Projects like Freenet, GNUnet and IIP are creating decentralized, anonymous Peer-to-Peer networks that can strongly resist censorship by any attacker. I believe that if (when?) these kinds of secure networks replace currently popular networks (FastTrack, IRC, etc) as IP infringement tools, your job of effectively finding, stoping and prosecuting IP infringers will become much, much harder, and will require many more computer resources (perhaps impossibly many resources, both in computing time and in network bandwith).
Now my questions:
For how long do you think mass IP infringement will continue to take place in plain view, rather than on decentralized, anonymous, P2P networks?
If mass IP infringment does move to those kinds of networks, what kind of resources will your office be able to expend to attack those networks?
Would you be allowed to attack those networks at all without violating their user's First Ammendment right to anonymous speech?
What changes to IP law do you think would be needed to address decentralized anonymous networks?
If you use just one political scale things tend to wrap around and become meaningless. Libertarians are half far left and half far right. "Classic" liberals and "classic" conservatives end up right next to each other in the middle when you build some bogus scale like libertarians on one end and NAZIs on the other. (BTW, put the two on either end of the scale as it makes just as much sense)
As you suggest, the political spectrum doesn't have just a single axis. In fact, there are a several websites out there with multi-axis political scales. Here is a very good one and a much more slanted one (it takes Capitalism for granted).
Another issue you allude to is how the meanings of some words have changed over time. For example, the word "socialism" has been horribly distorted from it's original meaning. "Anarchist" also has a lot of baggage attached to it. Our political debate is horribly weakened by this distortion of language.
We are going to war with Iraq for the freedom of the people, not the plunder. Right?
Actually, neither.
Certainly both of those motives are ones the Bush administration has played on to persuade various constituencies to back the war, but the real reason is one of control. Our government wants to control the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, and from Iraq in particular (we already have pretty strong influence over other Gulf States such as Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia). We don't need to own the oil, we just want to influence who it gets shipped to and in what quantities (of course, given the oportunity, we'll be sure that our corperations do get a cut).
You see, the guiding strategy behind the war is the maintenance of an American hegemony over the world. A key part of that is control over the world's energy resources. (If you don't know what I mean by hegemony, or you want more info about the strategy I'm refering to, check out the links in this article and in some of the attached comments.)
Frankly, this strategy disgusts me, as I don't believe that the government of my country, the United States, is really all that much better than that of other nations in the world. We do not feed, house, educate nor provide medical care for all of our own people, yet somehow we think we can do so for the rest of the world. Our government isn't as bad as some others, but not being the worst is poor qualification to rule the world.
In the last century (and at an accelerating rate in recent decades), technology has brought people all around the world much, much closer together. And that closeness has lead to many conflicts. It may be that the world is moving towards the point where we will have one World Government. I hope that there's a way for us to unite the World without a sizable fraction of that world cowering under the heel of American millitary strength.
Re:That would have made MUCH more sence...
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Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 1
Well, that would have been a good title, except that it's not true. If you actually read the article (link kindly provided by this comment), you'll see that this announcement is for the last model in Compaq's line of Alpha processors.
I think what you can do is severely limeted to what kind of employee oversight there is of the computers that you are providing access from.
If you have enought people working there (unlikely in a laundromat) then you can get away with little or no blocking of content. The employees simply must regularly look over each of the terminals that are being used (or maybe just the ones being used by kids, if thats what the liability is about). If anyone is viewing improper matreial (as determined by the management), they should be asked to stop viewing it, and if they will not, they should be kicked off the computer.
If you have sombody working there, but don't have enough people to implement that kind of labor intensive oversight, you could go for a more strict keyword blocking system, but one that could be overridden by the administrator at the request of any customer who could explain why their request was reasonable. This is one place you would probably have problems with commercial blocking software, as they tend not to allow this kind of customization.
The last option that I see, if your employer will not have any human oversight of the terminals, is to do your best at making a fair keyword list that will prevent the high school students from finding porn too easily. This is surely not going to be effective, but it will be enough to keep you from getting sued (hopefully) and will keep the management happy.
There's not really a perfect solution. Morality and social acceptability are too complex concepts to be captured in a simple program. Maybe with a hell of a lot of AI, high quality censorware could be implemented, but I think such AI could be better used on educating kids about sex (oh and other trivial topics too...). Maybe the in the future these problems will find solutions, but not anytime soon. Do the best you can, and don't sweat the impossible.
I think you've got a strange idea of what "exploitation" is. What is given away cannot be stolen.
I think that the BSD and Linux kernel developers, and the members other Free software projects would characterize that "exploitation" as "use." All sofware was written to be used by the people who have it. The GPL doesn't dictate how you use code it licenses. It does tell you what you have to do to be permitted to distribute the code, or code based on it. This is something that you cannot do at all with most software.
What developers are saying, in a sense, when they release their code under the GPL, is "This software is the best damned thing out there, or at least, we think it has the potential to be the best (at whatever). Please use it. Please read the source, and make changes to it. Use whatever changes you make. But we made it, so if you want to distrubute your changed version, you must follow our terms, which are stated in the GPL."
So, corperate use of Open Source software is no "exploitation." It is a use of the software, probably as the it's author desired (though not always). The author's decision to use the GPL to distribute his code gave his permission to use it. Apple using BSD or an ISP using Linux and Apache, all are perfectly valid uses.
None of this addresses the issues of what the GPL should protect, rather than what it currently does. I think that future versions of the GPL should address issues surrounding networked use of software, and if such uses should cound as "distribution." I think they should err on the side of requiring source to be release more often, rather than less often. Bad source doesn't hurt anyone, but binaries without source could do just about anything (literally). I think source should be made available inside corperations when they use versions of GPL'd code (though employees might be prevented from distributing that source outside the company). I also think that some types of networked software should be considered distributed when they are used.
Anyway, I'm sure the GPL will gradually evolve as views on Free Software change. I hope it will always remain true to it's underlying philosophies.
Computers are getting to the point where they will be everywhere very soon. So you can load the manual of the software you're working on to your handheld computer, you can take it anywhere you could take the print manual.
Read the manual in the bathroom? Sure. Just don't drop the computer...:-)
I don't think that giving to local charity tells you much about the corperation's social responsability. Sure the employees at the corporate headquarters may help their local communities, but how does the company treat the employees at their plant's in less noticable locations.
I don't think this applies to HP at all, but I'm sure that other companies who have foreign manufacturing plants do far less giving to the communities in other countries then they do here. They can get away with this because so few of their stock holders have any interest in those plants, other than the fact that they reduce production costs and drive up their stock prices. They are more than happy to let the corperation take advantage of foreign workers, as long as US workers can live in communities that are well provided for.
When you judge a company on social responsability, do not look only at how it treats it's American workers and the communities that suround them. Check if their generosity is also matched with contributions to help foreign and international communities.
I am presupposing the scarcity of brains and talent, and I am quite sure that this scarcity isn't going to go away whatever technology develops.
So are "brains and talent" property? Intellectual property laws, by their definition, require this assumption. But are creativity and genius the same kind of things as physical resources?
I Think not, because unlike physical resources (metal, platics, energy, etc), intelectual resources are not consumed when they are used to create something. Furthermore, no more resources are required to duplicate the product.
So, unlike physical resources, the amount of intelectual resources in the world is theoretically infinate. Though the number of creative people in the world is finite, they can create a possibly infinate amount of intellectual "property".
This is why intellectual property laws are mistaken. They assume that intellectual resources are equivalent to physical resources.
So could the music industry work on a model based on Open Source development? They could distribute the music for free, but charge for concerts. I'm not sure that they could possibly make as much money under this system as they do now, but maybe that's as it should be.
I'm going to ignore the rant at the start of your post.
What will probably happen, and would seem to be the best idea, is if MegaCorp A wants to keep it's brand new copy of OfficeSuite 3000 from showing up everywhere, just coordinate a upload/request barrage of something that looks like the OS3000 but is a worm/virus/trojan whatnot, then blame it on "pirates" or "hackers", pointing out that you can only "trust a copy we put out."
This would not work. The dynamic caching system that Freenet implements (and the voting system it will eventually implement) would not let such a centralized organization corrupt much of the network. A server holding the company's trojan/unstable version would simply get fewer votes and the information would be requested less often. A server holding the real functional version would get more hits/votes and thus would be more widely distributed. Even if the company had it's employees or other such agents try to skew the cacheing information, they could at worst corrupt the cache's of the servers closest to them in the network.
Discredit it quickly, and make it unuseable. That's the key.
The system is designed to make this as hard as possible. It remains to be seen how much of an effect a corperation or a government could have on it.
But what about the good? What sorts of documents would Freenet be better at handling than the WWW?
Freenet is ideal for hosting data that some powerful organization wants to destroy or hide.
A few examples of such organizations and the data they are trying to suppress:
the MPAA and DeCSS,
the US gov't with strong crypto software,
the Chinese gov't and anything at all controversial about Democracy or human rights.
Information posted to a node in Freenet cannot be removed from the system if it is sufficiently demanded (ie, not spam). The initial poster is also protected from persecution as their identity cannot be easily determined (though anonymity is not too well implemented at this point, according to the FAQ). This is in contrast to the Web, where all data is on an identifiable server and (often) can be traced back to who put it there.
To publish information on Freenet, you don't need your own node. A citezen in the hypothetical country you mention could use the Freenet client software to post whatever they want on other nodes. Then, human rights advocates, govenments who do value human rights, etc. can find those reports and try to stop the country from abusing the rights of it's citizens.
It is also impossible to know what information exists on a node (without testing all possible keys or doing traffic analysis or something of that type). So even if the information you happen to have on, or send from your node is illegal, you cannot be held responsable for any of it (theoretically at least, IANAL).
That is really the point of Freenet, that you can publish information, without letting anyone know who posted it or where exactly the information is located.
Well, the web link to the ftp site is incredibly slow, but doing a console ftp to the site gets it very quickly. It is very fast so far at rendering slashdot, and no serious bugs to report (unlike the last few night's with mozilla...). I strongly recomend getting it, at least for a test run.
congradulations to the Netscape team on their release, and the Mozilla people who wrote the code (mostly but not entirely the same set of people). Keep up the good work.
I think a better analogy to use would be that DeCSS is like lockpicks. Lockpicks have both legal and illegal uses, but all of them involve breaking into things. The same can be said for DeCSS. The DMCA may ban DeCSS, just as lockpicks are often lot legal to own unless you are a locksmith.
There are only the broad issues of course. Much of the defence in the DeCSS cases is likely to revolve around the wording of 17 USC 1201 (aka the DMCA) because it is not clear in the wording how it might apply to DeCSS and the whole CSS access control scheme in general.
I hope the judge will side with the defense and say that the valid uses of DeCSS ought weigh any possible uses that violate the rights of the copyright holder. We will have to see how it goes.
Everyone who posts legal discussion should put on IANAL (unless they are lawyers, in which case another disclamer would be more appropriate). The reason is that it is illegal to give legal advice without a valid license. That is just the nature of our legal system, not any presumption by the people posting.
I guess the reason for that kind of law it is that if you were a lawer and sombody took a statement you make (ie "DeCSS is legal to distribute any way you want") and acted on it, you might be liable for any legal trouble they get in. It's unlikely that a judge would convict anyone for posting on slashdot, but being supoenaed to appear in court somwhere far away, just because another slashdot reader acted stupid on your advice would not fun.
I am definately not a lawyer, but I try to understand the law when it applies to me, and I like to be able to discuss it with other people when it applies to them too. But so that nobody misunderstands my comments as legal advice, I put IANAL in my message so they know that they should consult a real lawyer licensed in their state before they do anything that might be illegal.
Of course, IANAL so this post should not be considered legal advice either....
Steve
Re:Major problem with split along product lines
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Microsoft Loses
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I think there would be a great amount of demand for one of the baby bills to break from the "de-facto standard" of windows, and, just as you say, break compatibility to fix the problems that are there. They would probably make something roughly based on windows (the good parts) but changed to take advantage of whatever new ideas they had. This would be good for consumers, as it would mean more diversity in OSs.
The reason Windows is the current standard is that Microsoft has exclusive control of it. There is no real competition, so the standard becomes whatever microsoft implements. However, if there are many microsofts, all changing the windows code in different ways, then the standard would become whatever works best.
That is the point of competition, to make the best products rise to the top. At one point, Microsoft had the best product (ok, thats arguable, maybe). But for the last 5 or so years, certainly, they have spent more effort keeping others down then on improving windows. The improvements they did make (yes, there were some) were not done to improve their product, but to beat down another product that threatened their monopoly. Integrating IE into windows 98 was an improvement, but Microsoft's reason for doing it was to get around their agreement with the DoJ preventing them from legally requiring IE to be bundled with windows. Integration was just a technical loophole microsoft exploited.
This is another reason I think a vertical split would work better than a horizontal (along product lines) split. Having IE integrated into windows does make them both better. It is only when that is used to destroy competition that it is bad. If BabyMS#1 integrates IE#1 into Windows#1, then good for them. If MS#2 allows mozilla to integreate into their Windows#2, in the place of IE#2, then consumers are better served, because they can choose IE or mozilla, or whatever other browser works best for them.
Comparing possible Baby MSs to the Baby Bells is not quite fair. The Bells inherited phisical infrastructure, which was not really practical to have equally shared. MS on the other hand, has it's code as it's primary infrastructure (I'm ignoring buildings, people, etc as less significant to my point, yell if you want). Code can be shared evenly between a potentially infinate number of Baby Bills. Because they all have the same things, there is no reason for them to cooperate with each other (nothing to gain, nothing to offer). A product line split, however, would require close government supervision to avoid cooperation between the seperated companies. Whoever had IE would want to be in on any changes in the OS, whoever had the OS would want to know about how the compilers were being designed, and the MS Office group would want to know all the hidden APIs of everyone else so that their software would continue to work better than competitors' products.
In general, a vertical split allows competition to renew inovation to the OS market, where a horizontal split would require government oversight to avoid anticompetitive cooperation between several seperate monopolies.
Biological weapons and nano-weapons are not equivalent situations. Bio-weapons are basically adaptations of super-advanced technology created by nature--bacteria and viruses that make their living attacking humans. No one knows how to build bacteria or viruses from the ground up. This lack of knowledge means that defenders are at a disadvantage. The best defense is still the human immune system--also designed by nature.
You say that bio-weapons and nano-weapons are inherently different. I see them as very similar. The only difference is bio-weapons (and defenses) already exist in nature, without our effort or understanding. Theoretically, the same technology that creates bio-weapons can create immune systems of genetically engineered cells that would protect us from infections. The challenge (which you sort of touch on) is that our understanding of how viruses and bacteria work is better than our knowledge of how our immune system works.
This same concept can apply to nanotech. Defensive systems can be build using the same technology as attacking systems. The defending system can be adaptable, just as an immune system is and create new defensive nanites as new threats emerge. A well designed defensive system could kill off any "infection" that might come at it.
One problem with a self replicating defensive system (mentioned in Joy's Wired article) would be that it could be just as dangerous as an attacking system, if it began to misidentify things as threats. The solution to this would be to make our defensive system non-replicating. A system would produced locally, whereever defense is wanted or needed. Thus, a city could have one large scale system that could protect everyone in it to some degree. A building could have its own system that protected everything inside of it (and maybe a little ways outside too due to leaking). An individual person could have inside of them an nanotechnological immune system to protect their own body from attack. Each of these would be produced right where they were to be used. This is actually exactly like a human immune system (at least to my knowledge of biology) where white blood cells are produced only in bone marrow.
I agree that widespread nanotech systems could allow (and might require) surveillance to a much greater degree than exists today, but nanotech also allows privacy to be stronger. A defense system like I described in the previous paragraph could destroy any suveillance nanites it encounters. Also, encrypted messages could be transported by billions of nanites, making it extremely difficult for any government to control communications.
With nanotech, attackers and defenders should be on approximately equal footing with respect to the technology, but defenders (the World) should be able to devote more resources than attackers (rouge individuals). There is the danger that governments will develop nano-weapons and then not be able to prevent the design information from leaking out to rouge individuals. Also, attackers have the considerable advantage of surprise.
I do think that you make the right point when you refer to resources available. Defensive, and privacy protecting systems will always be at the advantage in resources because they will be operating close to where they are produced. This means that they will be more concentrated (more nanites in less space) and more effective because of that. The element of surprise would exist, but defenders could adapt themselves more rapidly to changes than could attackers, since they would be closer to their source.
One of the requirements for a good outcome like this is open development of nanotechnology. Only if developed secretly will nano-weapons ever be able to defeat nano-defenses. This is what I feel that public policy be on nanotech research should be.
What I wonder is why a horizontal split is what everyone thinks is best? Why split into OS, apps, net, etc. all of which would keep their part of the MS code? Might a vertical split into several fully fledged mini-MS's be better?
The advantage I see with this would be that all of the new companies would have to compete with each other. To do this, they would have to differentiate their products. MS #1 might concentrate on servers, while MS #2 goes for home desktops, while MS #3 tries to get on embedded systems.
This would also help the Open Source community, because some of the baby-Bills might open up some parts of the Windows (or office, or whatever) source so they could better cooperate with other companies.
All in all, I think this kind of break would be better for consumers and "the industry" both.
Many of those failures come on gradually and could be detected by sensors hooked to the computer. If it detects falling tire pressure or something, it could pull out of the convoy and inform the occupants.
Sure there is a chance that something will fail anyway, but I would still think that computers could respond better than any human driver could.
Under the law, does the name of the host need to be publicly available, or merely accessible to the government (though the webmaster for instance). The first outright bans anonymity. The second establishes responsibility for content. Under the second it would also still be possible for webmasters who trusted their users (or monitored them) to allow fully anonymous hosting (at some liability to themselves).
The significance of this depends a great deal on the details of the law. I hope that if it is a reasonable one.
However, I think filtering could be okay if it only targetted misleading sites, email, and posts. This might include pyramid-schemes (though education is much more important and effective here) but wouldn't include all porn, risque geocity sites, hate sites, or nearly anything based solely on content. Fraud is illegal, and filtering out fraudulent content doesn't harm anyone's first ammendment rights.
Well, maybe a better solution would be to approach the problem you discribe from a different technological angle.
I think (though I'm no expert in any of this) that the best way to correct the problem might be to change the way we browse the net. Most of the "horror stories" that censorship advocates love to tell, involve children finding porn or other "inappropriate" content, by accident. This is either because of a bad result turned up by a search engine, or from following a link from another "appropriate" page.
If there were better ways for us to accurately tell what web pages really contained, and organize that information so that we could use it to navigate more easily, then it would be easier for everyone to find what they want. Little kids wouldn't accidentaly end up on a porn page that pops up half a dozen other porn pages when it is closed. Adults who are looking for porn would be able to find it. Adults looking for some porn, but who don't like other porn, could find that too. Anyone looking for anything else would be better able to find it.
The question is, how to make this work. I don't know all that much about search engine algorithms, or anything else that might be useful for something like this, but I'm sure some readers on Slashdot do. Can better search engines accomplish this? Perhaps it will will need a radical (or evolutionary at least) new way of navigating between pages.
There's not going to be any revolution that will bring censorware to computers everywhere (not that some groups won't try). The internet will continue to chage and adapt to it's users needs and gradually the porn sites will fade into the background a bit more.
Anyway, congradulations to everyone who helped defeat the effort in Holland.
Give all Anonymous Cowards a number (and some kind of password) that they could reuse if they wanted.
You could always get a new AC # any time you wanted, but it would also allow ACs to have somewhat meaningfull conversations, without the danger of trolls jumping in and making it impossible for moderators or anyone else to tell who is who. Call it meta-anonymity?;-)
The question is, what is being protected under the law, the video on the DVD, or CSS itself?
I doubt that the court will agree with you that digital video is actually a "program". I think that it will decide that video is simply data that can be handled under the first part of the law, but not under the later parts (that you quoted).
This doesn't necessarily mean that the deCSS case should be won by the MPAA. I think that the freedom to duplicate data on a DVD that you own is protected by fair use. There is a very real chance that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will be declared unconstitutional.
Even better than a hybrid, what if you could recharge the fuel cell electrically while you were plugged in? Or (probably more practical) buy a seperate charger that makes methanol from CO2 in the air and water from the tap (or maybe deionized so not to clog it or screw up the electrodes). Now that would be cool I think. I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the fuel cells were strongly against this because then the power company would be making the money they would otherwise get from celling methanol cartriges.... Similar to how disposable battery makers don't like Li/Ion batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
Some introductory material first:
Projects like Freenet, GNUnet and IIP are creating decentralized, anonymous Peer-to-Peer networks that can strongly resist censorship by any attacker. I believe that if (when?) these kinds of secure networks replace currently popular networks (FastTrack, IRC, etc) as IP infringement tools, your job of effectively finding, stoping and prosecuting IP infringers will become much, much harder, and will require many more computer resources (perhaps impossibly many resources, both in computing time and in network bandwith).
Now my questions:
For how long do you think mass IP infringement will continue to take place in plain view, rather than on decentralized, anonymous, P2P networks?
If mass IP infringment does move to those kinds of networks, what kind of resources will your office be able to expend to attack those networks?
Would you be allowed to attack those networks at all without violating their user's First Ammendment right to anonymous speech?
What changes to IP law do you think would be needed to address decentralized anonymous networks?
As you suggest, the political spectrum doesn't have just a single axis. In fact, there are a several websites out there with multi-axis political scales. Here is a very good one and a much more slanted one (it takes Capitalism for granted).
Another issue you allude to is how the meanings of some words have changed over time. For example, the word "socialism" has been horribly distorted from it's original meaning. "Anarchist" also has a lot of baggage attached to it. Our political debate is horribly weakened by this distortion of language.
Ah well.... "War is Peace" after all.
Actually, neither.
Certainly both of those motives are ones the Bush administration has played on to persuade various constituencies to back the war, but the real reason is one of control. Our government wants to control the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, and from Iraq in particular (we already have pretty strong influence over other Gulf States such as Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia). We don't need to own the oil, we just want to influence who it gets shipped to and in what quantities (of course, given the oportunity, we'll be sure that our corperations do get a cut).
You see, the guiding strategy behind the war is the maintenance of an American hegemony over the world. A key part of that is control over the world's energy resources. (If you don't know what I mean by hegemony, or you want more info about the strategy I'm refering to, check out the links in this article and in some of the attached comments.)
Frankly, this strategy disgusts me, as I don't believe that the government of my country, the United States, is really all that much better than that of other nations in the world. We do not feed, house, educate nor provide medical care for all of our own people, yet somehow we think we can do so for the rest of the world. Our government isn't as bad as some others, but not being the worst is poor qualification to rule the world.
In the last century (and at an accelerating rate in recent decades), technology has brought people all around the world much, much closer together. And that closeness has lead to many conflicts. It may be that the world is moving towards the point where we will have one World Government. I hope that there's a way for us to unite the World without a sizable fraction of that world cowering under the heel of American millitary strength.
Well, that would have been a good title, except that it's not true. If you actually read the article (link kindly provided by this comment), you'll see that this announcement is for the last model in Compaq's line of Alpha processors.
I think what you can do is severely limeted to what kind of employee oversight there is of the computers that you are providing access from.
If you have enought people working there (unlikely in a laundromat) then you can get away with little or no blocking of content. The employees simply must regularly look over each of the terminals that are being used (or maybe just the ones being used by kids, if thats what the liability is about). If anyone is viewing improper matreial (as determined by the management), they should be asked to stop viewing it, and if they will not, they should be kicked off the computer.
If you have sombody working there, but don't have enough people to implement that kind of labor intensive oversight, you could go for a more strict keyword blocking system, but one that could be overridden by the administrator at the request of any customer who could explain why their request was reasonable. This is one place you would probably have problems with commercial blocking software, as they tend not to allow this kind of customization.
The last option that I see, if your employer will not have any human oversight of the terminals, is to do your best at making a fair keyword list that will prevent the high school students from finding porn too easily. This is surely not going to be effective, but it will be enough to keep you from getting sued (hopefully) and will keep the management happy.
There's not really a perfect solution. Morality and social acceptability are too complex concepts to be captured in a simple program. Maybe with a hell of a lot of AI, high quality censorware could be implemented, but I think such AI could be better used on educating kids about sex (oh and other trivial topics too...). Maybe the in the future these problems will find solutions, but not anytime soon. Do the best you can, and don't sweat the impossible.
Steve
I think you've got a strange idea of what "exploitation" is. What is given away cannot be stolen.
I think that the BSD and Linux kernel developers, and the members other Free software projects would characterize that "exploitation" as "use." All sofware was written to be used by the people who have it. The GPL doesn't dictate how you use code it licenses. It does tell you what you have to do to be permitted to distribute the code, or code based on it. This is something that you cannot do at all with most software.
What developers are saying, in a sense, when they release their code under the GPL, is "This software is the best damned thing out there, or at least, we think it has the potential to be the best (at whatever). Please use it. Please read the source, and make changes to it. Use whatever changes you make. But we made it, so if you want to distrubute your changed version, you must follow our terms, which are stated in the GPL."
So, corperate use of Open Source software is no "exploitation." It is a use of the software, probably as the it's author desired (though not always). The author's decision to use the GPL to distribute his code gave his permission to use it. Apple using BSD or an ISP using Linux and Apache, all are perfectly valid uses.
None of this addresses the issues of what the GPL should protect, rather than what it currently does. I think that future versions of the GPL should address issues surrounding networked use of software, and if such uses should cound as "distribution." I think they should err on the side of requiring source to be release more often, rather than less often. Bad source doesn't hurt anyone, but binaries without source could do just about anything (literally). I think source should be made available inside corperations when they use versions of GPL'd code (though employees might be prevented from distributing that source outside the company). I also think that some types of networked software should be considered distributed when they are used.
Anyway, I'm sure the GPL will gradually evolve as views on Free Software change. I hope it will always remain true to it's underlying philosophies.
Steve
Computers are getting to the point where they will be everywhere very soon. So you can load the manual of the software you're working on to your handheld computer, you can take it anywhere you could take the print manual.
Read the manual in the bathroom? Sure. Just don't drop the computer... :-)
Steve
I don't think that giving to local charity tells you much about the corperation's social responsability. Sure the employees at the corporate headquarters may help their local communities, but how does the company treat the employees at their plant's in less noticable locations.
I don't think this applies to HP at all, but I'm sure that other companies who have foreign manufacturing plants do far less giving to the communities in other countries then they do here. They can get away with this because so few of their stock holders have any interest in those plants, other than the fact that they reduce production costs and drive up their stock prices. They are more than happy to let the corperation take advantage of foreign workers, as long as US workers can live in communities that are well provided for.
When you judge a company on social responsability, do not look only at how it treats it's American workers and the communities that suround them. Check if their generosity is also matched with contributions to help foreign and international communities.
Steve
So are "brains and talent" property? Intellectual property laws, by their definition, require this assumption. But are creativity and genius the same kind of things as physical resources?
I Think not, because unlike physical resources (metal, platics, energy, etc), intelectual resources are not consumed when they are used to create something. Furthermore, no more resources are required to duplicate the product.
So, unlike physical resources, the amount of intelectual resources in the world is theoretically infinate. Though the number of creative people in the world is finite, they can create a possibly infinate amount of intellectual "property".
This is why intellectual property laws are mistaken. They assume that intellectual resources are equivalent to physical resources.
Steve
So could the music industry work on a model based on Open Source development? They could distribute the music for free, but charge for concerts. I'm not sure that they could possibly make as much money under this system as they do now, but maybe that's as it should be.
Any thoughts on this idea?
Steve
I'm going to ignore the rant at the start of your post.
This would not work. The dynamic caching system that Freenet implements (and the voting system it will eventually implement) would not let such a centralized organization corrupt much of the network. A server holding the company's trojan/unstable version would simply get fewer votes and the information would be requested less often. A server holding the real functional version would get more hits/votes and thus would be more widely distributed. Even if the company had it's employees or other such agents try to skew the cacheing information, they could at worst corrupt the cache's of the servers closest to them in the network.
The system is designed to make this as hard as possible. It remains to be seen how much of an effect a corperation or a government could have on it.
Steve
Freenet is ideal for hosting data that some powerful organization wants to destroy or hide.
A few examples of such organizations and the data they are trying to suppress:
Information posted to a node in Freenet cannot be removed from the system if it is sufficiently demanded (ie, not spam). The initial poster is also protected from persecution as their identity cannot be easily determined (though anonymity is not too well implemented at this point, according to the FAQ). This is in contrast to the Web, where all data is on an identifiable server and (often) can be traced back to who put it there.
Steve
To publish information on Freenet, you don't need your own node. A citezen in the hypothetical country you mention could use the Freenet client software to post whatever they want on other nodes. Then, human rights advocates, govenments who do value human rights, etc. can find those reports and try to stop the country from abusing the rights of it's citizens.
It is also impossible to know what information exists on a node (without testing all possible keys or doing traffic analysis or something of that type). So even if the information you happen to have on, or send from your node is illegal, you cannot be held responsable for any of it (theoretically at least, IANAL).
That is really the point of Freenet, that you can publish information, without letting anyone know who posted it or where exactly the information is located.
Steve
Well, the web link to the ftp site is incredibly slow, but doing a console ftp to the site gets it very quickly. It is very fast so far at rendering slashdot, and no serious bugs to report (unlike the last few night's with mozilla...). I strongly recomend getting it, at least for a test run.
congradulations to the Netscape team on their release, and the Mozilla people who wrote the code (mostly but not entirely the same set of people). Keep up the good work.
Steve
I think a better analogy to use would be that DeCSS is like lockpicks. Lockpicks have both legal and illegal uses, but all of them involve breaking into things. The same can be said for DeCSS. The DMCA may ban DeCSS, just as lockpicks are often lot legal to own unless you are a locksmith.
There are only the broad issues of course. Much of the defence in the DeCSS cases is likely to revolve around the wording of 17 USC 1201 (aka the DMCA) because it is not clear in the wording how it might apply to DeCSS and the whole CSS access control scheme in general.
I hope the judge will side with the defense and say that the valid uses of DeCSS ought weigh any possible uses that violate the rights of the copyright holder. We will have to see how it goes.
Steve
Everyone who posts legal discussion should put on IANAL (unless they are lawyers, in which case another disclamer would be more appropriate). The reason is that it is illegal to give legal advice without a valid license. That is just the nature of our legal system, not any presumption by the people posting.
I guess the reason for that kind of law it is that if you were a lawer and sombody took a statement you make (ie "DeCSS is legal to distribute any way you want") and acted on it, you might be liable for any legal trouble they get in. It's unlikely that a judge would convict anyone for posting on slashdot, but being supoenaed to appear in court somwhere far away, just because another slashdot reader acted stupid on your advice would not fun.
I am definately not a lawyer, but I try to understand the law when it applies to me, and I like to be able to discuss it with other people when it applies to them too. But so that nobody misunderstands my comments as legal advice, I put IANAL in my message so they know that they should consult a real lawyer licensed in their state before they do anything that might be illegal.
Of course, IANAL so this post should not be considered legal advice either....
Steve
I think there would be a great amount of demand for one of the baby bills to break from the "de-facto standard" of windows, and, just as you say, break compatibility to fix the problems that are there. They would probably make something roughly based on windows (the good parts) but changed to take advantage of whatever new ideas they had. This would be good for consumers, as it would mean more diversity in OSs.
The reason Windows is the current standard is that Microsoft has exclusive control of it. There is no real competition, so the standard becomes whatever microsoft implements. However, if there are many microsofts, all changing the windows code in different ways, then the standard would become whatever works best.
That is the point of competition, to make the best products rise to the top. At one point, Microsoft had the best product (ok, thats arguable, maybe). But for the last 5 or so years, certainly, they have spent more effort keeping others down then on improving windows. The improvements they did make (yes, there were some) were not done to improve their product, but to beat down another product that threatened their monopoly. Integrating IE into windows 98 was an improvement, but Microsoft's reason for doing it was to get around their agreement with the DoJ preventing them from legally requiring IE to be bundled with windows. Integration was just a technical loophole microsoft exploited.
This is another reason I think a vertical split would work better than a horizontal (along product lines) split. Having IE integrated into windows does make them both better. It is only when that is used to destroy competition that it is bad. If BabyMS#1 integrates IE#1 into Windows#1, then good for them. If MS#2 allows mozilla to integreate into their Windows#2, in the place of IE#2, then consumers are better served, because they can choose IE or mozilla, or whatever other browser works best for them.
Comparing possible Baby MSs to the Baby Bells is not quite fair. The Bells inherited phisical infrastructure, which was not really practical to have equally shared. MS on the other hand, has it's code as it's primary infrastructure (I'm ignoring buildings, people, etc as less significant to my point, yell if you want). Code can be shared evenly between a potentially infinate number of Baby Bills. Because they all have the same things, there is no reason for them to cooperate with each other (nothing to gain, nothing to offer). A product line split, however, would require close government supervision to avoid cooperation between the seperated companies. Whoever had IE would want to be in on any changes in the OS, whoever had the OS would want to know about how the compilers were being designed, and the MS Office group would want to know all the hidden APIs of everyone else so that their software would continue to work better than competitors' products.
In general, a vertical split allows competition to renew inovation to the OS market, where a horizontal split would require government oversight to avoid anticompetitive cooperation between several seperate monopolies.
Steve
You say that bio-weapons and nano-weapons are inherently different. I see them as very similar. The only difference is bio-weapons (and defenses) already exist in nature, without our effort or understanding. Theoretically, the same technology that creates bio-weapons can create immune systems of genetically engineered cells that would protect us from infections. The challenge (which you sort of touch on) is that our understanding of how viruses and bacteria work is better than our knowledge of how our immune system works.
This same concept can apply to nanotech. Defensive systems can be build using the same technology as attacking systems. The defending system can be adaptable, just as an immune system is and create new defensive nanites as new threats emerge. A well designed defensive system could kill off any "infection" that might come at it.
One problem with a self replicating defensive system (mentioned in Joy's Wired article) would be that it could be just as dangerous as an attacking system, if it began to misidentify things as threats. The solution to this would be to make our defensive system non-replicating. A system would produced locally, whereever defense is wanted or needed. Thus, a city could have one large scale system that could protect everyone in it to some degree. A building could have its own system that protected everything inside of it (and maybe a little ways outside too due to leaking). An individual person could have inside of them an nanotechnological immune system to protect their own body from attack. Each of these would be produced right where they were to be used. This is actually exactly like a human immune system (at least to my knowledge of biology) where white blood cells are produced only in bone marrow.
I agree that widespread nanotech systems could allow (and might require) surveillance to a much greater degree than exists today, but nanotech also allows privacy to be stronger. A defense system like I described in the previous paragraph could destroy any suveillance nanites it encounters. Also, encrypted messages could be transported by billions of nanites, making it extremely difficult for any government to control communications.
I do think that you make the right point when you refer to resources available. Defensive, and privacy protecting systems will always be at the advantage in resources because they will be operating close to where they are produced. This means that they will be more concentrated (more nanites in less space) and more effective because of that. The element of surprise would exist, but defenders could adapt themselves more rapidly to changes than could attackers, since they would be closer to their source.
One of the requirements for a good outcome like this is open development of nanotechnology. Only if developed secretly will nano-weapons ever be able to defeat nano-defenses. This is what I feel that public policy be on nanotech research should be.
Steve
What I wonder is why a horizontal split is what everyone thinks is best? Why split into OS, apps, net, etc. all of which would keep their part of the MS code? Might a vertical split into several fully fledged mini-MS's be better?
The advantage I see with this would be that all of the new companies would have to compete with each other. To do this, they would have to differentiate their products. MS #1 might concentrate on servers, while MS #2 goes for home desktops, while MS #3 tries to get on embedded systems.
This would also help the Open Source community, because some of the baby-Bills might open up some parts of the Windows (or office, or whatever) source so they could better cooperate with other companies.
All in all, I think this kind of break would be better for consumers and "the industry" both.
Steve
Many of those failures come on gradually and could be detected by sensors hooked to the computer. If it detects falling tire pressure or something, it could pull out of the convoy and inform the occupants.
Sure there is a chance that something will fail anyway, but I would still think that computers could respond better than any human driver could.
Steve
Under the law, does the name of the host need to be publicly available, or merely accessible to the government (though the webmaster for instance). The first outright bans anonymity. The second establishes responsibility for content. Under the second it would also still be possible for webmasters who trusted their users (or monitored them) to allow fully anonymous hosting (at some liability to themselves).
The significance of this depends a great deal on the details of the law. I hope that if it is a reasonable one.
Steve
Well, maybe a better solution would be to approach the problem you discribe from a different technological angle.
I think (though I'm no expert in any of this) that the best way to correct the problem might be to change the way we browse the net. Most of the "horror stories" that censorship advocates love to tell, involve children finding porn or other "inappropriate" content, by accident. This is either because of a bad result turned up by a search engine, or from following a link from another "appropriate" page.
If there were better ways for us to accurately tell what web pages really contained, and organize that information so that we could use it to navigate more easily, then it would be easier for everyone to find what they want. Little kids wouldn't accidentaly end up on a porn page that pops up half a dozen other porn pages when it is closed. Adults who are looking for porn would be able to find it. Adults looking for some porn, but who don't like other porn, could find that too. Anyone looking for anything else would be better able to find it.
The question is, how to make this work. I don't know all that much about search engine algorithms, or anything else that might be useful for something like this, but I'm sure some readers on Slashdot do. Can better search engines accomplish this? Perhaps it will will need a radical (or evolutionary at least) new way of navigating between pages.
There's not going to be any revolution that will bring censorware to computers everywhere (not that some groups won't try). The internet will continue to chage and adapt to it's users needs and gradually the porn sites will fade into the background a bit more.
Anyway, congradulations to everyone who helped defeat the effort in Holland.
Steve
A solution I thought of:
Give all Anonymous Cowards a number (and some kind of password) that they could reuse if they wanted.
You could always get a new AC # any time you wanted, but it would also allow ACs to have somewhat meaningfull conversations, without the danger of trolls jumping in and making it impossible for moderators or anyone else to tell who is who. Call it meta-anonymity? ;-)
Steve
The question is, what is being protected under the law, the video on the DVD, or CSS itself?
I doubt that the court will agree with you that digital video is actually a "program". I think that it will decide that video is simply data that can be handled under the first part of the law, but not under the later parts (that you quoted).
This doesn't necessarily mean that the deCSS case should be won by the MPAA. I think that the freedom to duplicate data on a DVD that you own is protected by fair use. There is a very real chance that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will be declared unconstitutional.
Good ridance to it!
Steve
Even better than a hybrid, what if you could recharge the fuel cell electrically while you were plugged in? Or (probably more practical) buy a seperate charger that makes methanol from CO2 in the air and water from the tap (or maybe deionized so not to clog it or screw up the electrodes). Now that would be cool I think. I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the fuel cells were strongly against this because then the power company would be making the money they would otherwise get from celling methanol cartriges.... Similar to how disposable battery makers don't like Li/Ion batteries.
Steve