You're out of date. The latest w3c patent policy does *not* allow patented standards unless a Royalty Free license is available. There is a loophole in the policy that says effectively "if we hit a brick wall with this policy and can't implement a standard within it, we'll form an advisory group to decide what to do" (with the implicit suggestion that one of the things they might theoretically do is go with a patented standard) but there are a whole lot of hoops that must be jumped through before that point can even be reached.
Besides, as you would know if you'd done a little research rather than just skimming headlines, the w3c has never *had* a patent policy before, and therefore could easily have created a standard that relied on patented technology. The fact that they haven't is an indication of their general goodwill towards patent-free standards - when they got half-way through SVG and found that apple had a patent on alpha-blending, they stopped what they were doing for ages to try to ensure that the standard would remain patent-free. That was when they started looking into having a patent policy.
Of course, as a closed organization they first asked their members, who are primarily corporations, and those corporations said "we should have patented standards". Hence their first draft. Then they submitted the draft for public review, and NOBODY NOTICED. After a long comment period with no comments, someone suddenly posted it to slashdot with 2 days to go, and all hell broke loose - and the w3c essentially backtracked and now have a sane policy.
If anyone is to blame for the poor original policy, it's the fact that the community wasn't alert - it's mindboggling that the "many eyes" that are supposed to make bugs shallow didn't catch a major announcement like that from the w3c.
The proposal story only needs 27ish more comments to be #3 on the Hall of Fame (which seems to be broken ATM, but the story in #3 position had 2087 comments). I know it's kind of pointless to be rooting for that story to get as high as possible, but I happen to think that a story about love and happiness deserves to be higher among all those stories about hate and terror. So go post some comments!
It would be even nicer if the batteries could be charged while the unit is in use. Imagine hooking this up to, say, an exercise bike: put a docking station for the laptop on the handlerbars, and pedal while you code! I guess if it really only takes 5 minutes of pedalling per 20 minutes of uptime, you could just pedal while trying to think what the heck is causing this bizarre bug you're seeing...
I can't find it now, but I remember seeing a post somewhere from the author of Dillo saying that Mozilla was actually as fast or faster than Dillo at page-rendering. I thought that was rather funny:)
(Note that I said "at page-rendering", not "at opening new windows", or any of the operations mentioned in the parent post. If the speed of those operations is important to you the of course Dillo still has the upper hand...)
FWIW, as I write this, it will only take 60 more comments to get this story to #3 in the HOF. So here's a comment just to boost the story a little closer to that total; and since it's a completely content-free post, I'll waive my +1 for it:)
I already posted congratulations, but I'll say it again anyway:)
Okay, here's a bit of blatant vote-manipulation, but it's in a good cause, and it's not like anyone's going to read the twelve-hundred-and-somethingth post anyway...
If you have an account on www.kuro5hin.org, you'll notice this story is in the queue of submissions. At the time of writing it needs about 30 more votes to be posted (minus anyone who votes against it in the meantime), and the proportion of votes that say "front page" needs to increase by about 10% for it to get there.
I spent a while trying to think of something clever or witty to say, but it seems like everything's taken already (and that's reading at +2!). Oh well...
Congratulations Rob and Kathleen!
Stuart.
PS I did actually *think* of posting a "one ring to bind them" comment before I read the three or four that are already here, though. I guess some things are just too obvious.
Despite what they claim, vp3 is not open source. The license forbids modification of the software in any way that is incompatibile with the data format of the original codec, which (for example) completely rules out using any of the technology in it to form the basis of a new and better codec. It is also completely at odds with the Open Source definition, as found on opensource.org, and the free software definition, as found on gnu.org.
You may think I'm being pedantic, but the term "open source" gets devalued every time somebody uses it to describe a license that is not truly "open source". Next thing you know, the Sun Community Source License will start being accepted as "open source", which is even worse than the vp3 one. Then anything which provides the source but doesn't let you modify it.
The Open Source definition was written for a reason: to specify a minimum set of requirements for licenses that are open enough to allow the code to be used for anything, by anyone, in perpetuity. The vp3 license ain't it.
I don't know about all those features, but I do know that the CLR supports both tail-recursion and closures, which are important to functional languages. Sure, it doesn't support absolutely everything you might ever want to do (one notable example is C++-style generics) and I have no idea what "lambda lists" or "multiple dispatch" are, and I don't know enough about continuations to have the first clue as to whether they're supportable or not, but there are certainly features in the CLR that C# doesn't take advantage of (C# doesn't do tail-calls, at the least, although it can make closures I think).
That was a wonderful run-on sentence, but I think I made my point:) The CLR is limited wrt advanced language features, but it's not limited to "strictly C#".
"There is the issue that we might not be able to keep up (right
now, we dont, as.NET Framework 1.0 is already out there, and we
are, well still underway). Also, theoretically there is the risk
of a given API being unimplementable on Unix.
Even if that is the case, we still win, because we would get
this nice programming environment, that althought might not end up
being 100%.NET Framework compatible, it would still be an
improvement and would still help us move forward. So we can reuse
all the research and development done by Microsoft on these ideas,
and use as much as we can."
This applies just as much to being intentionally broken by Microsoft as it does to them simply outpacing Mono's development.
At the same time, the few features I do want never seem to be a priority.
Did it ever occur to you that the "featuritis" you complain about is simply the result of a few hundred people all working on "the few features they want"?
As for myself, the only feature I want is the linktoolbar/site navigation bar turned on by default. So that's what I'm working on (making the changes that are considered necessary to get it turned on). That's just one feature, not featuritis. And it's the *only* thing I'm working on, and also is extremely unlikely to destabilize the rest of the product. But multiply me by a couple of hundred other people working on similar pet features, and you get something that looks like featuritis.
"You do not have to agree to this license, because you have not signed it. However, nothing else gives you permission to redistribute or modify the software. Therefore, by redistributing or modifying the software, you indicate your agreement to this license."
(I'm sure I've got the wording wrong, but equally sure that I have the meaning correct[1]).
Note specifically that it does *not* say "nothing else gives you permission to USE the software" or "by USING the software". The GPL does not restrict use of the software in any way.
By contrast, every MS or Oracle license includes restrictions on the use of the software and requires you to agree to it (usually by a click-through) before using the software at all.
Did it honestly never occur to you that there might be a reason that you don't have to click-through the GPL before using linux or other GPL'd software?
Stuart.
[1] Sure, I could have gone to that URL and copy'n'pasted the appropriate text. I deliberately didn't do so, in the hope that the fact that I can quote the relevant section almost-verbatim from memory indicates that I know the contents of the GPL pretty well. Feel free to compare my version with the actual text - if there's any substantial difference in meaning, I'll eat my hat.
Okay, I give up, what does the "black perl" script listed on that timeline page (or also findable by searching google for "black perl") actually do?
I'd run it and find out, but I notice scary commands like "unlink" and "kill" in there and I have a feeling that I wouldn't like the results if I tried it:)
I remember reading an article some time ago in which a scientist proposed that Quantum Physics could actually be a natural corollary of General Relativity (where each particle is some kind of "ripple" in the space-time continuum), and that the mathematics of this could make sense if the requirement for Causality ("cause must happen before effect") were dropped from General Relativity.
His proposal suggested that quantum coupling (where two particles can become intertwined based on an earlier interaction) was caused by some kind of ripple-effect going back in time from the observed particle to the time that the original interaction happened.
He was able to explain many other aspects of Quantum Physics the same way, although he claimed that the mathematics was so complex that only the simplest of interactions had been formally proved to match between his model and QP - most of his theory, including the explanation of coupling, was hand-waving.
I always thought that this theory seemed one of the most elegant I've ever heard - no need to introduce new hypothetical particles like Strings, no need to assume that all the complexities of the Standard Model are fixed, absolute and arbitrary. Just take General Relativity, drop Causality, and look at what emerges.
I've often wondered whether this guy's theory ever went anywhere. It seems to have something in common with the theory proposed in this article - that QP is just an "emergent behavior" from GR. The difference is that the article seems to propose that there is no underlying rule at all except chaos and GR itself emerged from that; this guy proposed that GR was fundamental and QP was the emergent behavior.
Anyone know anything about this theory or know where the original article might be? Did this guy have any success or get any recognition? Has his theory been actually disproved, or simply ignored?
You missed the most important layer, and I'm betting that that's because that layer actually isn't open source.
Are you running this on Kaffe? gcj? ORP? Kissme?
Didn't think so. (If you actually are, I'm dead impressed - please let me know how you managed it)
You're using Sun's J2SDK. Which isn't open source.
I'll be very happy when it really is possible to put together an open source J2EE stack. But that day isn't today, because the VM/classlib layer has no open source alternative that's up to running these enterprise-level apps.
Re:alas, not 0.9.5
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The two things that 0.9.5 provided (link tag support and tabbed browsing) were probably the major reason why Netscape didn't want to use 0.9.5. They wanted stabilization and bugfixes, not new features. I for one am glad they used 0.9.4 for this very reason - the problem with 6.0 was its poor stability, and if 6.2 has a reputation for being rock-solid, that'd be great for the future perception of Netscape in general.
As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code. There are also some negative interactions with the tabbed browsing feature which will need to be resolved before it can be turned on by default.
In the meantime, be glad that Netscape chose the earlier release rather than shipping something buggy, like the current state of the link (sorry "site navigation") toolbar and tabbed browsing.
Stuart.
PS Thanks to/. for adding link tags! It's great to visit sites and actually see the toolbar in use:)
The first quoted section should have contained your comments about RMS thinking paying for software is evil, and the second should have contained your claim that you can't "disarm unilaterally". Sorry.
While I was generally impressed with your argument, you dropped at least one blatant inaccuracy in there which hurts the credibility of the rest of your argument.
You write >
This is blatantly untrue; RMS himself made his living for years by selling software for money. In the early days of emacs he survived by charging for copies of it on (presumably) floppy disks, and I believe you can still buy CDs of "the GNU system" from the FSF.
RMS has plenty of faults that can be criticized, and can certainly be legitimately described as a fanatic. But argue with what he actually says, not with strawmen.
On an unrelated note... you write:
>
How about offering a "public license" on your patents? Something like the following, with appropriate legalese:
"You may use this patented technology in any product, provided that you make publically available all other patents used in the same product, either under the same terms as this license or on a royalty-free and nondiscriminatory basis. If you do not have permission to do this for all other patents used in the product, you may not use this patented technology at all."
Offering the above license would seem to preserve the patent for use defensively, while still permitting its use in Free Software *and* promoting the use of the same license by other people. It would be kind of a GPL for patents. What do you think?
Unfortunately it seems that everyone has an opinion on this story, so everyone's posting and nobody's moderating. Look at the difference between the number of comments at +2 (the default if you have high enough karma, I guess - although how I ended up with high karma is anyone's guess) and +3 (which requires at least one moderation).
I don't care whether anyone moderates me up, but I do hope that there are people out there who will eventually moderate this story instead of just posting - the choice between 200ish comments and 23 doesn't leave a whole lot of choice for people who want to filter the best. Plus the ones that actually got usefully moderated are the early posts, rather than the best ones.
Oh well -/. isn't perfect, but it sucks less than anything else out there.
The following is written in the format of an editorial targetted at non-technical users. Anyone lobbying against crippling encryption is welcome to use it. It's (c) 2001 Stuart Ballard.
Should we require all encryption to have a backdoor?
A recent poll on MSNBC suggests that the vast majority of Americans would favor legislation requiring all encryption software to carry a "back door" allowing the government to read through it, as a means of preventing tragedies like the one that occurred on September 11th. This appears to be a legitimate attempt to protect the security of our nation, but let's look a little closer at what the effects would actually be.
On the internet, "encrypted" is the same as "secure". Remember when your web browser tells you you've gone to a "secure site"? Remember how everyone tells you never to enter your credit card number on the internet unless it's a secure site? That's right - the same encryption that evil terrorists use to plan killing people is what stops evil hackers from stealing your credit card number.
And remember, evil hackers are clever. If there's a hole in something, they'll find it. Remember all the viruses and worms you hear about? Those are all using holes that nobody even intended to put there - they were there by mistake. Imagine how much easier it would be to find a backdoor-sized hole that was put there on purpose!
Now the question seems a little harder to answer, doesn't it? Keep your credit card number safe from hackers, or keep your country safe from terrorists?
But it's even worse than that. The way encryption works is just math, and it's math that somebody with college-level mathematics knowledge can learn in a matter of hours. There's a page on the net that encourages every programmer to write his own encryption program just to learn how to do it - it only takes a few hours for a competent programmer. That knowledge is so widespread among programmers and mathematicians that it would be impossible to legislate it away - and any attempt to censor that knowledge would be laughed out of court on First Amendment grounds.
So why would a terrorist use a commercial encryption program with a known hole in it, when they can write their own in a couple of hours? Or even just keep hold of the copies they have now, which don't have the hole?
So what was the question again? Oh yes: should we make it easy for evil hackers to steal your credit card number, without actually stopping terrorists from communicating just as secretly as they already can?
Slashdot Mirror
You're out of date. The latest w3c patent policy does *not* allow patented standards unless a Royalty Free license is available. There is a loophole in the policy that says effectively "if we hit a brick wall with this policy and can't implement a standard within it, we'll form an advisory group to decide what to do" (with the implicit suggestion that one of the things they might theoretically do is go with a patented standard) but there are a whole lot of hoops that must be jumped through before that point can even be reached.
Besides, as you would know if you'd done a little research rather than just skimming headlines, the w3c has never *had* a patent policy before, and therefore could easily have created a standard that relied on patented technology. The fact that they haven't is an indication of their general goodwill towards patent-free standards - when they got half-way through SVG and found that apple had a patent on alpha-blending, they stopped what they were doing for ages to try to ensure that the standard would remain patent-free. That was when they started looking into having a patent policy.
Of course, as a closed organization they first asked their members, who are primarily corporations, and those corporations said "we should have patented standards". Hence their first draft. Then they submitted the draft for public review, and NOBODY NOTICED. After a long comment period with no comments, someone suddenly posted it to slashdot with 2 days to go, and all hell broke loose - and the w3c essentially backtracked and now have a sane policy.
If anyone is to blame for the poor original policy, it's the fact that the community wasn't alert - it's mindboggling that the "many eyes" that are supposed to make bugs shallow didn't catch a major announcement like that from the w3c.
Stuart.
Campaign for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society.
The proposal story only needs 27ish more comments to be #3 on the Hall of Fame (which seems to be broken ATM, but the story in #3 position had 2087 comments). I know it's kind of pointless to be rooting for that story to get as high as possible, but I happen to think that a story about love and happiness deserves to be higher among all those stories about hate and terror. So go post some comments!
Stuart.
Doesn't look like we're going to make it, but continuing to do my part... ;)
It would be even nicer if the batteries could be charged while the unit is in use. Imagine hooking this up to, say, an exercise bike: put a docking station for the laptop on the handlerbars, and pedal while you code! I guess if it really only takes 5 minutes of pedalling per 20 minutes of uptime, you could just pedal while trying to think what the heck is causing this bizarre bug you're seeing...
Stuart.
I can't find it now, but I remember seeing a post somewhere from the author of Dillo saying that Mozilla was actually as fast or faster than Dillo at page-rendering. I thought that was rather funny :)
(Note that I said "at page-rendering", not "at opening new windows", or any of the operations mentioned in the parent post. If the speed of those operations is important to you the of course Dillo still has the upper hand...)
Stuart.
FWIW, as I write this, it will only take 60 more comments to get this story to #3 in the HOF. So here's a comment just to boost the story a little closer to that total; and since it's a completely content-free post, I'll waive my +1 for it :)
:)
I already posted congratulations, but I'll say it again anyway
Congratulations!
Stuart.
Okay, here's a bit of blatant vote-manipulation, but it's in a good cause, and it's not like anyone's going to read the twelve-hundred-and-somethingth post anyway...
:)
If you have an account on www.kuro5hin.org, you'll notice this story is in the queue of submissions. At the time of writing it needs about 30 more votes to be posted (minus anyone who votes against it in the meantime), and the proportion of votes that say "front page" needs to increase by about 10% for it to get there.
Go vote it up!
Stuart.
I spent a while trying to think of something clever or witty to say, but it seems like everything's taken already (and that's reading at +2!). Oh well...
Congratulations Rob and Kathleen!
Stuart.
PS I did actually *think* of posting a "one ring to bind them" comment before I read the three or four that are already here, though. I guess some things are just too obvious.
Despite what they claim, vp3 is not open source. The license forbids modification of the software in any way that is incompatibile with the data format of the original codec, which (for example) completely rules out using any of the technology in it to form the basis of a new and better codec. It is also completely at odds with the Open Source definition, as found on opensource.org, and the free software definition, as found on gnu.org.
You may think I'm being pedantic, but the term "open source" gets devalued every time somebody uses it to describe a license that is not truly "open source". Next thing you know, the Sun Community Source License will start being accepted as "open source", which is even worse than the vp3 one. Then anything which provides the source but doesn't let you modify it.
The Open Source definition was written for a reason: to specify a minimum set of requirements for licenses that are open enough to allow the code to be used for anything, by anyone, in perpetuity. The vp3 license ain't it.
Stuart.
I don't know about all those features, but I do know that the CLR supports both tail-recursion and closures, which are important to functional languages. Sure, it doesn't support absolutely everything you might ever want to do (one notable example is C++-style generics) and I have no idea what "lambda lists" or "multiple dispatch" are, and I don't know enough about continuations to have the first clue as to whether they're supportable or not, but there are certainly features in the CLR that C# doesn't take advantage of (C# doesn't do tail-calls, at the least, although it can make closures I think).
:) The CLR is limited wrt advanced language features, but it's not limited to "strictly C#".
That was a wonderful run-on sentence, but I think I made my point
Stuart.
Miguel himself responded to this point:
.NET Framework 1.0 is already out there, and we
.NET Framework compatible, it would still be an
"There is the issue that we might not be able to keep up (right
now, we dont, as
are, well still underway). Also, theoretically there is the risk
of a given API being unimplementable on Unix.
Even if that is the case, we still win, because we would get
this nice programming environment, that althought might not end up
being 100%
improvement and would still help us move forward. So we can reuse
all the research and development done by Microsoft on these ideas,
and use as much as we can."
This applies just as much to being intentionally broken by Microsoft as it does to them simply outpacing Mono's development.
Did it ever occur to you that the "featuritis" you complain about is simply the result of a few hundred people all working on "the few features they want"?
As for myself, the only feature I want is the linktoolbar/site navigation bar turned on by default. So that's what I'm working on (making the changes that are considered necessary to get it turned on). That's just one feature, not featuritis. And it's the *only* thing I'm working on, and also is extremely unlikely to destabilize the rest of the product. But multiply me by a couple of hundred other people working on similar pet features, and you get something that looks like featuritis.
Stuart.
[[ so, when will the first International Obfuscated Perl Code Contest will come? Perl poetry is getting kinda old. ]]
<tongue-in-cheek>Wouldn't that be rather like having a International Wet Water Contest?</tongue-in-cheek>
Stuart.
I prefer...
You've got mail(1)!
The merger announcement should have been put at...
http://let.it.be.com/
I think it's you who hasn't read it.
From memory:
"You do not have to agree to this license, because you have not signed it. However, nothing else gives you permission to redistribute or modify the software. Therefore, by redistributing or modifying the software, you indicate your agreement to this license."
(I'm sure I've got the wording wrong, but equally sure that I have the meaning correct[1]).
Note specifically that it does *not* say "nothing else gives you permission to USE the software" or "by USING the software". The GPL does not restrict use of the software in any way.
By contrast, every MS or Oracle license includes restrictions on the use of the software and requires you to agree to it (usually by a click-through) before using the software at all.
Did it honestly never occur to you that there might be a reason that you don't have to click-through the GPL before using linux or other GPL'd software?
Stuart.
[1] Sure, I could have gone to that URL and copy'n'pasted the appropriate text. I deliberately didn't do so, in the hope that the fact that I can quote the relevant section almost-verbatim from memory indicates that I know the contents of the GPL pretty well. Feel free to compare my version with the actual text - if there's any substantial difference in meaning, I'll eat my hat.
Okay, I give up, what does the "black perl" script listed on that timeline page (or also findable by searching google for "black perl") actually do?
:)
I'd run it and find out, but I notice scary commands like "unlink" and "kill" in there and I have a feeling that I wouldn't like the results if I tried it
Stuart.
I remember reading an article some time ago in which a scientist proposed that Quantum Physics could actually be a natural corollary of General Relativity (where each particle is some kind of "ripple" in the space-time continuum), and that the mathematics of this could make sense if the requirement for Causality ("cause must happen before effect") were dropped from General Relativity.
His proposal suggested that quantum coupling (where two particles can become intertwined based on an earlier interaction) was caused by some kind of ripple-effect going back in time from the observed particle to the time that the original interaction happened.
He was able to explain many other aspects of Quantum Physics the same way, although he claimed that the mathematics was so complex that only the simplest of interactions had been formally proved to match between his model and QP - most of his theory, including the explanation of coupling, was hand-waving.
I always thought that this theory seemed one of the most elegant I've ever heard - no need to introduce new hypothetical particles like Strings, no need to assume that all the complexities of the Standard Model are fixed, absolute and arbitrary. Just take General Relativity, drop Causality, and look at what emerges.
I've often wondered whether this guy's theory ever went anywhere. It seems to have something in common with the theory proposed in this article - that QP is just an "emergent behavior" from GR. The difference is that the article seems to propose that there is no underlying rule at all except chaos and GR itself emerged from that; this guy proposed that GR was fundamental and QP was the emergent behavior.
Anyone know anything about this theory or know where the original article might be? Did this guy have any success or get any recognition? Has his theory been actually disproved, or simply ignored?
Stuart.
You missed the most important layer, and I'm betting that that's because that layer actually isn't open source.
Are you running this on Kaffe? gcj? ORP? Kissme?
Didn't think so. (If you actually are, I'm dead impressed - please let me know how you managed it)
You're using Sun's J2SDK. Which isn't open source.
I'll be very happy when it really is possible to put together an open source J2EE stack. But that day isn't today, because the VM/classlib layer has no open source alternative that's up to running these enterprise-level apps.
As for the link toolbar, there are good reasons why it's disabled by default: namely a 5% speed penalty on every page load, regardless of whether it's in use or not. If you like and use links, this is a price worth paying, but Mozilla has a "zero tolerance" policy for this kind of performance hit. This is bug 103097 and I'll be working on it as soon as someone with C++ knowledge can make the necessary underlying changes in the C++ code. There are also some negative interactions with the tabbed browsing feature which will need to be resolved before it can be turned on by default.
In the meantime, be glad that Netscape chose the earlier release rather than shipping something buggy, like the current state of the link (sorry "site navigation") toolbar and tabbed browsing.
Stuart.
PS Thanks to /. for adding link tags! It's great to visit sites and actually see the toolbar in use :)
The first quoted section should have contained your comments about RMS thinking paying for software is evil, and the second should have contained your claim that you can't "disarm unilaterally". Sorry.
While I was generally impressed with your argument, you dropped at least one blatant inaccuracy in there which hurts the credibility of the rest of your argument.
You write >
This is blatantly untrue; RMS himself made his living for years by selling software for money. In the early days of emacs he survived by charging for copies of it on (presumably) floppy disks, and I believe you can still buy CDs of "the GNU system" from the FSF.
RMS has plenty of faults that can be criticized, and can certainly be legitimately described as a fanatic. But argue with what he actually says, not with strawmen.
On an unrelated note... you write:
>
How about offering a "public license" on your patents? Something like the following, with appropriate legalese:
"You may use this patented technology in any product, provided that you make publically available all other patents used in the same product, either under the same terms as this license or on a royalty-free and nondiscriminatory basis. If you do not have permission to do this for all other patents used in the product, you may not use this patented technology at all."
Offering the above license would seem to preserve the patent for use defensively, while still permitting its use in Free Software *and* promoting the use of the same license by other people. It would be kind of a GPL for patents. What do you think?
Thanks for the positive response :)
/. isn't perfect, but it sucks less than anything else out there.
Unfortunately it seems that everyone has an opinion on this story, so everyone's posting and nobody's moderating. Look at the difference between the number of comments at +2 (the default if you have high enough karma, I guess - although how I ended up with high karma is anyone's guess) and +3 (which requires at least one moderation).
I don't care whether anyone moderates me up, but I do hope that there are people out there who will eventually moderate this story instead of just posting - the choice between 200ish comments and 23 doesn't leave a whole lot of choice for people who want to filter the best. Plus the ones that actually got usefully moderated are the early posts, rather than the best ones.
Oh well -
The following is written in the format of an editorial targetted at non-technical users. Anyone lobbying against crippling encryption is welcome to use it. It's (c) 2001 Stuart Ballard.
Should we require all encryption to have a backdoor?
A recent poll on MSNBC suggests that the vast majority of Americans would favor legislation requiring all encryption software to carry a "back door" allowing the government to read through it, as a means of preventing tragedies like the one that occurred on September 11th. This appears to be a legitimate attempt to protect the security of our nation, but let's look a little closer at what the effects would actually be.
On the internet, "encrypted" is the same as "secure". Remember when your web browser tells you you've gone to a "secure site"? Remember how everyone tells you never to enter your credit card number on the internet unless it's a secure site? That's right - the same encryption that evil terrorists use to plan killing people is what stops evil hackers from stealing your credit card number.
And remember, evil hackers are clever. If there's a hole in something, they'll find it. Remember all the viruses and worms you hear about? Those are all using holes that nobody even intended to put there - they were there by mistake. Imagine how much easier it would be to find a backdoor-sized hole that was put there on purpose!
Now the question seems a little harder to answer, doesn't it? Keep your credit card number safe from hackers, or keep your country safe from terrorists?
But it's even worse than that. The way encryption works is just math, and it's math that somebody with college-level mathematics knowledge can learn in a matter of hours. There's a page on the net that encourages every programmer to write his own encryption program just to learn how to do it - it only takes a few hours for a competent programmer. That knowledge is so widespread among programmers and mathematicians that it would be impossible to legislate it away - and any attempt to censor that knowledge would be laughed out of court on First Amendment grounds.
So why would a terrorist use a commercial encryption program with a known hole in it, when they can write their own in a couple of hours? Or even just keep hold of the copies they have now, which don't have the hole?
So what was the question again? Oh yes: should we make it easy for evil hackers to steal your credit card number, without actually stopping terrorists from communicating just as secretly as they already can?
Hmm... What do you think?