FYI, Nader gives the vast majority of his income to charities. Or, did you think that a man with the name recognition of Nader, who runs several big non-profits (I live near one--the building alone, right off of Connecticut Avenue in a neighborhood which has gone posh since Nader's folks moved in, must be worth twice Nader's personal worth), could only earn that much after all these years?
Fact is, $3 million is small change in the political world. The Democrats raise three times that at a single fundraising dinner. The head of a gay Republican lobbyist group--surely a fairly small constituency--just paid $2 million cash out of pocket for his new house, so you'd figure he's worth substantially more. Nader has made a million dozens of times over, and has given all but a small fraction of it to charity.
So, don't try to impugn him, when it's you who needs impugning. I'm not even a Nader supporter--I usually vote Republican, because I think it's the federal government's job to stay out of everyone's way and only regulate what the Constitution provides for--but I'm tired of people who malign those who give most of their income to charity, calling them hypocrites for keeping anything for themselves and their families, while they themselves are usually resource hogs who give away only a tiny percentage of what they get.
Corporations have been granted, through legal fictions instituted within the last century and a half, the rights of individuals. With those rights they were also supposed to have all the responsibilities of individuals. However, they no longer live up to their responsibilities, and in so doing shift them back on the rest of us. For example, corporations are supposed to pay federal taxes, just as an individual would; but few do, because most corporations can afford to hire lobbyists to make loopholes and attorneys to exploit them--yet few individuals can. So, the tax burden gets shifted to the individuals, when corporations aren't paying their fair percentage.
The corporations buy loopholes from the government, and we should put a stop to it. There is more pressure for a viable third party--a populist party--now than there's been for a century. The day is coming when there will be accountability, and when corporations suddenly start having to pay the $400 million here and $120 million there that they should have been paying all along, they'll likely collapse from not being accustomed to it. I look forward to that day...
This is why I said "run a public remailer" instead of just "run a remailer." Anyone can download and configure the standard remailer software, but naturally that doesn't make you a real remailer. However, it doesn't take a lot of effort to advertise a remailer--almost all serious users of remailers read a few basic forums, such as alt.privacy.anon-server. If you make "the big announcement" in such places, and prove yourself to have consistent uptime and reliability, you'll probably start getting hundreds or even thousands of messages a week within about a month or two--if you're reliable. If however you're offline and unavailable too much, or if your stats are flaky, no one will use you.
In deciding what remailers to use, people go on two things--reputation of the operator, and reliability statistics. Operate a reliable service and post in the right places, maybe join the remops mailing list, and you'll have absolutely no problem getting people to use your service and hence have complete deniability.
But in any event I suggested something even more important later in my post--that if someone would write an easy-to-use application for sending and relaying anonymous, encrypted e-mail, something simple enough for everyone to use, along the principles I outlined, then the public would beat a path to your door. Imagine if running a remailer and sending anonymous email through it were as simple as installing a Napster or Gnutella client--with thousands of nodes sending encrypted communications to each other, through randomized paths chosen by algorithms in the software, traffic analysis of any kind would be useless and anonymity would be guaranteed.
The problem is, no one has even tried such a thing. If half the effort put into Gnutella and Freenet were put into such a project, it would happen and quite quickly. It'd be one of the top downloads on Download.com and Tucows. But, among the several reasons this hasn't happened are the fear of having widespread easy-enough-for-anyone anonymous email, since it could be used by criminals and even worse abused by spammers. There's a reason that remailers are notoriously difficult to use: the people who code the software to run them and interface with them are the same kinds of people who are remops themselves, and they fear being used for spam or kiddy porn since that could get them visits from the fuzz. What they fail to realize is that a properly redesigned system of remailers with a clean and easy software interface which requires all clients to be servers as well, all traffic to be encrypted from node to node with a different key and padded to a different size, and other basic precautions, would get so many users as to make any visits from the men in suits useless. The same sorts of people who install Napster to get music and Gnutella for file sharing would install this program for private e-mail. There would be too many nodes and too much traffic to trace anything, and if they did trace parts of a path back to a particular node they'd contact the user and in all likelihood get some guy who has no idea what they're talking about because he's just an average user who wanted to send private mail. If all the data is never stored unencrypted, then the men in suits wouldn't even have any excuse to examine that Joe User's computer. It all comes down to designing the system well, and if it's designed well, it would become ubiquitous and impossible to stop or trace.
The only bad side effect of this would be increased possibilities for spamming, but since almost all spam is commercially motivated the senders are known. It would perhaps even be a good thing if a system like this were implemented and spamming skyrocketed, because it would spur on anti-spamming legislation which, without a big crisis, simply isn't going to happen thanks to Congress' own "commercial interests." The ultimate effect of such legislation, which as I said will probably only happen if spamming does skyrocket, would be to make spamming far smaller than it is now since the risks of severe criminal and civil penalties would outweigh the potential benefits.
Not only is PGP or GPG good enough, but this new service really doesn't offer anything useful. Here are a few points to consider:
First of all, peer-to-peer over the Internet isn't really peer-to-peer at all. It's very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle exploits, since by definition any packets going out over the Internet aren't headed straight for the recipient, they have to travel over an untrusted network first. At any point along this network, a third party could insinuate himself between you and the recipient--particularly if that third party is a law enforcement or intelligence agency, since companies which own the Internet infrastructure are legally required to help such organizations. Since the data is encrypted, this may or may not be a threat depending on the strength of the implementation and upon the ability of the sender and recipient not to be socially engineered into giving out compromising information. If the third party can trick you into thinking that he's your intended recipient, you're absolutely screwed. In the case of PKI, for instance, if the man-in-the-middle can get your trust and say something like, "Sorry, John, I had a hard disk crash last week, and the old floppy I had my backup keyring on is corrupted. I needed to make a new key pair, you'll have to use that to send messages from now on," then either you'll be communicating with the third party in readable fashion from now on, or you'll have to stop communicating anything confidential at all. Since a passphrase has to be suitably complex to be useful, the same attack is useful against shared-key crypto. I don't see how this new system could overcome this flaw at all.
Secondly, the biggest security flaw in communicating via the Net is usually whether you should trust the person at the other end or not. Many of the people we correspond or transact with over the Net are people we've never met IRL, and therein lies the problem. We have no way of knowing if the person we just started communicating with is really a fellow subversive who'll come and help with the demonstrations against the IMF we're planning, or whether he's LEA. Peer-to-peer messaging is therefore useless in real-life applications.
In fact, peer-to-peer messaging is perhaps actively dangerous. It provides a direct record that a given IP address communicated with this other given IP address at a particular time. Therefore, if your recipient is really an enemy, he now has a record of your IP communicating with him. Even though the message under this system is supposedly encrypted all the time and destroyed after a set period, this means nothing: your recipient's eyes have to see it at some point, so he can just as easily do a screen grab or if that's not possible take photographs of the text. Yes, IPs can be spoofed of course, but it's harder to do in peer-to-peer communications, and you'll still probably leave a trail of logs.
Contrast this with anonymizing forms of communication. Properly anonymized through use of remailers or remailers in combination with m2n gateways, or through services such as ZKS Freedom (if it can be trusted--who knows?), it doesn't matter if there's a man-in-the-middle, nor does it matter if your recipient is trusted or untrusted. If you leave no trail, you're safe, untraceable therefore untouchable. Peer-to-peer is the opposite of this, and very useless in the real world. PGP your message and send it via Freedom or a remailer chain, and you're golden. Of course, the best way to assure your protection is to run a public remailer yourself--that way you can be sure that at least one remailer in your chain will forward no previous headers and keep no logs. Then, you have absolute deniability even if traffic analysis hints at your involvement with the message in question--aside from which, remailers often pad messages, send out bogus messages, and use delays between receipt and sending of messages to thwart traffic analysis.
The ultimate way to communicate privately is to use the above suggestions and also divorce recipient e-mail messages from the game entirely once communications have been established. Use a m2n gateway at the end of your remailer chain, to post the PGP'd message to USENET. Either use alt.anonymous.messages with a predetermined heading, or use an empty or spam group. By using a nym with the reply block pointed to a given news group, you can allow people to communicate with you just as if they were e-mailing a real e-mail address, which eases first contacts with people not used to security.
In other words, peer-to-peer isn't a step forward, it's a step back. It's inherently insecure. The only secure communication is insulated communication, with several layers between sender and recipient. Personally, I'd love to see a company or group of hackers put together easy-to-use software to allow for this sort of anonymous communication, rather than the false security of direct peer-to-peer. Imagine if everyone with a cable or DSL connection (it takes some bandwidth and uptime to be a remailer) who wanted secure communications could just download a simple piece of software which sends anonymous messages for them and also acts as a remailer itself. Imagine a Gnutella-like network for remailing anonymous PGP'd messages and possibly posting them through news gateways to a group like alt.PGPtella.messages. If you made it easy to use, we could have truly private and secure communications in the hands of the people, and Carnivore and other spyware would be useless. For my ideas on how to make a network such as this work, read my musings about what Gnutella should have done and how to replace Napster here. The concept in that post which I think is applicable here is the idea about "regional servers," only in a remailer-type system instead of a file sharing system the "regional servers" would be mostly for finding IPs of connected machines to route through and for establishing initial connections to the network, although you could make this user0definable in case you know a trusted party on the network. All messages in such a system would be PGPd from each hop to the next, with "regional servers" promoted by the software itself based on uptime and other factors, and unlike with the current remailer system you needn't manually choose each hop along the route--the software could be let to do that, and if the next hop along the route that has been chosen has gone offline, the remailer stuck with the message would forward it to a random hop which is online. Currently, the remailer system is sometimes unreliable, but a new system like this could solve reliability issues. And, as I said, since every user of the system would be a remailer as well as a potential sender, there's absolute deniability: "Sorry, Secret Service guy, you may have traced the message back this far but I'm afraid my machine doesn't keep logs after a day. No, the logs aren't recoverable because they're securely overwritten after the specified period, with no possibility for recovery. I didn't send it and I don't know who did; feel free to look at the computer running the software." All your personal info can be encrypted with something like Scramdisk or the Encrypted File System, just in case the men-in-black do decide to take a look at your box(es).
Anyway, I think I've adequately described my distaste for direct peer-to-peer communications like this product.
The failure rate of CD-R media is entirely dependent upon the quality of the materials and manufacturing process, and CD-R media from good manufacturers is just as long-lasting as any MiniDisc. Since Sony licenses MiniDisc media manufacture to some other companies, I'm sure the MiniDisc world is probably the same way.
Getting media on a spindle doesn't mean it's not high-quality; Imation, for example, makes a very high quality disc, and uses the same discs on its spindles that it uses in its nice slimline cases. On sale, you can get them sometimes for as little as $30 for 50. And, the media will last in excess of fifty years, and probably closer to a century, without bit-rot. There was a story on/. a while back about testing CD-R media from different manufacturers by artificially aging them through exposure to high pressures, temperatures, and moisture levels over extended periods of time; you can probably find it by searching the archives.
You're right that not all burners can use an 80-min CD-R to full capacity, but that's pretty much irrelevant since most people aren't using 4 year old 1-2x CD burners. My own Craetive burner was purchased two years ago, and has no problem with them. But, even very, very ancient CD players will be able to use an 80-min audio CD--I have a walkman from when I was in high school which plays them glitchlessly. Aside from which, a good CD burner and a decent portable CD player cost less new than a new MD player/recorder.
If you want to go the uber-cool route, you could shell out a few more $$ and instead of getting a plain-Jane CD player, get something like a portable Encino Voyager CD MP3 player--easily fitting 150 high-quality mp3 recordings (192kbps or greater) onto a single medium.
And contrary to the FUD surrounding the issue, mp3 sound is as high quality as most other compressed formats, probably including ATRAC. The key is to remember that bitrate affects audio quality immensely--a 128k mp3 will sound flat and dull on even a mid-range stereo system, if you're an audiophile; but, a 192k mp3 sounds as good as a CD on a high-end system, unless you have better hearing than most people do; and, anything greater than that sounds indistinguishable from CD audio even to highly skilled audiophiles with great hearing. I believe Ars Technica did an mp3 comparison which touched on these issues. Personally, I use HQ VBR mp3 encoding, which varies the bitrate up to 320kbps and down to 96kbps as necessary, depending on the demands of the stream at any given time. It produces absolutely flawless sound, as good as any CD.
So, claims of CD-quality sound are absolutely true, if you create a high quality file. I find plenty of them on Napster, too, so I'm not the only audiophile who's keen to this. The resulting files are usually about 6-10MB, depending on bitrate--HQ VBR can produce smaller files than 256kbps files, and often they're even smaller than 192kbps files. And, you can call it piracy if you want, but I gleefully download any songs older than 14 years without any concern for copyright since the Constitution specified a copyright term of 14 years, and the extensions to this have been gained by heavy-handed and too-powerful corporations acting against the interests of the people. I also don't feel *too* bad about downloading new stuff from companies who are responsible for the DMCA and other extensions of copyright against the public interest. The only CDs I purchase any more are from bands who actually deserve my support, like Kittie, Chuck D, and people affiliated with indie labels. The music industry--and by that I mean the big corporations who are witholding IP from the public domain indefinitely, whereas it was originally supposed to be public domain after a reasonable 14 year term--don't deserve my money for abusing and taking away the rights of the people to public domain IP, but we *do* deserve to take from them since they withold IP which should rightfully be in the public domain. As David Boies, Napster attorney who was instrumental in the DoJ's case against Microsoft, pointed out, if a company or group of companies abuses its copyrights to gain or illegally exploit a monopoly, they lose their legal rights to those copyrights.
I have nothing against the MD formet in itself--it's Sony's control of it I dislike, and that's why I will never use it. Sony tried to control us with Beta, they tried to prevent resale of CDs, and they're making a very flawed version of mp3 players, and they are among the worst offenders of the DVD Consortium and one of the multinationals responsible for the DMCA. I don't trust them, and in fact hate the world they want to create, where all content and IP is encrypted, rented, and no one can touch it but them.
No, but I'm not spreading FUD, unless by FUD you mean truth.
> Not true. You have 2 routes, convert to ATRAC, or wrap the file with a SDMI compliant
> wrapper which leaves the file in MP3 format but lets the player handle it like any other file.
Fine, so there is an alternative to the ATRAC conversion--an alternative which *STILL* requires an extra, unnecessary, step. So, my point stands, since either way it's adding unneeded complexity. Is there any reason that to use an mp3 you already have, you would have to wrap it in SDMI bullshit? Umm, no, since you already have the mp3 in a non-SDMI format, there is no logical reason to impose this highly useless step. Bah.
>>This takes time and effort and makes the files almost twice as large as a normal mp3.
>
> Nope. ATRAC is as efficent, if not more so than MP3 than file compression.
Yes, ATRAC is efficient; but you, evidently, are not. Had you been paying attention, you would have seen that I was talking about converting an existing mp3 file to ATRAC for use with Sony's badly designed mp3 players, mp3 players which do not in fact play standard mp3s since you have to either convert the mp3 file to ATRAC or, as you pointed out, give it an SDMI wrapper. Converting an mp3 file into an ATRAC file causes the file size to nearly double in many cases--I suppose this is a result of recompressing the file into an entirely different compression format.
> You are
> obviously repeating half remembered stuff from other/.'rs.
No, you are obviously not paying attention. I'm repeating what I know FROM PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE. I'd never buy one of these Sony monstrosities, but a friend of mine has one that I've played with. Yes, from personal experience, recompressing an mp3 into ATRAC can double file size. I didn't even know the option existed to put an SDMI wrapper around an mp3 file and use that instead of ATRAC, which means that the software is either extremely bad or the type of Sony player my friend had doesn't have this option (I believe Sony makes at least 3 "mp3" players).
> It can be suggested that
> it will take twice the space because you'd have 2 copies of the file, one wrapped/
> converted, one unwrapped.
No, as I said you're just not paying attention. Try to read *before* you flame, kay?
>>They obviously want to make it more complicated than necessary to use their mp3 players,
>
> Insert CD. Select autocheckout. Press record. Player loaded. Hey, maybe you should
> try using the stuff first?
I never mentioned ripping from CDs to the mp3 player, something fewer people would want to do than to just download to the player mp3s which are already on his HD. As I said, using existing mp3 files is a pain in the ass. Why should they have to be converted first? Because Sony wants to make it difficult to use mp3 players, so that everyone will stay with/switch to MiniDisc. Sony needs to make one themselves to compete with the other companies making mp3 players, but that doesn't mean that Sony wants to make them easy to use; Sony has a long history of discouraging products even as they make them, to try to get people to switch to formats they better approve of. Umm, remember Beta, and how Sony tried to get everyone to switch from VHS to that but prices were never on par since Sony demanded royalty fees for each Beta-format product, whereas VHS was more affordable because Sony wasn't milking everyone?
>> so that customers will switch back to CDs and MiniDiscs.
>
> You mean them minidiscs which offer better price performance than MP3?
Now you're just being retarded, comparing a type of media to a file format. Well, mp3s could easily be stored on MiniDiscs, you know. And, how pray tell do MiniDiscs offer better price/performance than mp3 players? Last time I went to Best Buy, MiniDiscs were pretty damned expensive. I could buy a whole spindle of quality Imation 12x 80min CD-Rs for the same price as a paltry few MiniDiscs, thanks to Sony's insane licensing fees. News flash: MiniDisc is losing, because of Sony's excessive royalty demands, just like consumer Beta lost for the same reason. MiniDisc devices have been out for far longer than mp3 players have, but with that huge advantage they haven't conquered the market. And, they won't, because of Sony's greed over their pet proprietary formats. mp3 players are getting cheaper and gaining larger capacities, but I have yet to see any significant evolutionary developments in MiniDic players. Sony's SACD format will fail for the same reason, especially since other companies are moving towards DVD-Audio; why should they pay Sony to license SACD, when they can use DVD-Audio for free (the major labels are all part of the DVD Consortium).
But, I digress. My point stands about Sony's mp3 players being unnecessarily complicated in requiring ATRAC or SDMI conversion for existing mp3 files, and I continue to support my statement that Sony is supporting mp3 players half-heartedly, to try to take marketshare away from real mp3 player manufacturers like Creative and Diamond, while simultaneously using a poor implementation to try to leave consumers with a bad taste in their mouths which they'll unfairly blame on mp3 devices in general instead of on Sony in particular.
> When an engineer builds a device it serves a purpose, there may be an artistic
> component to the work, but it's first and foremost a solution to a problem.
But source code written by a programmer is not at all like a device built by an engineer. It's more like *blueprints* drafted by an engineer. The blueprints aren't a device; they're used to build a device. The source code is not a program; it's used to build a program. As such, it would be protected under the First Amendment. You see, I can possess and distribute blueprints to illegal devices, such as bombs, silencers, and automatic weapons. I cannot possess or distribute the devices which those blueprints can be used to build, but those blueprints are merely protected speech/expression. You may not like the fact that they are, but the Court has repeatedly held that such information is legal even though the devices are not.
And that's the crux of the matter. Judge Kaplan's DeCSS decision is a mere pandering to the wishes of influential corporations for whom he used to work and for whom he may well work in the future. Look at the text of his decision: he doesn't base it on sound legal precedent, he bases it on his corporate little notions of economic necessity. Well, my rights aren't subject to economic necessity, "Your Honor," and I spit in your general direction. Any "judge" who disregards Constitutional rights in favor of "corporate necessity" shouldn't be a judge. Do you think for a minute that Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, or Madison would have approved of this decision? Of course not, and since Madison and Jefferson are the two individuals most responsible for the Constitution, we should always ask ourselves what they would have meant by it.
> The protection afforded by free speech was originally intended to allow the
> expression of opinions, not to protect the creation of illegal devices on
> artistic grounds.
But source code is no more an illegal device than a schematic of an automatic weapon is. And, as I said, if you want to talk about what was "originally intended" by the Constitution, then you'll have to consider the Framers' "clear intent." Was their intent to allow corporations to prevent individuals from freely accessing materials which, under the original provisions of the Constitution, were public domain after just 14 years? Was their intent to allow corporations to not even let people draw schematics (write source code) for devices the corporations don't like? Was their intent to grant vast IP monopolies to corporations, keeping IP out of the hands of the people for in excess of a century? Was their intent to make people unable to reverse engineer devices for interoperability, when in their day anyone could clone anything, and it was considered fair business? Of course not. So, if you're going to talk about what Constitutional protections were intended to do, realize that the primary goal of that document was to ensure the rights of every individual, and that if Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were alive today they'd be leading a Revolution against corporate tyranny.
Yes, the OEM Live! Value lacks the connector. However, most people aren't going to need it, and if they do then this can be solved for as little as $14. A company called Audience Digital Products makes add-on connectors for the Live! Value OEm and other SB cards, which connect to an onboard set of pins present on the soundcard. A review of some of their products is at http://www.rageunderground.com/articles/adp.shtml . This makes the Live! Value OEM a very attractive option for people on a budget who still need additional connectors; ADP also makes more expensive add-ons which have the functionality of the LiveDrive, but for less money than paying the premium for a SB Live! Platinum. They aren't as pretty as the LiveDrive, but they offer similar connection options.
Just FYI, the SB Live! MP3+ soundcard doesn't have hardware mp3 compression/decompression. That's a common mistake, many people make it. The reason it's called the "MP3+" is merely because of the software bundle, which contains mp3 software--just as the "X-Gamer" version contains gaming software. You may as well just buy the plain Live! Value OEM and save money though, since it's basically the same card and there is plenty of mp3 software readily available and the bundle with the X-Gamer version has older games which can be picked up cheap if you really want them--but if you really wanted them you'd have them already, they're so old.
I myself got the Live! Value OEM, and am very happy with it. I just wish I could have afforded the Live! Platinum, since the LiveDrive is both cool and useful. I mean, having all those audio connections mounted on a front drive bay is just plain cool looking, plus I'm always reaching behind the computer to switch audio connections anyway since I use it for a DVD player (Hollywood+ cards rock).
But, the very idea of banning any mp3 players at CeBit is just disgusting. I mean, it's just a type of audio player, which you can use with your own paid-for CDs after all, just as you can legally make a mix tape or CD from CDs and tapes you bought. Funny how they're not banning MiniDisc devices, since they can be used to pirate music too with any soundcard that has an SP/DIF connector--just decompress the mp3s and burn them to MiniDisc. But, oh, wait, Sony makes a fortune from every MiniDisc device and media sold, so it's okay to have them present.
And yes, Sony makes mp3 players, but half-heartedly--after all, at least one of their "mp3 players" requires that mp3 files be converted to the proprietary Sony "ATRAC" format before downloading them to the player. This takes time and effort and makes the files almost twice as large as a normal mp3. They obviously want to make it more complicated than necessary to use their mp3 players, so that customers will switch back to CDs and MiniDiscs. And, am I the only one who notices the ironic sound of "ATRAC," so similar to the doomed "8-track" format? Arrgh, the more I learn about Sony, the more I start to think that they're the most evil corporation this side of the future "Disney's AOL/Time-Warner" which I'm convinced will happen one day... They introduce a proprietary format for everything, in the attempt to keep people from using better, open formats--like trying to get their new 1.3GB CDs to be used by consumers instead of the better DVD and DVD-R formats which they are actively trying to hamper.
But, I digress. All I can say is, you can bet that Sony had a hand in ensuring that mp3 devices would be banned from Cebit. I personally buy nothing Sony, and nothing by another brand which I know is made for them by Sony.
You see, the nagative implications outweigh the positive ones. Yes, there are positive advantages to targeted adverts, like showing you something you might actually be interested in instead of something you're almost surely not.
However, what we rail against is the potential for abuse. To generate targeted ads, there must be a database of your preferences. This information about you could be used against you, to harm your character or reputation, or as evidence against you in a criminal proceeding.
For example, tracking information indicating that you frequent gay/lesbian/bisexual sites could be used to unwillingly "out" you, and even to destroy your career. One of the most notable cases is that of Tim McVeigh--not the bomber, though they share names--who was outed to the military by one of AOL's "guides" who handed over information about McVeigh's interest in gay chatrooms.
Also, databases of consumer buying patterns have already been used against people in criminal cases. The example which comes to mind immediately is that of a small-town marijuana dealer unfortunate enough to use a store discount card at the supermarket--police subpoenad his shopping records, to ascertain whether he bought an unusually large number of plastic baggies or other "drug paraphernalia." Let's not forget that, while he was a criminal, the legalization of marijuana is favored by an extraordinarily large percentage of Americans, and that the potential for such databases to be exploited in investigations goes far beyond this.
Do you want your TiVo records to indicate that you watch a lot of softcore Cinemax porn when you're falsely accused of rape? Believe it or not, conservative juries can look down on even softcore legal stuff, and some judges will let it in. Or, what if you watch a lot of The Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and you're falsely accused of child molestation? Such "evidence" would *definitely* be used against you since a psychiatrist would be called to testify as to how well you fit the profile of a pedophile--watching excessive amounts of kids' shows is common pedophiliac behaviour.
Even worse, corporations have total control over this data--they can merge it into vast databases, covering every aspect of your life. That's what several corporations are aiming to do. What if this data is made available to other corporations for a small fee? Well, then a prospective employer could do a background check which includes your TV viewing habits and shopping habits, and screen you out because you watch too much Cinemax porn or too many mindless sitcoms, or because you buy too many OTC medicines and must be a health risk. Right now, privacy policies aren't really legally binding and can be changed without notice, so all this information could be merged into a seamless database without any legal recourse to stop it.
It's quite clear that the benefits of seeing ads I might be more inclined to click through are far surpassed by the risks. It's all in the name of making human beings into blathering, mindless consumers instead of citizens anyway--do I really care what ads they throw at me? Fuck no, I ignore them, like a good *individual* should. The less I give to corporations or support their domination of every media outlet, the better.
> Nobody's saying that your kid can't read, watch, and play what he wants. If
> you want it that way, go to KMart yourself and buy it for him or her.
You are missing the mark by a mile or two. How am I to teach my kids to be free and use that freedom responsibly, if they're living in a very un-free country which requires them to "present their papers" to buy a CD, video game, or film? That's what this is about. Making a parent go up to the counter and buy a video game for a 16 year old, as if he were a child of 5 instead of a young adult, sends a message to that teenager: you're a child; we may say you're a young adult, but that's just lip service since you have no more rights than a 5 year old; if you hurt someone we can try you as an adult, and put you in adult prison, and you have all the responsibilities of an adult--but you have *NO* adult rights, even though the responsibilities are yours; you have no rights; you are property, unable to make any decisions for yourself, your parents must make all decisions for you; your parents matter, you do not. You may not think it sends that message, but it does: ask teenagers about it, since they have a perspective different from yours.
Now, it would be impossible--*IMPOSSIBLE*--for me to treat my teenager as a young adult if I have to go to the counter with him to buy him a CD or video game. All of a sudden, he's being treated *exactly* like he's five years old, and all my work is ruined. Way to instill self-confidence and self-sufficiency in someone, oh wise society.
That's not even bringing up the issue of rights and fairness. If someone is expected to behave as an adult, he should be given the rights and privileges attendant upon those responsibilities. To do any less is a gross unfairness. I find it revolting and disgusting that we can and do try and sentence young teens as adults, and yet we don't give them any adult rights whatsoever. A fifteen-year-old, legally, has no more rights than a five-year-old, and yet has far more legal and social responsibilities. there is something quite wrong with that.
> (Of course,
> you have other things to do than that, and couldn't be bothered to take any
> responsibility for your views by taking some action.)
On the contrary, I am clearly much more able and willing to be involved in raising my children than you are. After all, I have thought out the implications of treating them like children when they are no longer mere children, but young adults; and you seem content to treat teenagers like second-graders with no regard for their maturing process and self-esteem. And, I take as much action as I can to make sure my kids will grow to be adults in a world which is friendly to them--I write and have published in actual print media articles about the troubles facing teens these days, most of which come from parents and other adults who are well-meaning but misguided.
Let's look at the immediate issue, though; if stores card everyone for video games and CDs with mature content, and therefore either parents or older kids have to buy such materials for their teenage kids, what are the effects?
1) I and other parents who actually desire to treat our teenagers as young adults, in an effort to nurture responsibility and self-worth, will be unable to avoid treating our teens like they're five years old whenever they want a video game or CD. Of course, this sends our kids the same message we try so hard not to give them, and it can't be avoided.
2) *Your* teens, whom you wish to treat like immature little kids instead of nurturing their growing minds and self-consciousness, will still get the games and music you don't want them to by having older kids get them or by playing them at friends' houses. Your kids won't like you because you're an overbearing bastard who tries to give them all the responsibilities of adulthood but NONE of the rights and privileges.
Nothing truly constructive, in other words. Now, compare that to what heppens without such restrictions:
1) Progressives like me have one less thing to worry about in raising our teens.
2) Teenagers may still be put upon and held back by clueless parents, overbearing administrators, and some fellow classmates, but at least the video game store/CD store/arcade is one less place that they're treated like five-year-olds whose opinions and self-esteem are worthless.
3) People like you will have to actually *parent* instead of letting retailers do it for you, but you can still have control over what your kids bring into your house. If you find a contraband copy of Diablo 2, throw it away and chastise your teen.
4) As with the other list above, your kids can still see all the video game violence and arcade sexuality they want--by going over to the houses of friends with more progressive parents. Like, well, my house.;-) That's the way it's always been; kids will see what they want to see, regardless of what the parents want.
So, we can clearly see that censorship-at-the-store helps no one, and hurts parents who actually trust and nurture their children.
> You can disagree with KMart
> and WalMart all you want, but saying that they should share your views is
I don't say they should share my views; I say they shouldn't share *yours*. Retailers should be parenting-neutral; it isn't their job to make decisions for anyone's kids, mine or yours. *Yours* is the only opinion that would have corporations making parenting decisions for us, not mine.
> unfounded arrogance on your part,
Well, I already disputed this above, but on a side note: yes, I'm arrogant, but my arrogance is well-founded. Unlike you, I've actually read most of the best, most recent literature on adolescent development. Unlike you, I care more about raising teenagers to be healthy and completely developed adults, rather than in misguidedly exposing them only to things which I personally approve of 100% and attempting to shield them from the world.
> that's shared by most of your clueless slashdot colleagues.
I disagree with a lot of people on/. when it comes to tech matters. What can I say, I don't think Windows is so bad, because it's so functional and easy to use. But I share the more progressive views which the majority of/.ers tend to hold. After all, a lot of people here were geeks in high school who played video games or roleplaying games or got into violent films as a relief of tensions that geeks above most others are subject to. As such, we can understand better than you can what it's like to be a stressed teenager, and how cathartic such release valves are. Without them, many teens would become the next Eric Harris. Is that what you want? No? Then stop being selfish and start to think about what teenagers need, instead of thinking about what you personally dislike.
> If graphical depictions of violence are considered good psychological
> replacements for actually dealing with you problems, or even are treated as
> a generic escape route, then I think that there's a problem, and it's not
> KMart's.
That's your opinion, and you're welcome to it; but it's an unfounded opinion and you shouldn't try to force it upon everyone else. Every single human being is an escapist--why else do we dream? Without dreams, we cannot function. If you allow a person to sleep as long as he wants, but wake him briefly whenever REM sleep indicates he's ready to dream, you'll have a very agitated and unhelthy person in short order. This has been proven by clinical studies. For whatever reason, we need to dream. We need that escape. Video games perhaps serve a similar function--we exercise our reflexes in ways we can't in day-to-day life, but which were common in our primordial days; we exorcise our violent impulses, which otherwise would stay bottled up inside us until they flare up IRL; we can be powerful, important characters in video and roleplaying games, to make up for the lack of power and importance which plague so many teenage lives.
Using games as a cathrsis doesn't mean that you're not solving your problems IRL; but often there are problems in real life which we cannot solve. For example, when society gets medieval with teenagers and starts treating them like little children, as in the present example of restricting the purchase of simple games, there's little a teenager can do about it. He can complain all he wants, but sadly enough, adults won't listen to him because too many of them are as thoughtless as you are.
>...the majority of parents have some ideas of what they do and don't want
> their kids to see, and appreciate a policy that agrees with them.
Yes, but the majority are often wrong. That's why the founders of our country and its Constitution used phrases like "the tyranny of the majority" and "the rights of the minority." Just because a majority of parents--and I don't think it's anywhere near a majority, but for the sake of the argument--have an opinion does not mean that they have the right to violate the rights of other parents and the rights of teens. Sadly enough, though, in legal terms teenagers have few rights--not much more than young children do, and that's not right. Just because the majority desires something doesn't make it right; in fact, the majority is typically wrong. That's why there are so many safeguards in the Constitution against tyranny of the ignorant masses, like the Electoral College. Who should be making decisions, smart people (the minority) or average people (the majority)? And, before you answer, realize that the "average" person can't locate South America on a globe, or learn to use Windows without calling tech support *a lot*.
> The rest of your paragraph is a fine argument that
> unrestricted access is ideal, but it misses the point. KMart is taking reasonable
> actions to fit in to the society that it caters to.
If indeed unrestricted access is ideal, you should support it. "Society," though I hate to use such a blanket term here, should be changed through education if it's wrong, and ignored if it won't listen. After all, what makes the U.S. fairly unique is not the rule of the majority, but the respect we maintain for the rights of the minority. So, if unrestricted access is, as you say, ideal, then that's the way it should be.
>...And anyone that's going to "snap" because they're denied their video games
> has mental problems anyway
Where have you been lately, my friend? Most teenagers have mental problems--or at least what society chooses to call mental problems. A very significant portion of the teenage population are permanently medicated--why, you can't walk into a classroom these days without finding someone who'd at least on Ritalin, if not anti-depressants. Personally, I chalk most of these "mental problems" up to being merely symptoms of adolescence and the emotional intensities that are always a part of it. Many doctors agree that Ritalin is definitely over-prescribed. I've also known teenagers on Zoloft and Wellbutrin. Most of them should not be. But, most teenagers have clinically diagnosable "mental problems" like depression. But largely they're just part of growing up. It's sad that we medicate our teenagers to remove the symptoms of adolescence, but we do.
> Everyone has limits on what they're allowed to do.
Yes, but in the U.S. we have far too many. That would be why the only country with a larger percentage of its population in prison is Russia. That's very telling and hideous. "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"--Tacitus, *The Annals*
> Teenagers have a few more; they always have in our society.
True, and many of the "extra" limitations are necessary. But new ones are not. Unfortunately, every year we oppress teenagers more. Legally enforced curfews--in my city, a teenager can't legally spend the night in a friend's house, even if they stay indoors all night, without written parental consent. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT ABOUT?!? In Michigan(?) a 16 year old boy was found guilty of statutory rape and subject to the sex offender registry for having consensual sex with his 14 year old girlfriend. That's *wrong*, and would never have happened even during the height of the Reagan morality police. Kids are now being profiled in schools by FBI software. We have tried 11 year old kids as adults and given them life in prison for murders which they quite frankly could not have understood--no rehabilitation, they're just thrown away. Our young people are at risk--from their elders. This video game business may be a relatively minor thing, but it's one more thing which should be stopped, one more thing which goes over the line. A small evil is still an evil.
> Learning to live with that is part of growing up.
No, for all the kids I knew growing up and know now as an adult, learning to get around those rules is part of growing up. After all, when I was a kid, movie theaters didn't even card for R-rated movies--the ratings were a "suggestion" and not enforced. And now, I can't buy a damned cigar without being carded even though I look about 34 with my beard and all. We are becoming a pathetic country in which no one is free anymore. I remember back in the 80s we used to say that what separated us from the Soviets was that a Russian had to show his papers everywhere he goes, and an American could go wherever he wanted to and no one would question him about it. Now, we have to show our papers as much as anyone in the Soviet Union ever had to. And we treat our teenagers like they aren't even people. in 20 years, America has gone from being the soul and savior of the world, to being a mocked and ridiculed and hated caricature. Our children are failing because we've failed to protect them by guaranteeing basic rights.
> BTW: Great song, great Lyrics, and great point, but completely irrelevant
If you think so. But I think it's the whole point. It's why Columbine and Jonesboro happened. Violent video games didn't do it; boxing our teenagers in, treating them like veal, did.
> First, why should KMart be dedicated to Free Speech? (That's the citizen's job, not theirs.)
And why the Hell isn't it the citizen's job to take care of his kids, instead of letting K-mart, Wal-Mart, the MPAA and other clueless corporate pieces of shit be responsible for them? Tell your kid what you think is inappropriate for him to play, watch, read, whatever. If he disobeys you, throw away the copy of Diablo 2 he bought against your wishes. Just don't tell my kid he can't read, watch, and play whatever he wants--which is what you do if you make stores card people for video games, because parents shouldn't have to take their teenagers up to the counter like toddlers to buy them video games, music, books and films.
Clue: there is no causal link between video game violence and meatspace violence. And there never will be, because as any frustrated teenager will tell you video games are a tool for catharsis--they let you relieve the tension of dealing with obnoxious bullies, teachers who shouldn't have been allowed to graduate college much less teach high school, girls who ignore them or worse, make out in the halls all day in front of you, administrators who bully students who dress, look, or think differently than the tyranny of the majority, and clueless parents who are from a different generation and just don't understand that times have changed.
Here's another clue: stores don't do things like this out of a feeling of beneficence, they do it because they perceive that people like you want them to. They do it because clueless and ignorant parents want them to, since they choose to blame teenage violence on video games and films instead of on bad parenting and a failing school system. It makes parents feel better when they have a scapegoat to blame instead of facing the truth that it's not video games or movies that are to blame, it's parental irresponsibility and the squalor of a school system in which they're "dumbing down" standardized tests because students can't pass them as well as they could 20 years ago. It's the fault of a repressive society which wants teenagers to bottle up their natural sexuality instead of being free to express it and experiment with it in healthy ways. It's the fault of a social machine which pushes away anyone in high school who tries to be different, unique, instead of "just another brick in the wall." It's the fault of an oppressive government which lets the FBI release "profiling software" to schools to try to pick out the potentially dangerous, but probably acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy to make people dangerous by alienating them and singling them out further. All these are the problem, not sex and make-believe violence in cathartic video games and films and music.
So, what;s the solution? Something like this only tightens the noose further, makes teenagers feel even more alienated and underesteemed. Teenagers aren't five year olds, they need to be treated like people who are in the process of becoming adults, people who need to make their own decisions, with some guidance, and make their own mistakes and learn from them. Why is it that we can give teenagers all the responsibilities of adulthood--we can even try them as adults and send them to adult prison when they commit crimes--but none of the rights? America puts more children in prison than any other country in the world, and we have a larger percentage of our population in prison than any country except Russia. Sadly enough, you have a greater chance of going to jail in America, a "free" country, than you do in Iraq, China, Iran, Libya, or North Korea; it's not because we're more violent, it's because we have a no-tolerance system with no room for mistakes, in which a 17 year old kid can go to prison for having consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend, in which getting caught with a few ounces of marijuana for personal use can get you a long prison sentence as a dealer, in which we incarcerate as punishment instead of rehabilitate as treatment. A lack of rights is the fundamental problem that causes teenagers to snap. Taking away more can only make things worse. The kids who go on school shootings and what not are the ones who feel alienated, treated unfairly, not treated like adults by their parents, bullied at school by administrators for being different, feeling the pressures to conform to adult rules of behaviour but not having any of the rights that go along with it. Of course they snap; they aren't being treated like people, they're being treated like objects.
The solution is for us to loosen the reigns a bit, not tighten them. For all the complaining about school shootings being on the rise, violence in schools is actually at a ten year low--it's just that there have been more high-profile shootings, where kids snap and bring guns to school. If we're going to hold teenagers to the responsibilities of adults, and make them subject to prison when they transgress whereas in ages past we just would have sent them to juvenile detention and released them at 18 after counseling, then we have to give them some rights to go along with the responsibilities. We don't do that, and that's why our kids are having problems. We don't treat them like people anymore. Start treating them like adults-in-training instead of like toddlers or property.
"We don't need no education,
We don't need no thought control.
Dark sarcasm in the classroom--
Teacher, leave them kids alone.
Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all,
It's just another brick in the wall...
All in all,
You're just another brick in the wall...
I don't need your arms around me,
I don't need your drugs to calm me.
I Have seen the writing on the wall...
I don't think I need anything at all;
No don't think I need anything at all.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall...
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall..."
--Pink Floyd
Re:But there ARE compatibility issues...
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 2
Aargh, I can't find the link I was looking at last time. Last time I was there, which was within the last couple of months, there was a link right on the main page to a site which linked to pages with the RSA and IDEA modules and information about them, I took this to be a site by the modules' developers. I guess the site was reworked a bit when the FAQ came out--the date on the FAQ is 6 Sept. 2000, just yesterday. So yes, the words I ascribed to the GPG people themselves are no longer there. But since the FAQ came out just yesterday, and there is no other link on the site about the modules, we can assume that 1) there used to be such a link before the link was put into the new FAQ, therefore 2) I am not entirely full of shit even though I can no longer back my claim since the original link was deleted when the info was added to the FAQ, published *yesterday*.
Take my characterizations cum grano salis, if you want, but the FAQ is less than a day old and that link to the modules' developer site was there, before the link to the files on the gnupg server was put into the FAQ. If I feel up to it I could always go to Google and look for that site for the modules, but...hell, it's 5:22 in the morning. I'm going the fuck to bed...;-) Feel free to flame me in my absence, but I repeat: the FAQ came out only yesterday, and I swear that link with the characterizations I used was there recently. I hate change...
Re:But there ARE compatibility issues...
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 3
> If you've never tried these patches, how can you say they aren't 100% compatible?
Because the official GPG pages used the words "unofficial" and "buggy" and "beta" when I looked into GPG just a month or so ago. If GPG devs themselves say there are compatibility issues, I would be inclined to believe them.
> Also, they're plug-ins, not patches.
Joy. Either way, it isn't ready for prime time until RSA support is written into the GPG code itself. Even so, compatibility will be a big issue--in the world of those who are *serious* about communications privacy and security, legacy applications are still the norm since they are tried-and-true, proven, and free from code bloat. As such, these applications are typically not going to be GPG-compatible for some time. Such popular software includes Jack B. Nymble for remailer client/nym use, Private Idaho for nym creation and use, and Reliable for use as a remailer server. Some such applications have to make calls to PGP, which cannot be duplicated in GPG; there are wrappers and such for GPG, but that's a very klumsy kludge since it's far easier and more reliable to just install PGP 2.6.x with its 100% compatibility with those calls and low overhead since no wrapper is necessary.
Personally, I use PGP 2.6.3ckt for compatibility with Private Idaho calls and for creating the more secure non-ADK type 3 RSA keys, and also have Reliable and Jack B. Nymble configured to use the 2.6.3ckt install. Then I use PGP 6.02ckt for general usage, since the keys import nicely from my 2.6.3ckt install when necessary and since it's far quicker to use the GUI tools that come with 6.x versions than to bring up a CLI and type long strings of commands. Of course, it's set to warn before encrypting to an ADK.
Point being, until GPG has full RSA compatibility and can take PGP commands, it's useless for those who operate remailers, it's useless for those who still use good ole' Private Idaho (a lot of people who use remailers or nyms still do), and I believe it's also still useless to those who use Jack B. Nymble although I haven't looked at the latest release yet. There also needs to be a GUI with tools as functional as those in PGP 6.x for it to gain widespread acceptance among those who currently use PGP--if you use PGP on a daily basis, nothing is as useful as that PGPtray util. further, I started to install GPG a couple weeks ago since I do want to show support for Open Source and Free Software, but the damned thing was more difficult to set up and configure than the ancient PGP 2.6.x is, so I just said "fuck it" since I was happy with PGP anyway.
> I've got the RSA and IDEA plug-ins running with
> my GPG just fine.
That's nice. Good for you. Do you use it with Nym and remailer applications? I doubt it. Have you sent messages through notoriously finicky Cypherpunk chains with it? Again, doubtful.
> I imported my PGP 2.6 secret key and keyring just grand. I've had
> zero problems encrypting to people with RSA keys and decrypting messages sent from
> them.
That's nice and all, but don't think that just because it works *for you* means it works universally. Even the GPG folks say it doesn't, and it's useless to use something so unproven in critical areas such as remailer use.
> Please don't knock something if you've never even tried it.
Again, I mentioned its lack of complete compatibility because the GPG site mentioned it, and because no one in the remailer world that I know of uses it. Even amongst the non-remailer-guys in the alt.privacy* and alt.security* hierarchies, I have seen a GPG signature only twice in my two years of involvement. Very, very few amongst those truly quite into communications privacy use GPG, and this will remain the case until a 100% compatible right-out-of-the-box version is released.
I really question the rationale behind GPG anyway. PGP source code is available for free--it ain't Free Software, GPLed "Free," but it's good enough and it gets hacked on a lot to create custom versions with extended features. The tried-and-true PGP 2.6.x codebase has been reviewed for security for years, with no holes. Put a GUI and extended functionality into that code, and hand it over to pgpi.org, and you'd have the best, most compatible, most proven, most useful application of the type. So, it seems that GPG is more about FSF style philosophy than about making the best application. I'm all for the Open Source and FSF ethos, I really do appreciate the philosophy and worldview involved; but I and most people into securing our communications won't use a product just for its philosophy, we need a product with a proven track record and 100% compatibility with the applications which are necessary in the field. I hope that'll be GPG someday, but it won't be for a long while. Instead of cloning PGP, the industry standard, developers went off on their own with everything from command syntax to ciphers. Would StarOffice and WordPerfect and others have any chance of succeeding if they didn't try to be as compatible as possible with handling of the evil but industry-standard.doc file format? No fscking way. I'm sure GPG will eventually be fully compatible with PGP, but until then those of us *really* into private communications and Type 1 remailers and nyms will be sticking with PGP.
But there ARE compatibility issues...
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 4
Yes, you can interoperate PGP and GPG in that GPG can be made to use PGP-compatible DH/DSS keys. But, there is a lack of support for PGP RSA keys which is a fatal flaw at this point. From what I've read, I think there are unofficial and still-buggy source code patches available from Europe for RSA compatibility--though I may be wrong--but overall the only way to maintain near-100% compatibility with most PGP users is to make RSA keys.
The only versions of PGP which don't support RSA keys are early and now-defunct versions of PGP Freeware 5.x. Other than those--which can easily be replaced by a later international version or later freeware version--all PGP incarnations can use RSA keys. This is important because many of the more privacy-conscious people are still using good ole version 2.6.x, which cannot use any keys but RSA.
This especially comes into play if you ever want to use the Cypherpunk remailer system--there have always been some cypherpunk remailers who don't have support for DH/DSS keys, but now almost all of the remailer operators who used to support DH as well as RSA have revoked their DH/DSS keys and switched to solely having RSA Type 3 keys produced by PGP 2.6.x and thus invulnerable to any ADK issues.
So, PGP is a necessity for compatibility with Type 1 (Cypherpunk) remailers. More than that, the most privacy conscious individuals are still using PGP 2.6.x for their own private correspondence, so you won't be able to communicate with those stalwarts via GPG.
That being said, now that RSA is unencumbered I'm sure GPG will be incorporating full RSA key support. But until then, it's frankly unusable unless all the other people you privately correspond with aren't using RSA, and forget about remailers unless you stick with Type 2 Mixmasters only--which are vulnerable to the NSA thanks to their short key sizes, according to one of the Mixmaster developers Lance Cottrel.
And BTW, the new version of PGP which supposedly solves the ADK issue really doesn't--it won't decrypt to the ADK if present, but it also won't notify you of the presence of an ADK--so you'd never know if someone tried to bug the key in question. That sucks.
I had a circa 1995 WinBook XP laptop I bought used a few years ago. Running Win95 with its mere 8 megs of RAM was a bit slow, but hey I'd been using old 25MHz MAcs in the computer lab, so it was faster than whet I was used to.
It had a 486DX4-100MHz processor, and...let's just say that I couldn't use it for more than half an hour without putting a pillow or book between it and my leg. I was worried that it was running too hot, but the fan was working properly, so I guess that's just how hot it was supposed to get.
So when people complain nowadays about their new laptops getting too warm or power-hungry, I laugh. Not too long ago a laptop could almost burn a hole in your pants with a battery life of only an hour. And people complain about Athlons needing too much power and producing too much heat for laptop use...
"As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up."
Script suggestion for *Armageddon II: Liv Lives*; Scene !!!, Liv and NASA Geek in her dressing room just before flight.
"Liv, can I zip you up? Please?"
"Umm, no, you little geeky pervert. You and that puny little Perl script you have the nerve to call an application can get the hell out of my dressing room. Don't even *think* about *applying* that thing to me."
"No, don't worry I've already seen them in that topless scene you did in *Stealing Beauty*. I'm not trying to cop a peek or feel, I just want to help you save the world from that asteroid through whatever highly unlikely and unscientific methods those hack screenwriters have dreamt up without consulting technical experts who didn't get their degrees from Joe Bob's College of Astrophysics and Auto-Repair."
"Oh. Okay, then, zip me up."
"Wow, your lips are so much more beautiful and soft-looking in person. They're just like Julia Roberts' lips, only on an *attractive* face."
"Oh my God, is that a slide rule in your pocket or...ohh, we have to bring you with us! Maybe the sight of your enormous..."T-square"...will scare the asteroid away into a more elliptical orbit! Or at the very least our all-female crew can ravage you in a desperate attempt to cover up for poor screenwriting by depicting lots and lots of gratuitous sex!"
"But what about Bruce Willis, he's part of your crew too?"
"Well, he gets to ravage you too. It's in his contract."
"Umm, err...okay, you're worth taking it in the ass from a deranged scientologist foolish enough to divorce Demi Moore's breasts. I mean, Demi Moore."
[Kissing and groping]
"So, you like my lips, NASA geek. Everyone does. It's the one thing I got from my Dad--well, that and Alicia Silverstone; we used to share her on alternate Thursdays."
"Oh no....that's right you're...Steven Tyler's daughter! I forgot! Oh, my God, I can't look at those luscious lips without thinking about your dad. Oh no, it's like kissing Aerosmith! Acchhh, I'm going to be sick! I feel like I just made out with Aerosmith...gross..blechh....barf [much vomiting. NASA geek exits stage left, leaving a trail of vomit and shouting "Nooooo, I just made out with Aerosmith! Yuck!]
The best way to fix the patent system would be to constantly flood it with more and more patents applied for by OSS and FSF types willing to share the IP that should be shared. "Pre-emptive" patenting, which could hopefully invalidate future patents by clueless corps. Have a new idea, or just half an idea you thought up in a dream about flux-capacitor-like fanciful ideas? Apply for a patent on the new "development." Then, hopefully, it will cover something used later in a patent application by a big corporation, so that it can invalidate the claim. Have a database of these pre-emptive patents maintained by someone like FSF or OSS. I'm sure every one of us (well, a lot of us at least) comes up with ideas for new types of pointing devices, web interfaces, protocols, etc.; well, patent them to keep a big corporation from doing it and patenting it later.
Face it, the P!!! is having extreme problems getting past 1GHz, while the Athlon is sailing on by. I mean, remember that the 1GHz P!!! had to have a microcode update to function properly? Bah. A microcode change slows the chip down, usually disabling or correcting something--which begs the question of why the P!!! design got out the door with so many flaws.
This story makes the problems Tom was having getting his first P!!! 1GHz to run stably worth another look. After other reviewers including Anand had no problems, they sent Tom a new chip and chalked it up to a faulty part. But maybe, just maybe, that part Tom got was a P!!! 1GHz which hadn't had the microcode update? If anything fails to even POST properly without a big microcode update, there was a *major* flaw in there somewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the problem Tom was having.
The P!!! core is basically the PPro core with a few new instructions and a wider path to the L2 cache, more or less. Is it any wonder that this ancient 5-year-old core is straining? Of course not; it was designed to operate at 200MHz, and it's a wonder they got it to operate at 1GHz at all. But the Athlon is all new, and seems to be feeling no strain getting into the highest speeds.
Compare this to the P4 design, which Intel admits won't be as fast clock-per-clock as the P!!! thanks to the huge pipeline. Athlon will probably at least match this new P4 chip clock-for-clock, if not slightly outperform it. And, the new Mustang(?) cores are on their way. Face it: Intel is inferior now. For years AMD was the underdog and Intel was king of the x86 castle. And now, AMD has surpassed Intel in every way, in price and in performance when you consider that the P4 will perform worse clock-for-clock than P!!! while the Mustang cored Athlons will surely perform better than the Thunderbirds we have now.
News organizations, first of all, never report with impartiality. Sometimes they try, but most often they don't even make an effort to be impartial--reporters are people, and people are inherently biased and inclined to express those biases, even if only subconsciously.
The problem I see is that news organizations these days try to *appear* impartial to the public, while in reality infusing their stories with either a liberal or conservative bias depending on the people running the show. Thus, the public thinks what they're hearing is impartial "fact" when the reality is that they're hearing subtle political propaganda.
In the old days, newspapers came right out and proudly proclaimed their political beliefs. Think of the rampant jingoism of a Hurst (Hearst? sorry, my mind is asleep and I'm too lazy to go to Google to check) news organization. That was honesty about being biased. But now news organizations just lie about their biases, and that's dangerous: it indoctrinates the citizenry to have the same bias, through subtle manipulation of facts, instead of teaching them to form their own opinion.
If you want an example, just look at the huge mistake CNN made when they ran the story two years ago about American forces using CS gas against civilians during the Vietnam War. It was a lie based on the ramblings of an unstable person with a bad memory, who when questioned by others couldn't even remember who some of his commanding officers were. There was no corroborating evidence at all, but they ran the story as if it were gospel truth. No one thought of pulling the plug, because everyone there had an inherent bias. Journalism is just a dangerous illusion--no one in the profession is impartial.
Aside from which, if it were illegal to link to DeCSS code or binaries, CNN would be committing a crime by doing so just as if a private citizen were to do the same. I dare say that's doubtless why the link has been removed. A news person cannot break the law to get a story or in reporting a story. For example, a journalist who freelanced and did contract pieces for NPR and other organizations was arrested for child pornography when he was investigating it for a piece, because he retransmitted an image which he'd downloaded in a chat room (he got the image from a Fed shill, BTW--doesn't our government have better things to do than distribute child pornography? Entrapment, anyone?)...
If I had anywhere near $1800 at the moment, I'd be sorely tempted to buy one of the old powerbooks used just so that I could get the $700 credit towards a new model. After all, in my city, the local paper has a Computers category in the classified which is usually populated with old P166 boxes and ancient Powerbooks... Sounds like a great deal, since you can sometimes find those things, at least around here, for less than half the price of the credit Apple is offering. [sound of paper rustling as thousands of geeks thumb through the classifieds for an antique Powerbook buying binge...]
Yes, DSL is more technologically advanced than cable internet, but only bgecause it has to be--it takes a lot of finessing to get high bandwidth connections over tiny little copper telephone lines. I'm waiting for RR cable service to get to my area instead of dealing with DSL precisely because I'm sure that the old copper wires in my house and stretched across the telepjone poles in my very old neighborhood won't handle DSL, and if they do it'll be at a horribly slow connection rate.
Cable, however, has very fat pipes with almost unlimited capability for growth and carrying more bandwidth--any wires that can deliver 120 channels of full NTSC cryastal clear to my house can handle major internet bandwidth. Granted, a cable connection often offers instabilities in its bandwidth, but fluctuating between 0.75Mbps and 1.5Mbps beats the hell out of getting a steady 0.375 or 0.5Mbps. Plus, there's room for expansion in the future with cable--there's a lot of future-proofness in those fat pipes, whereas copper phone lines have to be reaching their limits sooner. It's just simple math.
Yes, there's been talk of making RDRAM data paths wider, but this isn't the point. That discussion is mainly about increasing bandwidth, which helps performance when you have lots of throughput but otherwise faster is better. You can make SDRAM paths wider, too, and add additional channels. There's a lot that can be done to improve either RAM technology, much of which has to do with improving chipset and motherboard design--which IMHO are the big bottlenecks today; the fundamental architecture of x86 mainboards hasn't changed much in far too many years. Personally, I'd like to see a pooled architechture like the SGI Visual Workstations, where the rest of the system is basically built around the memory implementation. But in the world of standard vanilla x86 boards, too much performance and stability is sacrificed to old and slow bus architectures and data paths which aren't wide enough.
But my point about RDRAM is that it has to be clocked at 800MHz to equal the performance of PC133 SDRAM, and that's horrid. Memory performance in SDRAM can also be increased by other means than clockspeed, too, but SDRAM has so much headroom in the clockspeed department that there's no need to worry about that for some time yet, whereas RDRAM clockspeed is horribly fast with so little room for MHz jumps. I mean, most people have CPUs that don't run at 800MHz, ferchrissakes. Even a top-of-the-line graphics processor like the GeForce 2 Ultra runs at a mere 250MHz, with on-card memory running at less than 500MHz DDR. AGP is running at a mere 66MHz. PCI is still the slowpoke at 33MHz, and really needs to be improved because it is a bottleneck. But the point is, the RDRAM is running so fast that it has so little room to increase its clockspeed at all, whereas SDRAM has so much room.
MRAM is probably five or possibly more years away, so it's not going to be anywhere near the "next generation" of RAM tech. Check out the front page of ArsTechnica for some linkage.
The next generation of RAM is clearly going to be DDR-SDRAM, and will be for some time. Cheap modules will be PC-200, but PC-266 DDR will be out at the same time, with very little use of the "mere" 200MHz (effective) variety. The tech is there right now, it's just that there's no demand yet since there aren't any chipsets out (VIA to the rescue, in a few months); so, regular SDRAM is tying up production right now, but the switch to DDR will probably be fairly smooth.
Face it, RAMBUS RDRAM is a terrible idea in the first place. When you have to make a new technology like RDRAM run at 800MHz to get similar performance to existing PC-133 SDRAM, that should be a sign that the new technology is worthless--do you really think it will be as easy to make RDRAM at 1.6GHz as it will be to make DDR SDRAM at 266MHz DDR? Hell no. I predict a quick demise for RDRAM within a few months of the release of VIA's forst DDR-SDRAM chipset.
Yes, the statement in my title is *technically* inaccurate, untrue. But the average computer user is not a technical person who knows the difference, and never will be. that's the fundamental problem I see in the Linux community--it fails to see how most end users will be using their computers, and therefore I fear that Linux will stop making progress on the desktop if another vendor presents a better OS--like if OSX were to go x86, which is doubtful--or that Linux will stop moving onto the desktop when another company offers a proprietary add-on GUI for either Linux or *BSD which offers the ease of use Linux continues to lack.
For example, people here are talking about how multiuser timesharing machines are making a comeback thanks to home networking and the like. Bullshit. The average house still doesn't have a home network, but has instead one, maybe two, standalone PCs or Macs. Home Networking is still a geek/tech enthusiast thing. Until computers can be plugged together with a little cable, or with a couple of AirPort type devices, with absolutely no configuration necessary beyond a quick Wizard, home networking will remain a small minority market. The closest thing to that right now is Macs using the AirPort.
And, most home networks probably consist of Windows boxen linked together, not multiuser Linux systems. I know of absolutely no one who actually uses the Windows "Profiles" version of multiuser, much less who uses a real multiuser Linux or NT box at home--NT, sure, but with only a single non-administrator user profile. Most home users view multiuser systems as a burden to be put up with, not as a useful feature. Do you know what home users do instead of using multiuser systems? They use single-user systems with different folders for different users' stuff. If there is a home network, it's usually a network of such single-user machines, not a network of multiuser systems running *nix or NT with different logons for each user.
Please, don't make the mistake of thinking that home users think the same way or want the same things that tech enthusiasts and geeks do. they don't. And unless Linux developers start thinking about what Joe Windoes or Jane Macintosh use and want, Linux will never take over the desktop. My title was "No, the GUI *is* the OS" precisely because that's a true perception of home users--they don't see or care about what's going on underneath the GUI, the GUI is their world, the GUI is their perception of the OS; and if the GUI sucks, as most Linux ones do in the user-friendliness dept. compared to Win/Mac, then the OS sucks as well for the desktop user. It ain't about the server space any more; the desktop market is about look and feel, not multiuser complicated stuff. Just my 2 pence.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, Nader gives the vast majority of his income to charities. Or, did you think that a man with the name recognition of Nader, who runs several big non-profits (I live near one--the building alone, right off of Connecticut Avenue in a neighborhood which has gone posh since Nader's folks moved in, must be worth twice Nader's personal worth), could only earn that much after all these years?
Fact is, $3 million is small change in the political world. The Democrats raise three times that at a single fundraising dinner. The head of a gay Republican lobbyist group--surely a fairly small constituency--just paid $2 million cash out of pocket for his new house, so you'd figure he's worth substantially more. Nader has made a million dozens of times over, and has given all but a small fraction of it to charity.
So, don't try to impugn him, when it's you who needs impugning. I'm not even a Nader supporter--I usually vote Republican, because I think it's the federal government's job to stay out of everyone's way and only regulate what the Constitution provides for--but I'm tired of people who malign those who give most of their income to charity, calling them hypocrites for keeping anything for themselves and their families, while they themselves are usually resource hogs who give away only a tiny percentage of what they get.
Corporations have been granted, through legal fictions instituted within the last century and a half, the rights of individuals. With those rights they were also supposed to have all the responsibilities of individuals. However, they no longer live up to their responsibilities, and in so doing shift them back on the rest of us. For example, corporations are supposed to pay federal taxes, just as an individual would; but few do, because most corporations can afford to hire lobbyists to make loopholes and attorneys to exploit them--yet few individuals can. So, the tax burden gets shifted to the individuals, when corporations aren't paying their fair percentage.
The corporations buy loopholes from the government, and we should put a stop to it. There is more pressure for a viable third party--a populist party--now than there's been for a century. The day is coming when there will be accountability, and when corporations suddenly start having to pay the $400 million here and $120 million there that they should have been paying all along, they'll likely collapse from not being accustomed to it. I look forward to that day...
This is why I said "run a public remailer" instead of just "run a remailer." Anyone can download and configure the standard remailer software, but naturally that doesn't make you a real remailer. However, it doesn't take a lot of effort to advertise a remailer--almost all serious users of remailers read a few basic forums, such as alt.privacy.anon-server. If you make "the big announcement" in such places, and prove yourself to have consistent uptime and reliability, you'll probably start getting hundreds or even thousands of messages a week within about a month or two--if you're reliable. If however you're offline and unavailable too much, or if your stats are flaky, no one will use you.
In deciding what remailers to use, people go on two things--reputation of the operator, and reliability statistics. Operate a reliable service and post in the right places, maybe join the remops mailing list, and you'll have absolutely no problem getting people to use your service and hence have complete deniability.
But in any event I suggested something even more important later in my post--that if someone would write an easy-to-use application for sending and relaying anonymous, encrypted e-mail, something simple enough for everyone to use, along the principles I outlined, then the public would beat a path to your door. Imagine if running a remailer and sending anonymous email through it were as simple as installing a Napster or Gnutella client--with thousands of nodes sending encrypted communications to each other, through randomized paths chosen by algorithms in the software, traffic analysis of any kind would be useless and anonymity would be guaranteed.
The problem is, no one has even tried such a thing. If half the effort put into Gnutella and Freenet were put into such a project, it would happen and quite quickly. It'd be one of the top downloads on Download.com and Tucows. But, among the several reasons this hasn't happened are the fear of having widespread easy-enough-for-anyone anonymous email, since it could be used by criminals and even worse abused by spammers. There's a reason that remailers are notoriously difficult to use: the people who code the software to run them and interface with them are the same kinds of people who are remops themselves, and they fear being used for spam or kiddy porn since that could get them visits from the fuzz. What they fail to realize is that a properly redesigned system of remailers with a clean and easy software interface which requires all clients to be servers as well, all traffic to be encrypted from node to node with a different key and padded to a different size, and other basic precautions, would get so many users as to make any visits from the men in suits useless. The same sorts of people who install Napster to get music and Gnutella for file sharing would install this program for private e-mail. There would be too many nodes and too much traffic to trace anything, and if they did trace parts of a path back to a particular node they'd contact the user and in all likelihood get some guy who has no idea what they're talking about because he's just an average user who wanted to send private mail. If all the data is never stored unencrypted, then the men in suits wouldn't even have any excuse to examine that Joe User's computer. It all comes down to designing the system well, and if it's designed well, it would become ubiquitous and impossible to stop or trace.
The only bad side effect of this would be increased possibilities for spamming, but since almost all spam is commercially motivated the senders are known. It would perhaps even be a good thing if a system like this were implemented and spamming skyrocketed, because it would spur on anti-spamming legislation which, without a big crisis, simply isn't going to happen thanks to Congress' own "commercial interests." The ultimate effect of such legislation, which as I said will probably only happen if spamming does skyrocket, would be to make spamming far smaller than it is now since the risks of severe criminal and civil penalties would outweigh the potential benefits.
But, I digress...
Not only is PGP or GPG good enough, but this new service really doesn't offer anything useful. Here are a few points to consider:
First of all, peer-to-peer over the Internet isn't really peer-to-peer at all. It's very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle exploits, since by definition any packets going out over the Internet aren't headed straight for the recipient, they have to travel over an untrusted network first. At any point along this network, a third party could insinuate himself between you and the recipient--particularly if that third party is a law enforcement or intelligence agency, since companies which own the Internet infrastructure are legally required to help such organizations. Since the data is encrypted, this may or may not be a threat depending on the strength of the implementation and upon the ability of the sender and recipient not to be socially engineered into giving out compromising information. If the third party can trick you into thinking that he's your intended recipient, you're absolutely screwed. In the case of PKI, for instance, if the man-in-the-middle can get your trust and say something like, "Sorry, John, I had a hard disk crash last week, and the old floppy I had my backup keyring on is corrupted. I needed to make a new key pair, you'll have to use that to send messages from now on," then either you'll be communicating with the third party in readable fashion from now on, or you'll have to stop communicating anything confidential at all. Since a passphrase has to be suitably complex to be useful, the same attack is useful against shared-key crypto. I don't see how this new system could overcome this flaw at all.
Secondly, the biggest security flaw in communicating via the Net is usually whether you should trust the person at the other end or not. Many of the people we correspond or transact with over the Net are people we've never met IRL, and therein lies the problem. We have no way of knowing if the person we just started communicating with is really a fellow subversive who'll come and help with the demonstrations against the IMF we're planning, or whether he's LEA. Peer-to-peer messaging is therefore useless in real-life applications.
In fact, peer-to-peer messaging is perhaps actively dangerous. It provides a direct record that a given IP address communicated with this other given IP address at a particular time. Therefore, if your recipient is really an enemy, he now has a record of your IP communicating with him. Even though the message under this system is supposedly encrypted all the time and destroyed after a set period, this means nothing: your recipient's eyes have to see it at some point, so he can just as easily do a screen grab or if that's not possible take photographs of the text. Yes, IPs can be spoofed of course, but it's harder to do in peer-to-peer communications, and you'll still probably leave a trail of logs.
Contrast this with anonymizing forms of communication. Properly anonymized through use of remailers or remailers in combination with m2n gateways, or through services such as ZKS Freedom (if it can be trusted--who knows?), it doesn't matter if there's a man-in-the-middle, nor does it matter if your recipient is trusted or untrusted. If you leave no trail, you're safe, untraceable therefore untouchable. Peer-to-peer is the opposite of this, and very useless in the real world. PGP your message and send it via Freedom or a remailer chain, and you're golden. Of course, the best way to assure your protection is to run a public remailer yourself--that way you can be sure that at least one remailer in your chain will forward no previous headers and keep no logs. Then, you have absolute deniability even if traffic analysis hints at your involvement with the message in question--aside from which, remailers often pad messages, send out bogus messages, and use delays between receipt and sending of messages to thwart traffic analysis.
The ultimate way to communicate privately is to use the above suggestions and also divorce recipient e-mail messages from the game entirely once communications have been established. Use a m2n gateway at the end of your remailer chain, to post the PGP'd message to USENET. Either use alt.anonymous.messages with a predetermined heading, or use an empty or spam group. By using a nym with the reply block pointed to a given news group, you can allow people to communicate with you just as if they were e-mailing a real e-mail address, which eases first contacts with people not used to security.
In other words, peer-to-peer isn't a step forward, it's a step back. It's inherently insecure. The only secure communication is insulated communication, with several layers between sender and recipient. Personally, I'd love to see a company or group of hackers put together easy-to-use software to allow for this sort of anonymous communication, rather than the false security of direct peer-to-peer. Imagine if everyone with a cable or DSL connection (it takes some bandwidth and uptime to be a remailer) who wanted secure communications could just download a simple piece of software which sends anonymous messages for them and also acts as a remailer itself. Imagine a Gnutella-like network for remailing anonymous PGP'd messages and possibly posting them through news gateways to a group like alt.PGPtella.messages. If you made it easy to use, we could have truly private and secure communications in the hands of the people, and Carnivore and other spyware would be useless. For my ideas on how to make a network such as this work, read my musings about what Gnutella should have done and how to replace Napster here. The concept in that post which I think is applicable here is the idea about "regional servers," only in a remailer-type system instead of a file sharing system the "regional servers" would be mostly for finding IPs of connected machines to route through and for establishing initial connections to the network, although you could make this user0definable in case you know a trusted party on the network. All messages in such a system would be PGPd from each hop to the next, with "regional servers" promoted by the software itself based on uptime and other factors, and unlike with the current remailer system you needn't manually choose each hop along the route--the software could be let to do that, and if the next hop along the route that has been chosen has gone offline, the remailer stuck with the message would forward it to a random hop which is online. Currently, the remailer system is sometimes unreliable, but a new system like this could solve reliability issues. And, as I said, since every user of the system would be a remailer as well as a potential sender, there's absolute deniability: "Sorry, Secret Service guy, you may have traced the message back this far but I'm afraid my machine doesn't keep logs after a day. No, the logs aren't recoverable because they're securely overwritten after the specified period, with no possibility for recovery. I didn't send it and I don't know who did; feel free to look at the computer running the software." All your personal info can be encrypted with something like Scramdisk or the Encrypted File System, just in case the men-in-black do decide to take a look at your box(es).
Anyway, I think I've adequately described my distaste for direct peer-to-peer communications like this product.
The failure rate of CD-R media is entirely dependent upon the quality of the materials and manufacturing process, and CD-R media from good manufacturers is just as long-lasting as any MiniDisc. Since Sony licenses MiniDisc media manufacture to some other companies, I'm sure the MiniDisc world is probably the same way.
/. a while back about testing CD-R media from different manufacturers by artificially aging them through exposure to high pressures, temperatures, and moisture levels over extended periods of time; you can probably find it by searching the archives.
Getting media on a spindle doesn't mean it's not high-quality; Imation, for example, makes a very high quality disc, and uses the same discs on its spindles that it uses in its nice slimline cases. On sale, you can get them sometimes for as little as $30 for 50. And, the media will last in excess of fifty years, and probably closer to a century, without bit-rot. There was a story on
You're right that not all burners can use an 80-min CD-R to full capacity, but that's pretty much irrelevant since most people aren't using 4 year old 1-2x CD burners. My own Craetive burner was purchased two years ago, and has no problem with them. But, even very, very ancient CD players will be able to use an 80-min audio CD--I have a walkman from when I was in high school which plays them glitchlessly. Aside from which, a good CD burner and a decent portable CD player cost less new than a new MD player/recorder.
If you want to go the uber-cool route, you could shell out a few more $$ and instead of getting a plain-Jane CD player, get something like a portable Encino Voyager CD MP3 player--easily fitting 150 high-quality mp3 recordings (192kbps or greater) onto a single medium.
And contrary to the FUD surrounding the issue, mp3 sound is as high quality as most other compressed formats, probably including ATRAC. The key is to remember that bitrate affects audio quality immensely--a 128k mp3 will sound flat and dull on even a mid-range stereo system, if you're an audiophile; but, a 192k mp3 sounds as good as a CD on a high-end system, unless you have better hearing than most people do; and, anything greater than that sounds indistinguishable from CD audio even to highly skilled audiophiles with great hearing. I believe Ars Technica did an mp3 comparison which touched on these issues. Personally, I use HQ VBR mp3 encoding, which varies the bitrate up to 320kbps and down to 96kbps as necessary, depending on the demands of the stream at any given time. It produces absolutely flawless sound, as good as any CD.
So, claims of CD-quality sound are absolutely true, if you create a high quality file. I find plenty of them on Napster, too, so I'm not the only audiophile who's keen to this. The resulting files are usually about 6-10MB, depending on bitrate--HQ VBR can produce smaller files than 256kbps files, and often they're even smaller than 192kbps files. And, you can call it piracy if you want, but I gleefully download any songs older than 14 years without any concern for copyright since the Constitution specified a copyright term of 14 years, and the extensions to this have been gained by heavy-handed and too-powerful corporations acting against the interests of the people. I also don't feel *too* bad about downloading new stuff from companies who are responsible for the DMCA and other extensions of copyright against the public interest. The only CDs I purchase any more are from bands who actually deserve my support, like Kittie, Chuck D, and people affiliated with indie labels. The music industry--and by that I mean the big corporations who are witholding IP from the public domain indefinitely, whereas it was originally supposed to be public domain after a reasonable 14 year term--don't deserve my money for abusing and taking away the rights of the people to public domain IP, but we *do* deserve to take from them since they withold IP which should rightfully be in the public domain. As David Boies, Napster attorney who was instrumental in the DoJ's case against Microsoft, pointed out, if a company or group of companies abuses its copyrights to gain or illegally exploit a monopoly, they lose their legal rights to those copyrights.
I have nothing against the MD formet in itself--it's Sony's control of it I dislike, and that's why I will never use it. Sony tried to control us with Beta, they tried to prevent resale of CDs, and they're making a very flawed version of mp3 players, and they are among the worst offenders of the DVD Consortium and one of the multinationals responsible for the DMCA. I don't trust them, and in fact hate the world they want to create, where all content and IP is encrypted, rented, and no one can touch it but them.
> It doesn't help when you spread FUD...
/.'rs.
No, but I'm not spreading FUD, unless by FUD you mean truth.
> Not true. You have 2 routes, convert to ATRAC, or wrap the file with a SDMI compliant
> wrapper which leaves the file in MP3 format but lets the player handle it like any other file.
Fine, so there is an alternative to the ATRAC conversion--an alternative which *STILL* requires an extra, unnecessary, step. So, my point stands, since either way it's adding unneeded complexity. Is there any reason that to use an mp3 you already have, you would have to wrap it in SDMI bullshit? Umm, no, since you already have the mp3 in a non-SDMI format, there is no logical reason to impose this highly useless step. Bah.
>>This takes time and effort and makes the files almost twice as large as a normal mp3.
>
> Nope. ATRAC is as efficent, if not more so than MP3 than file compression.
Yes, ATRAC is efficient; but you, evidently, are not. Had you been paying attention, you would have seen that I was talking about converting an existing mp3 file to ATRAC for use with Sony's badly designed mp3 players, mp3 players which do not in fact play standard mp3s since you have to either convert the mp3 file to ATRAC or, as you pointed out, give it an SDMI wrapper. Converting an mp3 file into an ATRAC file causes the file size to nearly double in many cases--I suppose this is a result of recompressing the file into an entirely different compression format.
> You are
> obviously repeating half remembered stuff from other
No, you are obviously not paying attention. I'm repeating what I know FROM PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE. I'd never buy one of these Sony monstrosities, but a friend of mine has one that I've played with. Yes, from personal experience, recompressing an mp3 into ATRAC can double file size. I didn't even know the option existed to put an SDMI wrapper around an mp3 file and use that instead of ATRAC, which means that the software is either extremely bad or the type of Sony player my friend had doesn't have this option (I believe Sony makes at least 3 "mp3" players).
> It can be suggested that
> it will take twice the space because you'd have 2 copies of the file, one wrapped/
> converted, one unwrapped.
No, as I said you're just not paying attention. Try to read *before* you flame, kay?
>>They obviously want to make it more complicated than necessary to use their mp3 players,
>
> Insert CD. Select autocheckout. Press record. Player loaded. Hey, maybe you should
> try using the stuff first?
I never mentioned ripping from CDs to the mp3 player, something fewer people would want to do than to just download to the player mp3s which are already on his HD. As I said, using existing mp3 files is a pain in the ass. Why should they have to be converted first? Because Sony wants to make it difficult to use mp3 players, so that everyone will stay with/switch to MiniDisc. Sony needs to make one themselves to compete with the other companies making mp3 players, but that doesn't mean that Sony wants to make them easy to use; Sony has a long history of discouraging products even as they make them, to try to get people to switch to formats they better approve of. Umm, remember Beta, and how Sony tried to get everyone to switch from VHS to that but prices were never on par since Sony demanded royalty fees for each Beta-format product, whereas VHS was more affordable because Sony wasn't milking everyone?
>> so that customers will switch back to CDs and MiniDiscs.
>
> You mean them minidiscs which offer better price performance than MP3?
Now you're just being retarded, comparing a type of media to a file format. Well, mp3s could easily be stored on MiniDiscs, you know. And, how pray tell do MiniDiscs offer better price/performance than mp3 players? Last time I went to Best Buy, MiniDiscs were pretty damned expensive. I could buy a whole spindle of quality Imation 12x 80min CD-Rs for the same price as a paltry few MiniDiscs, thanks to Sony's insane licensing fees. News flash: MiniDisc is losing, because of Sony's excessive royalty demands, just like consumer Beta lost for the same reason. MiniDisc devices have been out for far longer than mp3 players have, but with that huge advantage they haven't conquered the market. And, they won't, because of Sony's greed over their pet proprietary formats. mp3 players are getting cheaper and gaining larger capacities, but I have yet to see any significant evolutionary developments in MiniDic players. Sony's SACD format will fail for the same reason, especially since other companies are moving towards DVD-Audio; why should they pay Sony to license SACD, when they can use DVD-Audio for free (the major labels are all part of the DVD Consortium).
But, I digress. My point stands about Sony's mp3 players being unnecessarily complicated in requiring ATRAC or SDMI conversion for existing mp3 files, and I continue to support my statement that Sony is supporting mp3 players half-heartedly, to try to take marketshare away from real mp3 player manufacturers like Creative and Diamond, while simultaneously using a poor implementation to try to leave consumers with a bad taste in their mouths which they'll unfairly blame on mp3 devices in general instead of on Sony in particular.
> When an engineer builds a device it serves a purpose, there may be an artistic
> component to the work, but it's first and foremost a solution to a problem.
But source code written by a programmer is not at all like a device built by an engineer. It's more like *blueprints* drafted by an engineer. The blueprints aren't a device; they're used to build a device. The source code is not a program; it's used to build a program. As such, it would be protected under the First Amendment. You see, I can possess and distribute blueprints to illegal devices, such as bombs, silencers, and automatic weapons. I cannot possess or distribute the devices which those blueprints can be used to build, but those blueprints are merely protected speech/expression. You may not like the fact that they are, but the Court has repeatedly held that such information is legal even though the devices are not.
And that's the crux of the matter. Judge Kaplan's DeCSS decision is a mere pandering to the wishes of influential corporations for whom he used to work and for whom he may well work in the future. Look at the text of his decision: he doesn't base it on sound legal precedent, he bases it on his corporate little notions of economic necessity. Well, my rights aren't subject to economic necessity, "Your Honor," and I spit in your general direction. Any "judge" who disregards Constitutional rights in favor of "corporate necessity" shouldn't be a judge. Do you think for a minute that Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, or Madison would have approved of this decision? Of course not, and since Madison and Jefferson are the two individuals most responsible for the Constitution, we should always ask ourselves what they would have meant by it.
> The protection afforded by free speech was originally intended to allow the
> expression of opinions, not to protect the creation of illegal devices on
> artistic grounds.
But source code is no more an illegal device than a schematic of an automatic weapon is. And, as I said, if you want to talk about what was "originally intended" by the Constitution, then you'll have to consider the Framers' "clear intent." Was their intent to allow corporations to prevent individuals from freely accessing materials which, under the original provisions of the Constitution, were public domain after just 14 years? Was their intent to allow corporations to not even let people draw schematics (write source code) for devices the corporations don't like? Was their intent to grant vast IP monopolies to corporations, keeping IP out of the hands of the people for in excess of a century? Was their intent to make people unable to reverse engineer devices for interoperability, when in their day anyone could clone anything, and it was considered fair business? Of course not. So, if you're going to talk about what Constitutional protections were intended to do, realize that the primary goal of that document was to ensure the rights of every individual, and that if Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry were alive today they'd be leading a Revolution against corporate tyranny.
Yes, the OEM Live! Value lacks the connector. However, most people aren't going to need it, and if they do then this can be solved for as little as $14. A company called Audience Digital Products makes add-on connectors for the Live! Value OEm and other SB cards, which connect to an onboard set of pins present on the soundcard. A review of some of their products is at http://www.rageunderground.com/articles/adp.shtml . This makes the Live! Value OEM a very attractive option for people on a budget who still need additional connectors; ADP also makes more expensive add-ons which have the functionality of the LiveDrive, but for less money than paying the premium for a SB Live! Platinum. They aren't as pretty as the LiveDrive, but they offer similar connection options.
Just FYI, the SB Live! MP3+ soundcard doesn't have hardware mp3 compression/decompression. That's a common mistake, many people make it. The reason it's called the "MP3+" is merely because of the software bundle, which contains mp3 software--just as the "X-Gamer" version contains gaming software. You may as well just buy the plain Live! Value OEM and save money though, since it's basically the same card and there is plenty of mp3 software readily available and the bundle with the X-Gamer version has older games which can be picked up cheap if you really want them--but if you really wanted them you'd have them already, they're so old.
I myself got the Live! Value OEM, and am very happy with it. I just wish I could have afforded the Live! Platinum, since the LiveDrive is both cool and useful. I mean, having all those audio connections mounted on a front drive bay is just plain cool looking, plus I'm always reaching behind the computer to switch audio connections anyway since I use it for a DVD player (Hollywood+ cards rock).
But, the very idea of banning any mp3 players at CeBit is just disgusting. I mean, it's just a type of audio player, which you can use with your own paid-for CDs after all, just as you can legally make a mix tape or CD from CDs and tapes you bought. Funny how they're not banning MiniDisc devices, since they can be used to pirate music too with any soundcard that has an SP/DIF connector--just decompress the mp3s and burn them to MiniDisc. But, oh, wait, Sony makes a fortune from every MiniDisc device and media sold, so it's okay to have them present.
And yes, Sony makes mp3 players, but half-heartedly--after all, at least one of their "mp3 players" requires that mp3 files be converted to the proprietary Sony "ATRAC" format before downloading them to the player. This takes time and effort and makes the files almost twice as large as a normal mp3. They obviously want to make it more complicated than necessary to use their mp3 players, so that customers will switch back to CDs and MiniDiscs. And, am I the only one who notices the ironic sound of "ATRAC," so similar to the doomed "8-track" format? Arrgh, the more I learn about Sony, the more I start to think that they're the most evil corporation this side of the future "Disney's AOL/Time-Warner" which I'm convinced will happen one day... They introduce a proprietary format for everything, in the attempt to keep people from using better, open formats--like trying to get their new 1.3GB CDs to be used by consumers instead of the better DVD and DVD-R formats which they are actively trying to hamper.
But, I digress. All I can say is, you can bet that Sony had a hand in ensuring that mp3 devices would be banned from Cebit. I personally buy nothing Sony, and nothing by another brand which I know is made for them by Sony.
You see, the nagative implications outweigh the positive ones. Yes, there are positive advantages to targeted adverts, like showing you something you might actually be interested in instead of something you're almost surely not.
However, what we rail against is the potential for abuse. To generate targeted ads, there must be a database of your preferences. This information about you could be used against you, to harm your character or reputation, or as evidence against you in a criminal proceeding.
For example, tracking information indicating that you frequent gay/lesbian/bisexual sites could be used to unwillingly "out" you, and even to destroy your career. One of the most notable cases is that of Tim McVeigh--not the bomber, though they share names--who was outed to the military by one of AOL's "guides" who handed over information about McVeigh's interest in gay chatrooms.
Also, databases of consumer buying patterns have already been used against people in criminal cases. The example which comes to mind immediately is that of a small-town marijuana dealer unfortunate enough to use a store discount card at the supermarket--police subpoenad his shopping records, to ascertain whether he bought an unusually large number of plastic baggies or other "drug paraphernalia." Let's not forget that, while he was a criminal, the legalization of marijuana is favored by an extraordinarily large percentage of Americans, and that the potential for such databases to be exploited in investigations goes far beyond this.
Do you want your TiVo records to indicate that you watch a lot of softcore Cinemax porn when you're falsely accused of rape? Believe it or not, conservative juries can look down on even softcore legal stuff, and some judges will let it in. Or, what if you watch a lot of The Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and you're falsely accused of child molestation? Such "evidence" would *definitely* be used against you since a psychiatrist would be called to testify as to how well you fit the profile of a pedophile--watching excessive amounts of kids' shows is common pedophiliac behaviour.
Even worse, corporations have total control over this data--they can merge it into vast databases, covering every aspect of your life. That's what several corporations are aiming to do. What if this data is made available to other corporations for a small fee? Well, then a prospective employer could do a background check which includes your TV viewing habits and shopping habits, and screen you out because you watch too much Cinemax porn or too many mindless sitcoms, or because you buy too many OTC medicines and must be a health risk. Right now, privacy policies aren't really legally binding and can be changed without notice, so all this information could be merged into a seamless database without any legal recourse to stop it.
It's quite clear that the benefits of seeing ads I might be more inclined to click through are far surpassed by the risks. It's all in the name of making human beings into blathering, mindless consumers instead of citizens anyway--do I really care what ads they throw at me? Fuck no, I ignore them, like a good *individual* should. The less I give to corporations or support their domination of every media outlet, the better.
> Nobody's saying that your kid can't read, watch, and play what he wants. If
;-) That's the way it's always been; kids will see what they want to see, regardless of what the parents want.
/. when it comes to tech matters. What can I say, I don't think Windows is so bad, because it's so functional and easy to use. But I share the more progressive views which the majority of /.ers tend to hold. After all, a lot of people here were geeks in high school who played video games or roleplaying games or got into violent films as a relief of tensions that geeks above most others are subject to. As such, we can understand better than you can what it's like to be a stressed teenager, and how cathartic such release valves are. Without them, many teens would become the next Eric Harris. Is that what you want? No? Then stop being selfish and start to think about what teenagers need, instead of thinking about what you personally dislike.
...the majority of parents have some ideas of what they do and don't want
...And anyone that's going to "snap" because they're denied their video games
> you want it that way, go to KMart yourself and buy it for him or her.
You are missing the mark by a mile or two. How am I to teach my kids to be free and use that freedom responsibly, if they're living in a very un-free country which requires them to "present their papers" to buy a CD, video game, or film? That's what this is about. Making a parent go up to the counter and buy a video game for a 16 year old, as if he were a child of 5 instead of a young adult, sends a message to that teenager: you're a child; we may say you're a young adult, but that's just lip service since you have no more rights than a 5 year old; if you hurt someone we can try you as an adult, and put you in adult prison, and you have all the responsibilities of an adult--but you have *NO* adult rights, even though the responsibilities are yours; you have no rights; you are property, unable to make any decisions for yourself, your parents must make all decisions for you; your parents matter, you do not. You may not think it sends that message, but it does: ask teenagers about it, since they have a perspective different from yours.
Now, it would be impossible--*IMPOSSIBLE*--for me to treat my teenager as a young adult if I have to go to the counter with him to buy him a CD or video game. All of a sudden, he's being treated *exactly* like he's five years old, and all my work is ruined. Way to instill self-confidence and self-sufficiency in someone, oh wise society.
That's not even bringing up the issue of rights and fairness. If someone is expected to behave as an adult, he should be given the rights and privileges attendant upon those responsibilities. To do any less is a gross unfairness. I find it revolting and disgusting that we can and do try and sentence young teens as adults, and yet we don't give them any adult rights whatsoever. A fifteen-year-old, legally, has no more rights than a five-year-old, and yet has far more legal and social responsibilities. there is something quite wrong with that.
> (Of course,
> you have other things to do than that, and couldn't be bothered to take any
> responsibility for your views by taking some action.)
On the contrary, I am clearly much more able and willing to be involved in raising my children than you are. After all, I have thought out the implications of treating them like children when they are no longer mere children, but young adults; and you seem content to treat teenagers like second-graders with no regard for their maturing process and self-esteem. And, I take as much action as I can to make sure my kids will grow to be adults in a world which is friendly to them--I write and have published in actual print media articles about the troubles facing teens these days, most of which come from parents and other adults who are well-meaning but misguided.
Let's look at the immediate issue, though; if stores card everyone for video games and CDs with mature content, and therefore either parents or older kids have to buy such materials for their teenage kids, what are the effects?
1) I and other parents who actually desire to treat our teenagers as young adults, in an effort to nurture responsibility and self-worth, will be unable to avoid treating our teens like they're five years old whenever they want a video game or CD. Of course, this sends our kids the same message we try so hard not to give them, and it can't be avoided.
2) *Your* teens, whom you wish to treat like immature little kids instead of nurturing their growing minds and self-consciousness, will still get the games and music you don't want them to by having older kids get them or by playing them at friends' houses. Your kids won't like you because you're an overbearing bastard who tries to give them all the responsibilities of adulthood but NONE of the rights and privileges.
Nothing truly constructive, in other words. Now, compare that to what heppens without such restrictions:
1) Progressives like me have one less thing to worry about in raising our teens.
2) Teenagers may still be put upon and held back by clueless parents, overbearing administrators, and some fellow classmates, but at least the video game store/CD store/arcade is one less place that they're treated like five-year-olds whose opinions and self-esteem are worthless.
3) People like you will have to actually *parent* instead of letting retailers do it for you, but you can still have control over what your kids bring into your house. If you find a contraband copy of Diablo 2, throw it away and chastise your teen.
4) As with the other list above, your kids can still see all the video game violence and arcade sexuality they want--by going over to the houses of friends with more progressive parents. Like, well, my house.
So, we can clearly see that censorship-at-the-store helps no one, and hurts parents who actually trust and nurture their children.
> You can disagree with KMart
> and WalMart all you want, but saying that they should share your views is
I don't say they should share my views; I say they shouldn't share *yours*. Retailers should be parenting-neutral; it isn't their job to make decisions for anyone's kids, mine or yours. *Yours* is the only opinion that would have corporations making parenting decisions for us, not mine.
> unfounded arrogance on your part,
Well, I already disputed this above, but on a side note: yes, I'm arrogant, but my arrogance is well-founded. Unlike you, I've actually read most of the best, most recent literature on adolescent development. Unlike you, I care more about raising teenagers to be healthy and completely developed adults, rather than in misguidedly exposing them only to things which I personally approve of 100% and attempting to shield them from the world.
> that's shared by most of your clueless slashdot colleagues.
I disagree with a lot of people on
> If graphical depictions of violence are considered good psychological
> replacements for actually dealing with you problems, or even are treated as
> a generic escape route, then I think that there's a problem, and it's not
> KMart's.
That's your opinion, and you're welcome to it; but it's an unfounded opinion and you shouldn't try to force it upon everyone else. Every single human being is an escapist--why else do we dream? Without dreams, we cannot function. If you allow a person to sleep as long as he wants, but wake him briefly whenever REM sleep indicates he's ready to dream, you'll have a very agitated and unhelthy person in short order. This has been proven by clinical studies. For whatever reason, we need to dream. We need that escape. Video games perhaps serve a similar function--we exercise our reflexes in ways we can't in day-to-day life, but which were common in our primordial days; we exorcise our violent impulses, which otherwise would stay bottled up inside us until they flare up IRL; we can be powerful, important characters in video and roleplaying games, to make up for the lack of power and importance which plague so many teenage lives.
Using games as a cathrsis doesn't mean that you're not solving your problems IRL; but often there are problems in real life which we cannot solve. For example, when society gets medieval with teenagers and starts treating them like little children, as in the present example of restricting the purchase of simple games, there's little a teenager can do about it. He can complain all he wants, but sadly enough, adults won't listen to him because too many of them are as thoughtless as you are.
>
> their kids to see, and appreciate a policy that agrees with them.
Yes, but the majority are often wrong. That's why the founders of our country and its Constitution used phrases like "the tyranny of the majority" and "the rights of the minority." Just because a majority of parents--and I don't think it's anywhere near a majority, but for the sake of the argument--have an opinion does not mean that they have the right to violate the rights of other parents and the rights of teens. Sadly enough, though, in legal terms teenagers have few rights--not much more than young children do, and that's not right. Just because the majority desires something doesn't make it right; in fact, the majority is typically wrong. That's why there are so many safeguards in the Constitution against tyranny of the ignorant masses, like the Electoral College. Who should be making decisions, smart people (the minority) or average people (the majority)? And, before you answer, realize that the "average" person can't locate South America on a globe, or learn to use Windows without calling tech support *a lot*.
> The rest of your paragraph is a fine argument that
> unrestricted access is ideal, but it misses the point. KMart is taking reasonable
> actions to fit in to the society that it caters to.
If indeed unrestricted access is ideal, you should support it. "Society," though I hate to use such a blanket term here, should be changed through education if it's wrong, and ignored if it won't listen. After all, what makes the U.S. fairly unique is not the rule of the majority, but the respect we maintain for the rights of the minority. So, if unrestricted access is, as you say, ideal, then that's the way it should be.
>
> has mental problems anyway
Where have you been lately, my friend? Most teenagers have mental problems--or at least what society chooses to call mental problems. A very significant portion of the teenage population are permanently medicated--why, you can't walk into a classroom these days without finding someone who'd at least on Ritalin, if not anti-depressants. Personally, I chalk most of these "mental problems" up to being merely symptoms of adolescence and the emotional intensities that are always a part of it. Many doctors agree that Ritalin is definitely over-prescribed. I've also known teenagers on Zoloft and Wellbutrin. Most of them should not be. But, most teenagers have clinically diagnosable "mental problems" like depression. But largely they're just part of growing up. It's sad that we medicate our teenagers to remove the symptoms of adolescence, but we do.
> Everyone has limits on what they're allowed to do.
Yes, but in the U.S. we have far too many. That would be why the only country with a larger percentage of its population in prison is Russia. That's very telling and hideous. "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"--Tacitus, *The Annals*
> Teenagers have a few more; they always have in our society.
True, and many of the "extra" limitations are necessary. But new ones are not. Unfortunately, every year we oppress teenagers more. Legally enforced curfews--in my city, a teenager can't legally spend the night in a friend's house, even if they stay indoors all night, without written parental consent. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT ABOUT?!? In Michigan(?) a 16 year old boy was found guilty of statutory rape and subject to the sex offender registry for having consensual sex with his 14 year old girlfriend. That's *wrong*, and would never have happened even during the height of the Reagan morality police. Kids are now being profiled in schools by FBI software. We have tried 11 year old kids as adults and given them life in prison for murders which they quite frankly could not have understood--no rehabilitation, they're just thrown away. Our young people are at risk--from their elders. This video game business may be a relatively minor thing, but it's one more thing which should be stopped, one more thing which goes over the line. A small evil is still an evil.
> Learning to live with that is part of growing up.
No, for all the kids I knew growing up and know now as an adult, learning to get around those rules is part of growing up. After all, when I was a kid, movie theaters didn't even card for R-rated movies--the ratings were a "suggestion" and not enforced. And now, I can't buy a damned cigar without being carded even though I look about 34 with my beard and all. We are becoming a pathetic country in which no one is free anymore. I remember back in the 80s we used to say that what separated us from the Soviets was that a Russian had to show his papers everywhere he goes, and an American could go wherever he wanted to and no one would question him about it. Now, we have to show our papers as much as anyone in the Soviet Union ever had to. And we treat our teenagers like they aren't even people. in 20 years, America has gone from being the soul and savior of the world, to being a mocked and ridiculed and hated caricature. Our children are failing because we've failed to protect them by guaranteeing basic rights.
> BTW: Great song, great Lyrics, and great point, but completely irrelevant
If you think so. But I think it's the whole point. It's why Columbine and Jonesboro happened. Violent video games didn't do it; boxing our teenagers in, treating them like veal, did.
> First, why should KMart be dedicated to Free Speech? (That's the citizen's job, not theirs.)
And why the Hell isn't it the citizen's job to take care of his kids, instead of letting K-mart, Wal-Mart, the MPAA and other clueless corporate pieces of shit be responsible for them? Tell your kid what you think is inappropriate for him to play, watch, read, whatever. If he disobeys you, throw away the copy of Diablo 2 he bought against your wishes. Just don't tell my kid he can't read, watch, and play whatever he wants--which is what you do if you make stores card people for video games, because parents shouldn't have to take their teenagers up to the counter like toddlers to buy them video games, music, books and films.
Clue: there is no causal link between video game violence and meatspace violence. And there never will be, because as any frustrated teenager will tell you video games are a tool for catharsis--they let you relieve the tension of dealing with obnoxious bullies, teachers who shouldn't have been allowed to graduate college much less teach high school, girls who ignore them or worse, make out in the halls all day in front of you, administrators who bully students who dress, look, or think differently than the tyranny of the majority, and clueless parents who are from a different generation and just don't understand that times have changed.
Here's another clue: stores don't do things like this out of a feeling of beneficence, they do it because they perceive that people like you want them to. They do it because clueless and ignorant parents want them to, since they choose to blame teenage violence on video games and films instead of on bad parenting and a failing school system. It makes parents feel better when they have a scapegoat to blame instead of facing the truth that it's not video games or movies that are to blame, it's parental irresponsibility and the squalor of a school system in which they're "dumbing down" standardized tests because students can't pass them as well as they could 20 years ago. It's the fault of a repressive society which wants teenagers to bottle up their natural sexuality instead of being free to express it and experiment with it in healthy ways. It's the fault of a social machine which pushes away anyone in high school who tries to be different, unique, instead of "just another brick in the wall." It's the fault of an oppressive government which lets the FBI release "profiling software" to schools to try to pick out the potentially dangerous, but probably acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy to make people dangerous by alienating them and singling them out further. All these are the problem, not sex and make-believe violence in cathartic video games and films and music.
So, what;s the solution? Something like this only tightens the noose further, makes teenagers feel even more alienated and underesteemed. Teenagers aren't five year olds, they need to be treated like people who are in the process of becoming adults, people who need to make their own decisions, with some guidance, and make their own mistakes and learn from them. Why is it that we can give teenagers all the responsibilities of adulthood--we can even try them as adults and send them to adult prison when they commit crimes--but none of the rights? America puts more children in prison than any other country in the world, and we have a larger percentage of our population in prison than any country except Russia. Sadly enough, you have a greater chance of going to jail in America, a "free" country, than you do in Iraq, China, Iran, Libya, or North Korea; it's not because we're more violent, it's because we have a no-tolerance system with no room for mistakes, in which a 17 year old kid can go to prison for having consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend, in which getting caught with a few ounces of marijuana for personal use can get you a long prison sentence as a dealer, in which we incarcerate as punishment instead of rehabilitate as treatment. A lack of rights is the fundamental problem that causes teenagers to snap. Taking away more can only make things worse. The kids who go on school shootings and what not are the ones who feel alienated, treated unfairly, not treated like adults by their parents, bullied at school by administrators for being different, feeling the pressures to conform to adult rules of behaviour but not having any of the rights that go along with it. Of course they snap; they aren't being treated like people, they're being treated like objects.
The solution is for us to loosen the reigns a bit, not tighten them. For all the complaining about school shootings being on the rise, violence in schools is actually at a ten year low--it's just that there have been more high-profile shootings, where kids snap and bring guns to school. If we're going to hold teenagers to the responsibilities of adults, and make them subject to prison when they transgress whereas in ages past we just would have sent them to juvenile detention and released them at 18 after counseling, then we have to give them some rights to go along with the responsibilities. We don't do that, and that's why our kids are having problems. We don't treat them like people anymore. Start treating them like adults-in-training instead of like toddlers or property.
"We don't need no education,
We don't need no thought control.
Dark sarcasm in the classroom--
Teacher, leave them kids alone.
Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all,
It's just another brick in the wall...
All in all,
You're just another brick in the wall...
I don't need your arms around me,
I don't need your drugs to calm me.
I Have seen the writing on the wall...
I don't think I need anything at all;
No don't think I need anything at all.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall...
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall..."
--Pink Floyd
Aargh, I can't find the link I was looking at last time. Last time I was there, which was within the last couple of months, there was a link right on the main page to a site which linked to pages with the RSA and IDEA modules and information about them, I took this to be a site by the modules' developers. I guess the site was reworked a bit when the FAQ came out--the date on the FAQ is 6 Sept. 2000, just yesterday. So yes, the words I ascribed to the GPG people themselves are no longer there. But since the FAQ came out just yesterday, and there is no other link on the site about the modules, we can assume that 1) there used to be such a link before the link was put into the new FAQ, therefore 2) I am not entirely full of shit even though I can no longer back my claim since the original link was deleted when the info was added to the FAQ, published *yesterday*.
;-) Feel free to flame me in my absence, but I repeat: the FAQ came out only yesterday, and I swear that link with the characterizations I used was there recently. I hate change...
Take my characterizations cum grano salis, if you want, but the FAQ is less than a day old and that link to the modules' developer site was there, before the link to the files on the gnupg server was put into the FAQ. If I feel up to it I could always go to Google and look for that site for the modules, but...hell, it's 5:22 in the morning. I'm going the fuck to bed...
> If you've never tried these patches, how can you say they aren't 100% compatible?
.doc file format? No fscking way. I'm sure GPG will eventually be fully compatible with PGP, but until then those of us *really* into private communications and Type 1 remailers and nyms will be sticking with PGP.
Because the official GPG pages used the words "unofficial" and "buggy" and "beta" when I looked into GPG just a month or so ago. If GPG devs themselves say there are compatibility issues, I would be inclined to believe them.
> Also, they're plug-ins, not patches.
Joy. Either way, it isn't ready for prime time until RSA support is written into the GPG code itself. Even so, compatibility will be a big issue--in the world of those who are *serious* about communications privacy and security, legacy applications are still the norm since they are tried-and-true, proven, and free from code bloat. As such, these applications are typically not going to be GPG-compatible for some time. Such popular software includes Jack B. Nymble for remailer client/nym use, Private Idaho for nym creation and use, and Reliable for use as a remailer server. Some such applications have to make calls to PGP, which cannot be duplicated in GPG; there are wrappers and such for GPG, but that's a very klumsy kludge since it's far easier and more reliable to just install PGP 2.6.x with its 100% compatibility with those calls and low overhead since no wrapper is necessary.
Personally, I use PGP 2.6.3ckt for compatibility with Private Idaho calls and for creating the more secure non-ADK type 3 RSA keys, and also have Reliable and Jack B. Nymble configured to use the 2.6.3ckt install. Then I use PGP 6.02ckt for general usage, since the keys import nicely from my 2.6.3ckt install when necessary and since it's far quicker to use the GUI tools that come with 6.x versions than to bring up a CLI and type long strings of commands. Of course, it's set to warn before encrypting to an ADK.
Point being, until GPG has full RSA compatibility and can take PGP commands, it's useless for those who operate remailers, it's useless for those who still use good ole' Private Idaho (a lot of people who use remailers or nyms still do), and I believe it's also still useless to those who use Jack B. Nymble although I haven't looked at the latest release yet. There also needs to be a GUI with tools as functional as those in PGP 6.x for it to gain widespread acceptance among those who currently use PGP--if you use PGP on a daily basis, nothing is as useful as that PGPtray util. further, I started to install GPG a couple weeks ago since I do want to show support for Open Source and Free Software, but the damned thing was more difficult to set up and configure than the ancient PGP 2.6.x is, so I just said "fuck it" since I was happy with PGP anyway.
> I've got the RSA and IDEA plug-ins running with
> my GPG just fine.
That's nice. Good for you. Do you use it with Nym and remailer applications? I doubt it. Have you sent messages through notoriously finicky Cypherpunk chains with it? Again, doubtful.
> I imported my PGP 2.6 secret key and keyring just grand. I've had
> zero problems encrypting to people with RSA keys and decrypting messages sent from
> them.
That's nice and all, but don't think that just because it works *for you* means it works universally. Even the GPG folks say it doesn't, and it's useless to use something so unproven in critical areas such as remailer use.
> Please don't knock something if you've never even tried it.
Again, I mentioned its lack of complete compatibility because the GPG site mentioned it, and because no one in the remailer world that I know of uses it. Even amongst the non-remailer-guys in the alt.privacy* and alt.security* hierarchies, I have seen a GPG signature only twice in my two years of involvement. Very, very few amongst those truly quite into communications privacy use GPG, and this will remain the case until a 100% compatible right-out-of-the-box version is released.
I really question the rationale behind GPG anyway. PGP source code is available for free--it ain't Free Software, GPLed "Free," but it's good enough and it gets hacked on a lot to create custom versions with extended features. The tried-and-true PGP 2.6.x codebase has been reviewed for security for years, with no holes. Put a GUI and extended functionality into that code, and hand it over to pgpi.org, and you'd have the best, most compatible, most proven, most useful application of the type. So, it seems that GPG is more about FSF style philosophy than about making the best application. I'm all for the Open Source and FSF ethos, I really do appreciate the philosophy and worldview involved; but I and most people into securing our communications won't use a product just for its philosophy, we need a product with a proven track record and 100% compatibility with the applications which are necessary in the field. I hope that'll be GPG someday, but it won't be for a long while. Instead of cloning PGP, the industry standard, developers went off on their own with everything from command syntax to ciphers. Would StarOffice and WordPerfect and others have any chance of succeeding if they didn't try to be as compatible as possible with handling of the evil but industry-standard
Yes, you can interoperate PGP and GPG in that GPG can be made to use PGP-compatible DH/DSS keys. But, there is a lack of support for PGP RSA keys which is a fatal flaw at this point. From what I've read, I think there are unofficial and still-buggy source code patches available from Europe for RSA compatibility--though I may be wrong--but overall the only way to maintain near-100% compatibility with most PGP users is to make RSA keys.
The only versions of PGP which don't support RSA keys are early and now-defunct versions of PGP Freeware 5.x. Other than those--which can easily be replaced by a later international version or later freeware version--all PGP incarnations can use RSA keys. This is important because many of the more privacy-conscious people are still using good ole version 2.6.x, which cannot use any keys but RSA.
This especially comes into play if you ever want to use the Cypherpunk remailer system--there have always been some cypherpunk remailers who don't have support for DH/DSS keys, but now almost all of the remailer operators who used to support DH as well as RSA have revoked their DH/DSS keys and switched to solely having RSA Type 3 keys produced by PGP 2.6.x and thus invulnerable to any ADK issues.
So, PGP is a necessity for compatibility with Type 1 (Cypherpunk) remailers. More than that, the most privacy conscious individuals are still using PGP 2.6.x for their own private correspondence, so you won't be able to communicate with those stalwarts via GPG.
That being said, now that RSA is unencumbered I'm sure GPG will be incorporating full RSA key support. But until then, it's frankly unusable unless all the other people you privately correspond with aren't using RSA, and forget about remailers unless you stick with Type 2 Mixmasters only--which are vulnerable to the NSA thanks to their short key sizes, according to one of the Mixmaster developers Lance Cottrel.
And BTW, the new version of PGP which supposedly solves the ADK issue really doesn't--it won't decrypt to the ADK if present, but it also won't notify you of the presence of an ADK--so you'd never know if someone tried to bug the key in question. That sucks.
I had a circa 1995 WinBook XP laptop I bought used a few years ago. Running Win95 with its mere 8 megs of RAM was a bit slow, but hey I'd been using old 25MHz MAcs in the computer lab, so it was faster than whet I was used to.
It had a 486DX4-100MHz processor, and...let's just say that I couldn't use it for more than half an hour without putting a pillow or book between it and my leg. I was worried that it was running too hot, but the fan was working properly, so I guess that's just how hot it was supposed to get.
So when people complain nowadays about their new laptops getting too warm or power-hungry, I laugh. Not too long ago a laptop could almost burn a hole in your pants with a battery life of only an hour. And people complain about Athlons needing too much power and producing too much heat for laptop use...
"As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up."
Script suggestion for *Armageddon II: Liv Lives*; Scene !!!, Liv and NASA Geek in her dressing room just before flight.
"Liv, can I zip you up? Please?"
"Umm, no, you little geeky pervert. You and that puny little Perl script you have the nerve to call an application can get the hell out of my dressing room. Don't even *think* about *applying* that thing to me."
"No, don't worry I've already seen them in that topless scene you did in *Stealing Beauty*. I'm not trying to cop a peek or feel, I just want to help you save the world from that asteroid through whatever highly unlikely and unscientific methods those hack screenwriters have dreamt up without consulting technical experts who didn't get their degrees from Joe Bob's College of Astrophysics and Auto-Repair."
"Oh. Okay, then, zip me up."
"Wow, your lips are so much more beautiful and soft-looking in person. They're just like Julia Roberts' lips, only on an *attractive* face."
"Oh my God, is that a slide rule in your pocket or...ohh, we have to bring you with us! Maybe the sight of your enormous..."T-square"...will scare the asteroid away into a more elliptical orbit! Or at the very least our all-female crew can ravage you in a desperate attempt to cover up for poor screenwriting by depicting lots and lots of gratuitous sex!"
"But what about Bruce Willis, he's part of your crew too?"
"Well, he gets to ravage you too. It's in his contract."
"Umm, err...okay, you're worth taking it in the ass from a deranged scientologist foolish enough to divorce Demi Moore's breasts. I mean, Demi Moore."
[Kissing and groping]
"So, you like my lips, NASA geek. Everyone does. It's the one thing I got from my Dad--well, that and Alicia Silverstone; we used to share her on alternate Thursdays."
"Oh no....that's right you're...Steven Tyler's daughter! I forgot! Oh, my God, I can't look at those luscious lips without thinking about your dad. Oh no, it's like kissing Aerosmith! Acchhh, I'm going to be sick! I feel like I just made out with Aerosmith...gross..blechh....barf [much vomiting. NASA geek exits stage left, leaving a trail of vomit and shouting "Nooooo, I just made out with Aerosmith! Yuck!]
The best way to fix the patent system would be to constantly flood it with more and more patents applied for by OSS and FSF types willing to share the IP that should be shared. "Pre-emptive" patenting, which could hopefully invalidate future patents by clueless corps. Have a new idea, or just half an idea you thought up in a dream about flux-capacitor-like fanciful ideas? Apply for a patent on the new "development." Then, hopefully, it will cover something used later in a patent application by a big corporation, so that it can invalidate the claim. Have a database of these pre-emptive patents maintained by someone like FSF or OSS. I'm sure every one of us (well, a lot of us at least) comes up with ideas for new types of pointing devices, web interfaces, protocols, etc.; well, patent them to keep a big corporation from doing it and patenting it later.
I'll wait for the new AMD 1337 MHz processor. Only for us 1337 d00dz, y'know. ;-)
Face it, the P!!! is having extreme problems getting past 1GHz, while the Athlon is sailing on by. I mean, remember that the 1GHz P!!! had to have a microcode update to function properly? Bah. A microcode change slows the chip down, usually disabling or correcting something--which begs the question of why the P!!! design got out the door with so many flaws.
This story makes the problems Tom was having getting his first P!!! 1GHz to run stably worth another look. After other reviewers including Anand had no problems, they sent Tom a new chip and chalked it up to a faulty part. But maybe, just maybe, that part Tom got was a P!!! 1GHz which hadn't had the microcode update? If anything fails to even POST properly without a big microcode update, there was a *major* flaw in there somewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the problem Tom was having.
The P!!! core is basically the PPro core with a few new instructions and a wider path to the L2 cache, more or less. Is it any wonder that this ancient 5-year-old core is straining? Of course not; it was designed to operate at 200MHz, and it's a wonder they got it to operate at 1GHz at all. But the Athlon is all new, and seems to be feeling no strain getting into the highest speeds.
Compare this to the P4 design, which Intel admits won't be as fast clock-per-clock as the P!!! thanks to the huge pipeline. Athlon will probably at least match this new P4 chip clock-for-clock, if not slightly outperform it. And, the new Mustang(?) cores are on their way. Face it: Intel is inferior now. For years AMD was the underdog and Intel was king of the x86 castle. And now, AMD has surpassed Intel in every way, in price and in performance when you consider that the P4 will perform worse clock-for-clock than P!!! while the Mustang cored Athlons will surely perform better than the Thunderbirds we have now.
News organizations, first of all, never report with impartiality. Sometimes they try, but most often they don't even make an effort to be impartial--reporters are people, and people are inherently biased and inclined to express those biases, even if only subconsciously.
The problem I see is that news organizations these days try to *appear* impartial to the public, while in reality infusing their stories with either a liberal or conservative bias depending on the people running the show. Thus, the public thinks what they're hearing is impartial "fact" when the reality is that they're hearing subtle political propaganda.
In the old days, newspapers came right out and proudly proclaimed their political beliefs. Think of the rampant jingoism of a Hurst (Hearst? sorry, my mind is asleep and I'm too lazy to go to Google to check) news organization. That was honesty about being biased. But now news organizations just lie about their biases, and that's dangerous: it indoctrinates the citizenry to have the same bias, through subtle manipulation of facts, instead of teaching them to form their own opinion.
If you want an example, just look at the huge mistake CNN made when they ran the story two years ago about American forces using CS gas against civilians during the Vietnam War. It was a lie based on the ramblings of an unstable person with a bad memory, who when questioned by others couldn't even remember who some of his commanding officers were. There was no corroborating evidence at all, but they ran the story as if it were gospel truth. No one thought of pulling the plug, because everyone there had an inherent bias. Journalism is just a dangerous illusion--no one in the profession is impartial.
Aside from which, if it were illegal to link to DeCSS code or binaries, CNN would be committing a crime by doing so just as if a private citizen were to do the same. I dare say that's doubtless why the link has been removed. A news person cannot break the law to get a story or in reporting a story. For example, a journalist who freelanced and did contract pieces for NPR and other organizations was arrested for child pornography when he was investigating it for a piece, because he retransmitted an image which he'd downloaded in a chat room (he got the image from a Fed shill, BTW--doesn't our government have better things to do than distribute child pornography? Entrapment, anyone?)...
If I had anywhere near $1800 at the moment, I'd be sorely tempted to buy one of the old powerbooks used just so that I could get the $700 credit towards a new model. After all, in my city, the local paper has a Computers category in the classified which is usually populated with old P166 boxes and ancient Powerbooks... Sounds like a great deal, since you can sometimes find those things, at least around here, for less than half the price of the credit Apple is offering. [sound of paper rustling as thousands of geeks thumb through the classifieds for an antique Powerbook buying binge...]
Yes, DSL is more technologically advanced than cable internet, but only bgecause it has to be--it takes a lot of finessing to get high bandwidth connections over tiny little copper telephone lines. I'm waiting for RR cable service to get to my area instead of dealing with DSL precisely because I'm sure that the old copper wires in my house and stretched across the telepjone poles in my very old neighborhood won't handle DSL, and if they do it'll be at a horribly slow connection rate.
Cable, however, has very fat pipes with almost unlimited capability for growth and carrying more bandwidth--any wires that can deliver 120 channels of full NTSC cryastal clear to my house can handle major internet bandwidth. Granted, a cable connection often offers instabilities in its bandwidth, but fluctuating between 0.75Mbps and 1.5Mbps beats the hell out of getting a steady 0.375 or 0.5Mbps. Plus, there's room for expansion in the future with cable--there's a lot of future-proofness in those fat pipes, whereas copper phone lines have to be reaching their limits sooner. It's just simple math.
Yes, there's been talk of making RDRAM data paths wider, but this isn't the point. That discussion is mainly about increasing bandwidth, which helps performance when you have lots of throughput but otherwise faster is better. You can make SDRAM paths wider, too, and add additional channels. There's a lot that can be done to improve either RAM technology, much of which has to do with improving chipset and motherboard design--which IMHO are the big bottlenecks today; the fundamental architecture of x86 mainboards hasn't changed much in far too many years. Personally, I'd like to see a pooled architechture like the SGI Visual Workstations, where the rest of the system is basically built around the memory implementation. But in the world of standard vanilla x86 boards, too much performance and stability is sacrificed to old and slow bus architectures and data paths which aren't wide enough.
But my point about RDRAM is that it has to be clocked at 800MHz to equal the performance of PC133 SDRAM, and that's horrid. Memory performance in SDRAM can also be increased by other means than clockspeed, too, but SDRAM has so much headroom in the clockspeed department that there's no need to worry about that for some time yet, whereas RDRAM clockspeed is horribly fast with so little room for MHz jumps. I mean, most people have CPUs that don't run at 800MHz, ferchrissakes. Even a top-of-the-line graphics processor like the GeForce 2 Ultra runs at a mere 250MHz, with on-card memory running at less than 500MHz DDR. AGP is running at a mere 66MHz. PCI is still the slowpoke at 33MHz, and really needs to be improved because it is a bottleneck. But the point is, the RDRAM is running so fast that it has so little room to increase its clockspeed at all, whereas SDRAM has so much room.
MRAM is probably five or possibly more years away, so it's not going to be anywhere near the "next generation" of RAM tech. Check out the front page of ArsTechnica for some linkage.
The next generation of RAM is clearly going to be DDR-SDRAM, and will be for some time. Cheap modules will be PC-200, but PC-266 DDR will be out at the same time, with very little use of the "mere" 200MHz (effective) variety. The tech is there right now, it's just that there's no demand yet since there aren't any chipsets out (VIA to the rescue, in a few months); so, regular SDRAM is tying up production right now, but the switch to DDR will probably be fairly smooth.
Face it, RAMBUS RDRAM is a terrible idea in the first place. When you have to make a new technology like RDRAM run at 800MHz to get similar performance to existing PC-133 SDRAM, that should be a sign that the new technology is worthless--do you really think it will be as easy to make RDRAM at 1.6GHz as it will be to make DDR SDRAM at 266MHz DDR? Hell no. I predict a quick demise for RDRAM within a few months of the release of VIA's forst DDR-SDRAM chipset.
Yes, the statement in my title is *technically* inaccurate, untrue. But the average computer user is not a technical person who knows the difference, and never will be. that's the fundamental problem I see in the Linux community--it fails to see how most end users will be using their computers, and therefore I fear that Linux will stop making progress on the desktop if another vendor presents a better OS--like if OSX were to go x86, which is doubtful--or that Linux will stop moving onto the desktop when another company offers a proprietary add-on GUI for either Linux or *BSD which offers the ease of use Linux continues to lack.
For example, people here are talking about how multiuser timesharing machines are making a comeback thanks to home networking and the like. Bullshit. The average house still doesn't have a home network, but has instead one, maybe two, standalone PCs or Macs. Home Networking is still a geek/tech enthusiast thing. Until computers can be plugged together with a little cable, or with a couple of AirPort type devices, with absolutely no configuration necessary beyond a quick Wizard, home networking will remain a small minority market. The closest thing to that right now is Macs using the AirPort.
And, most home networks probably consist of Windows boxen linked together, not multiuser Linux systems. I know of absolutely no one who actually uses the Windows "Profiles" version of multiuser, much less who uses a real multiuser Linux or NT box at home--NT, sure, but with only a single non-administrator user profile. Most home users view multiuser systems as a burden to be put up with, not as a useful feature. Do you know what home users do instead of using multiuser systems? They use single-user systems with different folders for different users' stuff. If there is a home network, it's usually a network of such single-user machines, not a network of multiuser systems running *nix or NT with different logons for each user.
Please, don't make the mistake of thinking that home users think the same way or want the same things that tech enthusiasts and geeks do. they don't. And unless Linux developers start thinking about what Joe Windoes or Jane Macintosh use and want, Linux will never take over the desktop. My title was "No, the GUI *is* the OS" precisely because that's a true perception of home users--they don't see or care about what's going on underneath the GUI, the GUI is their world, the GUI is their perception of the OS; and if the GUI sucks, as most Linux ones do in the user-friendliness dept. compared to Win/Mac, then the OS sucks as well for the desktop user. It ain't about the server space any more; the desktop market is about look and feel, not multiuser complicated stuff. Just my 2 pence.