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Information Preservation and Data Havens?
tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"
just spread your data around. Jurisdictional nightmare.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
and after i got a usb watch for xmas last year, i have gotten into the habit of archiving all of my company email every 3 monhhs, and walking out with the archive on my wrist
i always wondered about the constitutionality of that... it's not really MY email, even though, for all practical purposes, the content of it is more important to me than my company (records of who said what to whom, my ideas, my code, etc.)
we live in a day and age where corporate rights encroach on individual rights more and more
i think we should all do our best to fight that, in big ways and small
walking out with "corporate intellectual property" on my wrist is my way of doing that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I seem to remember reading that some organization was setting up servers on abandoned oil rigs in international waters for just such a purpose. I don't know what happened to them. Something about a giant squid maybe?
This place was referred to in the Wiki article via the link to HavenCo. HavenCo sounds like it's free of any type of outside infringement. Cool.
Reminds me of South Korea.
;-)
The copyright laws there are pretty much non-existant.
For example you can purchase a jacket or article of clothing, and they will embroider it with just about anything you want, including emblems/logos that in America are Trademarked (Starter, Nike, etc).
You can also buy fake oakley sunglasses (AKA Foaklies/Oakies) in many parts of the world for $5 a pop.
The rest of the world doesn't always play by America's rules. But we're working on that.
Slashdot = ((Technology + Politics) / Trolls) % Grammar Nazis
Plus, going to Mexico isn't all that cost-effective. I'm betting you can find someone who will run anything through his copier as long as you pay him as easily in the USA as in anywhere in the world.
Unforunetely students copy textbooks a ridiculous amount now adays. Plus, for the popular ones, you could actually just google/emule the textbook name and chances are someone has already done it. With some of the engineering books costing easily over 100 dollars....then running into professors that hardly use the book...one can see why students think this is a viable option.
I remember I took a class in Emperical Methods. The text book was 150 dollars and was very poorly translated from Spanish to English...almost to the point of not being able to use it. Definitely a waste of money on that one.
As far as data backup goes, I know there are viable options for potentially important data. The Medical Industry always has a company that they outsource all the PAX system data to. Losing data in these systems is simply not a option. Unfortunetly, I don't think its cheap or viable for non-commercial use.
It's ludicrous. This semester, I spent $350 on books for three classes. All of these classes got new editions of the text this year. In addition, after last semester I had only one textbook that the bookstore would take back, because all the others were being replaced!
Also, these days a ton of textbooks come with these stupid "learning aid" CDs and access to super-secret "study aid" websites to justify jacking up the price by another 50 bucks.
Most of the time, comparing two editions of the same textbook side by side reveals very little differences. Often they'll change the order of the exercises in the book, without actually changing any of them, just so you'll have to have the new edition or you'll end up doing the wrong problems for homework.
"What new discoveries come in math? Do derivatives change at all? How bout sine and cosine? Hmm?"
Insightfull????? More like TROLL! I think you will find there are many journals dedicated to publishing new "discoveries" in mathematics. You argument smacks of ignorance.
As for "new editions", Noone has to buy any such thing. A second hand relatively modern edition of a textbook will suffice in many cases.
When I was in engineering college and taking a class where I was sure I wouldn't need the textbook ever again I would just check it out of the campus library and hold on to it for the semester. You usually got the book for about a month and could renew it at least once. The late fees were low enough that I only spent about $10 per book for the semester.
Incoming fire has the right of way. Have a nice day.
I'm not american so I don't understand this: what kind of books are you supposed to buy? I'm in college and all the books I would ever need are available at the library (In fact, all my courses are done without books). I only bought two crypto books (Schneier and Zémor) because I told my teacher I wanted to have fun at home.
I'd much rather deal with an FBI raid I know about than NSA scrutiny I don't know about.
Of course, with PATRIOT, the distinction is meaningless. The NSA can snoop on citizens domestically and the FBI raids people overseas.
On further thought. Location of your datastore appears meaningless. Maybe a better idea is good ol' distributed secure p2p (freenet and the like). maybe with some stegonography for good measure.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
the prinicipality of SEALAND wants to be your data haven.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Offsite backup is a very good idea and not just in case of an FBI raid. If your building burns down, you want to be able to rebuild your business. It's much easier if your books still exist!
It occurs to me that a police raid is enabled by a warrant. The warrant is for a specific location. If they don't know where the backup data is they don't have a carte blanche to go fishing everywhere. Use your imagination.
As a young(er) Master's student in Computer Science back in 1996, I noted that many of my international colleagues (grad students) photocopying their textbooks and sharing the copies from semester to semester and student to student.
I brought this up at a department meeting I was a student-rep for, and the grad program chair said something like "why should we care?"
I was shocked at this attitude and lack of concern about the actions of those doing the copying. Yes, it is/was illegal and something should have been done/said about it. However, since I knew that several tenured professors didn't care, me saying anything to anyone wasn't going to change the situation. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have alerted the book companies.
About ten years ago I taught for a semester at Birzeit University (just north of Ramallah) and at the time this was routine -- in fact the copy center was one of the most efficient places on campus. Most of the students could barely afford the books at all, so this was hardly depriving a publisher of revenues, but the other curious thing is that it isn't entirely clear that it was illegal: the West Bank is governed (such as it is...) under an assortment of Ottoman, British mandatory, Jordanian, Israeli civil and military, and Palestinian Authority laws, and my guess is that except for Israeli civil law, none of these have a lot to say about photocopying (Ottoman law is particularly silent on the topic!). Meanwhile Israel tends to worry about things other than copyright violations.
You're completely wrong. Universities are forced by the publishers to force new editions on students every (approx.) 2 years. The biggest differences between the editions are that the problems are rearranged. Try getting through a class with a second hand modern edition when all of the problems are different, and the homework is graded. Try getting through calc 4 when the brand new book you bought 2 years ago containing the exact same content isn't the required reading, but instead you have to buy another brand new book to do the homework. I don't blame anybody who photocopies textbooks. The publishers are ripping off people who are already struggling through their educations. I openly admit to taking advantage of my campus bookstore's 7-day return policy for "borrowing" a book for a test or assignment, or to go to the library for some copies. So you may think it's a troll, but I'd like to see you spot the differences between the 7th edition from 2 years ago and the 8th edition the school is currently using, except those problems you must do to pass. Troll to you, a big rip off to me.
I'm taking a macroeconomics class and I had a choice between an internet version of the class, which all class materials, including the text are part of a pay to access website. Its $40 for the whole semester. The website is run by the professor who wrote the class materials, and after hosting costs, all of the money goes to him. The other choice was to buy a $100 text book which may or may not be bought back by the bookstore, and I have no want to look at after the semester is over. Guess which section of the class I chose. This is what should be making publishers scared, not some people in a border town making photo copies. I got a cheaper class, my professor makes more money, and the publisher can go to hell.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Why do they have to go to Mexico?
.agrippa.
When I was a student at University of California, San Diego I had to go to Kinkos to copy some material a fundraiser for Boy's Club my fraternity was putting on. I had to wait an hour while a team of medical students copied every page of all their textbooks and monoplized all the copiers. I asked them what they were doing and was told point blank that they had just bought those books and they were copying them with the intention of returning them the next day for a refund. I pointed them to a sign hung above the copiers that had a warning about duplicating copywrited material and they just shrugged.
I really need to get my work done so I talked to a Kinko's employee and asked him why he wasn't doing anything about the fact these medical students were blatantly disregarding not only Kinko policy but the law as well. His answer: We put that sign up but we don't really care if they do it. Shocked, I asked for his manager, explained the situation, and was given the exact same reply. Yea, the sign was up there, and the students knew they were doing something illegal in full site of people with the power to stop them, but as long as Kinkos was making money they didn't care.
There are lots of legitimate businesses and parties who need strong crypto, offsite data for protection against raids etc - journalists in many countries, unpopular but legal organisations who will be raided just to put them out of business by the powers that be (or by the powers that be on behalf of their paying customers like the IPR businesses)
One of the cutest I've seen was RAID5 over network block device (encrypted) with the disks all in different legal jurisdictions.
NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!
So what did I do?
Right.
I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
It would be nice to find offsite backup partners on some kind of P2P network. If you have 80 gigs to back up, you need to have 80 gigs available on your system to trade off. All encrypted, so it's safe. And if you're extra paranoid, find 2 or more partners!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's not because something is written in a contract, it can be enforced in a court of law. Non-compete clauses, for example, usually don't fare very well in California.
Not all professors... when I was one, I: (a) told publishers' reps I'd be happy to review any books they had, and they were welcome to pick them up when I was done (they never did); and (b) told students that it was stupid to buy books just to find homework problems and then sell them back after the semester, so not only would textbooks be optional, they'd be books that I felt would be good references for their future (computer science). I could handle the teaching and homework problem setting myself.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Why restirct your data to only two locations? Assume you want to spread your data across k locations.
Let F be the file we want to encrypt, and spread over k juristictions, so that all k encrypted files are needed to decrypt F.
1. Create k-1 random files the same size as F, and call them X1,X2,...,Xk-1.
2. Create another file Xk by assigning the nth bit of Xn to 1 if an odd number of ones existed in the nth bit over all the files, and put a zero otherwise.
3. For every bit of Xk, if it differs from the nth bit of F, then set the bit to 1. Else, set the bit to zero.
We now have k random files that together encode our original file F. To get it back count the number of 1's for each bit, and put a 0 for even and a 1 for odd.
As long as one of your locations is secure the attacker has nothing but a collection of random files.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
You can do what my friends and I tried... we setup an online bookstore to sell books to students at our university. At the time, the bookstore was selling for about 2% below list price, so we set our prices about 5% below list. Not much, but it was a start. However, we had some problems with the publishers, shipping, delivery, etc., and didn't break even the first semester. It really is a logistical nightmare, but we didn't screw any students... most got their books, and the rest at least got their money back.
The next semester, we were considering pulling our prices down further, to 8% off list (the problem was we weren't getting enough orders to be taken seriously by the publishers), but just as we were about to do it, the university bookstore pulled their prices down to 10% off list. Good for the students, but it put us out of business at that point.
We thought we had at least accomplished something, but then the prices at the bookstore went back up the next semester to 2% off list.
Oh well, we tried.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
If your business model suffers from the possibility of a FBI raid, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your business? Just a thought...
The problem is that almost every business has proprietary secrets that it can't afford to share with the general public. This usually means using encrypted communications - which may draw the suspicion of the FBI. Take for example:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Speak for yourself, then. I do work, and I do use my texts as reference. Maybe because I work with a manager who doesn't like meetings, doesn't like reports, and does a good job of shielding us from anyone else seeking to obtain those from us. I've had maybe 3 meetings in the past 3 months, and spent most of that time in the lab writing prototype code and tampering with my design. So for me, one day of meetings works out to about 4 weeks of design.
Specifically, in the past year I've hauled down my books on control systems, linear systems theory, DSP, C, MATLAB, acoustics, various calc textbooks, and borrowed books on power supply design, neural nets, and even my probability book (once). I use my books a lot. Dad's an engineer (civil). He uses his too, though maybe less than me since he runs his business, which means he spends a lot more time in meetings. Maybe its because I do get to do Real Engineering with a good portion of my time, and most of it isn't The Same Thing over and over. But I do use my books, a lot.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)