If you bring in a completely different point, which does not generalize to other situations (except if you think that companies should generally have total control over individuals, since they are always more honnest than them), and my argument does not address it, then it is not a problem with my argument.
It is good that something is being done about the reselling of tickets with a high markup.
I guess you would also agree to ban price increase for plane reservations at the last minute?
Companies do not disagree with selling the maximum each buyer will bear (instead of the minimum that N persons will bear, if you want to fill a N seat concert hall, which is the current case assuming identical seats). They just disagree with others making that money. This is all a matter of control, as is everything about DRM (that is to say, contracts). We had a market where a huge quantity of goods were sold with standardised contracts: buying an apple, a car or a concert ticket meant roughly the same (implicit, law defined) contract for the buyer. Standardisation meant it was easy to negotiate good deal on that single contract. Now this is being eroded more and more.
You still don't have the right to do it. Meaning, you can't start a buisness centered around it, you can't advertise it on their forums, admins could ban you for mentioning this in-game, etc, etc.
Basically, what you're saying is that it's not a bad thing to loose a right if you can cheat your way around it. I disagree.
Well, a completely wrong post which is actually well written does deserve an answer. Here goes:
>>What happens if Steam goes offline? >You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.
Then my guess is steam was not offline. If you can't ping steam servers, you certainly can't log in, and thus play. And offline mode you say? You have to go online to activate it. I'm not kidding. Basically, if you can plan that you will be offline, that's okay; but if your connection dies for a day (or you end up stuck on the train), you can't play.
>>How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM? >Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.
It is the same thing as asking permission because they can refuse. For example (as already stated) if the internet is down, or if your country or account suddenly ends up on their naughty list for whatever reason in 5 year.
>How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM? One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.
Ok, he should have said "at any time for any reason". "Any reason" includes a lot of bad ones. Wether they already did or not is an other story (I'm pretty sure they did), but you would have to trust them a lot about the future.
>What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access? Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid. Screw ups happen. It's a risk you should prepare for, by not accepting useless locks (so you can't loose the keys).
>You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed. Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?
Only the actual points need a rebuttal.
>You have no first sale rights without Steams approval. Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.
Good luck with that once you have 20+ games on the same account, which also has friends, counter strike clan, etc. Also the contract may forbid you to have more than one account (if it doesn't, it certainly might in the future).
>Steam is the worst possible DRM. Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.
I agree on this one: steam is not the worst. It might be the one with the worst effect though, because of its widespread adoption (and the direct binding of the DRM with the game store).
The supermarket is a semi-private place: you show your face knowing that only a fraction of people (those that live in the same town) are present there; and if do something embarassing, an employer 10 years from now won't be able to know.
Facebook is a worldwide public place. You have to be cautious because everything you say there is on the record, for everyone to see.
So the decision to be anonymous on facebook has an entirely different meaning than the supermarket. It is far from paranoia, even more so when you think of all the new ways this information could be used,in the future. And of course, the thing that really matters here is politic: by setting up an anonymous account on facebook, you can lead a political life, convincing people to go to protests, or to vote or donate for a cause. It is a pretty new thing to be able to do so anonymously, and there is nothing cowardly about it when you see how scientology (for example) illegally harasses opponents.
If you want to maintain privacy, keep your life private. That's not rocket science. If you put anything personal online on public sites, obviously people are going to *gasp* know personal things about you.
Except any idiot with a camera can then put a photo of you on *his* facebook profile. So you can either live alone, or try to forbid all your friends from using ther cameras when you're around. Good luck and screw you, respectively.
Now of course this has nothing to do with this news piece, in which facebook claimed copyright on your photos, even after canceling your account. We all know that what has been on the web can never be taken back; and people's reaction seem to be mostly an awekening to that. But still, people who signed on facebook had an expectation that facebook would be nice on that point, and they rightfully reacted to this breach of trust.
The really interesting thing here is that enough users had a reaction on a privacy issue (which is rare), and that the company acted on that reaction (rarer); which is a nice precedent. Of course in a perfect world, all such eulas should have as a standard clause that the website will not attack your privacy if it can avoid it.
Okay, so this sounds really smart at first: studios get some money when people watch something they have helped create, and the mashup artist gets some peace to show his stuff.
But wait... the ad would not be beside the video, but *overlaid* ????
So let me get this straight:
- knock knock, we're from the 'church' of Scientology, and we own the content to that (anti-scientology) clip. Can we overlay it with an ad for us, which lasts for the whole duration of the video, and cover the whole screen?
- Sure, I'm just an automated bot; pay me 10$ and you'll be on your way!
First, there is specialised hardware to handle that kind of amount of data. Someone in the thread is apparently trying to sell a Narus, and I'm sure there are a ton more.
Second, you don't need to store or even process all the information; remember when the NSA were saying that listening to every phone call was impossible. Well, they could (and iirc did) simply build a graph where two people were the more connected the more time they spent together on the phone. Then, when someone was suspected of terrorism (or being an anti-war activist), they could just ask the computer who were the first, second and third level aquintances of that guy; which is plenty scary already.
And of course, that's just a simple, simple example: there is a whole science devoted to that kind of data anilysis.
You deploy a lot of energy to convince us that this is no big deal. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, your post is full of the usual fallacies on this matter:
1) "People 'with half a brain' arleady use encryption": People who deliberatly use encryption are so few that the governements do not really care. If you look at the history of wiretap abuses, you'll see that it's mostly about political activists (who think they have nothing to hide, since what they do is legal), or simply random wiretaps to see what people think (see Mitterand's wiretaps).
2) "They have so much data, they can't do anything with it": I love this one. The head of the NSA used to say the exact same thing a couple years ago. That works well on people who don't realise the power of automated analysis. A simple example: the NSA built a huge graph of who called who, and for how long. Almost no processing power required, and they can extract aquintance relations at the first, second or third degree with ease.
3) "I've seen the government's lack of money/competence on other things, so they will b ineffective at that, too": Just because they slack on what they're supposed to do doesn't mean they will slack on what they want to do. The soviets had terrible living conditions, but military that rivaled the US (and one might explain the other).
4) "All this evidence will be of no use to them since they can't use it in court": Ha ha. That would be a good point if they were honest as snow, and if the aim was to convict people. See (1).
5) "It can't be what you think, they would be too afraid to be sued": Hahahahahaha. As a quick history of political scandals shows, they think they can get away with anything. An they often do, at least for the duration of their mandate; an if the heat is too much, they can always find a scapegoat. Or shout "terrorism".
Wikipedia is a lot of thing, but its governance is not open.
As they say themselves, they are "not an experience in democracy", which in my opinion is the source of all the scandals we've seen lately.
Disagree on the philosophy of Wikipedia? You've got to fight the delete wars.
Disagree with an admin decision on a delete war? You're out of luck. You're not an admin, so you can only try to convince him when he'll "decide on what the consensus is".
Disagree with Jumbo Wales on anything? You're out. Not only out of luck, but out of Wikipedia, too. Along with your whole IP range, probably.
On the other hand, slashdot would probably be a pretty good model for democracy (when the admins will lose the veto power on what makes first page, at least). And for those who complain about the noise to signal ratio here? That's democracy for you, guys. Go back to microsoft's forum about microsoft; I heard they make the trains arrive on time.
The difference is, when RMS wants the source code, it's to give it back to everybody, not to get an adventage against his competition who does not have it.
It's like privacy: there is no incoherence in asking both for privacy of citizens and footage of police arrests. Democracy is not giving privacy to police force during their work, and open source is not giving sources to governments.
Code to the people, privacy to the people, power to the people.
Hum, after reading TFA, the "tools of civil desobidiance" were indeed just that, and the claim that all the information was obtained from informants seems plausible. Oh, and I apparently dreamed the seizing of computers. Am I getting paranoid?
Not that it won't be a textbook example when we get more details; protecting their conventions seems so important to them that they always go way over the line.
At least this gives us a textbook example for the good old "nothing to hide" misconception.
You can bet that a lot of illegal wiretaping was involved here to find the ringleaders, exactly like during the anit-vietnam protests. Also, note how they went straight for the computers: welcome to the world of "little brother"!
"- I've got nothing to hide!" "- Then you agree with everything the government thinks. Oh, and the Church of Scientology, too." (alternate: "- Then you don't have a political life")
The "slashdot approach" is open: anyone can influence the article selection through firehose (even if editors keep special powers).
But even if you don't trust the editors, you know who they are: their reputation is at stake. In the case of wikileaks, they are anonymous, and even more, their sources are unknown. So the only reason for you to trust them is the knowledge that, if anyone thinks the information is wrong, he can come and explain why. Leaving comments is not enough for this to work: the article itself must be editable so that it reflects a consensus.
That's how wikipedia works (although it has shortcomings, and ultimatly relies on other sources to decide if a fact is true or not).
If they stop using a wiki model, their name should change. "Cryptome2", or "some anonymous guys leaks" would be more fitting. Right now the public sees the "wiki" prefix, and associate it with the wiki process. And we know that most journalists will easily miss the distinction too.
Hum, I agree they aren't open enough, but can you give examples of articles which "dried up"? There might not have been a highly mediatised leak since the banking one, but that doesn't mean they are going bankrupt any soon.
Only thing that could possibly save that place from bankruptcy is a 'Watergate' type scandal exposed by them, but most of leaked stuff will be out on the major news networks soon enough.
A lot of their leaks have made it to the major news networks, but they usually were credited as the one to uncover it, and the facts turned out to be true (in the banking incident, the bank itself authenticated the documents in court). I can't see how they loose from that.
If they called themselves cryptome2, and if the staff was publicly known, I wouldn't have a problem with it. I wouldn't have great expectations from it either, as would the public, instead of beiliving that it's "the wikipedia of jounalism". Which it is not.
Just a precision for people who don't see the joke: a log you make from a chat doesn't prove anything since you could just edit it as a text file.
But since I spoke with two (anonymous) persons to be from wikileaks, and that they seemed to completely agree on that, I'm pretty confident that they would confirm it if needed.
Wikileaks already explained in wired that they plan to abandon the wiki model, and also let journalists pay to get news before everyone else.
I really felt let down, so I went to their live chat to ask about it; they said that the subscription model was a way to keep good relations with journalists, and that abandoning the wiki model was because the first version of the articles (made by wikileaks staff) were always "of a superior quality". (since the chat was anonymous, it is hard to make this attribution; but they can always deny it later if it isn't true I guess). Instead the users would be able to leave comments about the articles. Also,recall that the really important decisions, like what material gets published, where always handled by wikileaks staff.
- I kinda understand the head start given to journalists, except it's not very 21rst century to draw a line between "real" journalists and others. Anyways, charging money for that subscription is not going to make any suspicion go away. - Abandoning the wiki model is really losing the core good idea of this website. Remember, they are an anonymous bunch of people; I just don't feel I can trust them with choosing what should be or not be published, let alone say they don't want a single comma changed in their article because they like their own version better.
I think at this point, they must change their name; any link to a "wiki" process is fake advertising ( and they admit that most of their initial visibility was due to people knowing wikipedia). They will end up giving open source politics a bad name at the first scandal.
And its a shame, because it was really the most fascinating thing I ever saw on the internet; and I have high hopes for a real open information website like this some day.
*Again*, this is the same buisness model as radio royaty, and public TV in the country where it exists.
People pay a fee, the audiance of each artist is measured using polling (TV audiance is not exact), and then you give the money according to that repartition.
Last time this was discussed, I was modded into oblivion for simply pointing that the majors were changing their stance on this (before, they hated it). We'll see if slashdotters have smarten up on this.
Look at how different p2p statistics and box office are for some movies: this would be a better system, because at the very least the medium is not controlled by the guy who sells the stuff. Also, no more bullshit about causing 10,000$ dammages for one song.
Yes, sorry for the mistake.
This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercialÂShareAlike 3.0 license He precises that this means you can remix it.
Yeah, I thouht the same, but it sounds like this one will be less "action" driven. I read little brother, and there's a number of thing it gets wrong IMHO. Anyways, we need books to explain those things, so a second one is still usefull.
As for "little brother", I think it tries too hard: every boingboing craze is in it, including caspaceine, "freegans" and something which looks like a pro-drug stance (it's targeted at parents, to give to their younger kids; probably not the best place to debate drug legalisation). The explainations of technical stuff are generaly well done, but sometimes they are just forced (the whole network of trust thing doesn't make any sense in the story, and takes too long to explain).
Also, there are a few bad things of bad taste, like having a turkish immigrant talk in broken english, though he has been in the US for 20 years, and the hero (indirectly) calling himself a terrorist at the end, when the whole point is that he suffered from anti-terrorist laws without being one.
But it still has a huge positive point: it's all GPL (and you can read it for free). So we could even make a better version from this one!
Agreed, the summary is misleading, as is the comparaison (from TFA) to googletrends.
This aside, the interest of "gootrude" is that it's not porvided by google, and so it's part of the many efforts to reverse engineer how goole comes up with his numbers.
Specificaly, it appears from TFA that the "number of results" stated by google is a wild guess for low numbers (1,000-10,000), with very sharp variations which hint at an iterative process.
So as I get it, it's not a tool for you and me, rather for google specialists.
Other plans include getting the open-source community to make closed source software while still working for free. And also get nokia "a pony" (*).
Oh wait. They want DRM, which needs the software to be closed source. So I guess that's already what they are asking for.
And the "we need closed vehicles" bit? Worst car analogy ever. If you want to "close" your music, you encrypt it. What nokia wants are cars that locks from the outside when you get in, so you can't escape from them. Not sure that we really need those.
(*)fake quote. Keep the pony if you've already bought it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you bring in a completely different point, which does not generalize to other situations (except if you think that companies should generally have total control over individuals, since they are always more honnest than them), and my argument does not address it, then it is not a problem with my argument.
It is good that something is being done about the reselling of tickets with a high markup.
I guess you would also agree to ban price increase for plane reservations at the last minute?
Companies do not disagree with selling the maximum each buyer will bear (instead of the minimum that N persons will bear, if you want to fill a N seat concert hall, which is the current case assuming identical seats). They just disagree with others making that money. This is all a matter of control, as is everything about DRM (that is to say, contracts). We had a market where a huge quantity of goods were sold with standardised contracts: buying an apple, a car or a concert ticket meant roughly the same (implicit, law defined) contract for the buyer. Standardisation meant it was easy to negotiate good deal on that single contract. Now this is being eroded more and more.
You still don't have the right to do it. Meaning, you can't start a buisness centered around it, you can't advertise it on their forums, admins could ban you for mentioning this in-game, etc, etc.
Basically, what you're saying is that it's not a bad thing to loose a right if you can cheat your way around it. I disagree.
Well, a completely wrong post which is actually well written does deserve an answer. Here goes:
>>What happens if Steam goes offline?
>You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.
Then my guess is steam was not offline. If you can't ping steam servers, you certainly can't log in, and thus play. And offline mode you say? You have to go online to activate it. I'm not kidding. Basically, if you can plan that you will be offline, that's okay; but if your connection dies for a day (or you end up stuck on the train), you can't play.
>>How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?
>Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.
It is the same thing as asking permission because they can refuse. For example (as already stated) if the internet is down, or if your country or account suddenly ends up on their naughty list for whatever reason in 5 year.
>How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?
One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.
Ok, he should have said "at any time for any reason". "Any reason" includes a lot of bad ones. Wether they already did or not is an other story (I'm pretty sure they did), but you would have to trust them a lot about the future.
>What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access?
Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.
Screw ups happen. It's a risk you should prepare for, by not accepting useless locks (so you can't loose the keys).
>You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed.
Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?
Only the actual points need a rebuttal.
>You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.
Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.
Good luck with that once you have 20+ games on the same account, which also has friends, counter strike clan, etc. Also the contract may forbid you to have more than one account (if it doesn't, it certainly might in the future).
>Steam is the worst possible DRM.
Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.
I agree on this one: steam is not the worst. It might be the one with the worst effect though, because of its widespread adoption (and the direct binding of the DRM with the game store).
Sorry, but you're completly missing the point.
The supermarket is a semi-private place: you show your face knowing that only a fraction of people (those that live in the same town) are present there; and if do something embarassing, an employer 10 years from now won't be able to know.
Facebook is a worldwide public place. You have to be cautious because everything you say there is on the record, for everyone to see.
So the decision to be anonymous on facebook has an entirely different meaning than the supermarket. It is far from paranoia, even more so when you think of all the new ways this information could be used ,in the future.
And of course, the thing that really matters here is politic: by setting up an anonymous account on facebook, you can lead a political life, convincing people to go to protests, or to vote or donate for a cause. It is a pretty new thing to be able to do so anonymously, and there is nothing cowardly about it when you see how scientology (for example) illegally harasses opponents.
If you want to maintain privacy, keep your life private. That's not rocket science. If you put anything personal online on public sites, obviously people are going to *gasp* know personal things about you.
Except any idiot with a camera can then put a photo of you on *his* facebook profile. So you can either live alone, or try to forbid all your friends from using ther cameras when you're around. Good luck and screw you, respectively.
Now of course this has nothing to do with this news piece, in which facebook claimed copyright on your photos, even after canceling your account.
We all know that what has been on the web can never be taken back; and people's reaction seem to be mostly an awekening to that. But still, people who signed on facebook had an expectation that facebook would be nice on that point, and they rightfully reacted to this breach of trust.
The really interesting thing here is that enough users had a reaction on a privacy issue (which is rare), and that the company acted on that reaction (rarer); which is a nice precedent. Of course in a perfect world, all such eulas should have as a standard clause that the website will not attack your privacy if it can avoid it.
Would you mind telling us which company his was? Unless they also got you to sign an NDA on this of course.
Okay, so this sounds really smart at first: studios get some money when people watch something they have helped create, and the mashup artist gets some peace to show his stuff.
But wait... the ad would not be beside the video, but *overlaid* ????
So let me get this straight:
- knock knock, we're from the 'church' of Scientology, and we own the content to that (anti-scientology) clip. Can we overlay it with an ad for us, which lasts for the whole duration of the video, and cover the whole screen?
- Sure, I'm just an automated bot; pay me 10$ and you'll be on your way!
First, there is specialised hardware to handle that kind of amount of data. Someone in the thread is apparently trying to sell a Narus, and I'm sure there are a ton more.
Second, you don't need to store or even process all the information; remember when the NSA were saying that listening to every phone call was impossible. Well, they could (and iirc did) simply build a graph where two people were the more connected the more time they spent together on the phone. Then, when someone was suspected of terrorism (or being an anti-war activist), they could just ask the computer who were the first, second and third level aquintances of that guy; which is plenty scary already.
And of course, that's just a simple, simple example: there is a whole science devoted to that kind of data anilysis.
You mean you think it does not mean what he thinks it mean?
You deploy a lot of energy to convince us that this is no big deal. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, your post is full of the usual fallacies on this matter:
1) "People 'with half a brain' arleady use encryption":
People who deliberatly use encryption are so few that the governements do not really care. If you look at the history of wiretap abuses, you'll see that it's mostly about political activists (who think they have nothing to hide, since what they do is legal), or simply random wiretaps to see what people think (see Mitterand's wiretaps).
2) "They have so much data, they can't do anything with it":
I love this one. The head of the NSA used to say the exact same thing a couple years ago. That works well on people who don't realise the power of automated analysis. A simple example: the NSA built a huge graph of who called who, and for how long. Almost no processing power required, and they can extract aquintance relations at the first, second or third degree with ease.
3) "I've seen the government's lack of money/competence on other things, so they will b ineffective at that, too":
Just because they slack on what they're supposed to do doesn't mean they will slack on what they want to do. The soviets had terrible living conditions, but military that rivaled the US (and one might explain the other).
4) "All this evidence will be of no use to them since they can't use it in court":
Ha ha. That would be a good point if they were honest as snow, and if the aim was to convict people. See (1).
5) "It can't be what you think, they would be too afraid to be sued":
Hahahahahaha. As a quick history of political scandals shows, they think they can get away with anything. An they often do, at least for the duration of their mandate; an if the heat is too much, they can always find a scapegoat. Or shout "terrorism".
False!
Wikipedia is a lot of thing, but its governance is not open.
As they say themselves, they are "not an experience in democracy", which in my opinion is the source of all the scandals we've seen lately.
Disagree on the philosophy of Wikipedia? You've got to fight the delete wars.
Disagree with an admin decision on a delete war? You're out of luck.
You're not an admin, so you can only try to convince him when he'll "decide on what the consensus is".
Disagree with Jumbo Wales on anything? You're out. Not only out of luck, but out of Wikipedia, too. Along with your whole IP range, probably.
On the other hand, slashdot would probably be a pretty good model for democracy (when the admins will lose the veto power on what makes first page, at least).
And for those who complain about the noise to signal ratio here? That's democracy for you, guys. Go back to microsoft's forum about microsoft; I heard they make the trains arrive on time.
The difference is, when RMS wants the source code, it's to give it back to everybody, not to get an adventage against his competition who does not have it.
It's like privacy: there is no incoherence in asking both for privacy of citizens and footage of police arrests. Democracy is not giving privacy to police force during their work, and open source is not giving sources to governments.
Code to the people, privacy to the people, power to the people.
Hum, after reading TFA, the "tools of civil desobidiance" were indeed just that, and the claim that all the information was obtained from informants seems plausible. Oh, and I apparently dreamed the seizing of computers. Am I getting paranoid?
Not that it won't be a textbook example when we get more details; protecting their conventions seems so important to them that they always go way over the line.
At least this gives us a textbook example for the good old "nothing to hide" misconception.
You can bet that a lot of illegal wiretaping was involved here to find the ringleaders, exactly like during the anit-vietnam protests. Also, note how they went straight for the computers: welcome to the world of "little brother"!
"- I've got nothing to hide!"
"- Then you agree with everything the government thinks. Oh, and the Church of Scientology, too."
(alternate: "- Then you don't have a political life")
The "slashdot approach" is open: anyone can influence the article selection through firehose (even if editors keep special powers).
But even if you don't trust the editors, you know who they are: their reputation is at stake. In the case of wikileaks, they are anonymous, and even more, their sources are unknown. So the only reason for you to trust them is the knowledge that, if anyone thinks the information is wrong, he can come and explain why. Leaving comments is not enough for this to work: the article itself must be editable so that it reflects a consensus.
That's how wikipedia works (although it has shortcomings, and ultimatly relies on other sources to decide if a fact is true or not).
If they stop using a wiki model, their name should change. "Cryptome2", or "some anonymous guys leaks" would be more fitting. Right now the public sees the "wiki" prefix, and associate it with the wiki process. And we know that most journalists will easily miss the distinction too.
Hum, I agree they aren't open enough, but can you give examples of articles which "dried up"? There might not have been a highly mediatised leak since the banking one, but that doesn't mean they are going bankrupt any soon.
Only thing that could possibly save that place from bankruptcy is a 'Watergate' type scandal exposed by them, but most of leaked stuff will be out on the major news networks soon enough.
A lot of their leaks have made it to the major news networks, but they usually were credited as the one to uncover it, and the facts turned out to be true (in the banking incident, the bank itself authenticated the documents in court). I can't see how they loose from that.
If they called themselves cryptome2, and if the staff was publicly known, I wouldn't have a problem with it. I wouldn't have great expectations from it either, as would the public, instead of beiliving that it's "the wikipedia of jounalism". Which it is not.
Just a precision for people who don't see the joke: a log you make from a chat doesn't prove anything since you could just edit it as a text file.
But since I spoke with two (anonymous) persons to be from wikileaks, and that they seemed to completely agree on that, I'm pretty confident that they would confirm it if needed.
Wikileaks already explained in wired that they plan to abandon the wiki model, and also let journalists pay to get news before everyone else.
I really felt let down, so I went to their live chat to ask about it; they said that the subscription model was a way to keep good relations with journalists, and that abandoning the wiki model was because the first version of the articles (made by wikileaks staff) were always "of a superior quality". (since the chat was anonymous, it is hard to make this attribution; but they can always deny it later if it isn't true I guess). Instead the users would be able to leave comments about the articles. Also,recall that the really important decisions, like what material gets published, where always handled by wikileaks staff.
- I kinda understand the head start given to journalists, except it's not very 21rst century to draw a line between "real" journalists and others. Anyways, charging money for that subscription is not going to make any suspicion go away.
- Abandoning the wiki model is really losing the core good idea of this website. Remember, they are an anonymous bunch of people; I just don't feel I can trust them with choosing what should be or not be published, let alone say they don't want a single comma changed in their article because they like their own version better.
I think at this point, they must change their name; any link to a "wiki" process is fake advertising ( and they admit that most of their initial visibility was due to people knowing wikipedia). They will end up giving open source politics a bad name at the first scandal.
And its a shame, because it was really the most fascinating thing I ever saw on the internet; and I have high hopes for a real open information website like this some day.
*Again*, this is the same buisness model as radio royaty, and public TV in the country where it exists.
People pay a fee, the audiance of each artist is measured using polling (TV audiance is not exact), and then you give the money according to that repartition.
Last time this was discussed, I was modded into oblivion for simply pointing that the majors were changing their stance on this (before, they hated it). We'll see if slashdotters have smarten up on this.
Look at how different p2p statistics and box office are for some movies: this would be a better system, because at the very least the medium is not controlled by the guy who sells the stuff. Also, no more bullshit about causing 10,000$ dammages for one song.
If you want to mod like this, you can just use the convienient "overrated" tag. Even when you're the first one to moderate!
NonCommercialÂShareAlike 3.0 license He precises that this means you can remix it.
Yeah, I thouht the same, but it sounds like this one will be less "action" driven. I read little brother, and there's a number of thing it gets wrong IMHO. Anyways, we need books to explain those things, so a second one is still usefull.
As for "little brother", I think it tries too hard: every boingboing craze is in it, including caspaceine, "freegans" and something which looks like a pro-drug stance (it's targeted at parents, to give to their younger kids; probably not the best place to debate drug legalisation).
The explainations of technical stuff are generaly well done, but sometimes they are just forced (the whole network of trust thing doesn't make any sense in the story, and takes too long to explain).
Also, there are a few bad things of bad taste, like having a turkish immigrant talk in broken english, though he has been in the US for 20 years, and the hero (indirectly) calling himself a terrorist at the end, when the whole point is that he suffered from anti-terrorist laws without being one.
But it still has a huge positive point: it's all GPL (and you can read it for free). So we could even make a better version from this one!
Agreed, the summary is misleading, as is the comparaison (from TFA) to googletrends.
This aside, the interest of "gootrude" is that it's not porvided by google, and so it's part of the many efforts to reverse engineer how goole comes up with his numbers.
Specificaly, it appears from TFA that the "number of results" stated by google is a wild guess for low numbers (1,000-10,000), with very sharp variations which hint at an iterative process.
So as I get it, it's not a tool for you and me, rather for google specialists.
Other plans include getting the open-source community to make closed source software while still working for free. And also get nokia "a pony" (*).
Oh wait. They want DRM, which needs the software to be closed source. So I guess that's already what they are asking for.
And the "we need closed vehicles" bit? Worst car analogy ever. If you want to "close" your music, you encrypt it. What nokia wants are cars that locks from the outside when you get in, so you can't escape from them. Not sure that we really need those.
(*)fake quote. Keep the pony if you've already bought it.