I had a similar problem with another site. My solution was to take one of the spam messages, forge a convincing "mailer-bounce" message, and set a cron job to send a "bounce message" to their postmaster every 15 seconds. After a few days, my "bounce messages" started bouncing back to me, and viola, no more spam to that email account.
Re:Solaris available on the net? & copyright issue
on
Solaris
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· Score: 2
Copyright for authors (as opposed to corporations) is life plus 70 years. Other posters in this thread have indicated that Mr. Lem is alive and well.
In Solaris, Kelvin's days are spent in a futile effort to understand a planet with strange characteristics and irrational features that combine logic and chaos into an alien mixture that defies human understanding.
I have largely the same feelings whenever I port software to a Sun system.
Instant runoffs don't quite work like that, or at least the way I understand it. Here's my understanding of the system:
As you said, each voter ranks the candidates by preference. Then you use the following algorithm:
1) Tally up the top preference on everyone's ballots.
2) If someone has > 50% of the votes, they are declared the winner.
3) Otherwise, drop the lowest scoring candidate from the race. All ballots with that candidate as their top choice move on to their next choice.
4) Go to (1) and retally the top preferences from the remaining candidates. Continue until a majority is reached.
Thus the "1%ers" -- fringe candidates exit the process first, one at a time, and their votes go to their voters' second choices. Note that this system will produce a majority in every case, because in a worst-case scenario, all but two candidates will be eliminated, one at a time, and one of them will have >50% of the vote.
Many people cast their votes for the "lessor of two evils"; they might want to vote for an independent candidate, but when they get into the booth, they will cast a vote for one major party candidate for the sole reason that they are afraid of the other major party candidate being elected.
Instant runoffs would encourage people to vote for their desired candidate, instead of against an unacceptable major party candidate.
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
That's exactly the way it works now. Even the disassembly and duplication of patented inventions is legal, so long as it is "for the mere
purpose of philosophical experimentation, or to ascertain the verity and exactness of the specification"
Trade secrecy laws do not protect against reverse engineering. Trade secrecy laws only protect against "insider jobs" -- where the trade secret is disclosed by someone who is contractually obligated to keep it secret.
The other applicable form of IP is copyright, and it is well established that you have the right to read copyrighted works, and thus, to understand them.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D.
This is not what "tragedy of the commons" means. Tragedy of the commons only applies to depletable resources, like a silo full of corn. If everyone takes corn out of the silo, and no one refills it (or pays money which is then used to refill it), the silo will quickly empty out, and no one will have corn. IP is not a depletable resource, and the "tragedy of the commons" does not apply.
Copyrights and patents create incentives to publish, which is good, but also turn unlimited resources into limited, scarce resources at the same time, which is bad.
Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
Good patent and copyright laws maximize the amount of disclosure of inventions and publication of works, while at the same time minimize the tremendous accumulation of power that can result from granting a corporate monopoly over an unlimited resource. The fact that our media corporations, which are basically holding companies for copyrights on nearly all of the intellectual work of the 20th century, are quickly becoming the most powerful entities on the planet -- more powerful then even national governments, is a sign that the system is not fairly balanced.
You describe one method of reverse engineering, but not the only method.
Reverse engineering can also involve dumping out the program, disassembling and commenting the code.
That would be the first step of a "clean-room" project. The result of the first step would be a copy of the original program, which, as you correctly pointed out, you can't use, because of copyrights on the code. You can't stop there.
The second step of the clean-room process is for the person who now understands the program to write a complete description of what the program does. Copyright only protects implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves, so you describe the ideas of the program without revealing the details of the implementation.
The third step of the clean-room process is to hand the complete description of what the program does to a second party who has never been "contaminated" by examining the original implementation. The second party is then free to write a new implementation, based on the description.
This is how the first PC clone BIOS was developed.
The first step in this completely legal, commonly used process is to copy the actual program. It is not theft.
What the article is describing is not just how to prevent someone from copying the data, it is describing how to prevent someone from reading the data; in order to prevent legitimate reverse engineering and legal clean-room re-implementations.
The author is describing how to obtain protections over and above what the law provides, not how to obtain legal protection. Legal protection comes from patents and copyrights. Trade-secret protection comes from obscurity and obscurity alone, not from the government.
Re:legal and illegal reverse engineering, differen
on
Obfuscated Circuitry?
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· Score: 2
This is totally different from simply stealing a design. This second type of reverse engineering is obviously what the article is about.
Duplicating an unpatented design is not theft.
That's the whole point of a patent -- in exchange for disclosing your design, you gain government protection. Without a patent, you have no legal protection for your design, and your design enters the public domain the instant someone examines it and realizes how it works.
Just because the author wants reverse engineering to == theft doesn't make it so.
While this topic is worth discussing, the article isn't as nasty as the story might lead you to believe. It's about industrial espionage; reverse engineering in order to gain access to (legally protected?) trade secrets for commercial purposes. I don't think that falls under fair use.
This article isn't about industrial espionage. Industrial espionage is where you, for instance, pay someone who works at the company to obtain the internal schematics of a gate array.
That's completely different from reverse engineering. It's illegal, and immoral. It's what trade secret law is supposed to protect against.
Reverse engineering is not industrial espionage. It is the legal method of breaking a trade secret. Trade secret law provides zero, nada, absolutely no protection against reverse engineering. Deliberately.
Fair use is a concept that only applies to copyright, not to trade secrets.
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
The only legal protection of trade secrets is protection against their being revealed by "insiders." Trade secrets may be legitimately revealed by reverse engineering, and then they cease to be trade secrets -- they are in the public domain, with no protection.
This is good.
Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed?
If you want the government to provide you with a monopoly on your invention, you need to file for a patent, and completely disclose your invention. It's your choice. Choosing the trade secret route carries benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that you don't have to disclose. The drawback is that you are subject to reverse engineering.
Sure you can protect your investment by using technological means to protect your trade secrets, which is what these are, but it is not theft to discover trade secrets by reverse engineering.
On the contrary, trade secrets deliberately lack legal protection against reverse engineering. If you want such legal protection, you must seek a patent, and disclose your work. That's a big part of the incentive to go through the trouble of obtaining a patent.
Why would people disclose their ideas by filing for a patent if they could have the same legal protection by keeping their ideas and implementations secret?
If your work qualifies for copyright protection, or is protected by a patent, then duplicating that work would be infringement, not theft. Otherwise, it isn't theft at all, regardless of what the industry wants you to believe.
Get real. I haven't been able to gain karma since the cap was put in, and I've already lost a point on this one. Serves me right for being such a karma whore:-)
Neither do I. If you are copying patented technology or duplicating something that qualifies for copyright protection, then you would be committing infringement, but certainly not theft.
And thus the real damage of the DeCSS case takes hold. Now, the act of studying things to find out how they work (reverse engineering) is redefined as "theft".
The encouraging thing about this article is that Sony is actually spending money to preserve their audio tape library, as opposed to the motion picture industry, which deliberately destroyed their silent movie archives, allowed their nitrate archives to molder to dust, and sat by as their Eastman color libraries faded away.
The phrase "well-regulated" means "in proper working order", and it was in reference to the weapons, not the militia. This was written in the days of flintlocks, when a firearm was not an off-the-shelf item, but required careful and knowledgable maintenance and practice by its owner.
A citizen militia would be worthless if their weapons were ill-maintained. The intended meaning of the 2nd Amendment was, "Because the citizen militia can only function properly if the citizens are able to maintain their own firearms in good working order, government may not infringe on the citizens rights to keep and train on their own weapons.
Bear in mind that the Constitution prohibits standing armies, which destroys your interpretation.
There's no such thing as a generalizable anything:1 lossless compression algorithm. I never talked about anything except for compressing audio. If you really think you have an audio file that will not compress using this algorithm, I invite you to download shortn32.exe (do a web search) and see for yourself. This entire discussion is about compressing audio, not about general compression of arbitrary data.
So, my poor attempt at humour yields the philosophical question, Would a Real Hacker(tm), knowing that the system he disagrees with is faulty, help that system persist by informing it of it's inherent weakness? Or, would this hypothetical hacker just keep his mouth shut until the faulty design was finalized, henceforth guaranteeing the complete Freedom of the information in question?
That would depend on whether the Real Hacker's interests lie in:
1) Being able to bypass the system
2) Not having the system implemented
There is a good reason to choose (2). The SDMI watermark will introduce distortion into the audio signal. If the Real Hacker's interest is in purchasing music with as little distortion as is technically possible, then her interest lies in killing SDMI before it is deployed.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Fair use is not a defense that allows you to break the law. Fair use is defined as being an exception to copyright. You have the right to make fair use of legal copies of copyrighted works. Whether you have the ability to do so is a different issue, and that's where the DMCA comes in -- the DMCA is designed to take away your ability to exercise fair use, but it does not affect your right to do so. The CSS lawsuits are not copyright infringement cases. The fact that you have the right to fair use is supported by decades of law.
That's like claiming that "zip" is useless because I can make you a file that does not compress at all. Well, yeah...
An uncompressable audio track would be very atypical. I've used the shorten program on many different music tracks, ranging from soundboards to concert recordings. I've never found one that doesn't compress, and they all compress to approximately 2:1.
Even if there were music files that were uncompressable, SDMI would still be on a collision course with uncompressed audio. It would just be 1:1 instead of 2:1.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar problem with another site. My solution was to take one of the spam messages, forge a convincing "mailer-bounce" message, and set a cron job to send a "bounce message" to their postmaster every 15 seconds. After a few days, my "bounce messages" started bouncing back to me, and viola, no more spam to that email account.
Copyright for authors (as opposed to corporations) is life plus 70 years. Other posters in this thread have indicated that Mr. Lem is alive and well.
Absolutely true. If you don't rank a candidate under this system, your vote is never counted towards that candidate under any circumstances.
... which is an important feature I left out.
In Solaris, Kelvin's days are spent in a futile effort to understand a planet with strange characteristics and irrational features that combine logic and chaos into an alien mixture that defies human understanding.
I have largely the same feelings whenever I port software to a Sun system.
- John
Instant runoffs don't quite work like that, or at least the way I understand it. Here's my understanding of the system:
As you said, each voter ranks the candidates by preference. Then you use the following algorithm:
1) Tally up the top preference on everyone's ballots.
2) If someone has > 50% of the votes, they are declared the winner.
3) Otherwise, drop the lowest scoring candidate from the race. All ballots with that candidate as their top choice move on to their next choice.
4) Go to (1) and retally the top preferences from the remaining candidates. Continue until a majority is reached.
Thus the "1%ers" -- fringe candidates exit the process first, one at a time, and their votes go to their voters' second choices. Note that this system will produce a majority in every case, because in a worst-case scenario, all but two candidates will be eliminated, one at a time, and one of them will have >50% of the vote.
Many people cast their votes for the "lessor of two evils"; they might want to vote for an independent candidate, but when they get into the booth, they will cast a vote for one major party candidate for the sole reason that they are afraid of the other major party candidate being elected.
Instant runoffs would encourage people to vote for their desired candidate, instead of against an unacceptable major party candidate.
While at the same time eliminating the GPL's incentive to distribute source code.
A couple of problems with #2
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
That's exactly the way it works now. Even the disassembly and duplication of patented inventions is legal, so long as it is "for the mere
purpose of philosophical experimentation, or to ascertain the verity and exactness of the specification"
Trade secrecy laws do not protect against reverse engineering. Trade secrecy laws only protect against "insider jobs" -- where the trade secret is disclosed by someone who is contractually obligated to keep it secret.
The other applicable form of IP is copyright, and it is well established that you have the right to read copyrighted works, and thus, to understand them.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D.
This is not what "tragedy of the commons" means. Tragedy of the commons only applies to depletable resources, like a silo full of corn. If everyone takes corn out of the silo, and no one refills it (or pays money which is then used to refill it), the silo will quickly empty out, and no one will have corn. IP is not a depletable resource, and the "tragedy of the commons" does not apply.
Copyrights and patents create incentives to publish, which is good, but also turn unlimited resources into limited, scarce resources at the same time, which is bad.
Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
Good patent and copyright laws maximize the amount of disclosure of inventions and publication of works, while at the same time minimize the tremendous accumulation of power that can result from granting a corporate monopoly over an unlimited resource. The fact that our media corporations, which are basically holding companies for copyrights on nearly all of the intellectual work of the 20th century, are quickly becoming the most powerful entities on the planet -- more powerful then even national governments, is a sign that the system is not fairly balanced.
You describe one method of reverse engineering, but not the only method.
Reverse engineering can also involve dumping out the program, disassembling and commenting the code.
That would be the first step of a "clean-room" project. The result of the first step would be a copy of the original program, which, as you correctly pointed out, you can't use, because of copyrights on the code. You can't stop there.
The second step of the clean-room process is for the person who now understands the program to write a complete description of what the program does. Copyright only protects implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves, so you describe the ideas of the program without revealing the details of the implementation.
The third step of the clean-room process is to hand the complete description of what the program does to a second party who has never been "contaminated" by examining the original implementation. The second party is then free to write a new implementation, based on the description.
This is how the first PC clone BIOS was developed.
The first step in this completely legal, commonly used process is to copy the actual program. It is not theft.
What the article is describing is not just how to prevent someone from copying the data, it is describing how to prevent someone from reading the data; in order to prevent legitimate reverse engineering and legal clean-room re-implementations.
The author is describing how to obtain protections over and above what the law provides, not how to obtain legal protection. Legal protection comes from patents and copyrights. Trade-secret protection comes from obscurity and obscurity alone, not from the government.
This is totally different from simply stealing a design. This second type of reverse engineering is obviously what the article is about.
Duplicating an unpatented design is not theft.
That's the whole point of a patent -- in exchange for disclosing your design, you gain government protection. Without a patent, you have no legal protection for your design, and your design enters the public domain the instant someone examines it and realizes how it works.
Just because the author wants reverse engineering to == theft doesn't make it so.
While this topic is worth discussing, the article isn't as nasty as the story might lead you to believe. It's about industrial espionage; reverse engineering in order to gain access to (legally protected?) trade secrets for commercial purposes. I don't think that falls under fair use.
This article isn't about industrial espionage. Industrial espionage is where you, for instance, pay someone who works at the company to obtain the internal schematics of a gate array.
That's completely different from reverse engineering. It's illegal, and immoral. It's what trade secret law is supposed to protect against.
Reverse engineering is not industrial espionage. It is the legal method of breaking a trade secret. Trade secret law provides zero, nada, absolutely no protection against reverse engineering. Deliberately.
Fair use is a concept that only applies to copyright, not to trade secrets.
As for reverse engineering being theft: it is. You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
The only legal protection of trade secrets is protection against their being revealed by "insiders." Trade secrets may be legitimately revealed by reverse engineering, and then they cease to be trade secrets -- they are in the public domain, with no protection.
This is good.
Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed?
If you want the government to provide you with a monopoly on your invention, you need to file for a patent, and completely disclose your invention. It's your choice. Choosing the trade secret route carries benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that you don't have to disclose. The drawback is that you are subject to reverse engineering.
Sure you can protect your investment by using technological means to protect your trade secrets, which is what these are, but it is not theft to discover trade secrets by reverse engineering.
On the contrary, trade secrets deliberately lack legal protection against reverse engineering. If you want such legal protection, you must seek a patent, and disclose your work. That's a big part of the incentive to go through the trouble of obtaining a patent.
Why would people disclose their ideas by filing for a patent if they could have the same legal protection by keeping their ideas and implementations secret?
If your work qualifies for copyright protection, or is protected by a patent, then duplicating that work would be infringement, not theft. Otherwise, it isn't theft at all, regardless of what the industry wants you to believe.
Get real. I haven't been able to gain karma since the cap was put in, and I've already lost a point on this one. Serves me right for being such a karma whore :-)
No, that's defined as infringement of a copyright monopoly.
Neither do I. If you are copying patented technology or duplicating something that qualifies for copyright protection, then you would be committing infringement, but certainly not theft.
I meant to say, "The real damage of the DMCA." Oops.
And thus the real damage of the DeCSS case takes hold. Now, the act of studying things to find out how they work (reverse engineering) is redefined as "theft".
The stolen Enigma is a rare four-rotor version, one of only three still known to be in existence.
Of course, they could have just bought this one off of eBay.
The encouraging thing about this article is that Sony is actually spending money to preserve their audio tape library, as opposed to the motion picture industry, which deliberately destroyed their silent movie archives, allowed their nitrate archives to molder to dust, and sat by as their Eastman color libraries faded away.
The phrase "well-regulated" means "in proper working order", and it was in reference to the weapons, not the militia. This was written in the days of flintlocks, when a firearm was not an off-the-shelf item, but required careful and knowledgable maintenance and practice by its owner.
A citizen militia would be worthless if their weapons were ill-maintained. The intended meaning of the 2nd Amendment was, "Because the citizen militia can only function properly if the citizens are able to maintain their own firearms in good working order, government may not infringe on the citizens rights to keep and train on their own weapons.
Bear in mind that the Constitution prohibits standing armies, which destroys your interpretation.
There's no such thing as a generalizable anything:1 lossless compression algorithm. I never talked about anything except for compressing audio. If you really think you have an audio file that will not compress using this algorithm, I invite you to download shortn32.exe (do a web search) and see for yourself. This entire discussion is about compressing audio, not about general compression of arbitrary data.
So, my poor attempt at humour yields the philosophical question, Would a Real Hacker(tm), knowing that the system he disagrees with is faulty, help that system persist by informing it of it's inherent weakness? Or, would this hypothetical hacker just keep his mouth shut until the faulty design was finalized, henceforth guaranteeing the complete Freedom of the information in question?
That would depend on whether the Real Hacker's interests lie in:
1) Being able to bypass the system
2) Not having the system implemented
There is a good reason to choose (2). The SDMI watermark will introduce distortion into the audio signal. If the Real Hacker's interest is in purchasing music with as little distortion as is technically possible, then her interest lies in killing SDMI before it is deployed.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
Fair use is not a defense that allows you to break the law. Fair use is defined as being an exception to copyright. You have the right to make fair use of legal copies of copyrighted works. Whether you have the ability to do so is a different issue, and that's where the DMCA comes in -- the DMCA is designed to take away your ability to exercise fair use, but it does not affect your right to do so. The CSS lawsuits are not copyright infringement cases. The fact that you have the right to fair use is supported by decades of law.
That's like claiming that "zip" is useless because I can make you a file that does not compress at all. Well, yeah ...
An uncompressable audio track would be very atypical. I've used the shorten program on many different music tracks, ranging from soundboards to concert recordings. I've never found one that doesn't compress, and they all compress to approximately 2:1.
Even if there were music files that were uncompressable, SDMI would still be on a collision course with uncompressed audio. It would just be 1:1 instead of 2:1.