hi, i'm the one that posted the original linux-on-mac post. the reason i'd want to do this is to develop a kernel module for my work, while still running mac os x for everything else.
The criminal penalties are: "(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and (2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense." Only someone who violates the law "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" can be convicted.
The Universit of Michigan is very clear that any code created by a student is his/her property and NOT the school's. This includes code written for classes. Also, there is help on campus for those who wish to go commerical, opensourece, etc with their code.
I'm pretty sure that the University Of Michigan in Ann Arbor respects privacy.
The one thing I know they do log is who's logged on to which computer when. so don't think about sending anonymous, threatening, mail to a prof or anyone. i don't think they log all email.
Also, they let you run servers provided you supplied in creating the content you server.
When it comes to writing code for class, you own the code, not them.
shit. tonight i finally decided to work the kinks out of my 2.2.16 compile. well, I did it. while i test out the cdrecorder that is now working, I decide to visit slashdot....oh well.
LOCKE: So let's start with the basics: When did Freenet get started? And how did you originally
envision it?
CLARKE: I started the Freenet project when I was at university as my fourth year project. I
completed the design in, I think, July of 1999. Freenet is a system designed to allow the distribution of
information on the Internet, in an efficient and anonymous manner. Much like a library -- a library
where anyone can place books in the library, and anyone can borrow books from the library with
complete anonymity.
LOCKE: I was just looking at your FAQ on the site, and it's very complete as to background, and
answering some of the dicier questions about criminals and pirates, and terrorism, and pornography, and
copyright infringement. Maybe a good way to get into that is to ask you what your take is on the current
Napster flap.
CLARKE: Well, I mean, I think that it's unfortunate. I think that the RIAA is making a mistake trying to
fight technology... There's a whole succession of technologies that the RIAA has tried to stifle -- and
failed. And, in the longer run, it's been demonstrated that those technologies have actually benefited the
recording industry. I think that will also be the case with digital distribution of media on the Internet.
Although the Internet will probably start to challenge conventional ideas of copyright.
LOCKE: On your FAQ you say threats to traditional publishing and recording industries have come
from radio, the mimeograph, television, photocopier, magnetic tape, compact disc, video cassette
recorder, et cetera. So what you're saying is that there's a long history of technologies of plagiarism, you
might call them.
CLARKE: Well, I think I would make a more general point than that. I think that you cannot try to
prevent technological progress. What you must do is take a step back, and say, "How can we adapt to
this new technology?" Because, you know, even if the RIAA succeeded in stifling a particular
technology in America, they're going to have a very hard time stifling it in the rest of the world. And
eventually it's going to creep back in. I think, generally speaking, any effort to try to prevent
technological progress to preserve your existing business models is just short sighted, and doomed to
failure.
LOCKE: I recall a case when the U.S. federal government was fighting the export of 128-bit
encryption. Some site called hushmail.com set up, I think it was in Barbados, and offered free 128-bit
encrypted mail to anybody who wanted to sign up on the site. So they went offshore a few miles and just
said, "Well, stop this." It's the old story of the Internet routing around obstacles. Let's talk about, for a
second, the difference between Freenet and Napster. I mean, obviously, the courts are stepping in, and
there's the potential of Napster being stopped by judicial decree, although I suppose that's questionable
along many lines. But, how does Freenet differ from that exposure to a particular government saying,
"You're not allowed to do this."
CLARKE: Okay, let me start with the motivations of Freenet. Freenet was designed to permit free
distribution of information, even under a government, which is intent on preventing that. Now because of
that, Freenet has been specifically designed to withstand attack by a government, even to withstand
attack by its own developers. So, really, Freenet has been specifically designed to be immune to any
kind of judicial attack. Sure, they might try to sue me, for example -- I'm an individual, and I can be
sued. But it would get them nowhere, because it would have no impact whatsoever upon Freenet.
LOCKE: There's enough code out there now, that if all your equipment was confiscated, others would
carry on the project. There's no one head to cut off, in other words.
CLARKE: Even if they put me in jail, confiscated my hardware, Freenet would not miss a step. In fact,
it would probably benefit Freenet, because...
LOCKE: Free PR.
CLARKE: Freenet has been designed with this kind of situation in mind, from day one.
LOCKE: You know, it strikes me that the real story is not the particular fate of Napster, but the overall
dynamics that the Internet brings to bear on such issues: Here is a mechanism for distributing MP3s
peer to peer, which is Napster today. And the business concerns try to stop that through whatever
means available. Then what comes behind it is a much more robust response. In which case I'm talking
about Freenet, which is potentially a hundred times scarier because you really can't do anything about it.
CLARKE: Although I think it is important to stress that Freenet was not designed with the issue of
copyright in mind. It was not designed to be the next Napster. It was actually a journalist who first said
to me, "Hey, well couldn't you do the same thing as Napster, but better?" But in terms of the actual
genesis of Freenet, I wasn't thinking about MP3s, I wasn't thinking about music, I was thinking about
freedom of speech.
LOCKE: Let me put your feet to the fire here, slightly. The first time we spoke you said very explicitly
our mission here is to destroy copyright. Maybe you don't want to go on record with that, but that was
pretty explicit, and I thought it was interesting.
CLARKE: Okay. Let me clarify. I do think that copyright is a bad thing, but my initial motivation was
not copyright. First, people started saying to me, "Hey, this could be used to distribute stuff without
enforcing copyright." Then people started to say, "This can be used to distribute material without
enforcing copyright, therefore, it shouldn't be allowed." And that put me in the situation where I had to
justify what Freenet did. So yes, I did come to the conclusion that copyright was a bad thing, but that
was not the initial motivation behind Freenet.
LOCKE: It seems like the initial motivation was free speech: unbounded ability to publish.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: When we first talked, I said that I thought that this mechanism would largely appeal to
contraband information.
CLARKE: Sure.
LOCKE: Whether it was whistle blowing by employees on companies dumping, you know, strontium
90 into rivers, or the Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak kind of stuff coming out of the Soviet Union.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: Or terrorist information or child pornography. Maybe you could address that suite of concerns
a little bit.
CLARKE: Well, if there's one thing that I got from a computer science background it's that if you find
yourself having to draw an arbitrary line between two things, you generally made a mistake earlier on.
And you need to rethink things on a more fundamental level. And so applying that philosophy, I thought,
well, why not permit everything, and then allow people to draw lines, for themselves.
LOCKE: You had a much more pragmatic argument, too: You made the point about child pornography,
that this is stuff people sell. They don't put it out there out of the goodness of their hearts. They can't sell
it on Freenet, so it's not an attractive proposition. I have a question about version control, which is if you
have an official document on a Web site -- a position statement or whatever it might be -- and it's a
kind of living document that gets updated according to the latest thinking. Now there's two possibilities
here. One is the revisionism that says, "Oh, we never said those things before, and the current version
doesn't reflect that stuff." It's something as simple as the definitive FAQ. Alternatively, you can have all
the versions, and you can go back and do the historical development of where did these ideas come
from, which dropped out, which were added. With Freenet you can keep all those versions -- but it
might be very hard to find the definitive current version of something.
CLARKE: We're actually addressing that issue at this very moment. We're working on a mechanism
that we call sub spaces, whereby you can actually reserve a subset of Freenet space of keys. So, you
can basically kind of reserve an area of key space in which, for example, if you're publishing a daily
magazine, you can publish each daily version. Yes, you're right, Freenet does kind of retain information.
It is a kind of version control -- at any point you can go back to see what was written before. Provided
it hasn't been dropped from the system due to unpopularity. But, in terms of finding the first, or the latest
version, that's not actually that big a problem -- you can use an algorithm and find the latest one
reasonably efficiently.
LOCKE: We talked about the magnetism of contraband information. What do you see as the advantage
Freenet has over the Web as it exists today for information that's not at the perceived risk of censorship,
or of being somehow abridged by whatever kind of authorities. You know, if I were just publishing a
humor zine, why would I want to put it on Freenet, as opposed to the Web? Or do you see them living
parallel lives?
CLARKE: At the beginning of the conversation you asked me what Freenet was designed to be, and I
said it was designed to be an efficient means to distribute information. Freenet is actually much more
efficient than the Web in the way it distributes information. With the Web, if a hundred people in Europe
request the same document in America, that will travel under the Atlantic a hundred times. With
Freenet it will only travel under once or twice. And then a copy will be stored locally in Europe, where it
can be distributed to the other ninety-nine or ninety-eight people requesting it.
LOCKE: So that's a caching capability.
CLARKE: It is caching, but it's not. Because generally, with the cache, you've got the cache, and
you've got the main repository. Whereas Freenet is... everything is a cache.
LOCKE: So it's a distributed caching...
CLARKE: That's correct, yes.
LOCKE: Right. Well, that speaks to sort of mechanical efficiency. But are there ramifications outside of
that? I would guess, because you're counting frequency of requests, that you also get, almost as a side
effect, a ranking of popularity. And that tells you something about what people are interested in.
CLARKE: Well, in a way, yes: Unpopular information is dropped from the system. But there isn't really
any way to conduct a census on the Freenet, like, there are fifteen copies of this and twenty copies of
that.
LOCKE: I'm very interested in mechanisms whereby people can hook up with communities of interest.
And I see the potential here for a way to gauge the current levels of interest that would be fed back into
a community of users, and would begin to constitute, let's say, communities in potentia.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: I mean, we see these waves across the Internet, these sort of memic waves that break out.
Cluetrain was my Web site and book, and they both had some of that quality, certainly. But, to be able to
see those early on, and find places that you can hook up with like minded people, that seems to be a
dimension of Freenet that's very interesting. Are you pursuing anything along those lines?
CLARKE: Well, yes, I mean, Freenet does actually self-organize and aggregate similar information
together. And that similar information is not only in terms of it being physically similar information, but in
terms of similar people being interested in the information. So it's a little bit like systems like Firefly, or
Amazon, where Amazon will say that other people who like this book, also like these books.
LOCKE: So, are you actually bringing some kind of collaborative filtering to bear here?
CLARKE: Well, right now, we actually deliberately prevent Freenet from doing that. Or we kind of
scrambled that mechanism. And the reason for that is so that you don't get, you know, all books about
philosophy on a small number of machines, which could then be wiped out, due to a kind of localized
failure. So we deliberately scramble that mechanism. However, we are working on a searching
mechanism, which will actually exploit that.
LOCKE: So you would aggregate the index to reflect categories and taxonomies.
CLARKE: That's correct, although there wouldn't be any centralized index, as such. The search
mechanism would be completely decentralized.
LOCKE: But, virtually, you have a way to aggregate topical information by subject.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: So it's something more like Yahoo! than Altavista.
CLARKE: Yes. That's exactly what it'll do. It'll be like a Yahoo! directory. But it'll actually figure out
the categories for itself, rather than rely on anyone to tell it what the categories are.
Share your thoughts on Freenet, copyright, and free speech, in the Loop.
VHS was more popular (not sure why, anyone care to comment?)
The people who made betamax kept the rights to the players (maybe other equipment?) while the creators of VHS (sony?) licensed it out to everyone. costs driven down....
Most of you posters go to college (i will in august) so I want to know before I choose a college... Which places have good net access? Do any have weird quirks? keep firewalling/proxies/uptime/speed in mind.
Thanks, Andrew de los Reyes -- This has been my first post on slashdot!
Slashdot Mirror
hi, i'm the one that posted the original linux-on-mac post. the reason i'd want to do this is to develop a kernel module for my work, while still running mac os x for everything else.
-andrew
The criminal penalties are: "(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and (2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense." Only someone who violates the law "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" can be convicted.
-andrew
(i added the bold)
The Universit of Michigan is very clear that any code created by a student is his/her property and NOT the school's. This includes code written for classes. Also, there is help on campus for those who wish to go commerical, opensourece, etc with their code.
I love it.
-andrew
I'm pretty sure that the University Of Michigan in Ann Arbor respects privacy.
The one thing I know they do log is who's logged on to which computer when. so don't think about sending anonymous, threatening, mail to a prof or anyone. i don't think they log all email.
Also, they let you run servers provided you supplied in creating the content you server.
When it comes to writing code for class, you own the code, not them.
They seem to "get it" across the board.
-andrew
I tried but i can't get it...
Which app did you use?
-andrew
I downloaded the daily snapshot to check this thing out and every filename had ",v" appended to it. anyone else got this?
-andy
That's http://www.booksizepc.com/.
-andy
I was just wondering if this program was open source or not.
-andy
shit. tonight i finally decided to work the kinks out of my 2.2.16 compile. well, I did it. while i test out the cdrecorder that is now working, I decide to visit slashdot....oh well.
a post like this deserves a sig
-andy de los reyes
just understant that your mother is quite obese
LOCKE: So let's start with the basics: When did Freenet get started? And how did you originally
envision it?
CLARKE: I started the Freenet project when I was at university as my fourth year project. I
completed the design in, I think, July of 1999. Freenet is a system designed to allow the distribution of
information on the Internet, in an efficient and anonymous manner. Much like a library -- a library
where anyone can place books in the library, and anyone can borrow books from the library with
complete anonymity.
LOCKE: I was just looking at your FAQ on the site, and it's very complete as to background, and
answering some of the dicier questions about criminals and pirates, and terrorism, and pornography, and
copyright infringement. Maybe a good way to get into that is to ask you what your take is on the current
Napster flap.
CLARKE: Well, I mean, I think that it's unfortunate. I think that the RIAA is making a mistake trying to
fight technology... There's a whole succession of technologies that the RIAA has tried to stifle -- and
failed. And, in the longer run, it's been demonstrated that those technologies have actually benefited the
recording industry. I think that will also be the case with digital distribution of media on the Internet.
Although the Internet will probably start to challenge conventional ideas of copyright.
LOCKE: On your FAQ you say threats to traditional publishing and recording industries have come
from radio, the mimeograph, television, photocopier, magnetic tape, compact disc, video cassette
recorder, et cetera. So what you're saying is that there's a long history of technologies of plagiarism, you
might call them.
CLARKE: Well, I think I would make a more general point than that. I think that you cannot try to
prevent technological progress. What you must do is take a step back, and say, "How can we adapt to
this new technology?" Because, you know, even if the RIAA succeeded in stifling a particular
technology in America, they're going to have a very hard time stifling it in the rest of the world. And
eventually it's going to creep back in. I think, generally speaking, any effort to try to prevent
technological progress to preserve your existing business models is just short sighted, and doomed to
failure.
LOCKE: I recall a case when the U.S. federal government was fighting the export of 128-bit
encryption. Some site called hushmail.com set up, I think it was in Barbados, and offered free 128-bit
encrypted mail to anybody who wanted to sign up on the site. So they went offshore a few miles and just
said, "Well, stop this." It's the old story of the Internet routing around obstacles. Let's talk about, for a
second, the difference between Freenet and Napster. I mean, obviously, the courts are stepping in, and
there's the potential of Napster being stopped by judicial decree, although I suppose that's questionable
along many lines. But, how does Freenet differ from that exposure to a particular government saying,
"You're not allowed to do this."
CLARKE: Okay, let me start with the motivations of Freenet. Freenet was designed to permit free
distribution of information, even under a government, which is intent on preventing that. Now because of
that, Freenet has been specifically designed to withstand attack by a government, even to withstand
attack by its own developers. So, really, Freenet has been specifically designed to be immune to any
kind of judicial attack. Sure, they might try to sue me, for example -- I'm an individual, and I can be
sued. But it would get them nowhere, because it would have no impact whatsoever upon Freenet.
LOCKE: There's enough code out there now, that if all your equipment was confiscated, others would
carry on the project. There's no one head to cut off, in other words.
CLARKE: Even if they put me in jail, confiscated my hardware, Freenet would not miss a step. In fact,
it would probably benefit Freenet, because
LOCKE: Free PR.
CLARKE: Freenet has been designed with this kind of situation in mind, from day one.
LOCKE: You know, it strikes me that the real story is not the particular fate of Napster, but the overall
dynamics that the Internet brings to bear on such issues: Here is a mechanism for distributing MP3s
peer to peer, which is Napster today. And the business concerns try to stop that through whatever
means available. Then what comes behind it is a much more robust response. In which case I'm talking
about Freenet, which is potentially a hundred times scarier because you really can't do anything about it.
CLARKE: Although I think it is important to stress that Freenet was not designed with the issue of
copyright in mind. It was not designed to be the next Napster. It was actually a journalist who first said
to me, "Hey, well couldn't you do the same thing as Napster, but better?" But in terms of the actual
genesis of Freenet, I wasn't thinking about MP3s, I wasn't thinking about music, I was thinking about
freedom of speech.
LOCKE: Let me put your feet to the fire here, slightly. The first time we spoke you said very explicitly
our mission here is to destroy copyright. Maybe you don't want to go on record with that, but that was
pretty explicit, and I thought it was interesting.
CLARKE: Okay. Let me clarify. I do think that copyright is a bad thing, but my initial motivation was
not copyright. First, people started saying to me, "Hey, this could be used to distribute stuff without
enforcing copyright." Then people started to say, "This can be used to distribute material without
enforcing copyright, therefore, it shouldn't be allowed." And that put me in the situation where I had to
justify what Freenet did. So yes, I did come to the conclusion that copyright was a bad thing, but that
was not the initial motivation behind Freenet.
LOCKE: It seems like the initial motivation was free speech: unbounded ability to publish.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: When we first talked, I said that I thought that this mechanism would largely appeal to
contraband information.
CLARKE: Sure.
LOCKE: Whether it was whistle blowing by employees on companies dumping, you know, strontium
90 into rivers, or the Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak kind of stuff coming out of the Soviet Union.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: Or terrorist information or child pornography. Maybe you could address that suite of concerns
a little bit.
CLARKE: Well, if there's one thing that I got from a computer science background it's that if you find
yourself having to draw an arbitrary line between two things, you generally made a mistake earlier on.
And you need to rethink things on a more fundamental level. And so applying that philosophy, I thought,
well, why not permit everything, and then allow people to draw lines, for themselves.
LOCKE: You had a much more pragmatic argument, too: You made the point about child pornography,
that this is stuff people sell. They don't put it out there out of the goodness of their hearts. They can't sell
it on Freenet, so it's not an attractive proposition. I have a question about version control, which is if you
have an official document on a Web site -- a position statement or whatever it might be -- and it's a
kind of living document that gets updated according to the latest thinking. Now there's two possibilities
here. One is the revisionism that says, "Oh, we never said those things before, and the current version
doesn't reflect that stuff." It's something as simple as the definitive FAQ. Alternatively, you can have all
the versions, and you can go back and do the historical development of where did these ideas come
from, which dropped out, which were added. With Freenet you can keep all those versions -- but it
might be very hard to find the definitive current version of something.
CLARKE: We're actually addressing that issue at this very moment. We're working on a mechanism
that we call sub spaces, whereby you can actually reserve a subset of Freenet space of keys. So, you
can basically kind of reserve an area of key space in which, for example, if you're publishing a daily
magazine, you can publish each daily version. Yes, you're right, Freenet does kind of retain information.
It is a kind of version control -- at any point you can go back to see what was written before. Provided
it hasn't been dropped from the system due to unpopularity. But, in terms of finding the first, or the latest
version, that's not actually that big a problem -- you can use an algorithm and find the latest one
reasonably efficiently.
LOCKE: We talked about the magnetism of contraband information. What do you see as the advantage
Freenet has over the Web as it exists today for information that's not at the perceived risk of censorship,
or of being somehow abridged by whatever kind of authorities. You know, if I were just publishing a
humor zine, why would I want to put it on Freenet, as opposed to the Web? Or do you see them living
parallel lives?
CLARKE: At the beginning of the conversation you asked me what Freenet was designed to be, and I
said it was designed to be an efficient means to distribute information. Freenet is actually much more
efficient than the Web in the way it distributes information. With the Web, if a hundred people in Europe
request the same document in America, that will travel under the Atlantic a hundred times. With
Freenet it will only travel under once or twice. And then a copy will be stored locally in Europe, where it
can be distributed to the other ninety-nine or ninety-eight people requesting it.
LOCKE: So that's a caching capability.
CLARKE: It is caching, but it's not. Because generally, with the cache, you've got the cache, and
you've got the main repository. Whereas Freenet is
LOCKE: So it's a distributed caching...
CLARKE: That's correct, yes.
LOCKE: Right. Well, that speaks to sort of mechanical efficiency. But are there ramifications outside of
that? I would guess, because you're counting frequency of requests, that you also get, almost as a side
effect, a ranking of popularity. And that tells you something about what people are interested in.
CLARKE: Well, in a way, yes: Unpopular information is dropped from the system. But there isn't really
any way to conduct a census on the Freenet, like, there are fifteen copies of this and twenty copies of
that.
LOCKE: I'm very interested in mechanisms whereby people can hook up with communities of interest.
And I see the potential here for a way to gauge the current levels of interest that would be fed back into
a community of users, and would begin to constitute, let's say, communities in potentia.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: I mean, we see these waves across the Internet, these sort of memic waves that break out.
Cluetrain was my Web site and book, and they both had some of that quality, certainly. But, to be able to
see those early on, and find places that you can hook up with like minded people, that seems to be a
dimension of Freenet that's very interesting. Are you pursuing anything along those lines?
CLARKE: Well, yes, I mean, Freenet does actually self-organize and aggregate similar information
together. And that similar information is not only in terms of it being physically similar information, but in
terms of similar people being interested in the information. So it's a little bit like systems like Firefly, or
Amazon, where Amazon will say that other people who like this book, also like these books.
LOCKE: So, are you actually bringing some kind of collaborative filtering to bear here?
CLARKE: Well, right now, we actually deliberately prevent Freenet from doing that. Or we kind of
scrambled that mechanism. And the reason for that is so that you don't get, you know, all books about
philosophy on a small number of machines, which could then be wiped out, due to a kind of localized
failure. So we deliberately scramble that mechanism. However, we are working on a searching
mechanism, which will actually exploit that.
LOCKE: So you would aggregate the index to reflect categories and taxonomies.
CLARKE: That's correct, although there wouldn't be any centralized index, as such. The search
mechanism would be completely decentralized.
LOCKE: But, virtually, you have a way to aggregate topical information by subject.
CLARKE: Yes.
LOCKE: So it's something more like Yahoo! than Altavista.
CLARKE: Yes. That's exactly what it'll do. It'll be like a Yahoo! directory. But it'll actually figure out
the categories for itself, rather than rely on anyone to tell it what the categories are.
Share your thoughts on Freenet, copyright, and free speech, in the Loop.
© FEED Inc. 2000
VHS was more popular (not sure why, anyone care to comment?)
The people who made betamax kept the rights to the players (maybe other equipment?) while the creators of VHS (sony?) licensed it out to everyone. costs driven down....
I can play GameBoy games on my Super Nintendo (remember Super Game Boy?).
Better color, too.
Most of you posters go to college (i will in august) so I want to know before I choose a college...
Which places have good net access? Do any have weird quirks? keep firewalling/proxies/uptime/speed in mind.
Thanks,
Andrew de los Reyes
--
This has been my first post on slashdot!