...you still have to communicate with parties who don't use encryption, or at least you do if you want a functional, general purpose email system.
Off-topic, but there used to be several remailer services who would route emails anonymously. The original email could be encrypted for the end reader, then again for each successive remailer like a letter in a series of envelopes.
One wonders if such services still exist, and if the original "Encrypt to destination reader" could be skipped, resulting in the last remailer decrypting the last "envelope," and the actual recipient receiving clear text.
I haven't messed with encryption and remailers in several years--while it's certainly effective, and while I certainly support those who choose to do so, I don't see the need for it in my life.
If I were to use encryption, I would encrypt everything--and would send dummy messages on a regular basis to avoid traffic pattern analysis. The actual process is trivial, but even with strong encryption, if you are being watched and you only encrypt to certain parties, those who watch you will also know who else to watch.
You can stop the storage company from turning things over to the govt by removing the company from the equation... but how do you stop the transiting ISPs from turning things over?
Ditto. Gmail has one of the best spam filters around, and the convenience of POP3 or webmail.
Now with Google getting into hosting, competition could rear its ugly head... but would it? Google is competing with free webhosts such as Geocities, but I really don't see it as competition for paid webhosting... yet.
You're suggesting there is any respect for them?
I don't think there is any left today
Well, obviously there is some respect for copyright laws... at least among copyright holders!:D
While copyright was useful tool it is no longer so - and it's getting so obvious that even the "average people" are noticing.
Dunno about that. I frequently worked with one sub-set of the music community that takes great care about copyright laws... not so much out of respect for the laws, but out of respect for the people who wrote the original songs. This is the filk community, and most everyone in the community knows everyone else. Of course, in the filk community, you're far more likely to see people licensing their music as Creative Commons or even under a custom "Use it however you like, but if you make money from it, I want my share."
A copied song--as it was not produced by the authorized agent--could be considered "counterfeit." At least, that's the closest to understanding that I can get to by guessing. It sounds like someone's buggered all their sense away.
Just asked him about this--he says part of the reason he avoids FOSS is not the software... it's the community. He got tired of dealing with the folks who looked down on him because he has certain business functions that he is required to use Windows for.
But we've wandered pretty far from the topic of the article. Best of luck to you.
Who do you continue to work for somebody who is that stupid and irrational?
Because on any other issue besides FOSS, he's one of the best bosses I've ever had, and one of the best CIOs around. He's been CIO of where I work for over 20 years, and not shot himself in the foot yet.
Are you a programmer, or is there someone in your organization who is?
I am--but the catchphrase for our department is "We don't code. Ever."
It's not a situation that's at all logical, and he knows that taking an absolute stand against FOSS isn't rational. But this is the same guy who will cheerfully pay $450 per hour for a consultant to come in and do something that we can (and have) done.
On the plus side, he keeps the rest of the departments off our backs, and gives us the tools and the freedom to do what we have to do. And if we make a decision--provided that it's within the limits of "allowed" software--he will back us to the hilt. So it's not all bad.
I wish I could be so lucky. My boss won't let FOSS anywhere near the system with the exception of one lonely PC set up as a webserver. He knows commercial software has its problems--his biggest problem with FOSS is "lack of support." I've tried showing him that there is support available, but when he wants support, he wants to be able to pick up a phone and get an answer the same business day.
Of course, this is the same boss who says "I'm not using anything I need to compile myself." Go figure!
As for the 'logic' of property, there is no logic, only rationalizations.
Rationalizations and compromise--the latter of which is vitally important.
As a culture, we can't get by without some form of property law. The possession, use, and transfer of property is the basis of our economy: like a democracy, it's a lousy way to do things, but it's less lousy than any other way we've discovered.
OK, so we need some form of law to regulate the use and transfer of property. Then it becomes an evolving balancing act. As I said in another post, until recently if I owned a piece of property, I could do whatever I wanted to: I could pollute the air, send raw sewage or lead directly into the groundwater, or whatever. It's only been in the last couple of centuries that my "right" to pollute has been abridged... and while I think it's a good thing, I don't think our laws go far enough.
For intellectual property... again, we do need some form of recognition of IP, which means we need laws regulating the use, misuse, and appropriation of IP. Just as land use laws have measures that restrict owners (I can't pollute without restraint), and restrictions against non-owners (Joe Schmoe can't come and squat on my land without my permission), so also laws regarding IP have restrictions against owners and non-owners.
Now, as the law stands right now, I feel that the restrictions against non-owners are too severe, and owners have too free a hand. But just as the laws regarding physical properties have changed in the last couple of centuries to acknowledge that property ownership is not absolute license, so too the laws regarding IP need to reflect this same wisdom.
Problem is, with IP, the stakes aren't nearly so high. With land use, if I polute the air or groundwater, I make a lot of people sick. With IP ownership, if I want to hog or abuse my IP rights, the only thing I do is deny people access to my IP. With a very few exceptions, denying access to my IP isn't going to kill people... so it's a lot harder to get Congress or Parliament motivated to change the laws.
The average person can't compete with armies of professionals paid to game the politcal system.
I quite agree--but the solution will take time and effort.
Air is inherently uncontrollable. But what about air pollution? You should not have the right to pollute my air just because you own a piece of land over there.
First and foremost, let's get the concept of "rights" dispensed with: when it comes to the concept of "rights," there is actually no such thing. "Rights" (like "ownership") are not some Ghod-given permissions--they are culturally-based legal allowances that we (technically, our Western-culture) have granted ourselves, and they are based in the law. Therefore, when we consider "rights," we must look to the law.
In the law, yes, until very recently I did have the right to pollute the air just because I owned (or controlled) the land I was using. If I wanted to put up a coal-burning factory to make widgets, I could do that. But within the last few centuries, we started making laws regulating what I could and could not do on my own land.
Now, I happen to think that the laws regarding environmental responsibility are a good thing: indeed, many of them don't go far enough, IMhO. But the "right" to do what I wish with the land that I "own" is a subject for law, not for some nebulous concept of "You don't have the right."
If we wish to address the shortcomings of property ownership regarding such things as pollution and IP, then we must reform the laws.
Intellectual Property is even trickier than that. You cannot control copying.
You're looking at two separate things: a technological issue, and a legal issue. Technologically speaking, you're quite correct: physical access to the data means you can (eventually) break any protection on that data. Legally speaking, however, you can control what can be done. You won't be able to bring the penalties of law onto every single person who violates them--and indeed, in my opinion, attempting to do so is futile--but as the law stands now, it is the legal, not the technological, control that matters. So yes, if I were to write a song and forbid copying, I have absolutely no way of technologically enforcing it. I do, however, have legal means of doing so.
And where are the boundaries of IP. Are ideas patentable? Trademarkable? Are they trade secrets?
Are algorithms protected? Are story ideas? Are business practices? In my opinion none of them are.
I happen to agree that none of these things should be subject to IP control. A song idea should not be copyrighteable--a specific set of lyrics should be, as should a specific recording, though I feel that current copyright laws go on for far too long. In addition, I don't feel that copyright should be salable or transferable.
Come to think of it all ownership should have clearly defined boundaries.
It's my air, you can't breath it unless you pay me rent.
Air cannot be controlled in the way that land (or IP) can.
Property discussions, fundamentally, deal with issues of control: something that cannot be controlled is not logically subject to property laws, though we have had some situations where people tried to do so (such as the sumptuary laws of England). Thus, things like the sun, of course, cannot fall under property laws.
But things like land, water rights, the disposition of IP--all of these things can be controlled, thus can be regulated by property laws.
The OP is not looking for a definition of the illogic of certain property statements--they are looking for a reasonable solution to the current mish-mash of conflicting property laws. If your proposed solution is to dispense with property laws altogether, so be it--but using examples like "air" or "the sun" does not advance the logic of your arguments.
I know you're just trying to be funny, but first, he never said that.
I'm aware he never said it--and I'm aware of his involvement (starting in the 1970s) as a Congressman in the development of the Internet. But heck, if Al Gore himself can go on the Letterman show and make jokes about how his quote has been spun, I was hoping it was worth a chuckle here.
Having now read about it though, it appears to be more of a cheap trick than a virus.
It is a trick, but it's not "cheap," per se. Macarena is, indeed, a virus, but it was written solely as a proof of concept. The original import was not intended to carry a payload or damage the system at all--indeed, I'm given to understand that any damage actually caused by the virus was accidental. But the point is this: Macarena, as a "proof of concept," means that virii can propagate on a Mac running OS X.
But that bare fact must be tempered by other facts. Using the default, out-of-the-box configuration, a Mac running OS X is still an incredibly secure machine--far more secure than any version of Windows that has ever existed. But no computer ever functions solely by itself: it must be installed, set up, and operated by people.
When one considers security, one cannot restrict their consideration to the platform or the software alone: one must also consider the people who operate the computer. That's why I stated (and still state) that any platform is vulnerable to a well-constructed attack: the best attacks have a technological component, but they also have a human component. Well-constructed attacks attempt to breach vulnerabilities in all available components.
In that sense, I would suppose that even more than virii, trojans, or other malware, one of the most well-constructed attacks is the e-mail chain letter. There's no payload save the letter itself, no computer functionality to cause the system to do its bidding--the "functionality" preys not on a system vulnerability, but on a human vulnerability.
Simply put, it pales in comparison to the damage one borked anti-virus package can do.
Eh, as far as I'm concerned, anything is better than Norton's.:D But just as malware writers will become more experienced in writing for the Mac, so will anti-malware authors. They'll never catch up, any more than they will in the Windows world, but that's fundamental to the software model.
I have been concerned about Chemtrails for some time....
Chemtrails are a dead subject, foisted upon the well-meaning and concerned by the dishonest and delusional. I take it as given that you fall into the first two categories, but you're following a topic composed almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and sheer duplicity of a few. Even were you not running for office, I implore you to investigate the science--actual science, not the blatherings of the conspiracy theories.
However, this thread is neither the time nor the place for such a discussion, and while I trust your ability to discuss such a topic dispassionately, I would not tempt those who profit from fear-mongering. Instead, I invite you to start with Ian Goddard's photographic comparison of contrails and natural clouds.
Fundamentally, one would project a frequency-tunable laser beam onto the Red Spot and read the "reflected" results. The different substances in the target absorb light at very specific frequencies: if a sufficiently powerful laser is used to illuminate the Red Spot (and sufficiently sensitive sensors to read the reflected results), it would be relatively simple to analyze the data and determine the composition of the cloud.
The big problem is that Jupiter is a long way away--at least 17 light-minutes, IIRC. Jupiter also emits infra-red and radio-frequency EM radiation, which may interfere with the test. And even if we have a powerful enough laser, I'm not sure we have powerful enough sensors to pick out the reflected laser light amidst the reflected sunlight.
With a powerful enough laser (more powerful than we currently have, IIRC), it might be possible to lase the area of the Red Spot and perform absorption spectroscopy.
Say you have (just as an example) 500 people doing something legally questionable that you don't want them doing. Let's also say that you can't sue all of them in a single case--each case should be taken care of individually. You could sue them all, one by one, but that would cost you a lot of money for filing fees, lawyers, court costs, and the like, and odds are you wouldn't get paid the full amount of the judgment.
Or you could sue two or three of them in high-profile, well-publicized cases. You may get some money from the individuals you sue, or you may not--but in the big picture, the balance of the 500 people are now aware that you could come after them with a lawsuit.
Defending yourself in a lawsuit is risky, expensive, and stressful. Even if you are completely and totally innocent, you still have to go to court, you still should hire a lawyer, and you still have to pay for your legal filings. Even then, if you've done nothing wrong, there is a possibility that the judge or jury will be persuaded by a slick-talking lawyer that you were in the wrong and must pay damages. That's going to make a lot of people nervous--even if they've not actually done something wrong.
That's bullying. When combined with the obscenely excessive claims for damage (as both the MPAA and the RIAA have made), the questionable and possibly illegal investigatory techniques performed by MediaSentry, and the utter arrogance of the plaintifs in these cases, the behavior of those (and similar) organizations is reprehensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Off-topic, but there used to be several remailer services who would route emails anonymously. The original email could be encrypted for the end reader, then again for each successive remailer like a letter in a series of envelopes.
One wonders if such services still exist, and if the original "Encrypt to destination reader" could be skipped, resulting in the last remailer decrypting the last "envelope," and the actual recipient receiving clear text.
I haven't messed with encryption and remailers in several years--while it's certainly effective, and while I certainly support those who choose to do so, I don't see the need for it in my life.
If I were to use encryption, I would encrypt everything--and would send dummy messages on a regular basis to avoid traffic pattern analysis. The actual process is trivial, but even with strong encryption, if you are being watched and you only encrypt to certain parties, those who watch you will also know who else to watch.
For a business? Absolutely, although it doesn't to some people. But for a home account or hobby account? Not so much.
You can stop the storage company from turning things over to the govt by removing the company from the equation ... but how do you stop the transiting ISPs from turning things over?
Ditto. Gmail has one of the best spam filters around, and the convenience of POP3 or webmail.
Now with Google getting into hosting, competition could rear its ugly head ... but would it? Google is competing with free webhosts such as Geocities, but I really don't see it as competition for paid webhosting ... yet.
Well, obviously there is some respect for copyright laws ... at least among copyright holders! :D
Dunno about that. I frequently worked with one sub-set of the music community that takes great care about copyright laws ... not so much out of respect for the laws, but out of respect for the people who wrote the original songs. This is the filk community, and most everyone in the community knows everyone else. Of course, in the filk community, you're far more likely to see people licensing their music as Creative Commons or even under a custom "Use it however you like, but if you make money from it, I want my share."
To me, it sounds like they're completely raping the legal system to accomplish their goal. Which can only result in contempt for copyright laws.
A copied song--as it was not produced by the authorized agent--could be considered "counterfeit." At least, that's the closest to understanding that I can get to by guessing. It sounds like someone's buggered all their sense away.
Just asked him about this--he says part of the reason he avoids FOSS is not the software ... it's the community. He got tired of dealing with the folks who looked down on him because he has certain business functions that he is required to use Windows for.
But we've wandered pretty far from the topic of the article. Best of luck to you.
Because on any other issue besides FOSS, he's one of the best bosses I've ever had, and one of the best CIOs around. He's been CIO of where I work for over 20 years, and not shot himself in the foot yet.
I am--but the catchphrase for our department is "We don't code. Ever."
It's not a situation that's at all logical, and he knows that taking an absolute stand against FOSS isn't rational. But this is the same guy who will cheerfully pay $450 per hour for a consultant to come in and do something that we can (and have) done.
On the plus side, he keeps the rest of the departments off our backs, and gives us the tools and the freedom to do what we have to do. And if we make a decision--provided that it's within the limits of "allowed" software--he will back us to the hilt. So it's not all bad.
I wish I could be so lucky. My boss won't let FOSS anywhere near the system with the exception of one lonely PC set up as a webserver. He knows commercial software has its problems--his biggest problem with FOSS is "lack of support." I've tried showing him that there is support available, but when he wants support, he wants to be able to pick up a phone and get an answer the same business day.
Of course, this is the same boss who says "I'm not using anything I need to compile myself." Go figure!
Rationalizations and compromise--the latter of which is vitally important.
As a culture, we can't get by without some form of property law. The possession, use, and transfer of property is the basis of our economy: like a democracy, it's a lousy way to do things, but it's less lousy than any other way we've discovered.
OK, so we need some form of law to regulate the use and transfer of property. Then it becomes an evolving balancing act. As I said in another post, until recently if I owned a piece of property, I could do whatever I wanted to: I could pollute the air, send raw sewage or lead directly into the groundwater, or whatever. It's only been in the last couple of centuries that my "right" to pollute has been abridged ... and while I think it's a good thing, I don't think our laws go far enough.
For intellectual property ... again, we do need some form of recognition of IP, which means we need laws regulating the use, misuse, and appropriation of IP. Just as land use laws have measures that restrict owners (I can't pollute without restraint), and restrictions against non-owners (Joe Schmoe can't come and squat on my land without my permission), so also laws regarding IP have restrictions against owners and non-owners.
Now, as the law stands right now, I feel that the restrictions against non-owners are too severe, and owners have too free a hand. But just as the laws regarding physical properties have changed in the last couple of centuries to acknowledge that property ownership is not absolute license, so too the laws regarding IP need to reflect this same wisdom.
Problem is, with IP, the stakes aren't nearly so high. With land use, if I polute the air or groundwater, I make a lot of people sick. With IP ownership, if I want to hog or abuse my IP rights, the only thing I do is deny people access to my IP. With a very few exceptions, denying access to my IP isn't going to kill people ... so it's a lot harder to get Congress or Parliament motivated to change the laws.
I quite agree--but the solution will take time and effort.
First and foremost, let's get the concept of "rights" dispensed with: when it comes to the concept of "rights," there is actually no such thing. "Rights" (like "ownership") are not some Ghod-given permissions--they are culturally-based legal allowances that we (technically, our Western-culture) have granted ourselves, and they are based in the law. Therefore, when we consider "rights," we must look to the law.
In the law, yes, until very recently I did have the right to pollute the air just because I owned (or controlled) the land I was using. If I wanted to put up a coal-burning factory to make widgets, I could do that. But within the last few centuries, we started making laws regulating what I could and could not do on my own land.
Now, I happen to think that the laws regarding environmental responsibility are a good thing: indeed, many of them don't go far enough, IMhO. But the "right" to do what I wish with the land that I "own" is a subject for law, not for some nebulous concept of "You don't have the right."
If we wish to address the shortcomings of property ownership regarding such things as pollution and IP, then we must reform the laws.
You're looking at two separate things: a technological issue, and a legal issue. Technologically speaking, you're quite correct: physical access to the data means you can (eventually) break any protection on that data. Legally speaking, however, you can control what can be done. You won't be able to bring the penalties of law onto every single person who violates them--and indeed, in my opinion, attempting to do so is futile--but as the law stands now, it is the legal, not the technological, control that matters. So yes, if I were to write a song and forbid copying, I have absolutely no way of technologically enforcing it. I do, however, have legal means of doing so.
I happen to agree that none of these things should be subject to IP control. A song idea should not be copyrighteable--a specific set of lyrics should be, as should a specific recording, though I feel that current copyright laws go on for far too long. In addition, I don't feel that copyright should be salable or transferable.
On this, we probably agree more than we disagree.
Air cannot be controlled in the way that land (or IP) can.
Property discussions, fundamentally, deal with issues of control: something that cannot be controlled is not logically subject to property laws, though we have had some situations where people tried to do so (such as the sumptuary laws of England). Thus, things like the sun, of course, cannot fall under property laws.
But things like land, water rights, the disposition of IP--all of these things can be controlled, thus can be regulated by property laws.
The OP is not looking for a definition of the illogic of certain property statements--they are looking for a reasonable solution to the current mish-mash of conflicting property laws. If your proposed solution is to dispense with property laws altogether, so be it--but using examples like "air" or "the sun" does not advance the logic of your arguments.
I'm aware he never said it--and I'm aware of his involvement (starting in the 1970s) as a Congressman in the development of the Internet. But heck, if Al Gore himself can go on the Letterman show and make jokes about how his quote has been spun, I was hoping it was worth a chuckle here.
Was that before, or after, Al Gore invented the Internet? ;)
It is a trick, but it's not "cheap," per se. Macarena is, indeed, a virus, but it was written solely as a proof of concept. The original import was not intended to carry a payload or damage the system at all--indeed, I'm given to understand that any damage actually caused by the virus was accidental. But the point is this: Macarena, as a "proof of concept," means that virii can propagate on a Mac running OS X.
But that bare fact must be tempered by other facts. Using the default, out-of-the-box configuration, a Mac running OS X is still an incredibly secure machine--far more secure than any version of Windows that has ever existed. But no computer ever functions solely by itself: it must be installed, set up, and operated by people.
When one considers security, one cannot restrict their consideration to the platform or the software alone: one must also consider the people who operate the computer. That's why I stated (and still state) that any platform is vulnerable to a well-constructed attack: the best attacks have a technological component, but they also have a human component. Well-constructed attacks attempt to breach vulnerabilities in all available components.
In that sense, I would suppose that even more than virii, trojans, or other malware, one of the most well-constructed attacks is the e-mail chain letter. There's no payload save the letter itself, no computer functionality to cause the system to do its bidding--the "functionality" preys not on a system vulnerability, but on a human vulnerability.
Eh, as far as I'm concerned, anything is better than Norton's. :D But just as malware writers will become more experienced in writing for the Mac, so will anti-malware authors. They'll never catch up, any more than they will in the Windows world, but that's fundamental to the software model.
Chemtrails are a dead subject, foisted upon the well-meaning and concerned by the dishonest and delusional. I take it as given that you fall into the first two categories, but you're following a topic composed almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and sheer duplicity of a few. Even were you not running for office, I implore you to investigate the science--actual science, not the blatherings of the conspiracy theories.
However, this thread is neither the time nor the place for such a discussion, and while I trust your ability to discuss such a topic dispassionately, I would not tempt those who profit from fear-mongering. Instead, I invite you to start with Ian Goddard's photographic comparison of contrails and natural clouds.
Fundamentally, one would project a frequency-tunable laser beam onto the Red Spot and read the "reflected" results. The different substances in the target absorb light at very specific frequencies: if a sufficiently powerful laser is used to illuminate the Red Spot (and sufficiently sensitive sensors to read the reflected results), it would be relatively simple to analyze the data and determine the composition of the cloud.
The big problem is that Jupiter is a long way away--at least 17 light-minutes, IIRC. Jupiter also emits infra-red and radio-frequency EM radiation, which may interfere with the test. And even if we have a powerful enough laser, I'm not sure we have powerful enough sensors to pick out the reflected laser light amidst the reflected sunlight.
With a powerful enough laser (more powerful than we currently have, IIRC), it might be possible to lase the area of the Red Spot and perform absorption spectroscopy.
There is another step between 2 and 3: Jury Box.
I don't have any mod points, but please accept an unofficial "+1: Insightful."
You and WilyCoder hit the nail on the head.
Not "internet bullying"--bullying by lawsuit.
Say you have (just as an example) 500 people doing something legally questionable that you don't want them doing. Let's also say that you can't sue all of them in a single case--each case should be taken care of individually. You could sue them all, one by one, but that would cost you a lot of money for filing fees, lawyers, court costs, and the like, and odds are you wouldn't get paid the full amount of the judgment.
Or you could sue two or three of them in high-profile, well-publicized cases. You may get some money from the individuals you sue, or you may not--but in the big picture, the balance of the 500 people are now aware that you could come after them with a lawsuit.
Defending yourself in a lawsuit is risky, expensive, and stressful. Even if you are completely and totally innocent, you still have to go to court, you still should hire a lawyer, and you still have to pay for your legal filings. Even then, if you've done nothing wrong, there is a possibility that the judge or jury will be persuaded by a slick-talking lawyer that you were in the wrong and must pay damages. That's going to make a lot of people nervous--even if they've not actually done something wrong.
That's bullying. When combined with the obscenely excessive claims for damage (as both the MPAA and the RIAA have made), the questionable and possibly illegal investigatory techniques performed by MediaSentry, and the utter arrogance of the plaintifs in these cases, the behavior of those (and similar) organizations is reprehensible.