet connections consider kiddie-pr0n to be highly illegal, it continues to thrive. If being illegal were enough of a reason for something to disappear wouldn't that be gone by now?
Napster, Gnutella and BearShare all have their flaws. This shows that regulators/authorities will always find a way to shut down any new innovation. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. The only thing that could make the interconnected nature of the Internet meaningless is if somehow it were possible to stop the next version of the program to avoid blocking. Freenet may well have many flaws and may be blocked completely some day, but how long do you think it would be till Freenet2?
The only argument the article addresses that's at all meaningful (hidden away in that secret 3rd page) is that the 'net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This really ends up being the same argument as the other ones. The only way these hackers are not an issue is if the thing they're attacking is attackproof. The only way to make something inaccessible to hackers is to make it inaccessible to everybody. The best that someone protecting something is that they make it so hard it's not worth the while to try. This is possible, but very unlikely.
Back to the subject line. This whole article is about preventing one or more people from getting something they want. One obvious example of this is video games. EA has been publishing computer games for about 20 years now, and in that time I've played cracked EA games on just about every platform, from the C64 to the PS2. Throughout that whole time EA has fought against "pirates", but they just can't stop them.
Right now getting an MP3 of RIAA music is about as easy as using a few POKE and PEEK commands on a C64 to bypass the copy protection of MULE or the Pinball Construction Set. In the future it may well be as hard as getting past the copy protection in Madden 2002 on a Nintendo cartridge. If it's worth it to them, people will do it.
The fact nobody has yet broken into Fort Knox doesn't mean that Fort Knox can't be broken into. It especially doesn't mean the issue of "keeping gold safe" has been solved. It's always just a matter of time.
My 'false hopes' revolve around the fact that I can connect one computer to another, somehow, without what I do being filtered, no matter what. So can anyone else, and so we eventually get the internet.
Pundits can argue all they want that it won't stay that way.. but it will.
Can Jimmy stop Bobby while permitting them to talk about nice safe legal things? Answer: No.
Suppose the penalty for passing bad information is execution. Catch someone and make an example of him. Then the Bobbys will be too scared to pass any bad information around. The Chinese call this "Killing one to scare a hundred."
HACKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE Seriously though, I think that if a large enough group of "hackers" or other "technically inclined individuals" teamed up, in some form of a primitive self-made democratic government the result would be a force to be reckoned with. Until now we have all taken great pride in our uniqueness and at times our anti-social behavior. We isolate ourselves by choice, spending countless hours in front of our comps; just trying to crack the kind of stuff the DCMA cooks up for us. We have been marginally successful, achieving small victory after small victory. But imagine what WE as a unity, would be capable of. And no I am not talking a union here; I am talking a cooperative government. If we teamed up, pitting our skills together, where one can program, another can do hardware hacks. Apart they aren't as powerful, together, they could hack right on through security measures. We need to overcome some of our anti-everything feelings, and begin to work together in an organized fashion, when that happens, there will be no Government, no DCMA, no clever Capitalist, who can stop us.
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
If bandwith is an issue, and the US is legally a business problem, then perhaps businesses could choose other world regions where there is infrastructure, and where they're safe from US legislation.
Software patents are not legal in Europe. It is certainly not going to happen that the "The Hague Treaty" will change that. It is not going to happen that the US will extend their own laws to any other part of the world (the UK excepted) via this treaty. The treaty could end democracy and could create a situation of "US law is universal" which won't be accepted (I'd like to refer to the G8 Riots in Genua and the Kyoto treaty in Bonn).
Although Napster and Gnutella have not succeeded (according to the article), the author lacks good arguments why Freenet would fail in their quest, my guess is that it's hard to tell the future.
If they wil tweak the hardware, the news that old PC's are still free will spread like fire. It could mean that old PC's could become more expensive than new ones.
And if authorities just simply shut down the internet... then I fear the uprising of more "Timothy McVeighs", because if governments want a war with their own people, they will certainly get it - that's exactly what's happening nowadays...
Bizar technology?
Nobody needs to go faster than 114 mph. Heck, no one needs to go faster than 75.
All this trashy talk about "freedom" is really about getting free access to pop culture, which is a ball and chain itself, a product of the marketing department of the companies you claim to want to be free from. As soon as the marketing program dictates it, the consumers "freely choose" to buy other crap, or to exchange it illegally.
The real opportunity of the internet is that independent producers can distribute their music a a very low cost. Distributing copyrighted music killed Napster, and it will kill any follow-up system.
What will destroy RIAA is a lack of demand for their crappy product, which means ignoring their marketing campaigns. Throw your TV and CD player in the trash and go buy a guitar.
Libertarians support Corporate control you numb-skull. Remember contract law and the EULAs? As long as governments enforce private property and place no checks on its coersive power [see MS and it "voluntary" relations with OEMs] we will have corporate control.
And where does this data eventually end up or does it continue circulating through your computers locked up paranoid encryption hardware? Most of the data we are talking about is eventually let out, like CD music is transformed into sound waves that your ears detect and then tell your brain hey this music sucks.
Even if the data was encrypted all the way to the speakers, you could put a microphone in front of them and record the music that way. Don't worry about loss as most humans can't even detect it. The Video industry was faced with such a threat, VCR to VCR copying. So they put a disrupting signal on the tape but still enterprising individuals (Pirates) made and sold devices that removed the disruption signal.
There is no way in the world they will ever be able to control the data completely, someone will always find a workaround. What these companies fail to understand is once you let the data out, people can do with it as they please. No matter how much encryption, hardware etc they use to protect it. Publishers and pirates have been fighting a technological battle for years and it will continue to go on. It's the fact that the data has to come out of hiding for the consumers to view or listen to it. If it didn't it would have a chance but since it can't it has no chance.
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
Rather, they cater to our consumerist demands and we like it. What's not to like about widespread prosperity the likes of which history has never seen? From a historical standpoint, this capitalist abandon has been going on for a very short time, and I believe that it will not satisfy American sensibilities forever. Just look at how cynical people have become about corporations in general, that is a massive change that has occurred quite rapidly in the last century.
I guess you are right insomuch as you address the failings 'today's society', but honestly I don't see the overall historical trend of more freedom reversing anytime soon. Indeed, many of these problems that you address probably come from too much freedom (for corporations), and will be resolved once people come to a greater consensus about how business should be regulated.
I think the model for the future is a worldwide free market completely separate from government, but with government placing the kind of moral restrictions that the free market does not address (like environmental & union laws). All that really stands in our way is meaningful campaign finance reform. I would like to see a system where money is no longer needed for campaigns. Instead there could be standardized government-sanctioned forums for the candidates to convey their message. Lose the marketing aspect of campaigns and suddenly it becomes about what it should be: the issues.
What you fail to notice is that language is evolutionary. Just because something was right before does not make it so tomorrow. If people use a word one way, *that* becomes the definition... not how it was originally defined
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
is REALLY for... blasting pirate satellites out of orbit ;-)
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
So... you were given a number at birth? I wasn't. In fact I was never forced to have an ID number. I do currently have a number of numbers that uniquely identify me or my possessions, but certainly no supreme ID tag. When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number. But rarely do I need that number except when dealing with such an above-the-board job.
You talk about what happens when I decide to fight. I'll tell you something -- I'm fighting already. And the government isn't going to have much luck disarming me. See, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can actually take on the government through physical violence. My weapon is my mind.
If you have a bank account, you have an account number. If you have a computer it has a serial number (and you as the owner can be identified by that). If you have a job you probably have a SSN/SIN. Does anybody ask me for any of those numbers when I go buy a pack of gum? What about when I travel across the country? Nope. Having a number of numeric IDs doesn't mean I was assigned a number at birth, and certainly doesn't give it that ominous feel you talked about. Don't let numbers scare you so much. Despite all these numbers we have, we still have more freedom than the numberless slaves did, or than the peasants of the middle ages. It's not the number that's dangerous -- it's how it's used, and until you can convince me that big brother is tracking my every bubble-gum purchase I'm not going to worry.
Imagine this scenario:
Officer: "ON THE GROUND TERRORIST!!" Officer 2: "HE HAS A GUN!!" Officer: "Damn armed terrorists"
Don't you think that's a wee bit more likely than being shot for being lippy?
This article breaks down into the following:
Laws can be whatever governments and their corporate sponsors want them to be.
Any corporate body will prosecute whomever is easiest, closest, most convenient to prosecute.
Any attempt to circumvent that will marginalize you.
Let's think about that for a moment. Laws can be made to do whatever the people who paid the government to create them, what then to do. True enough, with the stroke of a pen Disney can write a check to get a law passed making it illegal to say the phrase "Mickey Mouse" without flipping a quarter to Michael Eisner. I don't see the relevance of that. That is precisely what brought us to this point - the OVERREACHING of music, video and other companies to put a lock on every last bit. So? How has that prevented at least the technology to unwind that so far?
Next, Our corporate masters can go after whatever is easiest to bite. Nothing new there. If you can't sue the company owner then sue the service provider or the electric company that powers the site or the guy who brings the pizzas. Make it so difficult to do business that they fold of their own 'volition'. So it's gunboat diplomacy. I get it. But that is the xenophobic fallacy of 'they can never build it better than us'. Who's to say the mercurial powers of the PRC wouldn't be willing to turn a blind eye to someting that weakens the US supremacy in intellectual property? Can you say industrial espionage? This is precisely where companies like MS lose billions in bootleg CD's for example so how is digital music and movies any different?
The last point is really hubris. You can't fight city hall. Maybe not. Maybe all you have to do is burn it down.
Whether information is relatively free or not depends on the intent and focused efforts of ourselves. If we believe that some or all types of information need to be free and open to increase the well-being of ourselves and others then we need to lobby, demonstrate, create and spread memes and so on to that effect. The article makes the good point that information does not inherently want to be free and the internet will not inherently guarantee it is free. It leaves open the question of whether we the people want it to be free and what we can do about it if we do.
This article is crap. Anybody who can talk like that obviously has not been around long enough. This guy was clearly a low-end journalist looking for some hits. Traceroute? Sniffer? Oh NO!!! He actually believed that he was finding out information with those tools? Big deal. I especially liked where he talked about these companies getting together to design technology that won't allow files to be played on your machine unless they're coded correctly. Bah! Garbage! When will these useless newbies get it? Yes, there may be regulation, but there will never be total control. Down with FUD!!!
"There is no spoon"
Information is *not* free (as in beer). There is always a cost involed in gathering it and publishing it even if it's only somebody else's time.
If I expend money, time and effort in writing a book, recording music, writing a computer program etc, why shouldn't I expect other people to give me something in return for using it? Of course if I choose to give it away for free, then that's fine, but it's *my* decision, not yours.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
As Robert Cringley pointed out: M$ would say: I will save your day! I will eliminate anonymous surfing and all things in the net will be completely identifiable. All your info are belong to me! Har har har
However, here is the rebuttal:
1. Myth #1: The Internet Is Too International to Be Controlled.
He says everything is sniffable through tracerouter and sniffer.
Rebuttal: That's true. What about if you are connected through firewall that will translate your address. I doubt that tracerouter or sniffer would be able to do their job properly.
He says the privacy international law will sooner or later be ratified in every country.
That's true. However, for software sharing: Not all country accept the idea of software patents. See how Europe rejects it. Even more, countries in Asia or other developing country saw this as a tool to hinder them to acquire technology. See how pirated softwares are floating down there (>90%). Thus, those government will half-heartedly fight sofware piracy.
For music/video sharing: Especially in poor countries, they have no broadband connection. Thus, it is rather pointless downloading megs of movies/songs meanwhile there are lots of pirated CDs/videos sold freely in cheap price (mostly about $3). Anyone who have visited Indonesia, Hongkong and Malaysia know that. So, the government effort to curbing the piracy on the net would be pretty much futile.
Myth #2: The Net Is Too Interconnected to Control
He says: the claims for peer-to-peer's uncontrollability don't take into consideration how computers interact in the real world; a network that is absolutely decentralized is also absolutely dysfunctional.
Hmm... that's true, especially for the Net, we have some DNS "authority". However this authoritarian approach does not restrict the few "access provider" as you said in Gnutella case. Let's say you shut down the "prominent ones" in the so called hierarchy. You still cannot stop anyone to build another "service provider". Right? See the Verisign and ICANN case. Moreover, if the top level node in the hierarchy is shut down, it doesn't mean that there is no other way to reconnect the "lost node" since the nodes are redundantly interconnected.
Your argument in slow request is not an issue. Eventhough the broadband speed is not helping (your claim), I am sure that the speed of these lies on how speedily the routing algorithm performs. AFAIK, those file sharing programs just employs flooding technique, which is simple to implement, but very slow. IF some people come up with a smarter version, it would be the "doomsday" for "censorarian". Even more if the routing algorithm is designed to be "self healing"
Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
You said: Identification System will cure this.
It's true. But: Nobody can stop anyone from spoofing their identification. Even the identification scheme itself can be broken. Anyone have heard how hackers cracked WinXP WPA? That's a preliminary effort _before_ the product was shipped.
Hardware identification method? You mean NIC address is used for identification? Wahahah... even those 15-year-old hacker can do MAC address spoofing.
Moreover, it needs the whole world to cooperate to do non-anonymous internet access to be able to block those "libertarians". It's hard, if not impossible. Not all countries will comply. Then, the non-compliant countries will be blocked from the rest of the internet? Simply infeasible... unless the TCP/MS scheme by Cringley really worked as described...
#include<This rebuttal is not perfect.h>
#include<IANAL.h>
#include<Just my 2c.h>
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Cars are already speed governed to not go faster than a certain speed - even though they have the horsepower to do it.
You try to go faster and it just won't - it cuts back the throttle for you.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The United State Supreme Court has routinely found in favor of free speech when the restrictions against speech were chilling to other speech. A law targeted against porn, but which affected medical discussion would typically be found to be "over-broad" and stricken by the courts.
A treaty like this, however, is more than overbroad, it's overboard. In a questionable justifed attempt to make laws enforceable internationally, this treaty would quell Constitutionally-protected speech because even though it's protected within our borders, you'd be prosecuted on your first step onto foreign land. Why would you speak (or publish on the internet) if you'd get arrested when you traveled abroad? (The similarities to the Skylarov case are very much in mind here.
I don't mind too much if corporations want to lock their customers into "their" internet, and I don't care if the government attempt to regulate because they'll fail for a variety of reasons. I'm much more concerned about the rights issues. While treaties like this won't kill the internet(no, there's no immenient demise of the internet), but it will surely make it a less interesting place.
-sk
Articles like this help to emphisize the points made in the story/article. Interestingly, the slashdot article meantions hardware changes as a way to protect copyrighted materials without the possibility of copying. I should mention that this overlooks a major point-- hardware has to give the majority of choice up to the software, and anything that completely prevents digital copying of works must by necessity interfere with many innocuous activities without offering complete security (suppose I rip music from an encripted CD, decrypt it, pass it to another process through a named pipe, encode it in another format, and write it to disk. Is the hardware going to measure everything that the kernel does?)
THe only way around this is, IMO, to outlaw open source kernels (a possibility mentioned in The Right to Read). I don't think that this is a current possibility. The other possibility is to prevent CDROM drives from reading audio CDs. That is not going to happen soon either.
The slashdotted article states:"I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you."
This statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
Stallman seems to indicate that the DMCA poses a significant threat to free debuggers (which could be used to circumvent copy protections) and free kernels, which could also be used to circumvent protections.
We need to stand together supporting the right to read.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It describes, what corporations and governments want or doing in their attempts to control the Internet, but we know this already. The problem is, it doesn't contain any plausible reasons why those attempts can possibly be successful.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's primero you stupid fuck
sorry, you lose
While IPv6 does support long ping times, I don't thing your people would put up 0.238745 s to there ping time per hop!
Fire off satellites into the skies, using a collaboration of various phreaks and hax0r types as well as disgruntled rocket engineers and freethinkers. Put em in geostationary orbit. Sell send/receive dishes to send/receive IPv6 (sp?) over the airwaves.
Try backhoe cutting that connection, or suing space.
Of course, the US government could shoot em all down, but... it appears to me to be the only way to avoid the legal hassles...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
(The moderation on that fp was lightning fast BTW, I wonder if there's some sort of automation to it?)
...with the author's conclusion that peer-to-peer networks can be "fenced in." Yes, AOL/MSN/Earthlink can block access to known Bearshare backbone servers, and yes that may be detrimental to the speed of those users searches. However, that doesn't cut them completely off. It seems to me that this would simply slow down searches (forcing them to move at the speed of the slowest user connected) but not completely remove all functionality. Peer-to-peer advocates seem to have the stronger side of this right now, but the packet headers do show promise on the side of controlling things.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
My God, that is naive.
Most individual countries are passing their own restrictive laws, many of which have international consequences. Most recently, French law was able to force Yahoo to do its bidding.
There are central international organization today and more are still forming. WIPO the Hague convention, just to name a couple. Didn't you read the article?
Servers in space????? My God, you are a 1337 h4x0r. I bet you are the only one with their own launch facility.
Come on man, READ the article. You don't have to agree with all of it but, much of it is irrefutable. It has already happened.
Unfortunately, The Man still needs to fight crime (and, if he tried not to, how the heck would he explain this to his sometimes-boss, The People?), hence, Carnivore, developed by the FBI, something that we probably find far more unappetizing than a community-built standard.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.
The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.
Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.
Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.
The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.
The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?
This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.
This very same topic was covered in the Economist. (As an aside- this just reaffirms my belief that the media moves as a pack, or a mob of humans. Very often, stories I see in some places (the NY Times for example) show up later in other newspapers, then radio and TV.) http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm? Story_ID=730089
The Internet's new borders
Aug 9th 2001
'Geographical lines and locations are increasingly being imposed on the Internet. Is this good or bad?'
I think this paper outlines very important ideas that all geeks (particularly network engineers) shoudl keep in mind.
My argument is that with the kind of global communication we have today, the will of the people can no longer be subdued. While it is true that if we become complacent in our rich American lives then government and corporations can herd us into a small box with a bright light, it is also true that repression leads to revolution.
To prevent government and corporations from gaining a stranglehold on the Internet, I think steps should be taken to limit their control.
First off it would be nice to see some kind of non-profit/publicly owned organization building high capacity networks so that large telecoms can't suddenly control us through control of the backbone.
But I think the main thing is education. As geeks we are naturally drawn to knowledge and critical thinking, but not always to teaching and communication. I think it is our duty to let the people around us (particularly those making decisions) about potential damages to our freedom.
Big corporations and governments wield a lot of power, and it can be scary, but remember that all power comes from the people, and even people in big corporations are mostly individuals who value their freedom.
No no no, he's a Jew. Get that fucker into the ovens.
Now yer talkin' !
There will never be a way to restrict the access of information totally, a single Slashdot brainstorming session could come up with enough bizarre hacks to keep us safe for quite a while. What has freaked the companies out is how easy it is for the common person to gain access to copyrighted materials. And that's exactly how far things are going to be pushed; when the computers people buy in stores can't be made to easily access copyrighted materials, the companies will breath a collective sigh of relief and relax. We'll have burrowed tunnels through whatever protection mechanism that's in place but no one will really care.
They could at least try buying us off with some beads and blankets!
I may be a pool man, but I am f@#*&ng Jon Bon Jovi's pool man!!!
Internet service providers can always pull the plug?treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services.
...at which point Freenet will start tunneling through http, pop3, ftp, ssh, and any other common protocol. If ISPs start peeking at specific packets, Freenet will start using SSL.
And like i mentioned in an earlier comment, why would ISPs do this? MP3s and porn are far and away the most popular uses for the Internet today, according to a study i just made up. It would be like making cars that don't go over 55 or "tobacco water pipes" that only work with tobacco.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
hmmm, ill let you know
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Corporate control of the net will happen, because that's the only thing that can happen in today's world. Sure, it would be nice if netizens got some of those silly myths the author talks about out of their heads and adopted a more realistic attitude, but it's not like that would do anything to prevent corporate control from setting in any way. You can't prevent it -- that's the real truism of the net.
Free Hans!
As in "Rock Me Amadeus" Falco? Since when is he credentialed to judge the future of the Internet?
While we've been focusing on rights language, and discussions of what should be, WIPO, with the support of many old-economy publishers have begun to implement the legal constructs which will allow prosecution for net based offenses, related to intellectual property. The first evidence of this in the US was the DMCA, but for the rest of the story, read the WIPO whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (available in M$ word format and PDF format). It's a vary interesting read.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
The fact that he is able to write a document about regulating the web shows that it is not possible to regulate the web :-)
bash$
This article holds no water if any of the three myths are actually true - and surprise, there are problems with all 3 myths, particularly numbers 2 and 3.
The assumption that you need central servers, or identifiable traffic in order to run an efficient decentralized file sharing network is just plain wrong. The fact that something hasn't been done yet does not mean it can't be accomplished, you know. FreeNet itself is proof of concept that you can have a completely distributed network where no one node knows the whole story. As a programmer I see no reason why you couldn't design a system with traffic indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN, with adequate performance, that was completely decentralized.
I'm surprised at how well written this article is. There are bound to be opposing views on any subject, and I guess it's a good thing that this isn't filled with more FUD or pro-media propaganda. But as it goes, the arguments in this article just don't work. If you had a file-sharing network where you could publish anything, available to anyone at a high speed, how could you justify to the courts that you wanted it shut down? Does the availability of copyrighted material outweigh the overall benefit of the system? Of course not! As the article even says, in order to shut that kind of network down, you'd have to turn off the Internet.
Mighty Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get
Have you ever bee close to tragedy
Or been close to folks who have?
Have you ever felt a pain so powerful
So heavy you collapse?
I've never had to knock on wood
But I know someone who has
Which makes me wonder if I could
It makes me wonder if I've never had to knock on wood
And I'm glad I haven't yet
Because I'm sure it isn't good
That's the impression that I get
Have you ever had the odds stacked up so high
You need a strength most don't possess?
Or has it ever come down to do or die
You've got to rise above the rest?
I've never had to knock on wood
But I know someone who has
Which makes me wonder if I could
It makes me wonder if I've never had to knock on wood
And I'm glad I haven't yet
Because I'm sure it isn't good
That's the impression that I get
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass
Look at the tested and think there but for the grace go I
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out
I've never had to knock on wood
But I know someone who has
Which makes me wonder if I could
It makes me wonder if I've never had to knock on wood
And I'm glad I haven't yet
Because I'm sure it isn't good
That's the impression that I get
moron. everybody knows the correct spelling of 'first' in spanish is 'cuatro'
A quote in the article says, "The Internet is unstoppable! The flow of data can never be blocked". While I'm sure that the Internet, as it is now can be censored and thus, basically stopped (just look at the Great Firewall of China), the second sentence is the greatest truth - the flow of data can never be blocked. This is as true now as it was when the Nazi's publically burned books in 1933. The model of the internet routing around censorship is taken from real life - if you stop the net, we'll just find another way of spreading our information and letting the data flow. Information is ammunition, and the people will /never/ let that be taken away from them.
anyone who's been following the news for longer than a day or two realizes that the internet is moving towards regulation (whether we like it or not). i just hope it won't become so regulated that it's unusable. a lot of this article is just review, pointing out conclusions that most of us have already come to.
jinkusu
is that supposed to be a joke?
(Score: -1, Vaugely Concealed Anarchist Rant)
> When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number.
There is NO law that requires a person to have a SSN/SIN.
And yes, you CAN work,live,travel without one.
information and freedom are both hard-fought for and always have been. there will always be those trying to manipulate either or both.
so if you live in china/ singapore/ parts of the arab world, or are behind the firewalls of @home or timewarneraohell then your content is not going to reflect the net 100%: you will have additional content or less...
FUDmuckers will scaremonger up images of pr0n, spamscams, evil hackers, and fantastical virii and worms to create "gated communities" against the inner city of content that is the web...
none of this is new, the world will survive, life will go on... the only pity is the unborn who might never know the exciting times we have lived through with the emerging web in the twilight of the 20th century... if these times are filtered through a future lens of hype and disinformation, so be it... maybe someone will take a bunch of hard disks and make a time capsule, a snapshot of the net as it is today, right now, and some of these exciting times will live on.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You should really get in sync with that benevolent libertarian party you appear to be so enamored with.
their stance on property rights
I've heard the libertarian talking heads on the subject, they see us as theives and are all in favor of cracking down on intellectual property theft.
Honestly, I don't know what a libertarian government would do about it, but I would imagine you would see some responce. You see I'm a former libertarian. I came around when I realized that the corporations that prop up the government are more dangerous than that government.
Libertarians all read too much Ayn Rand and lionize the great capitalists. I'm pretty much a capitalist. I've got a small business, I'd like to see it bigger and better. The problem is when something grows beyond a man trying to make his money and becomes this huge corporate monster beyond the control of any rationale for behavior other than making a profit by any means necessary.
Libertarians want to extend the freedom from government intervention to entity's that want to deprive me of my freedoms. The corporations that have grown up are fully capable of taking choices away from me that I want to make. They have formed cartels that are not able to be countered with free market forces (eg. the dvd consortium, WIPA, the nest of whores that surrounds and makes up microsoft). I'm sort of without a party now. Is there some party in the US that is pro-personal liberty and in favor of strong controls on business past a certain size?
You know this one always bothered me. The whole CD-ROM thing is due for a rethink. How about connecting the laser and read head right to the machine you have now. Central Point Software (now swallowed by Microsoft...) had an option board that could directly control a floppy drive. Pretty cool unit. Gave the user proper control over the floppy disk. You could read mac disks and make backups of those fragile key disks required to make some programs run. That board also assisted in data recovery from damaged disks.
Early CPUs were probably not fast enough to make good use of a directly controlled CD writer, but the CPUs of today are.
The same thing could be done with DVD.
Why would someone want to do that? I can think of many good uses for this sort of thing.
1. Improved reading of error ridden media.
2. Reading of all CD-ROM formats. SGI EFS formatted discs do not work in a pretty large number of consumer CD-ROMS because their firmware was not written with alternate block sizes in mind.
3. Backups. This is still legal even with the DMCA. Given the high cost and limited release cycles of many types of media this concerns me. Bought a game? Want to play it 10 years from now? What if the media is not playable then? I have games written in 1979 for the Atari 2600 that are still playable on todays hardware. There is no reason this should not continue.
4. Enhanced formats. Users could come up with their own way of using the disc. Maybe they want more space, or perhaps greater resistance to errors. These would be valid choices and a percentage of users would be interested in them.
There are others I am sure, but one thing is sure. Opening up a CD-ROM and driving it yourself is no different from opening your car and making some choices as to what happens under the hood.
Pretty sure that anyone can go to a Radio Shack and get the interface parts required to do this sort of thing. If the current trends continue, particularly with Audio CD's then I just might consider it.
Yeah, I know it is a 'my tech is better than your lawyer' sort of thing. Sue me.
We need advocacy on our side. How can we get this done? Joe Q public has to be able to understand a point like the one I made above. Tell them they can't modify their car and they go nuts! Why is this so hard?
Blogging because I can...
Taken from an earlier post:
"
Here's a "simple" challenge for you. Send a single email to someone outside the USA, say for example in Europe, *knowing* that that email is NOT going through an FBI Carnivore box along its way.
"
The protection lies of course only in the legality of the methods by which the information was obtained. Entrapment and all that. If my personal letter is read on its way through the post office, what then? Does someone burn for that? I should think so, after all, prying into my personal life without my permission is essentially walking in the front door of my home and wandering around as i stand there protesting, taking pictures of this and that.
I would also like to postulate. Look around you. Do you see a single item in your home that you could not manually rip apart and document and then share with others? How is this any different from reverse-engineering? How do you learn how something is done (at any stage of your life) if you can't see it happening?
I fear the day when the net is "under control". The net is the last bastion of freedom. Everywhere else we are already slaves. Every one of us is probably a corporate tool, whether you have realized it or not. Check your clothing. Do you see a large logo emblazoned proudly across it? Advertising. And you paid them for it.
What do you do when the government has become the tool of corporations, and the corporations are under the control of a small group of the elite?
It is preposterous to say that "information wants to be free". Information is inanimate data, or no value except to those that care about it. This value is of course completely, utterly relative. Information has precisely zero value, and any value assigned is meaningless except to the person by which it was assigned.
As I look around me I see developing the great reaping of the crop sown way back when this country was founded. This country's roots have always been a joke, and I firmly believe that everyone knows this, they simply cannot envision a working alternative. Think of how this country began. Essentially, it began the same way it is now. A small, unelected group of slaveowners sated the ignorant masses with a document that was really just a lot of nonsense and given contradiction, full of tenets that made no sense then and make no sense now, but have stratified into unquestionable, immutable tradition. Government is like religion. Once set, it never changes. The crap we see shuffling around is the same exact crap that was shuffled around two hundred years ago. Government is, and was, a business, and has today become nothing more than an interest of large corporations.
I agree with what was said by another poster.
"Don't you think a better solution would be to work to develop a legal/government system that wouldn't be able to take away freedoms in the first place?"
This is the only workable solution. We have the numbers, after all, this is a democratic country (sort of), or at least i guarantee it would become one if suddenly one hundred million people showed up in our nation's capital demanding change. I have no doubt that the lyrics of Propagandhi's song "Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes" will hold true eventually, but hopefully the US will last at least until a better alternative makes itself available. Until then, stop whining and complaining, go enact some legislation to take back your rights!
Forget hacking out solutions, hiding behind the ridiculous pretense of "information wants to be free" and do what you can within the confines of the existing legal system. The system may be screwed, but it can be set right. Once it is set right, then we can start the real work of taking back our liberty, taking multinationals to the woodshed, and generally making things work the way the majority of citizens obviously want them to be, but seem to be too confused to bring about.
Jonathan Clarke
Everyone on slashdot has a journal.
LOL! I don't have any moderator points, but if I did, that would be way up! Thanks for making me laugh!
Allegedly!?!
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The article mentions that companies that choose to operate out of remote countries (such as Swaptor) are screwed for one major reason: they can't get good Internet connections.
I've always been a little wary of projects to wire the third world. I'm a firm believer that a country needs to eat before it needs to surf-- fat people before fat pipes, right? Wiring Somalia to give a 100 Mbps link to starving kids has always struck me as a little absurd.
But this does possibly create a new motivation to wire up third-world countries with developing governments. Multiple OC-192 connections to a small country with a generally friendly government (of course, friendly in this case probably means low taxes and minimal regulation). Software development companies and service providers would move in and help kick-start the nation's economy.
Then again, these countries could be easily enough shut off the Internet by a cut fiber.
Oh well. Worth a try.
You need to do some reading about Macrovision's latest abomination. It aims to do just that.
There will, of course, be people who crack these protections. But the important thing is the the vast majority of lusers won't know it -- all they'll know is that it won't rip (or even play) when they put it in their CD-ROM drive. So they'll stop putting audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives.
Bingo: the herds have shifted.
Rot-13 my address to e-mail me.
"So I hurry back to little earth / For another life another birth"
We do have a friend or two in high places.
The "it's inevitable" argument is the one used by socialists when they're trying to disarm opponents. Odd to see it being used here, both because of the context and because it's been so thoroughly discredited.
Even if the control freaks can overcome the technical obsticals, the only way they can get sustainable legal support (anyone wanna bet on the DMCA being around in full force in 5 years?) is by convincing the voting public that they want the restrictions, and while that's relatively easy for the pollution-control devices the TR author cites, it's a lot harder to come up with a compelling argument for 'net controls. The odds against figuring out both the technical and legal sides are in freedom's favor.
Ideas are special because, in most cases, it costs you nothing to share your thoughts with me. The internet however has inherent costs from electricity, infrastructure and support. It costs little in effort or energy for me to make copies of files on my computer, but once you start making a few million copies, those costs will add up.
More important at this moment in time, however is the issue of intellectual property. Back in Jefferson's day, the US notion of intellectual property was born because of the belief that if your original idea can make you money then, you ought to get the first shot at that wealth. Similarly with art and music, people want to be paid for original creations made with their talents and skills. The whole purpose was to spur on creativity and invention by giving a limited monopoly to the inventor.
Ultimately many people will fight tooth and nail to try and control the internet as long as they think that the way people are using it is costing them money!
I feel certain the number of regulations will increase. Perhaps it will only be a patchwork of different national government rules, but this will still stunt the growth and diversity of the net and certainly impact users in the countries where laws get passed. If our goal as a community is the free exchange of information and digital data then several things are going to need to happen.
- We need durable, low cost, low maintainence infrastructure to power the network.
- We need dirt cheap energy, in large amounts, to keep the whole thing running and power all our nifty toys.
- We need a paradigm shift in how we think about and compensate intellectual property. Art, music, and software which are freely reproducible may have to be subsidized on a governmental level to ensure its continued existence.
Personally I fear that it will turn out to be easier to dramatically (though probably not totally) clamp down on the exchange of information than to create a world where the value of a thing is measured more by it's mere existence than the number of copies that have been made.Simply put, the ISPs, Music Industry and Software companies exist because ultimately they expect to make money. As long as money is important in this world, anything which is free will fail without other means of support and anyone who can sell it will wish it wasn't free.
Well one could hack one's TCP stack so an initial SYN-ACK with certain fields set a certain way is treated as a normal SYN packet. That blasts a hole in the not allowing incoming packets filter. Of course, they can filter out that hack, etc. As was said in another post, they have to REACT, and would be one step (or more) behind.
What they could do, is change the rules. Right now things are permitted unless prohibited. If the laws were changed so that things were by default prohibited, instead of permitted, and made it illegal (preferrable as a felony - heck, then they could eventually take away the right of a felon to be on the net too), and made it illegal for hardware or software to exist that doesn't enofrce that, they they could win.
THey could require you pay the gov't a $10M license to provide content, and revoke licenses from any "troublesome" sites (so rich "eccentrics" would not be a threat).
Put enough people in jail for YEARS of their life, take every thing they own and sell it, and make them felons without the right of self-defense or even to vote (so the politicians can IGNORE them - and their fellow "citizens" will think of them as EVIL UNTRUSTWORTHY CRIMINALS), and people will be scared off and/or neutralized as a threat to the New World Order.
WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS POLITICALLY, NOT JUST TECHNICALLY. IF YOU GET SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR USING FREENET, NO TECHNOLOGY WILL HELP YOU (except a shovel to try to "tunnel" your way out of prison).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The article "addressed" it in a most unsatisfactory way. It used a single anecdotal case (St. Kitts & Nevis) and generalized from that, with no basis, to the entire world. So what if St. Kitts has one primary cable connection? They still have satellite. And other countries may have more connections. It is not going to be very easy to cut off a profitable link because someone within a country isn't playing nice.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
More frightening than the article, is the posts that have followed it. It would appear that none of these posters actually read the article. I know that it is a long, tough, three page read but, try reading it.
While I don't agree with all of the article, it makes a lot of VERY valid points. Many of these points have already come to pass, even if they are not readily noticed. And, that is the point of the whole article.
Many laws and restrictions are already in place and their grip is SLOWLY tightening. No one seems to realize or admit that it is happening but it is.
Look at the immediate past. RIAA, DMCA, WIPO, The Hague Convention, encryption export restrictions(recently eased), Yahoo in France, just to name a FEW.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. The number of laws is increasing daily and the are becoming more stringent every day. Also, the laws are broadening in geographical jurisdiction as countries try to normalize their laws and various international agreements allow laws to cross borders.
Then of course there is the hardware aspect of things, as the article mentioned. The technology it didn't mention though was localization technology. You know, the cool tech that everyone is talking about where, the net knows where you are and provides content specific to your location and likes. You don't think that that same technology won't also be used to track the 1337 h4x0r5 and also restrict the content that you can access?
Don't be naive and ignorant, read the article.
The first assumption is that people will buy the devices, LOL. Ever hear of divX?
Secondley, there will always be hardware available on the market without these protections and the last thing the chip makers want to do now is make something that noboy wants to buy.It looks like the IPDroids only alternative is to make his IP so attractive for the consumer to go through them(lower prices and more convience), instead of going through a p2p system.
Here's a brain teaser. Bobby wants to give Sally the DeCSS source code. Jimmy has absolute control over both of their computers, telephones, and the intervening network. Can Jimmy stop Bobby while permitting them to talk about nice safe legal things?
Answer: No.
Here's why: The only way to stop the transferral of "bad" information is to stop all information. Let's see how it would work in real life.
I think you see where this is going. Bobby will always be able to pass DeCSS off as "safe" traffic. No matter what Jimmy does, Sally will be cracking DVDs in short order. The article brings up some good points, but I think that there's no way to stop the informational tidal wave. Information may not "want to be free", but people do. There will always be a way.
This
- The host country has the same laws as the people seeking to stop the activity.
- The host country will be happy to help the foreigners obtain justice.
- All nations will be willing to target local servers.
- Everyone has the energy and ability to pursue legal action in every corner of the world.
Mann also uses some bogus example where the foreign-hosted server winds up in the US near the RIAA headquarters:Not everyone has a DCMA. Not everyone has the same patent laws. Not everyone has the same laws!
In some cases, being chased by country ``X'' is a badge of honor that grant you protection in country Y. Even when international treaties are signed, it can be nearly impossible for a foreigner to enforce them. Ask anyone who is stuck in an international custody battle how easy it is to obtain justice overseas. Ask anyone who seeking the recovery of stolen property. It is hard enough to asset your rights in a friendly foreign country when dealing with kids or physical objects ... let alone trying to deal with cyber-space objects.
There as a number of nations that would like to become the ``Swiss banking'' center for cyberspace. They see value in shielding cyberspace activity within their country. These locations are competing for such offshore server locations.
Sorry, some might, but not everyone
Well Duh! If you are going to break US laws, you might want to host your stuff outside the US!
Mann also offers some US-centric view that a foreign installation will be sub-standard. He says ``most out-of-the-way places don't have the requisite equipment'':
Sorry Charley, there are a number of out of the way places that have excellent facilities and/or are building them. Why? Because these places have found that beings money into their economy, for one thing! In addition, in terms of connectivity: the exist places where major trans-ocean cables ``come up for air'' on their island that have fantastic connectivity. Because these places that have created cyber-parks and server-farms (see the shielding cyberspace example above).
Perhaps Mann should have said:
Charles Mann's 2nd false argument: Mann brings out a particular peer-to-peer response to Napster. He then shows how its digital traffic signature allows it to be identified, targeted, and stopped.Well if Mann were to use a creditable protocol and service design, his argument won't sound so legitimate! You even acknowledge this fact by talking about an ``up and coming bleeding-edge solution'' has a work-a-round and then dismiss it because it is not ready. Sorry Charley: there are solutions with various levels of sophistication that exist today:
Where TCP/IP traffic hides and tunnels as HTTP or HTTPS protocols.
With true anonymous network activity.
Proxies that convert a TCP/IP connection into a data stream that mimics the entropy signature analysis of another data stream.
Perhaps Mann should have said:
Charles Mann's 3rd false argument: Mann constructs a world where hardware chip ID and built-in copy protection hardware make it impossible for a hacker to do what they want. Mann presents this idea is that hardware can make it impossible for software to do what it wants.Hardware can make it annoying for software. Nevertheless, your argument assumes that:
- The hardware copy protection system cannot be defeated.
- People will only have access to hardware copy protected systems.
- Hackers won't be cleaver enough to defeat the copy protection system.
- End users won't expend effort to get around copy protection schemes.
BTW Mann: In argument #2 you dismissed a potential peer-to-peer work-a-round as not being ready yet. However, in argument #3 you present a future world with lots of hardware copy protection enabled computers. You don't get to play the future-VS-now argument both ways!Look at the clipper. Look at Cell phones. Look at WEP. How many examples does one have to give in order to cast doubt on such schemes?
There is an awful lot of non-copy protected hardware out there already. In addition, if the user is motivated to extract the data, will they not be motivated to buy something on the user market? Won't some manufactures be interested in selling equipment that can be easily modified or configured by the end user to defeat the copy protection? (There are in the cases of DVD and DAT hardware, for example).
Heck, just having a copy protection system is an invitation for someone to try to break it. Its existence alone presents a challenge that some hackers love to tackle.
Just check out the conditions on the Sat TV or Cable TV market. Do you know how many sports fans buy equipment on a neighboring country just to get around local broadcast blackouts?
Perhaps Mann should have said:
Sorry Charley, you present 3 losing arguments that are full of holes. Maybe if you had used something along the lines of the ''should have said'' arguments, you would have presented a more realistic thesis and your arguments would have been stronger. Then again, you would have to have completely re-written your article.
Better luck next time Charley!
chongo (was here)
Even if Freenet does not end up in the crowded graveyard of vaporware, Internet service providers can always pull the plug--treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services.
Uhmn... no. You can only block telnet and Usenet because the service expects a certain port number. Nobody can selectively block packets that may be targeted to any given port without a signature, and an encrypted packet shouldn't contain one.
This, among many other technological faux pas, clearly show the author's lack of internet knowledge, while reporting on it.
Also mentioned is the hardware solution to piracy/information duplication/what have you. The article states that some people may 'rip up their motherboards' to make stuff free again, but that there'd be less music and videos around because of it. Earlier on page one, he said that once you put something on the net, it can be copied infinitely. So which is it? All it takes is one unprotected copy of a document and it's free forever.
And lastly, even with hardware protection, you must be able to view/hear/use the data in question. If you can perceive it, it can be copied, even if it requires more effort than most people would put into it. For instance, most of us wouldn't sit in a theater for 3 hours holding a camcorder to get The Matrix on digibeta... but all it takes is one person to do it, and everyone else "benefits".
FUD, FUD, FUD.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Also, sound, still images, and movies can all be put through an analog stage and then redigitized, which defeats both hardware and software-based digital controls.
Let's also remember that the world would be a worse place, not a better one, if hackers could crack anything. Suppose someone finds a way to factor large integers, thereby making all public-key encryption obsolete. That would be a horrible blow against individual freedom.
Find free books.
Nevis has Cable and Wireless for a provider. Cable and Wireless has an exclusive very long term government sanctioned monopoly on ALL telecommunications. You just try to set up your satellite ground station and see how fast you wind up in JAIL.
Sadly, it's like that throughout much of the Caribbean and Central/South America.
You'd be amazed what's happening outside your little patch of Hicksville
Asking me to join in setting up regulation for the net is like asking me to choose the pattern on the blade that will slit my throat! Refuse Resist Revolt!!!The best participation in this is non-participation!
Gee, what an intelligent statement. I know there are so many providers that drop my telnet traffic.... oh wait, I've never seen that happen, even when I was visiting china.
As far as the "digital signatures" of certain types of traffic. Sure you could block port 6347 or something, but then they'd use a different port. You could analyze every packet to see if it was GNUtella, but a) that would take massive hardware upgrades and b) people would just encapsulate the traffic. Suddenly gnutella will be proxied over HTTP-SSL, and the choice will be either to shut down all e-commerce, or live with it.
Let's burn these bridges when we get to them, There's no need for full-scale paranoia yet.
This statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
It also completely ignores the existence of hardware hackers. Remember how the Playstation wasn't supposed to be able to read copied games?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Unless your a fool you take the cdrom back to the store and get a refund, or better yet a new copy of an unplayable CD and do it all over again. Returns play hell with distributors, BIG TIME. You'll see companies go bankrupt under the deluge of returned merchandise. :)
As long as it is LABELED CD-ROM, IT MUST BE PLAYABLE ON ALL CERTIFIED CD-ROMS
Not that this will stop the inevitable CORP'ing
of the net. For that there is only one answer FREENET. Support FREENET NOW
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You're right, as long as you can connect two computers together, nobody can control what you do on those two computers. Someone else posted that people can start again with BBS's, Fidonet, etc. Great. But remember that those weren't nearly as useful as the Internet is today. The Internet became so valuable because people - normal, non-Slashdot reading, non-hacking people - use it, create content, read content, upload MP3's. If Napster were only used by the Slashdot crowd, it would not have been useful. It was only when thousands of high school and college kids started uploading and sharing all their music that it became valuable. You can always create a music sharing system that's unbreakable, but if corporations can get the ten largest ISPs to block it, it won't get critical mass. That is the point that a lot of people are missing. No matter how good the technical fix, as long as most of the ordinary people on the Internet are controllable, then any behavior can be kept far enough at the margins that it won't ever be a threat.
It seems like a lot of the posters are in denial. The backbones and ISPs can be controlled. The Internet can be controlled. 100% controlled, No, but the vast majority of the Internet can be controlled. Those trying to step outside of the "Law" will have to go to greater lengths to share those files. It may mean having to build your own computer to avoid the limitting hardware. It may mean having to connect via phone to secret BBSs instead of having a fast broadband connection. The article has a point, and the question you should ask is what needs to be done so that the clamps are not too restrictive.
If anything, Napster proved that people are more than willing to profit from the freedom someone else (even a commercial entity designed to make money by actively promoting breaking the law), but they're not in any way willing to defend their new freedom.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Somehow I doubt that the American government, regardless of where the money comes from, wants to become known around the world as the iron curtain of information exchange. Corporations want their profits, but they want their "apple pie" just as badly. Organizations like RIAA whom everyone hates already can take the brunt of shutting down a music exchange service. When it comes to shutting down a heterogenous system of interchange because someone *might* be exchanging materials in violation of copyright, that's the end of the Apple Pie era of corporate relations. Nike will never be the same again.
The networks discussed are a far cry from what's possible in the ultimate scenario. There's nothing about the coordination of these networks that make them unsuited to fully distributed stochastic control processes. You can slow the fabric down, but you can't make it run any slower than a juicy rumour in Washington. The politicos only have to look to their own brutally effective system of ad hoc "information sharing" to see how pointless this is in the end analysis.
The Internet is becoming more regulated; that is a fact. This trend is more than likely to continue. But this article, like so many others, appears to have been written by someone who doesn't understand (at a technical level) what either a computer of the Internet really is. The author picks three arguments which -- he claims -- are the arguments that the Internet cannot be controlled -- and then refutes them. None of these articles ever attempt to technically justify that the Internet can be controlled; in some sense, it cannot -- but it depends what you mean. As long as we have an end-to-end packet transport (aka the Internet), and general-purpose stored-program computers (eg PCs), we can do anything. Throw in a little strong cryptography, and it becomes impossible for anyone to know -- let alone control -- what we choose to do with this infrastructure. It seems implausible to suggest that either the end-to-end network or the computer will cease to exist in the foreseeable future... What is possible, of course, is that either (or both) of these technologies will become less accessible to consumers. General-purpose computers might become expensive specialist items if the mass-market tended towards low-cost dedicated devices that encompassed the popular PC functionality. Imagine a low-cost dedicated word-processor, dedicated email/web terminal, and a games console. Either as three separate devices, or as a single integrated device. All of these things exist, but with the exception of the games console, none has yet been successful. This failure, however, is more to do with price and functionality that with the fundamental idea. If the dedicated appliances were as featureful as their current PC incarnations, and substantially cheaper, then the home PC market would crash. Over time, 90% of PC users would cease to be PC users. Volumes would drop, prices would rise, and 90% of the remainder would not be able to justify the cost of a PC. The other part of the equation is that consumers will over time lose easy access to the end-to-end packet network that is the Internet. This is already starting to happen -- we have ISPs which proxy not just HTTP but also SMTP. They filter incoming access to many services, and perhaps outing access to some, too. Already they are not ISPs in the the pure sense of IP connectivity providers. If this trend continues then, over a period of time, consumer ISPs will cease to be Internet Service Providers, but will become Information Serivice Providers. You will continue to talk to your ISP with IP, but you will no longer be connecting to the Internet. You'll still be able to surf the web, send e-mail, watch streaming video, but you won't -- truly -- be connecting to the Internet. The point is that whilst both the computer and the Internet might cease to be consumer items in the pure forms, they will continue to exist, just as they did long before most consumers had access to them. The consequences of this could be quite interesting -- general purpose computers and end-to-end packet transport might once again be limited to computer-science departments and the research departments of IT-oriented commercial enterprises. The wheel would have turned full circle....
He goes on to talk about comments by the creator of BearShare:
This statement is so naive, it makes the rest of the article that descends from this notion nearly irrelevant. We've already seen how transparent the "open process of democracy" is. ICANN is the poster child for this trend. Everyone who cares about these issues already knows the Corps want to own the whole thing. This writer seems to have just discovered that an awful lot of ugliness happens because of decisions made in smoke-filled boardrooms. Gilmore, Falco, EMS and all the rest have known this for a very long time, indeed, knowning this has been going on for the entire history of the Internet is evidence that the "information wants to be free" dogma is more than a leap of faith.I have yet to see any lasting commercial success for the "universal library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert hall" crowd. Maybe it will happen. Maybe we'll all be flying around Blade Runner-style in hovercars, too.
Right. What is much more likely, in my view, is that the dream (nightmare?) of the "universal library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert hall" Internet, is overblown and unrealistic, given the facts about the way the Internet operates. It's much more likely that the universal-whatever network will be a private corporate owned and operated network, not the Internet as we know it, which will continue to exist in parallel.
Edith Keeler Must Die
The same rules exist all over the place. Plenty of satellite dishes. Easy to hide. Radio waves != visual spectrum waves. Camouflage therefore trivially feasible.
Granted, I've only worked on networking projects on 5 continents so far, so I've plenty to learn, but where exactly is Hicksville?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Sony has been continually adding hardware guards on the playstation models against playing non-sony discs. Time and time again, multiple chipping countermeasures have been cheap and plentiful, and there are lots of folk more than willing to do the soldering work for you for a minimal fee.
The hu-card hackers seem to be holding their own against hardware protection measures.
If anything, sometimes hardware protection schemes can be *more* vulnerable - at least software schemes can be upgraded. When you pick a hardware lock, it's picked forever!
He does make some good points, and this is good stuff to think about - definitely not something you want to dismiss out of hand. However, I think all of the points are refutable from many angles. Here's my take:
#1 - The Internet is Too International to Be Controlled
Actually, I think it's more than the international issues can keep things tied up in red tape long enough that we can do whatever we want in the meantime. Things on the Internet happen in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, and sometimes days; in terms of International law, they happen in terms of years and decades. By the time law is adapted to new technologies, those technologies are long since past the "new" stage and well on to the "outdated" stage, with other technologies to replace them. Law will never be able to keep up.
#2 - The Net is too Interconnected to Control
He focuses mainly on two points: that true peer-to-peer sharing is still to inefficient as networks get large, and that most Internet users run off of a few major networks (AOL, Earthlink, MSN). For the first point - yes that's true, but it's just technological hurdle. Such things, as we all well know, are much easier to solve than matters of law, and no doubt true peer-to-peer networks will be "good enough" sometime in the near future. As for the second point - well, the "hackers", which includes most everyone on Slashdot, don't use any of those services for Internet access. So it's true that those services could probably disconnect the mass market from the sharing networks fairly easily; but it seems likely that that would either cause many people to defect to "real" ISPs, or else that people would develop protocols that disguise themselvs as email, FTP, or web transfers.
#3 - The Net is too filled with Hackers to Control
His entire argument here seems to be that sooner or later companies will distribute their electronic information on properitary hardware that can't be accessed by a PC. If that's true, then he's right. But I don't think that will be profitable for the companies, because what's the point of getting something in electronic format if you can't put it on your computer? And if there is any way to view the information on your computer screen, then some bright 16-year-old from Norway will figure out how to download it as data. Period.
Arggg... There should be a clear warning to new users to enter the comment in HTML rather than English... :)
2nd attempt:
The Internet is becoming more regulated; that is a fact. This trend is more than likely to continue.
But this article, like so many others, appears to have been written by someone who doesn't understand (at a technical level) what either a computer of the Internet really is. The author picks three arguments which -- he claims -- are the arguments that the Internet cannot be controlled -- and then refutes them.
None of these articles ever attempt to technically justify that the Internet can be controlled; in some sense, it cannot -- but it depends what you mean.
As long as we have an end-to-end packet transport (aka the Internet), and general-purpose stored-program computers (eg PCs), we can do anything. Throw in a little strong cryptography, and it becomes impossible for anyone to know -- let alone control -- what we choose to do with this infrastructure.
It seems implausible to suggest that either the end-to-end network or the computer will cease to exist in the foreseeable future... What is possible, of course, is that either (or both) of these technologies will become less accessible to consumers.
General-purpose computers might become expensive specialist items if the mass-market tended towards low-cost dedicated devices that encompassed the popular PC functionality. Imagine a low-cost dedicated word-processor, dedicated email/web terminal, and a games console. Either as three separate devices, or as a single integrated device. All of these things exist, but with the exception of the games console, none has yet been successful. This failure, however, is more to do with price and functionality that with the fundamental idea. If the dedicated appliances were as featureful as their current PC incarnations, and substantially cheaper, then the home PC market would crash. Over time, 90% of PC users would cease to be PC users. Volumes would drop, prices would rise, and 90% of the remainder would not be able to justify the cost of a PC.
The other part of the equation is that consumers will over time lose easy access to the end-to-end packet network that is the Internet. This is already starting to happen -- we have ISPs which proxy not just HTTP but also SMTP. They filter incoming access to many services, and perhaps outing access to some, too. Already they are not ISPs in the the pure sense of IP connectivity providers. If this trend continues then, over a period of time, consumer ISPs will cease to be Internet Service Providers, but will become Information Serivice Providers. You will continue to talk to your ISP with IP, but you will no longer be connecting to the Internet. You'll still be able to surf the web, send e-mail, watch streaming video, but you won't -- truly -- be connecting to the Internet.
The point is that whilst both the computer and the Internet might cease to be consumer items in the pure forms, they will continue to exist, just as they did long before most consumers had access to them.
The consequences of this could be quite interesting -- general purpose computers and end-to-end packet transport might once again be limited to computer-science departments and the research departments of IT-oriented commercial enterprises. The wheel would have turned full circle....
Will said: But, in sum, it all comes down to this:
The Net is the Perception, Not the Reality.
So long as people believe in the above tenets, it will self-perpetuate. If they lose faith, it will change. Just as the founders of America believed in press freedom but favored other restrictions - remember the 50s, that teen gang era, eventually followed by the 80s.
And schulzdog replied What? If we hold hands and believe then it will be so? Why don't we all believe we can fly and save money on air travel?
Words are failing me... JUST BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANT SOMETHING TO BE A CERTIAN WAY DOESN'T MEAN IT WILL BE THAT WAY
that's the problem, a lot of powerful groups want some control, while the users are dancing around wagging their tounges and insisting that nothing can hurt them and nothing can stop them. Instead of thumbing our nose's at copyright holders desires we should start thinking about how to solve them. Because otherwise the internet will be controlled.
My point is that the Net being the way it is depends on the collective decisions many of us have to seek freedom and openness. If we decide we're too tired, or can't be bothered, it will undoubtably wither away. So long as people like you use port 81 when they close port 80, that attitude exists. But if the day comes when the vast majority of the people forcing it back open just give up, it dies.
Of course, maybe we let it die. Maybe we all jump onto Internet 2 and use IPv6 and let corporate control descend on Internet and IPv4. That means we've moved on, not that we've lost per se.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I hardly think St. Kitts/Nevis is the only place only served by one pipe. Face it, outside of the US, Japan, and Europe, the infrastructure is lacking in many parts of the world.
I think it's a valid point. Like the article said, it's not about cutting access entirely; they can shut you down by shutting down the high-speed pipes. Satellite's a possibility, very expensive to get up and running.
People are acting as if the government is going to outlaw the web. That's nuts. It ain't gonna happen. There is no reason to and too many people would object.
What is happening is things that are illegal in the physical world, but have been unrestrained in cyberspace are being cracked down on. I have a problem with the length of time that something can be copyrighted, but copyright infringment is illegal and the vast majority of people do not want to see all copyrights abolished. Napster like music trading of new music will be forced into an underground, just like child pornography, stock market scams and credit card fraud.
The US government is too scared to even enact taxes on the internet, something they would love to do and they even arguably have a good reason since internet sales deprive the local governments of local sales taxes. The US government has backed down on most encryption export controls and the requirement for key escrow. There has been little done to stop pornographic (but not obscene) material, even though both the right wing religions freaks and the left wing feminists both hate it.
Ok, we appear to be losing some ground on copyright issues, but the war is far from being lost. One of the biggest hurdles for people who want reasonable copyright reform are the people who think they should be able to get the lastest DVD movie for free, much like pictures of abused 5 year olds hurt people arguing it is ok to have adult erotica.
Go back and read that article again. It is nothing but FUD and the only people it should scare are thoses that think it is ok to trade the lastest MP3s and DVDs.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
his statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
I don't know about you, but I'm not aware of any way to write software to emulates a CD-ROM drive (that is, has the capability to directly read the CD-ROM without a CD-ROM drive being present). Hardware does things that software can't BECAUSE IT IS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. So while it's quite possible to emulate some parts of hardware (namely computational functions), physical interaction isn't truely emulatable (otherwise I'd just write code to have my laptop make my bed, pick up chicks, and haul them back to my dorm room). I think it is you who is naive.
My own personally curiosity.
Vermifax
Logout
... Tell that to users in China or Afganistan. The government actively shuts down ISP's and terminates all connections to "undesireable" sites. Once big brother becomes involved, personal liberties go right out the window. And don't try to tell me that "it could never happen here". Think again. You mean to tell me that if some alphabetic government agency or powerful international corporation started putting MASSIVE pressure on backbone providers to shut down... (enter offending matter here - Movies - MP3 - p0rn)... they couldn't get action?
The thing is, as anyone who pays attention knows, they never do shut it down. They catch one or two of them and the shops pop back up, on a different street, using a different reason for needing the phone lines. And with satellite ISPs, you can't even intercept them anyway.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's a race between the controlling agents (including MPAA, RIAA and others) and the trading agents (content producers and consumers). If the controlling agents win, then the existing physical model of distribution will be replicated in virtual space, complete with restrictions on how trading agents can use what they pay for on the one hand, and profit from producing content on the other hand. In other words, the interests of the superstars and distribution companies will be protected while the vast majority of both content producers and consumers will continue to have no say in what is produced or consumed.
On the other hand, should a model be found where content producers could present their content without a distributor, and make money at it, and where consumers could get that content without restrictions and for a fair price, then the distributors will largely disappear from the virtual world, and eventually from the physical world to some extent. (If I can sell my farm produce without paying a distributor, my family farm can be more profitable. If I can buy produce from a farmer directly, my food will be fresher and safer and cheaper.)
The problem is that the distributors have figured this out and most of the content producers and consumers have not.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If the internet is no longer useful to you, then what do you care what happens to it. Moreover, if it is the property and responibility of the people who took it away from you, destroying it will look more and more like a challenge to be met. And weve already seen what one angry sscript kiddie can do, now picture an army of angry uber h/crackers with nothing to lose. People will only be pushed so far.
if gnutella grew because of napster's vulnerability, then couldn't a gnutella2 grow from gnutella's vulnerabilies? sooner or later, traders will realize that compromising fault tolerance for quality of service is not a good trade.
In particular, I have a problem with section 3 of the article, which states at one point that
;)
"it's also possible to build such controls into hardware itself, and there are technical means available today to make hardware controls so difficult to crack that it will not be practical to even try."
It seems that the author makes a critical error at this point: true, any electronic system can have hardware that has been designed to prevent copyright infringement; for example, a hard drive designed to allow only MP3-like music files from a certain region to be played. But even if something like this eventually comes to pass, it seems obvious that "Myth #3" will come into play again: someone would inevitably code up a program designed to convert from one type of file to the other, in effect removing any extant copy protection.
Ultimately, the Internet is designed to transfer data. This alone ensures the continued existence of file-swapping programs. Unless the nature of the Web changes drastically, information (and hence files of _any_ sort) can and _will_ be transfered by people.
The fact that the link to the third page of the article does not work does nothing to raise my opinion of the article
I'll agree that this article is sometimes very lacking in technical accuracy but, the premise is sound.
The thing that amazes me most is that Slashdot is ground zero for "freedom fighters" and conspiracy theorists, yet most of the Slashdotters are preaching the very screed the article is warning against.
I'm amazed that so many Slashdotters have their heads so far up their ass that they can't see the truth in this article.
Remember kids, the internet population is only 7% of the world's population. Worse yet, 30% of the internet population thinks that AOL *IS* the internet. That means that the majority of the people that are creating and passing the laws that WILL control your lame ass, don't know anything about what they are regulating.
This might cause you to think that it will therefore be easy to circumvent any such regulations. But, in fact, it will allow a few powerful corporations, that *do* know exactly what they are regulating, to manipulate the masses to do their bidding.
Look at what is going on around you. Not just on the net but in real life too. Also, not just in Hicksville USA but, look at what's happening all over the world. The article is a prophecy that is almost complete, regardless of it's technical merit.
Well, I got my bunker stocked with 2 of the three anyway.
I couldn't agree with you more.
It totally saddens me that we have invented a utopia - a place where information is free - and we are so obsessed with money and power that we have to cripple it. And for what? So that the people who are "at the top" in monetary or political terms can remain there.
"Man is born free - and yet everywhere he is in chains." This is always because of scarcity (naural or artificial), greed, and desire for power. We have a chance to set ourselves free, and we're sitting back watching as laws like the DMCA get passed
It makes me ashamed to be human.
Looks like it's police state time for Amerika.
Big Brotherism starts the moment that individuals are forced to have ID numbers like a bunch of slaves. It's been around for a long time. It's just getting more efficient with computers. In fact, the more a trojan horses and viruses are unleashed on the net, the more secure and efficient it becomes. IP laws are just the tip of the fascist iceberg.
On a side note, there is a story in the old testament where King David gave the order to take a count of the people. God got so pissed off at that flagrant violation of liberty that he sent a nasty plague on them. Just a thought.
If you don't have income property, you're a slave. You can either live with it or fight it. But watch out if you decide to fight. The state is rather powerful. It is armed to the teeth and will not give up its power easily. They'll hurt you real bad if they have to. But first they will disarm you as they have pretty much done already. So you're all shit out of luck.
People simply won't buy those kinds of products. Last time I checked, you can still connect to the net with any type of hardware, provided you have the hardware necessary to make the connection. If you start making it so that you can only connect with say a "copyright compliant" HD or whatever, you will have a consumer revolt. And what of the Linux people? Make their stuff unable to connect to the net and I assure you there will be a revolt. a very violent one.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Another point is that if operating systems and even hardware become modified to be more "protection friendly", I know that I will simply not "upgrade" to them! If Windows XP is even half as bad as it looks like it's going to be, I know that my Win '98 machine won't be having that experience. As little control as Windows gives me, I'd rather have slightly more than XP appears to be offering.
Also, dare I say it, the whole PC obsolescence thing seems to be slowing down a bit. I've had my P3 850 for just over a year now, and even though computers have got much much faster, I've never come across anything that I actually NEED a faster computer for. Quake 3 runs just fine, thank you very much, and even editing of 1gb+ wave files can be done without having to wait more than a couple minutes at a time. I'd be prepared to wait two minutes at a time doing sound editing if it meant my computer stayed peer-to-peer compatible. It seems to me that try as they might, bloatware is not bloating itself so much as to even make me think of upgrading.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I sure know that I didn't feel like this one year after I bought my Pentium-90.
The crux is, as you say, that the platform will interfere with many innocuous activities. Because from the IP owner's point of view, the only innocuous activity is playing the program material through a licensed, authorized, tamperproof output device.
As you can see, there's no need to outlaw open source. If the IP interests are kind enough to open their specs, we will be able to play their material on open source platforms. No harm done, because the computer will never have access to the cleartext material.
When you stand on the the roof and shout "Come and fucking get me!" they generally do....
That's why I have a bunker. Wheee!
How about flashable chips?
On the contrary, it's long-term experience that leads tech-savvy Net users to believe that top-down regulation would be ineffective. And in the wake of the Communications Decency Act, the Telecommunications Act, and the Microsoft trial, why is it naive to doubt the US government could wisely or effectively control the Internet?
Paul Boutin | Wired magazine
Paul Boutin | writer for Slate, Wired, etc
When encryption kicks in, noone will be able to monitor content or block it.
Low-power IR lasers (great for line-of-sight)
Tunneling - via leased lines, over IP, over any other bidirectional transmission that might otherwise be restricted.
More importantly, there are many uses of a 'free' Internet which have no relation with the theft of intellectual property, and which, though Corporations may wish them to be supressed, cannot be legally controlled in a "free" society.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
this week.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Yes. Because the off-shore company cited in the article is apparently still operating, despite their alleged vulerability. However I still agree with the author that national sovereignty is becoming a less effective shield against corporate interests.
Many people here hope that a powerful antagonistic country like China could house data havens. The missing fact here is that if China did that, they'd be using the data havens as bargaining chips. So in a future negotiation with the US, China could give up the data havens in exchange for less pressure on their human rights record. Any country powerful enough to stand up to the US has its own agenda, which does not include freedom of information.
During the age of the pharohs, secret passages and traps were built in order to protect the royalty's treasure. They even killed the engineers and workers when they were done so nobody would know. But as historians will relate, often these places were looted in a matter of years, or less. Unless they make CD's that kill the listener if it's copied, or they execute (as in 'kill') every hacker and computer geek out there, they'll never be able to keep their secrets or treaure for long. And I'm not trying to equate theiving music to looting graves. (Unless you LIKE to download polka music)
Hacking isn't about software or hardware, it's about making a system of any sort behave outside of it's designed constraints.
The very first hackers were the people who built and modified hardware, and there has always been a strong culture of hardware hacking in the USA, Germany, and many other countries.
Has everyone forgotten the days of blue boxes, satellite TV hacks, Cable TV decoders, and every other method of physically either bypassing hardware controls or building replacement hardware decoders to bypass attempts to protect content from access by unintended recipients?
For somebody purporting to write an article about the future of technology, this guy sure has ignored the history of technology.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Throw in a little strong cryptography
And what makes you think that consumer use of "strong cryptography" for "general unknown purpose" will still be legal 10 years from now? Lets see .. Carnivore2010 .. inbuilt packet analysis .. detects encrypted traffic. FBI knocks on door, "what were you transmitting"? You keep quiet. You in jail.
Strong cryptography may well become illegal as organizations such as the FBI push the argument that they need it be illegal to prevent criminal activity .. and I sure don't see the US government saying no to such laws either. Hell, cryptography is already a "munition" according to them. They may be some very controlled exceptions in the laws in future (e.g. perhaps ecommerce), but I doubt it will be generally legal. Its easy to sucker the sheeple .. a few well-placed articles on major media outlets, some well-chosen keywords ("terrorists", "national security", "paedophiles", "child molesters") .. some made up "true stories" about some horrible monster child molester that got caught snaring kids over the internet "thanks to the fact that the FBI could snoop etc" .. trust me, the sheeple will suck it up.
Attack the sound card then, or better, the adapter interface. You could then digitize an audio version of the CD player output and use that as a basis for the attack. After enough samples, it should be reasonably possible to attack it realtime, assuming that the recording industry doesn't "get it" and hide behind good encryption rather than the DMCA....
Of course, the data is vulnerable when it leaves the initial reading device, wherever it is supposed to go. It might require hardware hacking, but it would likely not require too much hardware hacking ;)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This article makes some valid points. However, the simple fact is that no authority can unfairly hold back the public forever. Information doesn't want to be free, but people do. If corporate intrests continue to hold back democracy, someday, they will truly cross the line, and the people will be pissed. With a capital P. And then there will be a revolution, whether by protest marches, or boycotts, or blood. Ultimately, the people have the real power.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
As long as we have the ability to transport random bits around, we have free speech. And there are too many useful applications which generate random bits for anyone to control them. Given encryption, you can identify a pile of bits as something, and until/unless you release the key, who can tell if you're lying or not.
And anyway, if it were technologically possible to control the net, somebody please explain to me why Code Red exists? Don't even bother bringing in the lawyers, because what Code Red does is already horrifically illegal.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I just got back from several African countries a few months ago. There are moves afoot to give countries on the west coast of the continent access to high-bandwidth undersea cable connections. The first such will be installed by year's end. When that happens, it will be possible to send data from, say, Togo, just about as easily as from Toulouse or Toronto. Mann is dead right that, contrary to myth and legend, large swaths of the world still have lousy Internet bandwidth availability. But in a couple years, that will have changed. Any country that wants in on the global economy has to get wired. So they're dropping cable like crazy. And that'll make it practical to run your Internet business out of Accra or Freetown.
Mann's still right about another key point, though. You'd better not set foot in the US if you use the Internet to break American law. And he's also right that international law is being modified to seal off the safe havens. So while one point of his argument isn't as strong as he might think, it still holds up pretty well.
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
right on
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
It would seem to me that if the p2p that you aren't allowed to do on servers in our country, would be just as possible on servers in another counrty. What is napster moved to a country without laws regulating p2p and file sharing ? The government only has control over what goes on in its own country, and can't stop you from connecting to another foregn server to share files with anything short of a national firewall. p2p may not be legal in the US for much longer if Big Business get what they want (and they always do). What this means is that anymore p2p will have to take place somewhere else, and that companys which utlize file sharing may have to relocate, even if its just across the border to canada of mexico. The US then cannot regulate what gets shared, and there will always be at least one clever hacker that unincrypts the new files and makes them accessable to the public via foregn servers.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."- -- Albert Einstein
The hackers and techies of the world will not stand for this control of the internet and thus they will always be one step ahead.
The corporations are fighting a losing battle trying to gain control over a system which is fundamentally about non-control. If they somehow manage to eventually take over the net, don't you think the hackers will have created and switched to a new protocol, maybe even to a new physical network?
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
Unless the Internet will go back to the CompuServe age with all its controlled & paid forums, Internet hackers will always be ahead of regulators & corporations in terms of time [action of a hacker - reaction of the regulator/corp] and passion (hackers do it out of love - employees for the money).
I also think the corps & regulators will have difficulty to match the number of free thinking, ingenious hackers with sufficiently motivated & skilled functionaries (who in their free time will not make systems which circumvent the very protection they try to reinforce at their corp/gov job).
In short: the article's starting point is a static human.
I'm glad you see it. It seems that very few posting here do. The end of the computer and the end of the internet will mean nothing to the average user. Actually, life will probably be easier and cheaper for him. The fact that our computers are full-fledged internet hosts is a historical accident. The upcoming times could be the dark ages of computing. It doesn't bother me that we face a powerful adversary; it bothers me greatly that most of us foolishly underestimate that adversary.
I fail to see how this article dispels any of the 3 myths described within. It attempts to dissect the myths based on current technology. Of course nobody knows what new "killer app" is around the corner, and so such predictions of doom and gloom are rather unfounded. And the arguement against internationalisation eg: "Offshore links are useless because the pipes arent big enough out to the small countries" is a fucking joke. The police cant even stop real life issues such as drug dealing and petty crime, how could they possibly stop anything happening on the internet? They cant.
Spot on. Sure the regulations are coming soon, but the so called arguements in that article are short sighted and unfounded.
I've read the article and all the comments, and I think the comments simply reinforce the point of the article - we are arrogant and naive and continue to cling to our 'three myths'. Every time the adversary strikes a blow, we react with utter astonishment: "I can't believe they're really imprisoning us!" "How could they shut down that site - isn't it a First Amendment violation?"
And then we're back to our regularly scheduled hubris. The author warned us that "haha - you can't stop me" is not a viable message for winning over voters and politicans. The 'rebuttals' mostly say, "as long as we have host-host connectivity, we'll find a way around everything."
That rebuttal is begging the Powers That Be to shut off inbound TCP connections to consumers. It would be easy; it would save bandwidth and administrative headaches; it would prevent Code Red and similar things; it would remove ISPs' liability for user-hosted infringing content; and it would go unnoticed by 99% of the internet-using population. And when it happens, I expect the usual expressions of shock and astonishment on slashdot. The words of people who underestimated their adversaries.
There's another myth the author didn't address: "They can't arrest everybody!" Although this may be a variation of myth 3 - infinite supply of hackers. What this myth overlooks is that it will only take a few high-profile arrests and convictions to quell everyone. As Sun Tzu put it, 'Kill one to terrify ten thousand.' What this myth also overlooks is that the enforcement end of the system can be made profitable. The simplest procedure would be to seize the computers of p2p participants under Civil Asset Forfeiture. There would be no need to charge the violators with a crime, unless they obstruct police activity. Two cops driving around in a van, guided by a printout of addresses, could probably seize two computers an hour. That would more than pay for their time. And they might luck into some busts or other stuff - cops are by no means reluctant to have a pretext for entering homes.
Entering a battle with overconfidence is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Our puny weapon is just enough threat to justify pulling the trigger. And our overbearing and unjustified arrogrance makes all the neutral bystanders eager to see that trigger pulled.
So what? This sounds like a plus to me! Personally, I think the net would be a greater place if there weren't so many damn fool AOLers and their likes. Shit! Opening "infected" emails, getting swindled by obvious SPAM, getting on SPAM lists in the first place, unwittingly running unpatched instances of IIS, inbreeding, child-molestation, wife abuse, child porn addicts, fanatical Christians, ahem, trailer-trash republicans, and the list goes on and on! FUCK'EM, we'd be better off without'em anyhow!
Also, the net should be hard to access in the first place! None of this cushy ISP, GUI browser crap! What is this, cable TV or something? Command-line only! Hard and convoluted, that's the way we like it! Right guys? Anyone? Hello?
Anonymous Coward I hope to metamoderate that post of yours some day because it deserves better than the score it got.
Your solution that we as consumers should walk away from corporate culture and use the net to create and support our own is probably the best response to all of this.
I don't know CGI and the last thing I "hacked" was a CD from which I copied MSCDEX 2.0 more thann ten years ago. Most users will never be able to implement the fancy patches and protocols necessary to route around damage.
When it comes to privacy I'm more concerned about an employer reading outgoing email or sampling downloaded files that go to my hard drive, than I am about FBI Carnivore.
But buiding one's own culture through creative writing, web graphics, midi (yes midi. They're smaller and easier to upload and play) etc... might be possible.
I say "might" because as I see it there are two barriers. The first is technical. There is a caricature of the typical web users as a stupid yutz living in the web's trailer parks.
There's a grain of truth here. In one of my ladies' groups I found out I was the only one who knew html. Being able to code your own static web page on your hard drive is empowering, so is making your graphics with PSP. I haven't tried making my own midi or arranging them yet. I don't have the equipment.
Not only can't the typical user not code her own page. She forgets to back it up. Candi the founder of RAOK lost her entire web site due to Geocities' ban on remote loading. She was serving images off her site and yes the images were displayed gallery style so the site was not storage. Remote loading is important for leaving graphics in guestbooks.
What make this technical barrier worse is that Corporate internet tells typical users they don't have to learn to code. This is to the point where I know professors and librarians who have refused to learn html fearing it was too hard. At its worst typical users become attached to drag and drop editors which make their sites nonportable.
That's the technical barrier. There are also social barriers. When it comes to web graphics FREEDOM IS NOT PRIVATE PROPERTY. If your stuff is really good and it gets stolen and put on someone else's web page, you are doing a good job. If someone uses your graphics to make more graphics, than there is more stuff out there. This does not seem to sink in in the world of "no right click" and "don't steal my graphics without linking back." What makes you think your graphics are good enough that I'd want them on my page?
A typical internet user also feels NO PAIN NO GAIN. This means graphics that only a few experts can do and only some graphics are "nice enough." It is more than possible to work smarter rather than harder and turn out something presentable. I bet nearly everyone has this in them. The result may not be representational art but it will with some tweaks and practice suit your needs.
A typical user thinks he or she is not good enough. Look at the pained posed portraits on most personal pages and then look at the human forms of dreamy, spiritual, and Victorian ladies. Why shouldn't a candid shot be good enough? Why not try writing your own prose or poetry? If your poetry doesn't work, then try prose.
The last barrier is "us." I'm not sure if I'm part of "us." I'm currently a member of RAOK and LOTH. That gives me a foot in both camps. We need to start treating them as equals. We don't have to like all their art, but I have learned a lot about web page graphics from them. I build lusher more interesting pages because of this. Also making pressies or quilt squares is about the best graphic training there is. Then take those pressies on the road and sign a few guestbooks or do support. You will be amazed what you learn about yourself. You will have more in common with these people than you think. A quilt square is a 130*130 pixel grpahic that is displayed as part of a "quilt" of such squares.
If you want to talk about a noncorporate culture, this is where some of it is being made and while LOTH is all female, RAOK takes guys.
If, and it is big IF, the typical internet user can get past all the technical and psychological/social barriers to building a culture outside corporate control, it just might happen.
Eileen H. Krmer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
Please visit ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition http://www.zc2zc3.st