Re:That's Affirmatory, Good Buddy
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HighWLAN
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· Score: 2
That lingo is long gone. The only jargon I hear on CB these days is, "Grany Lane", "Hammer Lane", "Front Door", "Back Door", and "Elvis". I always thought "Affirmatory" was a joke
Well, 'affirmatory' (and similarly mutilated words) are a joke, I agree. I do not know the current state of CB-culture, if you will, but as a child I heard the word 'affirmatory' (and numerous other, similar bastardizations) quite often on the CB, being used in all earnestness.
The mockery was, at one time at least, very justified.:-)
There is a huge threat of terrorism in America, the land of the free, right now and you folks are not helping by spreading this illegal material around.
I speak as an American when I say:
Who give's one rat's ass about terrorism?
I mean really. Yes, 9/11 was a terrible trajedy in which 3,000 people were murdered by a wealthy, spoiled Saudi Arabian bigot's henchmen in the name of an obsolete religion[1], but I hate to break the news to you that over ten times as many people have died in car accidents as were killed on that day.
Terrorists can wreak localized, very dramatic havoc, kill a few people and scare a whole bunch more, but in reality there is very little actual harm they can do to us, even with such events as 9/11. Earthquakes in this country (and elsewhere) have killed more, sometimes (e.g. Japan) an order of magnitude more.
Of course, none of this talk of terrorism has anything whatsoever to do with x-box mod chips, or the rather sinister habit corporate america and government have gotten into in invading our homes and telling us what we are and are not allowed to do with our own property, which we purchased with our own money, while stealing from the public commons with the other hand and handing our common property to the same thieving thugs that would restrict our use of our property and forcibly place us on the couch in order to facilitate shoving more of their worthless, commercial-ridden crap down our unwilling throats, but I digress.
In short, the DMCA is a cure for a nonexistent problem, a cure that resembles arsenic for treatment of the common cold. Likewise the USA Patriot Act is a cure vastly worse than the disease... if 3,000 murdered people each year is the price we have to pay to remain free, it is a price I will gladly pay, even being one who works right across the street from one of Osama's big targets (when he isn't targeting the backside of that mule with his... well, nevermind).
I will not stand idly by and have my freedom taken, whether it be by terrorists from abroad, mindless idiots like yourself, the US government in the name of [insert this week's wars on whatever], or the media cartels of Hollywood. In short, you can have my general purpose, unencumbered, DRM free computer when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, and not a moment before. [1]Is there any religion that isn't obsolete?
why now? this whole episode seems to be a good example of the current system working well... tarball trojaned, ports system detects md5 mismatch, no compromise, no problem.
Yes, and No.
Yes, in that it showed the strength of free software's openness with information, such that as soon as one person noticed something funny, the news got out and the trojan averted.
No, because in fact we just got really, really lucky. If the MD5sum hadn't been located on a different (uncompromised) server, the attacker(s) could have changed the MD5sum as well, and it might have been weeks, months, or longer before anyone noticed. My bet is on weeks, since someone would have poked at the code, but one can never be sure.
In other words, the current approach didn't really work, it just got lucky. MD5sums are great for identifying corrupt data or incomplete downloads, but they are neither designed for, nor good at, identifying hostile, deliberate sabatage.
GPG signatures, on the other hand, combine the strengths of MD5sums with the ability to immediately recognize a file that has been placed in an archive by someone other then the recognized, official developer, and would have prevented this entire thing regardless of where the signature is located (assuming the keys themselves are properly managed: available on multiple, independent keyservers, downloadable from multiple archive sites like ibiblio, etc., and available for purchase on CDROM for the ultra-paranoid).
Say what? aught-two ?? Anyone here calls it aught-two ??
Nope. I call it two thousand and two, and I refer to the entire decade as the 'naughties' (but I'm in the minority on that). I've heard others say 'oh two', but even that is pretty rare. I think most people still like saying 'two thousand'...it'll take a few more years for the novelty to wear off I guess.
That's Affirmatory, Good Buddy
on
HighWLAN
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· Score: 2
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
VoIP would have spared them the jargon, too. No need to remember silliness like 'breaker one five' and 'ten four good buddy', as well as some of the more silly mutilations of common english words in a (mostly failed) effort to make them sound more official, or technical (an example of such is in the subject line:-).
Course, if they were going 95 instead of 65, they would want to know where all the 'bears' are hiding...
I don't know when the trojan appeared exactly, but as one who uses Gentoo at both work and at home, I can attest to the following:
Gentoo mirrors the source tarball at ibiblio and elsewhere, the current ssh being 3.4p1
The MD5sum for the Gentoo ebuild is correct
The mirrored tarball is also correct
I've had no trouble installing the current openssh over the last several days
I have personally verified the md5sums on each machine, not one of them contained the trojaned version, confirming that Gentoo's ebuild system did in fact correctly check the md5sum, had the correct md5sum, and had the correct source tarball.
We still need to have each ebuild, and IMHO each tarball, GPG signed by the appropriate developer, with separate third party trusted sources for the public keychain (and the ability to purchase the keychain on CD-Rom from trusted sources for the ultra-paranoid). I've been grousing about this off and on for over a year now (in Debian, later Source Mage, and now Gentoo, all of which need to address this. Maybe now they will.)
Do you complain that thugs don't get the same firepower, communications, and transportation support that police do?
If the police were allowed to break into my house, guns blazing, and mow myself and my family down (they are not allowed to do this) with no due process of law (analogous to the vigilatism inherent in the DoS law the copymonopoly cartels have proposed), then, yes, there would be nothing unethical about me defending myself and my family in kind, by doing unto the cops what they would do unto me, and doing it first. Regardless of what the law might say.
Now do you begin to grasp why vigilanti justice is such a profoundly bad idea?
As for file traders, since when is trading files illegal? I trade files of my vacation pictures with friends and relatives all the time. I even use P2P services to trade ISOs of GNU/Linux with friends all the time (P2P in the form of FreeNet reduces my own bandwidth requirements drastically over a client-server setup like ftp or http).
Your 'solution' is tantamount to saying "if you don't like it, get off the internet or become a passive user of our Approved(tm) Content."
The comparison with similarly unbalanced, historical laws holds. An unjust law such as the one proposed demands to be violated, and violating such a law is in no way unethical. Indeed, doing so as an act of defense against an attack by another, DoS or otherwise, is really quite unimpeachable in any reasonable ethical framework.
Your entire "cop" example underscores exactly why vigilante justice is such a bad idea, and the DoS attack against the RIAA, by whoever these people were, underscored very well exactly why this law is such an appallingly bad idea. It will, in all liklihood, destroy the internet's usability for some time, perhaps a very long time. Interestingly enough, those that are promoting such legislation have everything to gain, and nothing to do, by destroying the internet, and it is really a stretch to believe they are really so stupid as to not realize that.
If the RIAA is allowed to do a DoS attack, I don't see why individuals should be forbidden to do so
Because it's illegal, that's why.
Bullshit.
If a crime of aggression (ie. attack or subversion, physical or informational) is 'legalized' for a special group, but illegalized for another group, there is nothing ethically wrong with the attacked group fighting back using the same means, regardless of what the law might say.
To take an extreme, but historically accurate, example of the same sort of thing, if it is illegal for a black man to shoot a white man, yet legal for a white man to shoot a black man, there is nothing ethically wrong with the affected black man in question defending himself and his family from his attackers, and most certainly not if he is using the same means they are using (projectile weapons in this case), regardless of what some corrupt and morally bankrupt laws might say.
The only real difference in these two cases (cyberattacks allowed by one group against another, but not visa versa, and physical attacks allowed by one group against another, but not visa versa) is the magnitude of atrocity (vastly greater in the second instance), and the fact that, at one time in the United States, the second instance was in fact actually the law at one time, while the first example (cyber DoS attacks) have not (yet) ever been legalized for one group over another.
However, should DoS attacks by media cartels be legalized, there will be absolutely nothing ethically wrong with those attacked retaliating in kind. Indeed, the ethical breakdown appears to be almost entirely on the side of the copyright cartels, who have just been given a taste of things to come if these foolish laws should be passed.
I will not participate in such activities, but I will excercize my dwindling freedom of speech to openly cheer those who do.
I would infer that they plan to have (or at least want the option to have) these remotely controlled by an operator in some sort of "waldo" suit. Thus it makes sense to have the same basic configuration as your operator.
Besides which, if it is a critical (eg life supporting) part that needs repaired, and the robot breaks down, it is nice to have the option of suiting up and going outside yourself to fix it. By designing the robots to be humanlike, and the space station to be servicable by said robots, you have built in redundancy in terms of deployment options (human v. robot) if things go awry.
as much as it pains me to see the Internet neutered in much the same way the printing press, the telephone, television, and radio have been (take from the hands of the common man and restricted to the elite), I do not think losing the internet or losing general purpose personal computers, and the exponential growth in technology they have enabled, will come anywhere close to the levels of deprivation required for people to, finally, get off their overfed, apathatic, cowardly asses.
In rereading it I see that this probably isn't terribly clear to a lot of people. Historically, government (and entrenched oligarchs, which are essentially one and the same) have moved very quickly to restrict any new medium of communication from control by the common person.
The british crown did this with the emergence of the printing press, creating the first iteration of copyright, which restricted who was allowed to possess a printing press and publish and provided extremely harsh punishment for anyone violating the restrictions (including drawing and quartering, which happened to more than one independent publisher). These restrictions had absolutely nothing to do with artists being compensated, its sole purpose was to create a cartel of publishers answerable to the Crown, whome the Crown could keep under tight control.
In the early days of the telephone there were numerous, competing companies. At the time the U.S. government chose to legislate a nationwide monopoly, granting said monopoly to AT&T (who enjoyed this privelege for several decades). The 'excuse' was that this was the only way to have a coherent, interoperable network. The truth was quite different... already these regional, and in some cases competing, companies were connecting their networks together. That did not stop the government from putting almost all them out of business, overnight.
Radio and Television are similar. The FCC has been extremely draconian in its regulation of the spectrum, a spectrum which many have argued quite compellingly could have done without regulation altogether, or have been much more losely regulated through civil law ('your signal may not interfere with the pre-existing signal, interference defined by these measurable parameters, otherwise you are free to broadcast where, when, how, and on what frequency you like').
Instead we have an FCC which made it illegal to create your own private radio or TV station almost from the start, has placed the bar in terms of money and equipment so high that no one other than a large company can afford to enter the business, and yet has turned around and given away large portion of the same airwaves to the same, well entrenched, elite interests.
Now we have the internet and open, general computing, creating a revolution in communications the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the printing press or the advent of radio and television. In the historical context I've outlined above it should surprise none of us that a coordinated, deliberate, well financed, and thus far quite effective campaign is being waged to take the internet out of the hands of the common man, and place the tools for publishing and disseminating information back into the hands of the elite.
Essentially the same oligarchs (or rather, their descendents) want to control what we see, hear, and ultimately what we say now as did when the printing press, telephone, radio, and television were first invented. And, so long as we obey our corporate masters and refrain from speaking up on their cue, they will continue to succeed in doing so, with hardly a voice raised in protest against them.
Frankly, by being so beholden to our fat, well paying jobs, and putting profit before freedom, we are getting exactly what we deserve.
Written by someone who does not seem to be employed in the corporate world. How can you possibly expect any company to openly endorse a law-breaking event? Sheesh!
Folks, this is why we live under tyranny.
"When good people do nothing, evil flourishes." and all that. Even when we as individuals are willing to stand up to abuses of our constitution, if our Corporate Masters disallow us (and we obey them, valuing our well paying jobs over our freedom), then in fact tyranny will not be stood up to, and it will continue to thrive and grow unabated.
Worse still, those entities which have the means to do something about this kind of thing generally have no interest in doing so, no matter how just or right the cause.
This is an example of precisely the reason people cannot be moved to put up a fight when their freedoms are trampled... even those of good conscience put their jobs, and thus their employer's interests, first, and their own liberty (and that of their children) a distant second.
Until this changes we will lose, again and again. I for one do not expect it to change until conditions become absolutely intolerable, and as much as it pains me to see the Internet neutered in much the same way the printing press, the telephone, television, and radio have been (take from the hands of the common man and restricted to the elite), I do not think losing the internet or losing general purpose personal computers, and the exponential growth in technology they have enabled, will come anywhere close to the levels of deprivation required for people to, finally, get off their overfed, apathatic, cowardly asses.
This is just the beginning, folks. Get used to it.
Or better yet, we could use tiny, indiscriminate robot devices that detect humans and explode and cripple anyone that comes near them for years to come. Oh wait, we already have that one and refuse to join in a ban on their production and use.
I'm glad we are the good guys.
Of course, our enemies refuse to join such a ban either (Afghanistan has something like a million landmines already laid), so we are evil for not agreeing to deny ourselves a weapon our enemies use in quantities we've never even considered deploying? Whatever.
We may or may not be the good guys, depending on your point of view, but the hypocracy of such a stance ("deny yourself the weapons of your war-time enemy") is pretty pathetic (and I say this as someone who quite often posts scathing criticism of my government here on slashdot and elsewhere).
I am, however, very glad the people inventing these weapons are on my side, regardless of whether or not I approve of the weapon in question (and, quite frankly, I'd rather be blind than dead, so until the use of lethal force is banned in warfare I think complaints about non-lethal weapons like this are particularly absurd).
So, "let's go get some lunch and watch that movie on blinding techniques."[1]
I've heard of all that stuff before, except for the anticounterfeiting one. WTF???!!! The post you have above is worthy of 5 articles in major media. These are important issues and should be covered, but of course, like the HDTV bandwidth auction, got nary a peep out to the public.
Looks like someone either didn't want my criticism of the IEEE to be seen, or didn't like my criticism of Microsoft and their cohorts in Hollywood and D.C. In any event my post was modded down as off-topic... despite the fact that if any of those measures gets passed, or Microsoft is at all successful in its bid to eradicate open computing, there will be far more tech jobs lost in America than than ten times as many H1B visas could possibly account for.
So now that the economy sucks, and we have terrorism to cover our tracks, we're going to make a huge petition to throw a bunch of foreigners out of the country?
Mask it any way you want, but racism sucks.
Agreed.
Not only that, but there are real, potent issues that IEEE and others should be fighting that are a hell of a lot more important than the job market (which will get worse, or better, regardless, depending on the economic cycle as a whole. H1B plays only a minor role in all this in any event), namely:
Stopping proposed DRM regulation
The Senator "Disney" Hollings Bill (CBDTPA)
Stopping "Disney" Hollings effort to bypass the legislative process and have the FCC mandate DRM directly
Stopping "Disney" Hollings, Biden's, et. al.'s Anticounterfeiting Amendment of 2002, proposed by Fritz Hollings to make copying movies criminally equivelent to copying (counterfeiting) dollar bills.
Stopping Palladium and Microsoft's publicly stated goal of ending open computing as we know it
Stopping the legalization and empowerment of vigilanti cybercrimes by copyright cartels against individual both guilty and innocent alike
In short, stopping the attempt to "put the genie back in the bottle" by outlawing general computing in public hands, gutting the internet completely, and outlawing any efforts to resist or cry out against the same. This is almost precisely the same as what happened when the printing press was first invented, resulting in the initial creation of copyright law for the express purpose of censorship by the British Crown, which effectively banned private ownership of printing presses by anyone other than a cartel of "approved" publishers.
The IEEE is pathetic, and unworthy of even being considered representative of the tech community, much less donating funds to. They are out of touch and almost criminally negligent of the true issues that face technologists today.
Far better to join and support the lobbying group forming up under the unoffical name of "GeekPAC" (to be named something more professional RSN) and start fighting for what little freedom we have left, before even those shreds of it are gone.
You must be a troll (or a cartel lackey... the hotmail account should give it away I suppose).
A lot of people around here think there's no harm in hackers doing that to other people's computers, going so far to squeal when they get "ratted out" by others or end up in court for their actions.
Very few here thing that illegally cracking system security and breaking into computer systems is a "good thing." A fair number of people take exception to the absurd disparity between sentences and the severity of the crime, but few (if any) argue that engaging in this sort of behavior is in any way a positive act.
But when governments and large corporations can go around vandalizing and harming people legally, and the law makes it illegal to defend against such acts (by perhaps doing the same thing) for individuals, then, by any definition, we live under tyranny.
As uncool to say, and as extreme as it sounds, the digital sky is truly falling. Our freedom of expression is under wholesale and organized and concerted attack from both the media cartels and Microsoft, and the tame politicians they have in their pockets, and the reasonable sounding denials of these very stark facts don't make them any less true. We will either wake up and get involved politically and socially, educating our representatives and the lay public about these issues, or, just like the British Crown did with the printing press when it enacted the first iteration of copyright law, we will have the modern, digital equivelent of the printing press taken from us. In other words, our ability to speak and publish freely, and be heard, will be taken from us, and modern general purpose computers as we've come to know them will become a very restricted item.
Even Microsoft is publicly admitting that the end of open computing is at hand... they are preparing the public consciousness for exactly this event... having the industry and government thugs come into our personal lives and, in a very personal way, tell us exactly what we can and cannot do.
If you are such a lackey, or so blinded by your own petty greed or agenda, that you cannot see this coming, then you will no doubt be getting exactly what you deserve. Unfortunately, the rest of us, who have the observational and congnative skills that exceed those of the common garden slug, will be taken down into the pit along with you.
If, like me, you've never heard of UCITA and are looking to form your own opinion, a summary is available here:
I hope, before you formed that opinion, that you crossreferenced the UCITA promotional link you provided with other, more balanced links, almost all of which are critical of UCITA (including every software manufacturer, be it open source or proprietary, with the exception of Microsoft which as everyone here knows has its own, monopolistic agenda).
Do not be misled by one promotional site being run by the very persons who introduced the legislation to begin with. They are not trying to give you a balanced perspective on the issue.
Patching the Linux kernel (grsecurity, etc.) and implimenting ACLs is one level of security enhancement one can emply.
Userspace hardening (e.g. Bastille) is another.
Virtual servers sounds like an interesting approach as well (virtual servers running a grsecured, hardenend system anyone?)
But, security for things like web services do not end with kernel patches or even userspace hardening utilities.
As [...] noted here, the 'security' of Slashdot's moderation system has been shot to hell (astroturfers of various ilks, most commonly but not exclusively Microsoft paid lackeys, and outright trolls are posting at +2 and being granted moderator priveleges on a daily basis). As to whether the above troll you reference was moderated up by trolls, Microsoft Astroturfers, or a combination is anyone's guess.
The fix is obviously for the slashdot editors to begin creating a web of trust in a similar fashion to how GPG/PGP keys are managed (complete with revokation if that trust is abused). Initially only the slashdot moderators and some well known friends of theirs would be in the ring of trust, then gradually others (based upon posting content, relationships, what have you). This would at least allow the Astroturfers and trolls to have their moderation and/or +2 posting priveleges removed when they do occasionally slip through.
In the meantime, until such an approach is taken, I'm afraid the astroturfers and trolls will continue to abuse the moderation system for the foreseeable future. Numerical benchmarks such as karma simply do not cut it when trying to filter for quality of content, discussion, moderation, and meta-moderation.
Slashdot security in a discussion of security now rates a -3 Offtopic?
So, by pointing out that security for a web server doesn't stop at kernel patches, and pointing to a real world example to underscore that point (this very site), the comment is somehow now offtopic? I think this thread makes the aforementinoed example even more pointed than it already was.
Or is self-criticism now a taboo subject on this forum? Remarkable.
Patching the Linux kernel (grsecurity, etc.) and implimenting ACLs is one level of security enhancement one can emply.
Userspace hardening (e.g. Bastille) is another.
Virtual servers sounds like an interesting approach as well (virtual servers running a grsecured, hardenend system anyone?)
However, as you have noted here, the 'security' of Slashdot's moderation system has been shot to hell (astroturfers of various ilks, most commonly but not exclusively Microsoft paid lackeys, and outright trolls are posting at +2 and being granted moderator priveleges on a daily basis). As to whether the above troll you reference was moderated up by trolls, Microsoft Astroturfers, or a combination is anyone's guess.
The fix is obviously for the slashdot editors to begin creating a web of trust in a similar fashion to how GPG/PGP keys are managed (complete with revokation if that trust is abused). Initially only the slashdot moderators and some well known friends of theirs would be in the ring of trust, then gradually others (based upon posting content, relationships, what have you). This would at least allow the Astroturfers and trolls to have their moderation and/or +2 posting priveleges removed when they do occasionally slip through.
In the meantime, until such an approach is taken, I'm afraid the astroturfers and trolls will continue to abuse the moderation system for the foreseeable future. Numerical benchmarks such as karma simply do not cut it when trying to filter for quality of content, discussion, moderation, and meta-moderation.
Thats a spirit... or is it? If he gets arrested and then jailed nothing would have been accomplished. Only if Lawyers can get him off the hook after he's done this, then it will be a victory.
It is called civil disobedience, and it is often the only way to get injustice corrected (and the DMCA is extremely unjust).
If enough people are arrested for outrageously stupid reasons, public awareness of what is happening will be raised. I remember telling a non-technical friend of mine, who is a pilot for a major airline and served in the airforce (and saw combat in Yugoslavia), about the arrest of Dmitry and he was outraged. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen him as angry as he was that day. He took that injustice very personally, as do most people who believe in the ideals of democracy and not the rule of corporate oligarchs, cartels, and monopolists.
The more lay people that are made aware of these injustices the better, and Perens is going a long way toward accomplishing this, whether or not he gets arrested. The excesses of copyright have only succeeded these last decades because the awareness of what has happened (chronic copyright extentions, and now fundamental changes in its nature from a civil to a criminal law, and from a largely commercial regulation to a profoundly invasive personal one) has been absent. Copyright law, in its current form, will likely not withstand public scruitiny very well, which is something that would be good for every one of us (returning it back to its pre-1970 duration, if not repealing the notion altogether and replacing it with a gentler, non-monopolistic regime for compensating authors and artists, but that is a discussion for another day).
Raising public awareness of these issues is probably one of the most important things we can be doing, and if we as technically knowledgable people do not do so, no one will. Bruce Perens should be applauded for stepping up to the plate and putting his personal liberty on the line for the greater public good.
If we had more people willing to do this sort of thing when the despots seize personal liberty after personal liberty we would live in a much better world. He is a man who clearly feels strongly enough about software freedom to risk jail time, up to 5 years, which is a hell of a lot more grave than the $500,000 fine mentioned in the article (I wonder why they played that down. That makes his actions even more impressive).
It's proprietary software (regardless of being commercial or not -- realplayer is proprietary but free of charge) that will not work. This is due to the usual bad support that proprietary software vendors inflict upon the consumers.
Your example is flawed (Real is commercial software, even if it is distributed gratis. It is an example of both commercial and proprietary software) but your point is spot on.
Freeware that is distributed in binary only format (such as was often the case under DOS and Windoze) with no source availability (and no license to look at it) is proprietary even though it is not commercial.
Likewise, some commercial software, such as QT, is not proprietary at all (QT is licensed under a commercial license, the QPL, and the GPL, with the end user having their choice of which license to use the software under).
You are absolutely correct, the two terms, commercial v. proprietary, are completely orthogonal to one another.
This is probably a troll, but if so it is a reasonably clever one, so I'll bite.
This is extreme even for Slashdot. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Nonsense. I have accurately described the logical consiquence of any one of the aformentioned efforts (Palladium, DRM, The "Disney" Hollings Bill, etc) reaching fruition. If it sounds extreme, perhaps you should be directing those thoughts at those who are promoting these efforts: it is their goals which are extreme, not my shedding some light on them. You don't even need to take my word for it: read today's New York Times.
You set up a strawman which I will not bother to knock down, except to point out that I mentioned a confluence of events, not a conspiracy as such. In other words, interests happen to coincide, to their benefit and our great detriment. As for an "organized movement:" if you believe for one moment that the entertainment cartels are not organized in their efforts to lobby and shove DRM down our unwilling throats you are a fool. If you believe Microsoft's lobbying for Palladium is not organized either, then you are oblivious to even the most obvious, front-page (technical) news items we've been seeing here and elsewhere for weeks. Finally, if you believe a marriage of convinience between a software monopolist interested in locking in his monopoly and an outdated cartel interested in banning or neutering technology that threatens its business model and stranglehold on its respective industry to be farfetched, then I would humbly submit that you are profoundly naive. Particularly when the means and technical methodology to do the first is equivelent to the solution proposed to accomplish the second.
Taking away the digital freedom we have come to know and value, in other words, our freedom of expression as we have come to know it, does not equate some grand scheme to destroy mankind (as you would like to so misleadingly represent my thoughts on the subject), it merely indicates that some powerful interests have found that they stand to benefit from doing so, and feel no compunction whatsoever in acting on those interests to our detriment.
The fact that these forces are operating form such banal motives does not decrease the abhorrance of the act they are trying to commit, nor will it alleviate the detriment it will cause to the rest of us in the very least.
It is, in short, you who ought to be ashamed, not I.
> Digital Revelations is largely relying on > Intel-based computers for the effects on "Rendezvous > with Rama," a thriller coming out next year in > which a group of humans seek revenge on aliens > that blow up Italy.
Possibly offtopic, but I don't remember Arthur Clarke's story having any mention of destroying Italy...
IFF that caption accurately represents the Hollywood interpretation of Arthur C. Clark's masterpiece the movie will not be worth seeing.
In the book a meteor of natural origion caused tremendouse damage to the Earth when it skimmed by the atmosphere (I don't recall if Italy was affected per se, but it may have been), resulting is the construction of a space defense against any future incoming rocks. This defense detected an inert alien craft entering the solar system (years or decades after the defense system had been built), and a science mission was sent to explore it.
The encounter is a little remeniscent of Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco. The scientists experience a great deal, see a lot, learn a little, but those who survive come away at the end mostly baffled and uncomprehending of what they saw.
No "evil alien attacking" or other such nonsense... just an encounter with an intelligence (or perhaps just an automated machine) we are apparently unequiped to understand. A fun and very thoughtful story, which the blurb you quote above seems to imply Hollywood is shameless bastardizing into something unrecognizable and repellant.
This, right about the time ax-Microsoftie security snake oil salesman is harping about the dangers to our infrastructure [slashdot.org] because of the Internet, and when Microsoft is promoting Palladium [slashdot.org] as the solution to its MUA scripting bugs.
Coincidence? Probably. But geez, you can bet they will spin this to their favor. Instead of apologizing for their incompetence, they will use it as evidence of the dangerous new world we live in, and request us to please bend over for all their new security initiatives.
What makes it doubly absurd is that they tell us:
We should make our hardware capable of only running Microsoft's incompentently written, buggy, and phenominally insecure software and trust them that blocking every competitor's product from running on our hardware will somehow, magically make their poorly written, unaudited, closed-source (and thus never peer-reviewed) software more secure.
If we follow their advice and deploy Palladium, it will become impossible to deploy demonstrably much more secuire products like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
This makes almost as much sense as giving unprecendented power to an agency whose negligence allowed 9/11 to occur. Hell, if it worked for the FBI why shouldn't it work for Microsoft? It isn't as if our public officials have demonstrated a shred of intelligence within the last year anyway. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time they did demonstrate a sign of intelligence...
Yes, and the day I emigrate from the US is growing ever closer. I've given this serious thought and consideration, and the question remains: where can one go and remain free?
Canada seemed like a nice choice. Buying property and living there as an American is straightforward, the people are nice, the culture, pleasant, and I could afford to keep my airplane and maintain my lifestyle. But, alas, they just had a precident-setting ruling that outlaws the existence of a 3rd Party technology simply because it annoys a product's manufacturer. Goodbye Linux on the X Box, which means in a couple of years, Goodbye Linux on any Palladium hardware.
Europe? The European patent office is eager to follow America's lead and start issuing software patents (in fact, I believe they may have already begun doing so). Europe is considering an EU-wide law that is even worse than America's DMCA.
Central America? The US tends to invade any of those countries that tick off [insert favorite large enterprise here, MS certainly being a possibility], and with the government's current state of belligerance I don't hold out much hope of that changing. Were it a government of the people one could expect better behavior, particularly with the rather popular feeling that out cold-war imperialism was flat-out wrong. But alas, as we all know, our government is one of and for the corporations, and the opinion of little folk like us isn't worth a whole lot anymore (if it ever was).
Africa? That is all pretty hit and miss... assuming you can get conectivity to the net at all.
India? That is perhaps the best option to date... assuming the country isn't destroyed in a nuclear conflict with Pakistan. India is probably the most appealing possibility out there (and having visited that country once, I can say I rather liked it there).
But... most of the internet traffic is currently passing through the United States these days... until that problem is solved, the Long Arm of Uncle Sam, Aunt Hollywood, and Little Billy Gates will reach everywhere, making it difficult for anyone to persue freedom, inside the United States or anywhere else.
So, there may well be nowhere to run, and perhaps this battle isn't as irrelevant to those who are outside of the United States as they might like to think.
Slashdot Mirror
That lingo is long gone. The only jargon I hear on CB these days is, "Grany Lane", "Hammer Lane", "Front Door", "Back Door", and "Elvis". I always thought "Affirmatory" was a joke
:-)
Well, 'affirmatory' (and similarly mutilated words) are a joke, I agree. I do not know the current state of CB-culture, if you will, but as a child I heard the word 'affirmatory' (and numerous other, similar bastardizations) quite often on the CB, being used in all earnestness.
The mockery was, at one time at least, very justified.
There is a huge threat of terrorism in America, the land of the free, right now and you folks are not helping by spreading this illegal material around.
... if 3,000 murdered people each year is the price we have to pay to remain free, it is a price I will gladly pay, even being one who works right across the street from one of Osama's big targets (when he isn't targeting the backside of that mule with his ... well, nevermind).
I speak as an American when I say:
Who give's one rat's ass about terrorism?
I mean really. Yes, 9/11 was a terrible trajedy in which 3,000 people were murdered by a wealthy, spoiled Saudi Arabian bigot's henchmen in the name of an obsolete religion[1], but I hate to break the news to you that over ten times as many people have died in car accidents as were killed on that day.
Terrorists can wreak localized, very dramatic havoc, kill a few people and scare a whole bunch more, but in reality there is very little actual harm they can do to us, even with such events as 9/11. Earthquakes in this country (and elsewhere) have killed more, sometimes (e.g. Japan) an order of magnitude more.
Of course, none of this talk of terrorism has anything whatsoever to do with x-box mod chips, or the rather sinister habit corporate america and government have gotten into in invading our homes and telling us what we are and are not allowed to do with our own property, which we purchased with our own money, while stealing from the public commons with the other hand and handing our common property to the same thieving thugs that would restrict our use of our property and forcibly place us on the couch in order to facilitate shoving more of their worthless, commercial-ridden crap down our unwilling throats, but I digress.
In short, the DMCA is a cure for a nonexistent problem, a cure that resembles arsenic for treatment of the common cold. Likewise the USA Patriot Act is a cure vastly worse than the disease
I will not stand idly by and have my freedom taken, whether it be by terrorists from abroad, mindless idiots like yourself, the US government in the name of [insert this week's wars on whatever], or the media cartels of Hollywood. In short, you can have my general purpose, unencumbered, DRM free computer when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, and not a moment before.
[1]Is there any religion that isn't obsolete?
why now? this whole episode seems to be a good example of the current system working well... tarball trojaned, ports system detects md5 mismatch, no compromise, no problem.
Yes, and No.
Yes, in that it showed the strength of free software's openness with information, such that as soon as one person noticed something funny, the news got out and the trojan averted.
No, because in fact we just got really, really lucky. If the MD5sum hadn't been located on a different (uncompromised) server, the attacker(s) could have changed the MD5sum as well, and it might have been weeks, months, or longer before anyone noticed. My bet is on weeks, since someone would have poked at the code, but one can never be sure.
In other words, the current approach didn't really work, it just got lucky. MD5sums are great for identifying corrupt data or incomplete downloads, but they are neither designed for, nor good at, identifying hostile, deliberate sabatage.
GPG signatures, on the other hand, combine the strengths of MD5sums with the ability to immediately recognize a file that has been placed in an archive by someone other then the recognized, official developer, and would have prevented this entire thing regardless of where the signature is located (assuming the keys themselves are properly managed: available on multiple, independent keyservers, downloadable from multiple archive sites like ibiblio, etc., and available for purchase on CDROM for the ultra-paranoid).
Say what? aught-two ?? Anyone here calls it aught-two ??
Nope. I call it two thousand and two, and I refer to the entire decade as the 'naughties' (but I'm in the minority on that). I've heard others say 'oh two', but even that is pretty rare. I think most people still like saying 'two thousand'...it'll take a few more years for the novelty to wear off I guess.
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
:-).
VoIP would have spared them the jargon, too. No need to remember silliness like 'breaker one five' and 'ten four good buddy', as well as some of the more silly mutilations of common english words in a (mostly failed) effort to make them sound more official, or technical (an example of such is in the subject line
Course, if they were going 95 instead of 65, they would want to know where all the 'bears' are hiding...
I don't know when the trojan appeared exactly, but as one who uses Gentoo at both work and at home, I can attest to the following:
- Gentoo mirrors the source tarball at ibiblio and elsewhere, the current ssh being 3.4p1
- The MD5sum for the Gentoo ebuild is correct
- The mirrored tarball is also correct
- I've had no trouble installing the current openssh over the last several days
- I have personally verified the md5sums on each machine, not one of them contained the trojaned version, confirming that Gentoo's ebuild system did in fact correctly check the md5sum, had the correct md5sum, and had the correct source tarball.
We still need to have each ebuild, and IMHO each tarball, GPG signed by the appropriate developer, with separate third party trusted sources for the public keychain (and the ability to purchase the keychain on CD-Rom from trusted sources for the ultra-paranoid). I've been grousing about this off and on for over a year now (in Debian, later Source Mage, and now Gentoo, all of which need to address this. Maybe now they will.)Do you complain that thugs don't get the same firepower, communications, and transportation support that police do?
If the police were allowed to break into my house, guns blazing, and mow myself and my family down (they are not allowed to do this) with no due process of law (analogous to the vigilatism inherent in the DoS law the copymonopoly cartels have proposed), then, yes, there would be nothing unethical about me defending myself and my family in kind, by doing unto the cops what they would do unto me, and doing it first. Regardless of what the law might say.
Now do you begin to grasp why vigilanti justice is such a profoundly bad idea?
As for file traders, since when is trading files illegal? I trade files of my vacation pictures with friends and relatives all the time. I even use P2P services to trade ISOs of GNU/Linux with friends all the time (P2P in the form of FreeNet reduces my own bandwidth requirements drastically over a client-server setup like ftp or http).
Your 'solution' is tantamount to saying "if you don't like it, get off the internet or become a passive user of our Approved(tm) Content."
The comparison with similarly unbalanced, historical laws holds. An unjust law such as the one proposed demands to be violated, and violating such a law is in no way unethical. Indeed, doing so as an act of defense against an attack by another, DoS or otherwise, is really quite unimpeachable in any reasonable ethical framework.
Your entire "cop" example underscores exactly why vigilante justice is such a bad idea, and the DoS attack against the RIAA, by whoever these people were, underscored very well exactly why this law is such an appallingly bad idea. It will, in all liklihood, destroy the internet's usability for some time, perhaps a very long time. Interestingly enough, those that are promoting such legislation have everything to gain, and nothing to do, by destroying the internet, and it is really a stretch to believe they are really so stupid as to not realize that.
If the RIAA is allowed to do a DoS attack, I don't see why individuals should be forbidden to do so
Because it's illegal, that's why.
Bullshit.
If a crime of aggression (ie. attack or subversion, physical or informational) is 'legalized' for a special group, but illegalized for another group, there is nothing ethically wrong with the attacked group fighting back using the same means, regardless of what the law might say.
To take an extreme, but historically accurate, example of the same sort of thing, if it is illegal for a black man to shoot a white man, yet legal for a white man to shoot a black man, there is nothing ethically wrong with the affected black man in question defending himself and his family from his attackers, and most certainly not if he is using the same means they are using (projectile weapons in this case), regardless of what some corrupt and morally bankrupt laws might say.
The only real difference in these two cases (cyberattacks allowed by one group against another, but not visa versa, and physical attacks allowed by one group against another, but not visa versa) is the magnitude of atrocity (vastly greater in the second instance), and the fact that, at one time in the United States, the second instance was in fact actually the law at one time, while the first example (cyber DoS attacks) have not (yet) ever been legalized for one group over another.
However, should DoS attacks by media cartels be legalized, there will be absolutely nothing ethically wrong with those attacked retaliating in kind. Indeed, the ethical breakdown appears to be almost entirely on the side of the copyright cartels, who have just been given a taste of things to come if these foolish laws should be passed.
I will not participate in such activities, but I will excercize my dwindling freedom of speech to openly cheer those who do.
I would infer that they plan to have (or at least want the option to have) these remotely controlled by an operator in some sort of "waldo" suit. Thus it makes sense to have the same basic configuration as your operator.
Besides which, if it is a critical (eg life supporting) part that needs repaired, and the robot breaks down, it is nice to have the option of suiting up and going outside yourself to fix it. By designing the robots to be humanlike, and the space station to be servicable by said robots, you have built in redundancy in terms of deployment options (human v. robot) if things go awry.
as much as it pains me to see the Internet neutered in much the same way the printing press, the telephone, television, and radio have been (take from the hands of the common man and restricted to the elite), I do not think losing the internet or losing general purpose personal computers, and the exponential growth in technology they have enabled, will come anywhere close to the levels of deprivation required for people to, finally, get off their overfed, apathatic, cowardly asses.
... already these regional, and in some cases competing, companies were connecting their networks together. That did not stop the government from putting almost all them out of business, overnight.
In rereading it I see that this probably isn't terribly clear to a lot of people. Historically, government (and entrenched oligarchs, which are essentially one and the same) have moved very quickly to restrict any new medium of communication from control by the common person.
The british crown did this with the emergence of the printing press, creating the first iteration of copyright, which restricted who was allowed to possess a printing press and publish and provided extremely harsh punishment for anyone violating the restrictions (including drawing and quartering, which happened to more than one independent publisher). These restrictions had absolutely nothing to do with artists being compensated, its sole purpose was to create a cartel of publishers answerable to the Crown, whome the Crown could keep under tight control.
In the early days of the telephone there were numerous, competing companies. At the time the U.S. government chose to legislate a nationwide monopoly, granting said monopoly to AT&T (who enjoyed this privelege for several decades). The 'excuse' was that this was the only way to have a coherent, interoperable network. The truth was quite different
Radio and Television are similar. The FCC has been extremely draconian in its regulation of the spectrum, a spectrum which many have argued quite compellingly could have done without regulation altogether, or have been much more losely regulated through civil law ('your signal may not interfere with the pre-existing signal, interference defined by these measurable parameters, otherwise you are free to broadcast where, when, how, and on what frequency you like').
Instead we have an FCC which made it illegal to create your own private radio or TV station almost from the start, has placed the bar in terms of money and equipment so high that no one other than a large company can afford to enter the business, and yet has turned around and given away large portion of the same airwaves to the same, well entrenched, elite interests.
Now we have the internet and open, general computing, creating a revolution in communications the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the printing press or the advent of radio and television. In the historical context I've outlined above it should surprise none of us that a coordinated, deliberate, well financed, and thus far quite effective campaign is being waged to take the internet out of the hands of the common man, and place the tools for publishing and disseminating information back into the hands of the elite.
Essentially the same oligarchs (or rather, their descendents) want to control what we see, hear, and ultimately what we say now as did when the printing press, telephone, radio, and television were first invented. And, so long as we obey our corporate masters and refrain from speaking up on their cue, they will continue to succeed in doing so, with hardly a voice raised in protest against them.
Frankly, by being so beholden to our fat, well paying jobs, and putting profit before freedom, we are getting exactly what we deserve.
Written by someone who does not seem to be employed in the corporate world. How can you possibly expect any company to openly endorse a law-breaking event? Sheesh!
... even those of good conscience put their jobs, and thus their employer's interests, first, and their own liberty (and that of their children) a distant second.
Folks, this is why we live under tyranny.
"When good people do nothing, evil flourishes." and all that. Even when we as individuals are willing to stand up to abuses of our constitution, if our Corporate Masters disallow us (and we obey them, valuing our well paying jobs over our freedom), then in fact tyranny will not be stood up to, and it will continue to thrive and grow unabated.
Worse still, those entities which have the means to do something about this kind of thing generally have no interest in doing so, no matter how just or right the cause.
This is an example of precisely the reason people cannot be moved to put up a fight when their freedoms are trampled
Until this changes we will lose, again and again. I for one do not expect it to change until conditions become absolutely intolerable, and as much as it pains me to see the Internet neutered in much the same way the printing press, the telephone, television, and radio have been (take from the hands of the common man and restricted to the elite), I do not think losing the internet or losing general purpose personal computers, and the exponential growth in technology they have enabled, will come anywhere close to the levels of deprivation required for people to, finally, get off their overfed, apathatic, cowardly asses.
This is just the beginning, folks. Get used to it.
Or better yet, we could use tiny, indiscriminate robot devices that detect humans and explode and cripple anyone that comes near them for years to come. Oh wait, we already have that one and refuse to join in a ban on their production and use.
I'm glad we are the good guys.
Of course, our enemies refuse to join such a ban either (Afghanistan has something like a million landmines already laid), so we are evil for not agreeing to deny ourselves a weapon our enemies use in quantities we've never even considered deploying? Whatever.
We may or may not be the good guys, depending on your point of view, but the hypocracy of such a stance ("deny yourself the weapons of your war-time enemy") is pretty pathetic (and I say this as someone who quite often posts scathing criticism of my government here on slashdot and elsewhere).
I am, however, very glad the people inventing these weapons are on my side, regardless of whether or not I approve of the weapon in question (and, quite frankly, I'd rather be blind than dead, so until the use of lethal force is banned in warfare I think complaints about non-lethal weapons like this are particularly absurd).
So, "let's go get some lunch and watch that movie on blinding techniques."[1]
[1]superfilous Real Genius reference
I've heard of all that stuff before, except for the anticounterfeiting one. WTF???!!! The post you have above is worthy of 5 articles in major media. These are important issues and should be covered, but of course, like the HDTV bandwidth auction, got nary a peep out to the public.
... despite the fact that if any of those measures gets passed, or Microsoft is at all successful in its bid to eradicate open computing, there will be far more tech jobs lost in America than than ten times as many H1B visas could possibly account for.
Looks like someone either didn't want my criticism of the IEEE to be seen, or didn't like my criticism of Microsoft and their cohorts in Hollywood and D.C. In any event my post was modded down as off-topic
Mask it any way you want, but racism sucks.
Agreed.
Not only that, but there are real, potent issues that IEEE and others should be fighting that are a hell of a lot more important than the job market (which will get worse, or better, regardless, depending on the economic cycle as a whole. H1B plays only a minor role in all this in any event), namely:
In short, stopping the attempt to "put the genie back in the bottle" by outlawing general computing in public hands, gutting the internet completely, and outlawing any efforts to resist or cry out against the same. This is almost precisely the same as what happened when the printing press was first invented, resulting in the initial creation of copyright law for the express purpose of censorship by the British Crown, which effectively banned private ownership of printing presses by anyone other than a cartel of "approved" publishers.
The IEEE is pathetic, and unworthy of even being considered representative of the tech community, much less donating funds to. They are out of touch and almost criminally negligent of the true issues that face technologists today.
Far better to join and support the lobbying group forming up under the unoffical name of "GeekPAC" (to be named something more professional RSN) and start fighting for what little freedom we have left, before even those shreds of it are gone.
You must be a troll (or a cartel lackey ... the hotmail account should give it away I suppose).
... they are preparing the public consciousness for exactly this event ... having the industry and government thugs come into our personal lives and, in a very personal way, tell us exactly what we can and cannot do.
A lot of people around here think there's no harm in hackers doing that to other people's computers, going so far to squeal when they get "ratted out" by others or end up in court for their actions.
Very few here thing that illegally cracking system security and breaking into computer systems is a "good thing." A fair number of people take exception to the absurd disparity between sentences and the severity of the crime, but few (if any) argue that engaging in this sort of behavior is in any way a positive act.
But when governments and large corporations can go around vandalizing and harming people legally, and the law makes it illegal to defend against such acts (by perhaps doing the same thing) for individuals, then, by any definition, we live under tyranny.
As uncool to say, and as extreme as it sounds, the digital sky is truly falling. Our freedom of expression is under wholesale and organized and concerted attack from both the media cartels and Microsoft, and the tame politicians they have in their pockets, and the reasonable sounding denials of these very stark facts don't make them any less true. We will either wake up and get involved politically and socially, educating our representatives and the lay public about these issues, or, just like the British Crown did with the printing press when it enacted the first iteration of copyright law, we will have the modern, digital equivelent of the printing press taken from us. In other words, our ability to speak and publish freely, and be heard, will be taken from us, and modern general purpose computers as we've come to know them will become a very restricted item.
Even Microsoft is publicly admitting that the end of open computing is at hand
If you are such a lackey, or so blinded by your own petty greed or agenda, that you cannot see this coming, then you will no doubt be getting exactly what you deserve. Unfortunately, the rest of us, who have the observational and congnative skills that exceed those of the common garden slug, will be taken down into the pit along with you.
If, like me, you've never heard of UCITA and are looking to form your own opinion, a summary is available here:
I hope, before you formed that opinion, that you crossreferenced the UCITA promotional link you provided with other, more balanced links, almost all of which are critical of UCITA (including every software manufacturer, be it open source or proprietary, with the exception of Microsoft which as everyone here knows has its own, monopolistic agenda).
Do not be misled by one promotional site being run by the very persons who introduced the legislation to begin with. They are not trying to give you a balanced perspective on the issue.
Patching the Linux kernel (grsecurity, etc.) and implimenting ACLs is one level of security enhancement one can emply.
Userspace hardening (e.g. Bastille) is another.
Virtual servers sounds like an interesting approach as well (virtual servers running a grsecured, hardenend system anyone?)
But, security for things like web services do not end with kernel patches or even userspace hardening utilities.
As [...] noted here, the 'security' of Slashdot's moderation system has been shot to hell (astroturfers of various ilks, most commonly but not exclusively Microsoft paid lackeys, and outright trolls are posting at +2 and being granted moderator priveleges on a daily basis). As to whether the above troll you reference was moderated up by trolls, Microsoft Astroturfers, or a combination is anyone's guess.
The fix is obviously for the slashdot editors to begin creating a web of trust in a similar fashion to how GPG/PGP keys are managed (complete with revokation if that trust is abused). Initially only the slashdot moderators and some well known friends of theirs would be in the ring of trust, then gradually others (based upon posting content, relationships, what have you). This would at least allow the Astroturfers and trolls to have their moderation and/or +2 posting priveleges removed when they do occasionally slip through.
In the meantime, until such an approach is taken, I'm afraid the astroturfers and trolls will continue to abuse the moderation system for the foreseeable future. Numerical benchmarks such as karma simply do not cut it when trying to filter for quality of content, discussion, moderation, and meta-moderation.
Slashdot security in a discussion of security now rates a -3 Offtopic?
So, by pointing out that security for a web server doesn't stop at kernel patches, and pointing to a real world example to underscore that point (this very site), the comment is somehow now offtopic? I think this thread makes the aforementinoed example even more pointed than it already was.
Or is self-criticism now a taboo subject on this forum? Remarkable.
Patching the Linux kernel (grsecurity, etc.) and implimenting ACLs is one level of security enhancement one can emply.
Userspace hardening (e.g. Bastille) is another.
Virtual servers sounds like an interesting approach as well (virtual servers running a grsecured, hardenend system anyone?)
However, as you have noted here, the 'security' of Slashdot's moderation system has been shot to hell (astroturfers of various ilks, most commonly but not exclusively Microsoft paid lackeys, and outright trolls are posting at +2 and being granted moderator priveleges on a daily basis). As to whether the above troll you reference was moderated up by trolls, Microsoft Astroturfers, or a combination is anyone's guess.
The fix is obviously for the slashdot editors to begin creating a web of trust in a similar fashion to how GPG/PGP keys are managed (complete with revokation if that trust is abused). Initially only the slashdot moderators and some well known friends of theirs would be in the ring of trust, then gradually others (based upon posting content, relationships, what have you). This would at least allow the Astroturfers and trolls to have their moderation and/or +2 posting priveleges removed when they do occasionally slip through.
In the meantime, until such an approach is taken, I'm afraid the astroturfers and trolls will continue to abuse the moderation system for the foreseeable future. Numerical benchmarks such as karma simply do not cut it when trying to filter for quality of content, discussion, moderation, and meta-moderation.
Thats a spirit... or is it? If he gets arrested and then jailed nothing would have been accomplished. Only if Lawyers can get him off the hook after he's done this, then it will be a victory.
It is called civil disobedience, and it is often the only way to get injustice corrected (and the DMCA is extremely unjust).
If enough people are arrested for outrageously stupid reasons, public awareness of what is happening will be raised. I remember telling a non-technical friend of mine, who is a pilot for a major airline and served in the airforce (and saw combat in Yugoslavia), about the arrest of Dmitry and he was outraged. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen him as angry as he was that day. He took that injustice very personally, as do most people who believe in the ideals of democracy and not the rule of corporate oligarchs, cartels, and monopolists.
The more lay people that are made aware of these injustices the better, and Perens is going a long way toward accomplishing this, whether or not he gets arrested. The excesses of copyright have only succeeded these last decades because the awareness of what has happened (chronic copyright extentions, and now fundamental changes in its nature from a civil to a criminal law, and from a largely commercial regulation to a profoundly invasive personal one) has been absent. Copyright law, in its current form, will likely not withstand public scruitiny very well, which is something that would be good for every one of us (returning it back to its pre-1970 duration, if not repealing the notion altogether and replacing it with a gentler, non-monopolistic regime for compensating authors and artists, but that is a discussion for another day).
Raising public awareness of these issues is probably one of the most important things we can be doing, and if we as technically knowledgable people do not do so, no one will. Bruce Perens should be applauded for stepping up to the plate and putting his personal liberty on the line for the greater public good.
If we had more people willing to do this sort of thing when the despots seize personal liberty after personal liberty we would live in a much better world. He is a man who clearly feels strongly enough about software freedom to risk jail time, up to 5 years, which is a hell of a lot more grave than the $500,000 fine mentioned in the article (I wonder why they played that down. That makes his actions even more impressive).
Proprietary Software != Commercial Software
It's proprietary software (regardless of being commercial or not -- realplayer is proprietary but free of charge) that will not work. This is due to the usual bad support that proprietary software vendors inflict upon the consumers.
Your example is flawed (Real is commercial software, even if it is distributed gratis. It is an example of both commercial and proprietary software) but your point is spot on.
Freeware that is distributed in binary only format (such as was often the case under DOS and Windoze) with no source availability (and no license to look at it) is proprietary even though it is not commercial.
Likewise, some commercial software, such as QT, is not proprietary at all (QT is licensed under a commercial license, the QPL, and the GPL, with the end user having their choice of which license to use the software under).
You are absolutely correct, the two terms, commercial v. proprietary, are completely orthogonal to one another.
Hardly "IFF" - you have sufficiency, but clearly not necessity
Point well taken. I really meant IF, but the typo does change the meaning to 'if and only if' which as you point out isn't really the case here.
This is probably a troll, but if so it is a reasonably clever one, so I'll bite.
This is extreme even for Slashdot. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Nonsense. I have accurately described the logical consiquence of any one of the aformentioned efforts (Palladium, DRM, The "Disney" Hollings Bill, etc) reaching fruition. If it sounds extreme, perhaps you should be directing those thoughts at those who are promoting these efforts: it is their goals which are extreme, not my shedding some light on them. You don't even need to take my word for it: read today's New York Times.
You set up a strawman which I will not bother to knock down, except to point out that I mentioned a confluence of events, not a conspiracy as such. In other words, interests happen to coincide, to their benefit and our great detriment. As for an "organized movement:" if you believe for one moment that the entertainment cartels are not organized in their efforts to lobby and shove DRM down our unwilling throats you are a fool. If you believe Microsoft's lobbying for Palladium is not organized either, then you are oblivious to even the most obvious, front-page (technical) news items we've been seeing here and elsewhere for weeks. Finally, if you believe a marriage of convinience between a software monopolist interested in locking in his monopoly and an outdated cartel interested in banning or neutering technology that threatens its business model and stranglehold on its respective industry to be farfetched, then I would humbly submit that you are profoundly naive. Particularly when the means and technical methodology to do the first is equivelent to the solution proposed to accomplish the second.
Taking away the digital freedom we have come to know and value, in other words, our freedom of expression as we have come to know it, does not equate some grand scheme to destroy mankind (as you would like to so misleadingly represent my thoughts on the subject), it merely indicates that some powerful interests have found that they stand to benefit from doing so, and feel no compunction whatsoever in acting on those interests to our detriment.
The fact that these forces are operating form such banal motives does not decrease the abhorrance of the act they are trying to commit, nor will it alleviate the detriment it will cause to the rest of us in the very least.
It is, in short, you who ought to be ashamed, not I.
> Digital Revelations is largely relying on
... just an encounter with an intelligence (or perhaps just an automated machine) we are apparently unequiped to understand. A fun and very thoughtful story, which the blurb you quote above seems to imply Hollywood is shameless bastardizing into something unrecognizable and repellant.
> Intel-based computers for the effects on "Rendezvous
> with Rama," a thriller coming out next year in
> which a group of humans seek revenge on aliens
> that blow up Italy.
Possibly offtopic, but I don't remember Arthur Clarke's story having any mention of destroying Italy...
IFF that caption accurately represents the Hollywood interpretation of Arthur C. Clark's masterpiece the movie will not be worth seeing.
In the book a meteor of natural origion caused tremendouse damage to the Earth when it skimmed by the atmosphere (I don't recall if Italy was affected per se, but it may have been), resulting is the construction of a space defense against any future incoming rocks. This defense detected an inert alien craft entering the solar system (years or decades after the defense system had been built), and a science mission was sent to explore it.
The encounter is a little remeniscent of Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco. The scientists experience a great deal, see a lot, learn a little, but those who survive come away at the end mostly baffled and uncomprehending of what they saw.
No "evil alien attacking" or other such nonsense
Coincidence? Probably. But geez, you can bet they will spin this to their favor. Instead of apologizing for their incompetence, they will use it as evidence of the dangerous new world we live in, and request us to please bend over for all their new security initiatives.
What makes it doubly absurd is that they tell us:
- We should make our hardware capable of only running Microsoft's incompentently written, buggy, and phenominally insecure software and trust them that blocking every competitor's product from running on our hardware will somehow, magically make their poorly written, unaudited, closed-source (and thus never peer-reviewed) software more secure.
- If we follow their advice and deploy Palladium, it will become impossible to deploy demonstrably much more secuire products like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
This makes almost as much sense as giving unprecendented power to an agency whose negligence allowed 9/11 to occur. Hell, if it worked for the FBI why shouldn't it work for Microsoft? It isn't as if our public officials have demonstrated a shred of intelligence within the last year anyway. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time they did demonstrate a sign of intelligenceLuckily, america is not the world.
... assuming you can get conectivity to the net at all.
... assuming the country isn't destroyed in a nuclear conflict with Pakistan. India is probably the most appealing possibility out there (and having visited that country once, I can say I rather liked it there).
... most of the internet traffic is currently passing through the United States these days ... until that problem is solved, the Long Arm of Uncle Sam, Aunt Hollywood, and Little Billy Gates will reach everywhere, making it difficult for anyone to persue freedom, inside the United States or anywhere else.
Yes, and the day I emigrate from the US is growing ever closer. I've given this serious thought and consideration, and the question remains: where can one go and remain free?
Canada seemed like a nice choice. Buying property and living there as an American is straightforward, the people are nice, the culture, pleasant, and I could afford to keep my airplane and maintain my lifestyle. But, alas, they just had a precident-setting ruling that outlaws the existence of a 3rd Party technology simply because it annoys a product's manufacturer. Goodbye Linux on the X Box, which means in a couple of years, Goodbye Linux on any Palladium hardware.
Europe? The European patent office is eager to follow America's lead and start issuing software patents (in fact, I believe they may have already begun doing so). Europe is considering an EU-wide law that is even worse than America's DMCA.
Central America? The US tends to invade any of those countries that tick off [insert favorite large enterprise here, MS certainly being a possibility], and with the government's current state of belligerance I don't hold out much hope of that changing. Were it a government of the people one could expect better behavior, particularly with the rather popular feeling that out cold-war imperialism was flat-out wrong. But alas, as we all know, our government is one of and for the corporations, and the opinion of little folk like us isn't worth a whole lot anymore (if it ever was).
Africa? That is all pretty hit and miss
India? That is perhaps the best option to date
But
So, there may well be nowhere to run, and perhaps this battle isn't as irrelevant to those who are outside of the United States as they might like to think.