I feel old. I hate to say this, but it just didn't occur to me that one day you'd quit.
Though it's the work of many, there's always been a wise voice in charge here. You've been that guy. I can only be grateful for all the things you've done. Each well-chosen story was itself a gift. But I think your larger, architectural heritage - creating the modern moderation system, proving its success - is something that will echo throughout the coming years, with greater and greater significance. Organizing communities is, after all, our primary occupation as a species.
I feel privileged to have gotten to see it all first hand. And proud to have been able to participate, however imperfectly, in the discussion of this great salon at your end of the Internet.
The court struck down Eldred, surprising no one (I hope). I believe they would have had a principled argument not to do so, but I'm not a Supreme Court justice.:) I can certainly understand their argument. While the copyright laws may be egregious, the constitutional grounds for challenging them are ultimately, to be most polite, tenuous.
The court did not rule on the "correctness" of the latest copyright extension. Basically they concluded that they lacked the power to change it.
This has always been a fight in the legislature. To be honest, an 11th hour reversal by the Supremes would have been a hollow victory. The legislature can turn out this bought-and-paid-for garbage 10x faster than the courts can correct it, if they can even correct it at all. We need, as we have always needed, legislative reform.
The important thing to keep in mind is that our representatives are flagrantly taking bribes from big entertainement companies to pass legislation that is outrageously favorable to them at the expense of the economy, the rest of society, etc. This court case has been bringing national attention to that issue, and it did again today. So in that respect, we can say it's good news regardless of the outcome.
Every time corruption is exposed in the media, we get a little closer.
As with many of the new "security measures" we're currently swallowing, from most of the Patriot Act, to this, all the way to, perhaps, the coming war itself, no one seems to be able to make the case very well that any of them would have helped to prevent 9/11, or will help to prevent future attacks.
In fact, by tasking these agencies with vast new responsibilities in monitoring Americans, we can realistically expect worse performance when dealing with future terrorism.
Many citizens don't have the faculties or the will to recognize this fact, and many more who do stop themselves from asking why. But a man writing over 50 years ago gave us a few answers which I believe hit frighteningly close to the mark.
His name comes up so often now that he is in danger of becoming a cliche. But listen to his words:
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the massses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed."
"What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war."
"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."
-George Orwell, 1984
I urge to read the whole book. In my opinion he was an excellent writer of fiction in adition to everything else. But if you skip it, I'll just add that "keeping the structure of society intact" is code for keeping those on top, on top.
I wouldn't claim the Catweasel was in error without also testing the same floppies on a real machine. I have a working Macintosh, Amiga, Commodore w/ 1541, 1581 which can all read the disks the Catweasel rejects. Of course, I've also tried many, many different disks.
Microsoft's dominance in the operating system and applications market will continue basically unchecked. Because of it, Microsoft will find it all the easier to deploy Paladium, which will help cement their dominance by using "security" as an excuse for locking out the interoperability efforts of Linux and others. This will help balkanize the Linux and Windows worlds, which will slow migration away from Windows. It will also be a useful tool for silencing a few activists who defy the restrictions with court and prison. Let's also not forget, without the trial hanging over its collective head, Microsoft will be much freer to use the bludgeon of Office withdrawal against Apple, should it not tow the line.
Paladium is the beginning of efforts towards centralized surveillance and control of all electronic media. Once it is deployed and semi-usable, the "gentle coercion" of fees, compatility, and network-effect fear will help Microsoft as they phase out and then attempt to suppress older, more open versions of their operating system (Win2k, XP, etc). Perhaps Windows Update will back-port the "content revolution." Or perhaps the death blow to Microsoft's open legacy will be a virulent worm which preys on a security hole they refuse to fix.
People will ask incredulously, "who would abuse Paladium, and how?" and the answer is, "anyone who can, in any way they can get away with."
The evolution of the operating system will keep its super-slow-mo pace. It was bad enough before; who would invest a nickle in any new technology that could compete with Microsoft now? They have the King's indulgence. In addition to the enormous "natural" benefits of their momentum and size, they are effectively untouchable. Progress in the computer sciences, and then progress in all the fields computers touch (and could touch, in a more innovative world), is hurt tremendously by this.
The threat of loss, from competition or regulation, is what drives progress. Think of it - Windows' closest competitor is written by hobbyists! And even then, it is because of Linux, and this trial (and to a far lesser extent, Apple) that Windows 2000 is more stable than Windows 98 and NT. But with the antitrust case gone, the content trusts having paved the way with the DMCA, and Microsoft already preparing new "solutions" to problems of interoperability and easy migration, there will no longer be a threat.
We are on some kind of roll. As a nation, we seem to make a new decision that betrays our standards and squanders our legacy every day. But, though people will call me a geek or claim I have an exaggerated idea of the computer's importance, I say that today's failure is particularly egregious. What all the parties have done here, the DoJ, their counterparts in the various States, the judge (CKK), and not least Microsoft itself, has left our children a disgusting legacy, and they will curse us for it. Rightly so.
You clearly didn't read my post "Anonymous Coward." We tried a number of different computers of different manufacturers, ages, etc. as well as different floppy drives, cables. Are you suggesting that "the motherboard timing was off" on all of the HP, Dell, IBM, Gateway, and Compaq motherboards that we tried?
I have a million old disks in a Babel of formats, and I bought a Catweasel several years ago from Jens and his friend Norbert. I believed all the hype, I was ready to start the months-long process of imaging all my disks onto PC before too many of their bits shifted and they became unreadable.
The problem is that the Catweasel doesn't live up to its hype. Or at least the one I got.
I had about a 90% failure rate across the board. 100% failure with 1581 disks. 75% with Amiga. 90% with 800k Mac disks. ~90% with 1541-style Commodore. Absolutely abyssmal. Their rudimentary software (un-abortable without forcing open the drive door while it was in operation) would dump a mountain of German error messages on me. I would then take the same disk to a real Commodore/Amiga/Mac and read it perfectly.
I talked with them a bit about the problem. At their instructions, I tried different computers (4), different floppy drives (9), different floppy cables (5), all from different manufacturers, different speeds, and including a cable Jens himself said would work, etc... As you can see, I satisfied myself beyond all normal means that this was a problem with his card, and nothing else.
Eventually I sent my card back to Jens, and a month or two later, I received the exact same card back in the mail. He "couldn't find the problem." However, I still had a useless card, and then they stopped answering my emails.
The card did read a couple of disks - though not even reliably enough to make it a curiosity. This leads me to believe Jens is not a scam artist, and that he actually just still has (or had) some major bugs in his system. But not even trying to replace the card, and then just dropping me and keeping my (what was it? $50? $100?) money... He struck me as a hobbyist who'd gotten in over his head. So I'm very surprised to see him still in the business.
You guys still use HTTP to get this? P2P!
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't know why all you guys seem think Kazaalite and BearShare are for MP3s... They're for downloading RedHat ISO's, silly!
If you want to learn something, read Orwell. Then if you haven't got the point, maybe move on to Huxley.
I'm not being rude, I mean it. They put the case better than I ever could.
If you're not a reader, find a friend who lived in the U.S.S.R.. Ask them about what it was like to have serial numbers on typewriters and copy machines, and a national informant system, or to have to show papers to go from one town to the next, or at any time for any reason. To walk down a quiet street at night with a girl, arm in arm, but not steal that kiss, because you are not really sure you're alone.
The psychological effects of these regimes are subtle and pervasive.
The thing you want to think about is that, often times, the government does things not quite for the reasons that it gives. And surveillance is one of those things that has a lot of purposes besides preventing terrorism.
Consider the fact that almost none of the security measures passed since 9/11 were related to published dificiencies in our previous security program's handling of the disaster. National IDs had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and would not have prevented the attack - the attackers would have simply had their own. They were in the country legally.
The Soviets pulled out every stop. They did things the current pro-surveillance, pro-data-collection Americans would have nightmares about. I'll give you a hint. It didn't stop crime, let alone terrorism. But it did make a striking example that life in a totalitarian state is barely that.
Our history in this country is that of refugees from government. And we organized our society in perpetual conflict with its government as a result. If we trust government, why have a jury, since judges are better qualified? Why have courts? Don't you trust the police? Wouldn't they know best who'se guilty and who'se not? Why have elections? After all, as Lenin put it, some things are too important to put to a vote.
Instead we have checks and balances, and we have a sense that a life should not be lived in the shadow of government. That it should be in our lives as little as possible. That every time it intrudes, to collect a tax, to stamp a passport, to pull us over on the highway, it had better be giving us a hell of a bargain in return. Our country's resistance to ID's stems from a basic, visceral aspect of that conflict; I do not exist at the sufferance of my state. I do not need to be stamped and photographed to be legitimate. I am a free, "legal" person inherently - not because of my card. I am not, in other words, a number. But this sounds too much like rhetoric. The basic point is, let each agency who needs to know who I am ask each time it needs to. Let each give an ID if it must. Don't let government as a whole enumerate us; that's a bad bargain, because it doesn't need to. Only specific parts of it do. So let it do only as much as it needs.
Of course, it also stems from the basic necessities; a national ID system is expensive, and it has no clearly stated and important benefits that justify its expense. If you say that it helps provide "security," you'll have to say precisely how.
But I'd rather not preach at you. You should look at the works on the subject, read about the relevant history, and draw your own conclusions.
On a Windows 98 machine I administered, one aspect of its decay was that several keys on the keyboard stopped working ("e" being the biggest loss, if I recall correctly).
No, not a hardware problem. I tested different keyboards and they all exhibited the same behavior. And when the OS was wiped and Win2k was installed, no more problem.
There was nothing strange installed that I could find, AV software was up to date and apparently functioning... Very funny one.
You say "If you download Mario 2 for free, that's one less copy of Mario Advance they sell." This is actually a flawed argument, and one commonly used to justify absurdly high "estimates" about the impact of piracy.
Downloading a ROM does not mean that the user could or would have bought the product otherwise.
Note that I'm not making a statement about whether or not you should be allowed to download the ROM; just pointing out the fact.
That's a very good point. I think the big issue is to use any communications channel that they consider "legitimate." They often ignore or think much less of feedback from email, web forms, and other "automated" systems, because most still think the internet is kind of imaginary and/or populated by the radical fringe. They get so many bags of mail that they never read even a portion of it, and that was before anthrax. They're also pretty much inured to auto-fax campaigns run through the websites of the major lobby organizations (ACLU, etc) and generally ignore those entirely unless the numbers get really huge.
What scares them are positively identifiable ordinary citizens taking the trouble to contact them on a large scale. The phone seems to be the simplest way to do that. Of course, as seaan wisely points out, they don't really pay attention to details. If you mention a bill or an issue, they usually note it down with a + or -, and that's about it. Even still, when the advisers look at the results tally and see a big figure, they usually get the message quick. I would advise using the phone first, before anything else.
If you take the trouble to compose a fax of your own (even if you use someone else's text), rather than going through an automated system like the ACLU's, then I could believe you're also getting through. And if the phone people are actually telling you to use the fax, by all means!
I think they're worse on the balance, not specifically because of their policies with respect to the media, but in general. Not that I like either side.
All your points are very good ones. I can only say this. I wrote this speech because I'm familiar with the issue, as are a growing number of people here, so that others who get the jist can just read it and be saved the 30 minutes.
Society is supposed to work that way; opinions and strategies trickle down from specialists near an apex of a paricular issue to successively less and less specialized citizens. From experts and attorneys and career civil liberties campaigners to journalists like Taco etc. to me, and I reinforce that with some redundancy (reading about the issue from multiple, hopefully independent sources, and thinking about it critically). Then I digest it and pass it on again.
Specialization is vulnerable to counterfeiting; that is, pretending to be an expert whose opinion should matter, but actually just saying whatever benefits you, or whatever you've been told (or taught) to say. This is more commonly known as lying. This is a big, essential problem with our society today. Nonetheless, the system isn't broken, just under stress, and/. is an excellent example of a system that helps us accurately do this process online.
FYI, Democrats _and_ Republicans are both beholding to media interests (put simply, they're terrified of crossing the people who run television, radio and newspapers), although I think the Repubs are worse on the balance it barely matters who your rep is.
You're right. One guy calling a senate office they utterly ignore. But if you and 20,000 of your friends do it, they will shit themselves.
Trust me.
Now, how many millions of people read/. and agree with you on the issue? Just keep calling, and tell your friends to do the same, and have faith in the process. We got a long way on that method in our country, and we can certainly go farther on it.
I just did it; it's pretty easy. You can do it before lunch in about 5 minutes.
You go to this web page:
http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index.cfm
Search through the page using the "find" function in your browser for your state abbreviation and find your two senators.
If you have trouble getting their names, they're also listed by state on this page, but without phone numbers:
http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state. cf m
You call each of them. Calling senators and even house members is generally very easy; they usually know not to make potential voters wait on hold, they're very polite, and they are supposed to take notes and tally the opinions of callers throughout the day. This isn't as important to a senator as money, but if, say, 20,000 people (a tiny fraction of the/. readership) attempted to call about an issue on a single day, they would take serious notice.
Keep it polite, friendly, and under 5 minutes. If you can make your point in under 60 seconds, bonus points. Remember, you're just talking to an intern manning the phone, not a participant in a conspiracy. They might even be curious about what you have to say.
"Hello, I'm a voter from the Senator's home state of XX. I'd like to express my opinion on some pending legislation." And then they say go ahead, and you say, "I believe that the extravagant protections we are considering affording copyright holders are bad for our society and bad for our economy. I strong support the repeal of the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and today, I'm calling to inform you of my intention not to vote for anyone who supports S.2395, the Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002. Existing protections for copyright holders already go too far, and this bill would make it worse. Unnecessarily restricting fair use, free speech and free expression to protect the interests of media companies is morally wrong, and will make it harder to protect intellectual property in the long run."
You could get into a habit of doing this. Calling your representatives about an issue should be a normal part of your routine, like paying your bills or cleaning your house. The more people do it, the better things get for everyone.
I appreciate the spirit of your argument. However, as a consumer and a citizen, I simply say, I do not accept that analogy. It has no intrinsic legitimacy and no utility for myself or society as a whole. I consider the attempt to make it an unnecessary favor to the media businesses at the expense of much larger and more important concerns.
There are many reasons for taking this point of view on the matter. Others are at this moment elsewhere on this topic making far more detailed arguments to the point than I care to here. But I will leave you with an example.
In 100 years, after Sony is long bankrupt and we're all long dead, the only way we will see a lot of what's been copy-protected today is from the "pirates" who broke the protection and allowed it to be stored in general purpose, redundant media.
I often chuckle at the crackers, and their demos and intros that I see today, because in generations to come, we may see their work enshrined in the nations libraries and museums...
I think you are (more skillfully) getting at what I'm trying to say: the courts have the power, even under the DMCA, to do the right thing. The problem is that, here as well as abroad, when faced with a decision about whether a "significant non-infringing use" exists (in the DeCSS case, for instance), judges have been alarmingly wrong on the point.
Which was the idea when the law was written, but still.
The DMCA (arguably) forbids making, owning, or even discussing how to make mod chips.
The law is convoluted, badly written, and in practice self-contradictory. But the net effect may be that your mod chip could get you in trouble.
The media guys know it's a shaky defense; that's why they're not rushing to test its limits right away. Rather than sic the feds on everyone (as they certainly could), they're going for what we like to call a chilling effect; they want practices to change as people are _afraid_ of prosecution, and they want the law to age a bit. Recent laws always look like potential victims to a high court, so the theory goes. But once its 10 years, 20 years old, it starts to take on a certain "legitimacy."
There are many ways even the awful recent laws could be interpreted out of existence, so to speak. To really get what they want (which is impossible, but regardless), the big media industries not only need these draconian laws and worse, but they need very "conservative" enforcement in the courts.
Strictly speaking, I tend to agree with the Australians; security on the consoles (and proposed security in other systems) is far from being "primarily" a tool to prevent theft. It has many other purposes, stated and unstated.
We often call fair use a victim of the media industry's war on customers (or perhaps a war on civil liberties, or on sane contract and criminal law). Region coding aside, one thing in particular that frequently gets swept away in the "copy control" race is the notion of backups.
Yes, just simple backups. I'm in the habit of keeping things backed up when I can, and you should be too. Of course, don't take my word for it. You'll be a believer after you lose your first important batch of data, just like I did.
The media guys just want the backup issue to go away. They ignore it at every opportunity, and they hope you will too. But why can't we make backup copies of our CDs, DVDs, and, yes, playstation (etc etc) games? They get scratched, they wear out... even if you buy into the most apocalyptic notions about time shifting and space shifting, backups are still legit. And not only us, why can't _libraries_ and _rental places_ make backups? 100x as important for them as for us; they get a lot of wear and tear.
The "security" systems, as exemplified by the PS2 and other consoles aren't just for preventing theft. They're for preventing backups. You damage "your" property? Buy another copy. But is that legitimate?
This debate is filled with similar examples. Where's the "security" in region coding? It's entirely arbitrary! And the list goes on.
You see, there's a continuous conflict here, between big media's power grab, and fair use (making backups, quoting, time shifting, space shifting, etc), basic freedoms (like privacy, for DRM systems which "happen" to report what you do back to HQ), and elementary contract law (parties explicitly agree, implied contracts, no "surprising" fine print conditions, you own what you buy, etc - actually comes pretty close to the rule of least astonishment).
They want to abolish fair use altogether (along with getting special status for contract law and enforcement, etc) - that's the only way they can try to stop all theft. While they're at it, they're going to get fringe benefits that far outweight the value of their stated goal - control over all media devices? Carte blanche to dictate any kind of terms they want whenever they sell you anything? The ability to asses and collect taxes? Yet right now all the pieces aren't in place yet, and if you have to rule on the law, you still have the option to look objectively at the facts and conclude that mod chips and other game copying tools have legitimate uses and must be legal. I don't even think it's a stretch.
Until they explicitly eliminate fair use at the legislative level (which they might - who knows! anything's possible, apparently), that's always a possibility. Of course, controlling the courts isn't impossible either, perhaps... One thing the last few years should have taught us is that when it comes to corrupting influences in politics, politicians have a unique appreciation for the power of those who control the media.
I thank you for continuing the discussion. However, I again respectfully cannot agree with your conclusion; no theories are proven or disproven by these anecdotes or assertions; in fact, in the face of anecdote, it is generally wiser to give more consideration to negative outcomes. Whether a system is poorly documented or organized and hence requires some magical patching and tuning (which in the case of many of the projects I observed, even Microsoft itself was not able to supply) in order not to require nightly rebooting or to scale as it has been advertised to, or whether it is simply irretrievably broken for certain tasks, that is not a system you want. If NT4's success is as we rhetorically suggest is 50/50 or 33/66, that's terrible. But of course such numbers are meaningless - this is only to attempt to illustrate my point about anecdotes.
The thing that really troubles me about this conclusion is that application platforms like IIS and SQL Server are not like Photoshop or Sendmail. They're not special-purpose; they will be used to do a wide variety of jobs, each potentially drawing on another relatively small set of a vast feature library. If some people get them to work and others don't, it is just as reasonable to conclude, not that because it works for some that the others are incompetent, but that the system is broken but that not everyone's applications are equally unlucky in how they encounter the bugs.
Really your implication seems to continue to be that if I have had these experiences, I and those I am referring to are simply not as good at running NT as you are. There I suppose we have little chance of discovering the truth.:) Fortunately, there is not much at stake in the NT4: good or bad? argument anymore.:) I have nonetheless appreciated your points, and agree there are certainly many problems on both platforms that are attributable to failures to use the system correctly, yet blamed on the system itself.
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I feel old. I hate to say this, but it just didn't occur to me that one day you'd quit.
Though it's the work of many, there's always been a wise voice in charge here. You've been that guy. I can only be grateful for all the things you've done. Each well-chosen story was itself a gift. But I think your larger, architectural heritage - creating the modern moderation system, proving its success - is something that will echo throughout the coming years, with greater and greater significance. Organizing communities is, after all, our primary occupation as a species.
I feel privileged to have gotten to see it all first hand. And proud to have been able to participate, however imperfectly, in the discussion of this great salon at your end of the Internet.
It won't be the same without you.
The court struck down Eldred, surprising no one (I hope). I believe they would have had a principled argument not to do so, but I'm not a Supreme Court justice. :) I can certainly understand their argument. While the copyright laws may be egregious, the constitutional grounds for challenging them are ultimately, to be most polite, tenuous.
The court did not rule on the "correctness" of the latest copyright extension. Basically they concluded that they lacked the power to change it.
This has always been a fight in the legislature. To be honest, an 11th hour reversal by the Supremes would have been a hollow victory. The legislature can turn out this bought-and-paid-for garbage 10x faster than the courts can correct it, if they can even correct it at all. We need, as we have always needed, legislative reform.
The important thing to keep in mind is that our representatives are flagrantly taking bribes from big entertainement companies to pass legislation that is outrageously favorable to them at the expense of the economy, the rest of society, etc. This court case has been bringing national attention to that issue, and it did again today. So in that respect, we can say it's good news regardless of the outcome.
Every time corruption is exposed in the media, we get a little closer.
As with many of the new "security measures" we're currently swallowing, from most of the Patriot Act, to this, all the way to, perhaps, the coming war itself, no one seems to be able to make the case very well that any of them would have helped to prevent 9/11, or will help to prevent future attacks.
In fact, by tasking these agencies with vast new responsibilities in monitoring Americans, we can realistically expect worse performance when dealing with future terrorism.
Many citizens don't have the faculties or the will to recognize this fact, and many more who do stop themselves from asking why. But a man writing over 50 years ago gave us a few answers which I believe hit frighteningly close to the mark.
His name comes up so often now that he is in danger of becoming a cliche. But listen to his words:
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the massses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed."
"What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war."
"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."
-George Orwell, 1984
I urge to read the whole book. In my opinion he was an excellent writer of fiction in adition to everything else. But if you skip it, I'll just add that "keeping the structure of society intact" is code for keeping those on top, on top.
I wouldn't claim the Catweasel was in error without also testing the same floppies on a real machine. I have a working Macintosh, Amiga, Commodore w/ 1541, 1581 which can all read the disks the Catweasel rejects. Of course, I've also tried many, many different disks.
This is about as bad as I expected it could be.
Microsoft's dominance in the operating system and applications market will continue basically unchecked. Because of it, Microsoft will find it all the easier to deploy Paladium, which will help cement their dominance by using "security" as an excuse for locking out the interoperability efforts of Linux and others. This will help balkanize the Linux and Windows worlds, which will slow migration away from Windows. It will also be a useful tool for silencing a few activists who defy the restrictions with court and prison. Let's also not forget, without the trial hanging over its collective head, Microsoft will be much freer to use the bludgeon of Office withdrawal against Apple, should it not tow the line.
Paladium is the beginning of efforts towards centralized surveillance and control of all electronic media. Once it is deployed and semi-usable, the "gentle coercion" of fees, compatility, and network-effect fear will help Microsoft as they phase out and then attempt to suppress older, more open versions of their operating system (Win2k, XP, etc). Perhaps Windows Update will back-port the "content revolution." Or perhaps the death blow to Microsoft's open legacy will be a virulent worm which preys on a security hole they refuse to fix.
People will ask incredulously, "who would abuse Paladium, and how?" and the answer is, "anyone who can, in any way they can get away with."
The evolution of the operating system will keep its super-slow-mo pace. It was bad enough before; who would invest a nickle in any new technology that could compete with Microsoft now? They have the King's indulgence. In addition to the enormous "natural" benefits of their momentum and size, they are effectively untouchable. Progress in the computer sciences, and then progress in all the fields computers touch (and could touch, in a more innovative world), is hurt tremendously by this.
The threat of loss, from competition or regulation, is what drives progress. Think of it - Windows' closest competitor is written by hobbyists! And even then, it is because of Linux, and this trial (and to a far lesser extent, Apple) that Windows 2000 is more stable than Windows 98 and NT. But with the antitrust case gone, the content trusts having paved the way with the DMCA, and Microsoft already preparing new "solutions" to problems of interoperability and easy migration, there will no longer be a threat.
We are on some kind of roll. As a nation, we seem to make a new decision that betrays our standards and squanders our legacy every day. But, though people will call me a geek or claim I have an exaggerated idea of the computer's importance, I say that today's failure is particularly egregious. What all the parties have done here, the DoJ, their counterparts in the various States, the judge (CKK), and not least Microsoft itself, has left our children a disgusting legacy, and they will curse us for it. Rightly so.
You clearly didn't read my post "Anonymous Coward." We tried a number of different computers of different manufacturers, ages, etc. as well as different floppy drives, cables. Are you suggesting that "the motherboard timing was off" on all of the HP, Dell, IBM, Gateway, and Compaq motherboards that we tried?
I have a million old disks in a Babel of formats, and I bought a Catweasel several years ago from Jens and his friend Norbert. I believed all the hype, I was ready to start the months-long process of imaging all my disks onto PC before too many of their bits shifted and they became unreadable.
The problem is that the Catweasel doesn't live up to its hype. Or at least the one I got.
I had about a 90% failure rate across the board. 100% failure with 1581 disks. 75% with Amiga. 90% with 800k Mac disks. ~90% with 1541-style Commodore. Absolutely abyssmal. Their rudimentary software (un-abortable without forcing open the drive door while it was in operation) would dump a mountain of German error messages on me. I would then take the same disk to a real Commodore/Amiga/Mac and read it perfectly.
I talked with them a bit about the problem. At their instructions, I tried different computers (4), different floppy drives (9), different floppy cables (5), all from different manufacturers, different speeds, and including a cable Jens himself said would work, etc... As you can see, I satisfied myself beyond all normal means that this was a problem with his card, and nothing else.
Eventually I sent my card back to Jens, and a month or two later, I received the exact same card back in the mail. He "couldn't find the problem." However, I still had a useless card, and then they stopped answering my emails.
The card did read a couple of disks - though not even reliably enough to make it a curiosity. This leads me to believe Jens is not a scam artist, and that he actually just still has (or had) some major bugs in his system. But not even trying to replace the card, and then just dropping me and keeping my (what was it? $50? $100?) money... He struck me as a hobbyist who'd gotten in over his head. So I'm very surprised to see him still in the business.
I don't know why all you guys seem think Kazaalite and BearShare are for MP3s... They're for downloading RedHat ISO's, silly!
-David
If you want to learn something, read Orwell. Then if you haven't got the point, maybe move on to Huxley.
I'm not being rude, I mean it. They put the case better than I ever could.
If you're not a reader, find a friend who lived in the U.S.S.R.. Ask them about what it was like to have serial numbers on typewriters and copy machines, and a national informant system, or to have to show papers to go from one town to the next, or at any time for any reason. To walk down a quiet street at night with a girl, arm in arm, but not steal that kiss, because you are not really sure you're alone.
The psychological effects of these regimes are subtle and pervasive.
The thing you want to think about is that, often times, the government does things not quite for the reasons that it gives. And surveillance is one of those things that has a lot of purposes besides preventing terrorism.
Consider the fact that almost none of the security measures passed since 9/11 were related to published dificiencies in our previous security program's handling of the disaster. National IDs had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and would not have prevented the attack - the attackers would have simply had their own. They were in the country legally.
The Soviets pulled out every stop. They did things the current pro-surveillance, pro-data-collection Americans would have nightmares about. I'll give you a hint. It didn't stop crime, let alone terrorism. But it did make a striking example that life in a totalitarian state is barely that.
Our history in this country is that of refugees from government. And we organized our society in perpetual conflict with its government as a result. If we trust government, why have a jury, since judges are better qualified? Why have courts? Don't you trust the police? Wouldn't they know best who'se guilty and who'se not? Why have elections? After all, as Lenin put it, some things are too important to put to a vote.
Instead we have checks and balances, and we have a sense that a life should not be lived in the shadow of government. That it should be in our lives as little as possible. That every time it intrudes, to collect a tax, to stamp a passport, to pull us over on the highway, it had better be giving us a hell of a bargain in return. Our country's resistance to ID's stems from a basic, visceral aspect of that conflict; I do not exist at the sufferance of my state. I do not need to be stamped and photographed to be legitimate. I am a free, "legal" person inherently - not because of my card. I am not, in other words, a number. But this sounds too much like rhetoric. The basic point is, let each agency who needs to know who I am ask each time it needs to. Let each give an ID if it must. Don't let government as a whole enumerate us; that's a bad bargain, because it doesn't need to. Only specific parts of it do. So let it do only as much as it needs.
Of course, it also stems from the basic necessities; a national ID system is expensive, and it has no clearly stated and important benefits that justify its expense. If you say that it helps provide "security," you'll have to say precisely how.
But I'd rather not preach at you. You should look at the works on the subject, read about the relevant history, and draw your own conclusions.
-David
On a Windows 98 machine I administered, one aspect of its decay was that several keys on the keyboard stopped working ("e" being the biggest loss, if I recall correctly).
No, not a hardware problem. I tested different keyboards and they all exhibited the same behavior. And when the OS was wiped and Win2k was installed, no more problem.
There was nothing strange installed that I could find, AV software was up to date and apparently functioning... Very funny one.
You say "If you download Mario 2 for free, that's one less copy of Mario Advance they sell." This is actually a flawed argument, and one commonly used to justify absurdly high "estimates" about the impact of piracy.
Downloading a ROM does not mean that the user could or would have bought the product otherwise.
Note that I'm not making a statement about whether or not you should be allowed to download the ROM; just pointing out the fact.
That's a very good point. I think the big issue is to use any communications channel that they consider "legitimate." They often ignore or think much less of feedback from email, web forms, and other "automated" systems, because most still think the internet is kind of imaginary and/or populated by the radical fringe. They get so many bags of mail that they never read even a portion of it, and that was before anthrax. They're also pretty much inured to auto-fax campaigns run through the websites of the major lobby organizations (ACLU, etc) and generally ignore those entirely unless the numbers get really huge.
What scares them are positively identifiable ordinary citizens taking the trouble to contact them on a large scale. The phone seems to be the simplest way to do that. Of course, as seaan wisely points out, they don't really pay attention to details. If you mention a bill or an issue, they usually note it down with a + or -, and that's about it. Even still, when the advisers look at the results tally and see a big figure, they usually get the message quick. I would advise using the phone first, before anything else.
If you take the trouble to compose a fax of your own (even if you use someone else's text), rather than going through an automated system like the ACLU's, then I could believe you're also getting through. And if the phone people are actually telling you to use the fax, by all means!
I think they're worse on the balance, not specifically because of their policies with respect to the media, but in general. Not that I like either side.
And by "beholding" I mean "beholden."
All your points are very good ones. I can only say this. I wrote this speech because I'm familiar with the issue, as are a growing number of people here, so that others who get the jist can just read it and be saved the 30 minutes.
/. is an excellent example of a system that helps us accurately do this process online.
Society is supposed to work that way; opinions and strategies trickle down from specialists near an apex of a paricular issue to successively less and less specialized citizens. From experts and attorneys and career civil liberties campaigners to journalists like Taco etc. to me, and I reinforce that with some redundancy (reading about the issue from multiple, hopefully independent sources, and thinking about it critically). Then I digest it and pass it on again.
Specialization is vulnerable to counterfeiting; that is, pretending to be an expert whose opinion should matter, but actually just saying whatever benefits you, or whatever you've been told (or taught) to say. This is more commonly known as lying. This is a big, essential problem with our society today. Nonetheless, the system isn't broken, just under stress, and
FYI, Democrats _and_ Republicans are both beholding to media interests (put simply, they're terrified of crossing the people who run television, radio and newspapers), although I think the Repubs are worse on the balance it barely matters who your rep is.
/. and agree with you on the issue? Just keep calling, and tell your friends to do the same, and have faith in the process. We got a long way on that method in our country, and we can certainly go farther on it.
You're right. One guy calling a senate office they utterly ignore. But if you and 20,000 of your friends do it, they will shit themselves.
Trust me.
Now, how many millions of people read
I just did it; it's pretty easy. You can do it before lunch in about 5 minutes.
. cf m
/. readership) attempted to call about an issue on a single day, they would take serious notice.
You go to this web page:
http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index.cfm
Search through the page using the "find" function in your browser for your state abbreviation and find your two senators.
If you have trouble getting their names, they're also listed by state on this page, but without phone numbers:
http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state
You call each of them. Calling senators and even house members is generally very easy; they usually know not to make potential voters wait on hold, they're very polite, and they are supposed to take notes and tally the opinions of callers throughout the day. This isn't as important to a senator as money, but if, say, 20,000 people (a tiny fraction of the
Keep it polite, friendly, and under 5 minutes. If you can make your point in under 60 seconds, bonus points. Remember, you're just talking to an intern manning the phone, not a participant in a conspiracy. They might even be curious about what you have to say.
"Hello, I'm a voter from the Senator's home state of XX. I'd like to express my opinion on some pending legislation." And then they say go ahead, and you say, "I believe that the extravagant protections we are considering affording copyright holders are bad for our society and bad for our economy. I strong support the repeal of the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and today, I'm calling to inform you of my intention not to vote for anyone who supports S.2395, the Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002. Existing protections for copyright holders already go too far, and this bill would make it worse. Unnecessarily restricting fair use, free speech and free expression to protect the interests of media companies is morally wrong, and will make it harder to protect intellectual property in the long run."
You could get into a habit of doing this. Calling your representatives about an issue should be a normal part of your routine, like paying your bills or cleaning your house. The more people do it, the better things get for everyone.
I appreciate the spirit of your argument. However, as a consumer and a citizen, I simply say, I do not accept that analogy. It has no intrinsic legitimacy and no utility for myself or society as a whole. I consider the attempt to make it an unnecessary favor to the media businesses at the expense of much larger and more important concerns.
There are many reasons for taking this point of view on the matter. Others are at this moment elsewhere on this topic making far more detailed arguments to the point than I care to here. But I will leave you with an example.
In 100 years, after Sony is long bankrupt and we're all long dead, the only way we will see a lot of what's been copy-protected today is from the "pirates" who broke the protection and allowed it to be stored in general purpose, redundant media.
I often chuckle at the crackers, and their demos and intros that I see today, because in generations to come, we may see their work enshrined in the nations libraries and museums...
I think you are (more skillfully) getting at what I'm trying to say: the courts have the power, even under the DMCA, to do the right thing. The problem is that, here as well as abroad, when faced with a decision about whether a "significant non-infringing use" exists (in the DeCSS case, for instance), judges have been alarmingly wrong on the point.
Which was the idea when the law was written, but still.
Thank you,
-David
The DMCA (arguably) forbids making, owning, or even discussing how to make mod chips.
The law is convoluted, badly written, and in practice self-contradictory. But the net effect may be that your mod chip could get you in trouble.
The media guys know it's a shaky defense; that's why they're not rushing to test its limits right away. Rather than sic the feds on everyone (as they certainly could), they're going for what we like to call a chilling effect; they want practices to change as people are _afraid_ of prosecution, and they want the law to age a bit. Recent laws always look like potential victims to a high court, so the theory goes. But once its 10 years, 20 years old, it starts to take on a certain "legitimacy."
Don't ask me. I only live here.
There are many ways even the awful recent laws could be interpreted out of existence, so to speak. To really get what they want (which is impossible, but regardless), the big media industries not only need these draconian laws and worse, but they need very "conservative" enforcement in the courts.
Strictly speaking, I tend to agree with the Australians; security on the consoles (and proposed security in other systems) is far from being "primarily" a tool to prevent theft. It has many other purposes, stated and unstated.
We often call fair use a victim of the media industry's war on customers (or perhaps a war on civil liberties, or on sane contract and criminal law). Region coding aside, one thing in particular that frequently gets swept away in the "copy control" race is the notion of backups.
Yes, just simple backups. I'm in the habit of keeping things backed up when I can, and you should be too. Of course, don't take my word for it. You'll be a believer after you lose your first important batch of data, just like I did.
The media guys just want the backup issue to go away. They ignore it at every opportunity, and they hope you will too. But why can't we make backup copies of our CDs, DVDs, and, yes, playstation (etc etc) games? They get scratched, they wear out... even if you buy into the most apocalyptic notions about time shifting and space shifting, backups are still legit. And not only us, why can't _libraries_ and _rental places_ make backups? 100x as important for them as for us; they get a lot of wear and tear.
The "security" systems, as exemplified by the PS2 and other consoles aren't just for preventing theft. They're for preventing backups. You damage "your" property? Buy another copy. But is that legitimate?
This debate is filled with similar examples. Where's the "security" in region coding? It's entirely arbitrary! And the list goes on.
You see, there's a continuous conflict here, between big media's power grab, and fair use (making backups, quoting, time shifting, space shifting, etc), basic freedoms (like privacy, for DRM systems which "happen" to report what you do back to HQ), and elementary contract law (parties explicitly agree, implied contracts, no "surprising" fine print conditions, you own what you buy, etc - actually comes pretty close to the rule of least astonishment).
They want to abolish fair use altogether (along with getting special status for contract law and enforcement, etc) - that's the only way they can try to stop all theft. While they're at it, they're going to get fringe benefits that far outweight the value of their stated goal - control over all media devices? Carte blanche to dictate any kind of terms they want whenever they sell you anything? The ability to asses and collect taxes? Yet right now all the pieces aren't in place yet, and if you have to rule on the law, you still have the option to look objectively at the facts and conclude that mod chips and other game copying tools have legitimate uses and must be legal. I don't even think it's a stretch.
Until they explicitly eliminate fair use at the legislative level (which they might - who knows! anything's possible, apparently), that's always a possibility. Of course, controlling the courts isn't impossible either, perhaps... One thing the last few years should have taught us is that when it comes to corrupting influences in politics, politicians have a unique appreciation for the power of those who control the media.
Welcome to my ignore list. ;)
If you have a burning need to make an ass out of yourself, then by all means, don't let me stop you.
:)
Frankly, I feel you'd really be shortchanged if you didn't strive for even higher levels of embarrassment.
Have yourself a ball, cheez whiz.
Ah, undecidable. Forgot to click anonymous? Oh well. So nice to see you again.
;)
I know I must have hit pretty close to the mark in our previous conversation to earn your lasting affections.
I thank you for continuing the discussion. However, I again respectfully cannot agree with your conclusion; no theories are proven or disproven by these anecdotes or assertions; in fact, in the face of anecdote, it is generally wiser to give more consideration to negative outcomes. Whether a system is poorly documented or organized and hence requires some magical patching and tuning (which in the case of many of the projects I observed, even Microsoft itself was not able to supply) in order not to require nightly rebooting or to scale as it has been advertised to, or whether it is simply irretrievably broken for certain tasks, that is not a system you want. If NT4's success is as we rhetorically suggest is 50/50 or 33/66, that's terrible. But of course such numbers are meaningless - this is only to attempt to illustrate my point about anecdotes.
:) Fortunately, there is not much at stake in the NT4: good or bad? argument anymore. :) I have nonetheless appreciated your points, and agree there are certainly many problems on both platforms that are attributable to failures to use the system correctly, yet blamed on the system itself.
The thing that really troubles me about this conclusion is that application platforms like IIS and SQL Server are not like Photoshop or Sendmail. They're not special-purpose; they will be used to do a wide variety of jobs, each potentially drawing on another relatively small set of a vast feature library. If some people get them to work and others don't, it is just as reasonable to conclude, not that because it works for some that the others are incompetent, but that the system is broken but that not everyone's applications are equally unlucky in how they encounter the bugs.
Really your implication seems to continue to be that if I have had these experiences, I and those I am referring to are simply not as good at running NT as you are. There I suppose we have little chance of discovering the truth.