Unfortunately the inexepensive whores we elected to office and their clients, the RIAA, MPAA, and various other Copyright Cartels and Information Barons are not stupid. Anyone with even a modicum of foresight can see the brain drain that is looming on the horizon for the United States as the Copyright Cartels and their lackeys, the United States Government, get down to strictly and ubiquitiously enforcing a law which defines criminality so widely that nearly every citizen is in some respect "guilty" and bans common (and necessary) engineering practices such as reverse engineering.
In a relatively "free" market situation those most threatened, in this case programmers, software engineers, and security experts, would simply take their expertise elsewhere (Europe, Australia, or Latin America for example) until the United States feels the economic pinch of having no one willing to take the risk of writing software within its borders and mends its way.
These Cartels are worldwide, and their influence is really unmatched by anyone. The Disneys, Time-Warners, and Bertelsmanns of the world had the entire industrialized world on the brink of opening a trade war with China over copyright violations... an action that might have led to actual military conflict had China not backed down, and something which entailed economic risks for the west which were completely out of proportion to the "damage" being done by such violations.
They are using this influece to strike pre-emptively, to get the whole G8 world on board before a brain drain of this kind can occur. What good does it do me, or anyone else, to give up one's comfortable life and flee the potential of having the FBI break down my door and imprison me for, say, having recorded music digitally off the radio or having downloaded MP3s if, by moving, I simply trade one set of thugs for another?
If the laws are similar everywhere, nothing is disrupted, there is no brain drain, the United States never feels the natural consiquences of what they've done, and any pressures to reform the law or put an end to the Ludditesque witch hunts which have followed are neatly defused.
I fear that the future is quite ugly for all intelligent, free thinking people everywhere. --
Did you forget the sarcasm tags or do you really feel that way about our country? Calm down.
Having lived in the United States most of my life (including the last 8 years or so), and having lived for many years elsewhere (including Europe and Japan), and having travelled around the entire globe on two seperate occasions, I am under no illusion whatsoever that our country is the "freest" country on Earth: it isn't by a very long shot. Nor is it the worst place on earth.
It does, however, have much more in common with most "third world" countries I have visited than with the democracies of western Europe or even Japan. Western Europe (the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany in particular) has a much higher level of personal freedom than is accorded Americans by our government, and while Japan for various cultural regions isn't a bastion of democracy, it joins western Europe in providing basic amenities to all of its citizens (that dirty word "socialism" again).
The squalor one sees in the major cities of the Unites States (including tens of miles of it not too far south of my own home in Chicago) is matched only in places like Delhi, Mexico City, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, and the like. Not by Tokyo, not by Berlin, not by Paris, not even by London.
Corruption? Yes, it exists everywhere, but not with the flagrance of the United States. Again, to come close to matching the kind of things one sees here, such as the DMCA and dissappearance of engineers who upset large corporations, you must travel to places like Indonesia, El Salvador, and Russia.
The only thing keeping the United States out of the list of "third world" nations is our raw wealth, 98 per cent of which is controlled by less than 1 per cent of our population.
Factor in human rights, political corruption, environmental policies and by many people's reconing the United States would already qualify for third world status, our notorious wealth notwithstanding.
"Calm down." Good Lord, that is what Americans have been doing for over thirty years, and that is why we have become fat, slothful, and too lazy to even consider speaking out to defend our own basic rights, much less the rights of foreign visitors taken into custody by our own, home grown, secret police, and then held incommunicado for days, weeks, months, sometimes years, and in at least one instance executed in direct violation of international norms and the Geneva Convention without having ever been allowed to speak with his consulate.
Don't believe me? Do some research. The information is there, it just isn't being spoon fed to you on the evening news by Dan Rather.
Once you've informed yourself a little bit I suggest you get out and see a some of the world outside of this one country you seem to place so much blind faith and trust in (and no, the hotel room, the lobby, the taxi, and the office of your branch office in Madrid don't count, any more than they would if that were all you'd seen of the United States. Then again, perhaps it is that very deficiency which prompted your knee-jerk reaction to my earlier post. Or perhaps it hit a nerve, being so close to home.) --
Now it has turned out that I'll be doing my post-doctorate studies in the US next year and the Sklyarov case got me thinking if I might be in trouble because of my DeCSS mirroring. After all the MPAA lawyers argued that I was in breach of DCMA.
Why on earth would you do something so foolish as to come to the United States, particularly after Dmitry Sklyarov has disappeared into our Gulag for violating the very same law?
Any ideas?
Yes. Go somewhere else to do your graduate work. Do not risk imprisonment in the United States... unlike most civilized countries we are very bad about letting foreign nationals see their consulates or government representatives (we have even executed people without ever granting them this right, which is supposedly guaranteed by the Geneva Convention). We may be wealthy, but in most respects we are very much a third world nation, one whose corrupt politicians now have it in for programmers and free speech proponents such as yourself.
Unless you would like to become another martyr for the disappearing liberties of a fat and lazy people who couldn't be bothered to care for themselves, much less some foreigh "troublemaker," I would strongly suggest finding a less oppressive country in which to study and not take the risk. --
So, because everyone isn't touting your particular cause you feel they shouldn't tout any cause, or fight any injustice? Not to be rude, but what have you been smoking?
The War on Drugs is appalling. The obliteration of the fourth amendment that resulted was predicted and dismissed back in the early 80's in almost exactly the same way the obliteration of the first amendment was predicted when the DMCA was passed in the late 90's. The result, a terribble erosion of our fundamental rights with nary a complaint from the mindless, spoonfed masses.
The government has a very long and very dark history of picking minorities (blacks, native americans, youthful males with long hair, recreational drug users, high school misfits, and now programmers) and stomping their rights in the name of a photo opportunity or two, and an opportunity to feed whatever the public hysteria of the moment happens to be.
Saying "I don't care, they aren't part of my group" is exactly what enables this sort of serial, unconstitutional abuse to succeed. At any given moment the majority of the people are fat, well fed, and happy... only a small group is being actively persecuted. The message to the majority is simple: don't rock the boat or you might be next. By showing interest in only your parochial problems (or cause celebre) and dismissing everyone else's issues and injustices you place yourself squarely amongst those who are allowing, indeed facilitating, all of these abuses, including the very ones you rail against.
Grow up, and look beyond your own interests for a moment. You'll be shocked at the number of people who, because of what they are going through, are more likely to be open to your point of view on your particular issues as well, through bitter personal experience. But not if you dismiss their problems while touting your own (which are as irrelevant to them as their's are to you).
Injustice must be resisted and fought, everywhere, in every context, or we shall all lose our freedom. This is a bitter lesson our parent's never bothered to teach us, and now things have progressed sufficiently far that we're all going to have the opportunity to learn it the hard way. Would that it were otherwise. --
If this weren't so tragic it would be funny. Corporate America is essentially whining "Mommy! The world doesn't work the way I want it to, make it go away!" Unfortunately there is a very good chance that the cheap whores we've elected, or had appointed to office "on our behalf," will do exactly what these losers (in every sense of the word) want.
Capitalism relies on scarcity to function. Scarcity of food, scarcity of land, scarcity of medicine, scarcity of products. If something is not scarce, but rather abundant, then no "free" market can form around it. The air we breath is an obvious example of something so abundant and readilly available that no one would consider paying just to breath it. Water in many places is similar. Now, of course, even something as abundant as air can have value added (the oxygen cafes in California come to mind, as do pressurized oxygen systems for aircraft and scuba divers), but as it stands, in its raw state, its value is orthogonal to the capitalist system. Not valueless, for none of us would live ten minutes without it (making it perhaps one of the most valuable things around), but intractible as far as applying the Capitalist paradigm to it.
Socialism and Communism presuppose a level of abundance at least sufficient to provide "everyone" with certain basic products. As the physical world rarely has such abundance, such systems falter and even fail because of their conflict with our physical reality and the scarcity of the products and services their adherents generally want, things like food, electricity, and such. On the other hand, every nation on the planet practices communism in its pure form every day with respect to air... the oxygen I breath may be produced by your tree, but I breath it nevertheless. Why? Because it is so abundant that no amount of pro-capitalist or anti-socialist posturing, demagaugary, or hysteria is going to get anyone to seriously consider paying for the air they breath. The only way something like that would happen is if breathable air were to become scarce, as it would be for colonists in space, or citizens of a world so polluted that nature's natural sources of oxygen became unusable.
So to with information in the internet age. Take away the virtually free replication and distribution of information and we would be back to where we were twenty years ago, where information was scarce not because of its inherent nature, but because of the limited means available to distribute and share it. At one time this wasn't the case, when a culture's entire informational wealth was handed down from elder to youth in the form of folk lore, tribal rights, music, and so forth.
The internet was designed to allow information to flow freely, to be shared as widely as needed, and to become as ubiquitious, and as plentiful, as air. It has to a large part succeeded, so much so that the Information Barrons and Copyright Cartels have been falling over themselves bribing lawmakers in nearly every developed nation to pass some equivelent of the DMCA, the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act, and various anti-hacking and anti-speech laws.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as capitalism, on the internet, where information is as abundant as air, will have consiquences at least as bad as those efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as commmunism, on a world of physical scarcity. Legislation designed to do so will be at least as draconian as that which once governed the Soviet Union, perhaps even more so as even the Soviets never tried to charge for, nor ubiquitiously monitor, their citizen's use of oxygen.
We've already seen the kind of "free" world the Copyright Cartels and Information Barrons are persuing through their use of the DMCA to silence speech, drag 14-year old programmers from their homes in the middle of the night *cough* Motion Picture Association of America *cough*, and imprison visiting software engineers for exposing fraudulant marketing of products by large American corporations *cough* Adobe *cough*.
Is it really surprising the same people are now trying to make the most liberating and empowering medium ever created, the internet, simply go away? --
Making the entire book available is a nice gesture by O'Reilly.
This wasn't a "gesture" by O'Reilly so much as a gesture by the Book's author. O'Reilly will agree to publish authors who insist on it to release their work under the FDL, but the authors must explicity request this (O'Reilly doesn't volunteer the information that they allow it, and to all appearances would prefer authors not do so. At least, that has been their stance in the past according to several people I spoke with... perhaps that has changed as FDLed documentation has continued to sell, and thus make O'Reilly a profit, anyway).
The Free Software Foundation is really pushing for all documentation about Free Software to be released under the FDL, which they crafted with the help of some very big publishers (I want to say Random House but I don't think that is correct... I recall being very surprised at which publishers had given the FSF constructive feedback when they were writing the FDL, but no longer recall which Houses they were. This is an important point as the goal was to create a license which would allow publishers to make a profit while preserving the freedom of the information contained within the books being sold).
O'Reilly does deserve some credit for allowing authors to do this (and some criticism for being relatively mum about the option when signing authors), but the Author is clearly the one who deserves our highest praise, the best form of which would be purchasing his book and supporting his decision as well as underscoring O'Reilly's wisdom in allowing it. --
While my feelings on gun control are ambivelent at best -- Western Europe has less crime, but look at what happened in the balkans without the "check" gun-advocates argue private gun ownership helps hold our governments in check, and consider Switzerland, in which virtually every adult citizen is required to own and have ready a firearm, and the picture becomes decidedly more confused, leading a reasonable person to suppose other influences in the lower crime rates, like (gasp) more social justice and a less uneven distribution of wealth, leading to less privation and desparation overall than what one typically sees in the United States.
Be that as it may, the statistic you question does appear to be in reference to guns being used in offenses:
An independent report, Illegal Firearms in the UK, to be published by the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London tomorrow, says that handguns were used in 3,685 offences last year compared with 2,648 in 1997, an increase of 40 per cent.[Bamber, 2001]
While not beyond the realm of possibility that one might cook the statistics by including gun possession and misdefining possession as "use," were that the case I think we would be hearing about it from the pro-gun control side of the issue, loudly. It would, in fact, be an outright lie to use the word "used" in conjunction with mere passive possession, so while I don't comletely rule out your scenerio for pro-gun people cooking the stats, I do consider it to be very, very unlikely in this particular case.
I don't know exactly where I come down on this debate, except to say that the more I watch my own government in action in Washington, particularly with respect to the DMCA and Dmitry, the less inclined I am to trust their motives in taking away my right to own a firearm. On the other hand, living in downtown Chicago I don't have such a right anyway (handguns are illegal in the city, and other firearms strongly discouraged)[1], so any arguments pro- or con- are necessarilly rather theoretical from my standpoint.
[1]Of course, only the police and the criminals (by definition... the joys of writing laws is that anyone who acts in opposition to such law is automatically a criminal, making the entire injustice system rather circular in definition.
I don't see why you think forcing companies who orphan software (and forced upgrades to incompatible systems is certainly a form of orphanage) to GPL the product is so bad.
The original intent of copyright was that it be for a limited time. Only an ethically corrupt and morally bankrupt lawyer would interpret "life plus seventy five years" or "ninety years" (both significantly longer than the average human lifespan) to be 'limited' in any real sense of the word beyond the most technical (and in that technical sense a billion years would be a limited time, and clearly out of bounds of what the constitution was intended to allow).
Originally copyrights were 17 years in length, at which time the copyrighted material became public domain. Forcing Microsoft and other makers of proprietary software to GPL their products after they've been orphaned would actually be kinder (from their point of view) than returning copyright limits to their original length (which, IMnsHO is exactly what should be done) as GPLed software couldn't be used in a competing proprietary product the way public domain (or FreeBSD Licensed) code can.
Such a resolution would certainly be in the spirit of what was intended with copyright law when the constitution was written, and would do a lot to restore the shattered balance of the consumers' rights versus those of the copyright holder. Having said that, I'd much prefer the entire morass of Windows code remain proprietary and disappear into that proprietary black hole that has swallowed so many unreleased copyrighted material, never to see the light of day even after the copyright has expired and it would have entered the public domain. Losing that code could only be a service to humankind, but I digress...
...if Sklyarov as a foreign traveller still enjoys the same 1st amendment rights as US citizens while speaking in the US?
My first reaction to your question was to say "of course!" but then the laws have become so twisted in the last twenty years or so in order to support the War on Drugs (for example, laws which clearly violate the 4th amendment have been upheld by the courts because of "compelling state interest," which basically means the supreme court acknowledges that the laws violate the constitution, but think they're a good idea anyway and so refrain from striking them down... an impeachable offense if there ever was one, but unfortunately I don't think supreme court justices can be impeached. Then there are the concentration... excuse me, "boot"... camps we run for drug offendors, about which the less said the better it seems, and the silence surrounding these shadowy affairs is disturbing to say the least. Did I say "concentration camp?" I meant "happy camp."), and our first amendment rights so eroded that the answer to your question must be "that is a damn good question!"
As an American I assume all of the basic rights (speech, bear arms, religion, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, due process, etc.) apply to everyone equally, citizen or not. However, the law does appear to treat foreigners somewhat differently than citizens (playing it fast and loose with due process for deportation, for example) that I am forced to wonder just how deep into the system those differences carry.
According to commonly accepted American mores everyone should have the same rights regardless of creed, ethnicity, or citizenship (sans voting, of course, which is reserved for citizens). However, it becomes clearer each day that the mores of America are at severe odds with the mores of our government, the cheap whores who occupy its highest offices, and the lawyers who draft and interpret the legislation. Where that will lead who knows, but I must admit I find the Shakespearean Solution rather appealing these days ("hang all the [IP] lawyers").
As much as I hate the DMCA and all it stands for (the repression of speech, the creation of "thought crimes," the criminalization of standard engineering practices, and the elevation of corporate greed and profits above the basic rights of the individual to name a few), it is in no way Dmitry's responsibility to suffer in prison to defened our (America's) rights.
Where were we when the DMCA was being passed? Where were we when the 2600 case was being fought? How many of us did anything beyond bitching on slashdot? How many of us joined the EFF? How many of us have written our representatives to express our displeasure? For that matter, how many of us voted in the last election (Floridians are excepted, as their votes were only selectively counted anyway)?
It is our responsibility (those of us who are residents and citizens of the United States) to put an end to this obscenity (the DMCA) and the injustice it incurrs. Not a visiting Russian programmer whos only real crime is to speak out against a large company's flawed, perhaps even fraudulant, product.
Dmitry should do what he needs to get get free, and get clear of this repressive nation, and we should support him in doing so, not expect him to fight our battles for us (however tempting it may be). However, we should not be shy in using this situation to put the case forward to those who do not understand the issues, and to make it known far and wide what has happened so that neither the government nor Adobe ever live this abuse of power down.
A complete synopsis of the email exchange released by the Center for Defense Information reveals that the flaws in Microsoft's SQL server were serious, and seriously affected both the American and Russian systems for tracking nuclear materials.
Nuclear material may or may not have been misplaced or diverted. What is certain, however, is that currently neither country has complete track of its materials as a direct result of the aforementioned software bugs in Microsoft's SQL server, and the cost of reinventorying the materials will cost on the order of one billion US dollars for the United States alone. Furthermore, if materials have been diverted from within the US inventory, the diversion will not be identified by the reinventorying methods available. This situation is unambiguously a result of the problems both teams have had with Microsoft's SQL server, coupled with the fact that the bugs weren't identified until the project was well underway.
You may deny, deny, deny as much as you like, but the public record is clear and unambiguous, and, once again, the fault lies squarely on Microsoft's incompetent shoulders.
Its not that he found the problem, people always do that. He was selling software that cracks it for $99. Did everyone forget that?
No. His employer was selling the software for $99 in a country where the software was not only legal, but in which, in order for Adobe's software to be at all legal, the existence of the program was required.
Dmitry doesn't "own" the company that employs him, he works there. Would any of us want to be held accountable for our employer's behavior, however benign. While throwing Bill Gates in jail for Microsoft's behavior might seem reasonable, clearly throwing some low-level Microsoft programmer in jail for incompetent programming, or writing a piece of software used to illegally leverage Microsoft's monopoly, wouldn't be at all acceptable.
Yet that is very analogous to what happened here. The guy gave a speech on how software he helped develop (and was being sold by his employer in Russia, which last I checked isn't subject to US law). He gave no specifics, merely made it clear that Adobe's copy protection is virtually nonexistent. For that constitutionally protected speech he was carted off by the FBI, held without bail, and denied access to his Consulate while who-knows-what psychological games were played with his mind (not to mention outright interrogation techniques).
It never ceases to amaze me what levels pro-copyright zealots will stoop to in order to defend the indefensible.
The problem is people hate account security and won't use it. They don't like the bother of having to log out, closing everything they were doing, and log in as someone else just to install a new app. Heck, half the *linux* users I know log in as root all the time!
Be that as it may (and you certainly know a different breed of GNU/Linux users than I... even my mother doesn't mind logging into her GNU/Linux box), it is no excuse for building a system which even the most conscientious user cannot secure because the design (or lack thereof) simply makes it impossible.
It is one thing for foolish users to undermine or gut existing security features. It is another to make the features non-existent, then blame the users with "well, it's what they would have done on their own anyway." People aren't generally as stupid as we like to think... I've had numerous Windows users ask me how they can secure their system ("firewall" I tell them and, if they are serious, "switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, because even a firewall can't effectively protect a system as ridden with exploits as Windows." You'd be surprised at how many of them fall over themselves to install and learn a new system.)
I'm all for M$ bashing - when they deserved to be bashed (and there are plenty of areas where they deserve this). But in this case, the article is nothing more than anti-M$ propoganda.
No. The article is either pro-Microsoft spin couched as innefectual criticism or profoundly incompetently written. If you check the referenced source material you'll find that, in fact, there were severe bugs related solely to Microsoft's SQL Server which have not only compromised the Russian nuclear tracking system, but even more severely compromised the American nuclear tracking system. What is worse, the Russians were wise enough to keep their manual system intact as a check, despite ridecule from their American colleagues. The United States, on the other hand, has had no manual system or check of any kind in place. Verifying the American stockpiles will cost on the order of a Billion US Dollars and will not detect any material which has already been diverted.
Los Alamos has verified the bugs, both in the version of SQL server the Russians were using and in the version Microsoft recommended they upgrade to.
Microsoft spin and apologist propoganda aside, this fiasco is real, has truly shocking and horrifying security implications for the entire planet, and is absolutely inexcusable. Of course, inexcusable lapses on the part of Microsoft and the quality of their proprietary products is hardly new or surprising, but it remains news so long as their shoddy products continue to dominate the market through marketing misrepresentation and public ignorance of the facts.
Here in Chicago I got email today about the noon protest(s), which the EFF had announced in previous days was "on hold." Alas I got busy putting together a couple of new machines ande didn't see the email until the protests were over, so while I was all set last Friday to take a couple of hours off around noon-time and join the protests, I ended up missing them altogether as a direct result of the EFF's notice to hold off. I am understandably quite annoyed.
The EFF's conduct (disclaimer: I am a paying member of the EFF) in this aspect of the entire issue was unhelpful, to say the least. Which is probably exactly what Adobe intended by scheduling the talks for today, while Dmitry rots in an undisclosed jail somewhere.
Adobe's attourney-goons and PR droids aren't stupid... they almost certainly expected this outcry when they had Dmitry arrested, and this action to diminish any protests was almost certainly calculated for just that effect. What is annoying is the EFF's role in taking that bait hook, line, and sinker.
The appropriate approach would have been to continue the call for protests and have the protests go on while negotiating. This is typically what is done by other groups, Unions, etc. Caving before-the-fact and calling off protests just to get the other side to the negotiating table is not how one goes about strengthening one's hand, or one's cause...
If a silicon-based one was possible, Earth was the perfect planet for it.
Well, perhaps not. If carbon life is 100,000 times more likely to develop than silocon life (for reasons mentioned elsewhere sucn as silicon's weaker binding properties and lower reactiveness in simple compounds), and earth has 10,000 times more silicon than carbon, then under those conditions carbon based life is still 10 times more likely to develop than silocon based life. This by no means rules out silocon based life at all. Indeed, perhaps the presence of carbon, even in smaller amounts than silicon, was sufficient for carbon based life to evolve first, preventing any silicon life from ever developing (or outcompeting it in the primordial soup, which amounts to much the same thing).
In which case earth would not be the perfect place for silicon based life to develop, as it has been "poisoned" by the presence of carbon. This does not remotely prove, or even strongly imply, that silicon life can't and won't develop elsewhere. It merely suggests that, in earthlike conditions, carbon life is much, much more likely to develop. Even that is uncertain, as we have but one data sample, namely the Earth. The opposite could well be true: maybe silicon life is ten times more likely to develop than carbon based life, but we are one of the "ten percent" which have, nevertheless, developed carbon based life. Without additional datapoints (other worlds) the best we can do is make suppositions about this sort of thing, and any supposition we do make is necessarilly suspect.
I'm sure a lot of people here are going to go out and blame Microsoft for the Outlook-virus-of-the-week. But the fact is, Microsoft is just giving the user what they want.
Good Lord.
This reminds me, almost word for word, of statements typically made by rapists and child molesters. While the situation is vastly different (thankfully), the behavior of the guilty party, Microsoft, is appallingly similar: refuse responsibility for one's own actions and blame the victim.
The cause of these (now almost cliched) viruses is, quite simply, the appallingly lax security in the Microsoft Operating System and mail utilities, a lack of which is unequaled anywhere else in the computing world. Whether by design, negligence, or simple incompetence the fact remains: if you run any version of Windows, IIS, or Outlook, you are vulnerable to this sort of thing regardless of how savvy or cautious a user you are, and there is little or nothing you can do to protect yourself. Indeed, by the time you know of the exploit (assuming you are savvy enough to keep up on such things, which IMHO is asking far more of the user than simply learning a few basic commands a la GNU/Linux or DOS, much less a few GUI variations from with Windows paradigm a la Mac, KDE, or Gnome) chances are the malicious crackers have been exploiting it for weeks or even months.
Contrast this with the rest of the computing world, in which exploits are published and fixed as soon as they are found (and usually found by the product developers and/or testers before they are exploited), and in which the basic security paradigms allow one to secure the system in as paranoid a fashion as the situation requires, and the mind truly boggles at Microsoft's inability to at least match the quality of competing products such as Mac OS/X, the various *BSD flavors, and GNU/Linux.
It is bad enough that Microsoft appears incapable of building a secure system. It is even worse that they knowingly market an insecure and unstable system as though it were secure and stable (were there still any kind of "truth in advertising" requirements they would certainly be paying hefty fines for falsly marketing their products). It is unconscionable that they refuse to accept responsibility for their own engineering, choosing instead to blame the victims of its failure: their customers.
Hatch also threatened that if they don't quit being an ass about fair use he'll codify a law explicitly laying down what fair use is and what rights consumers have, and promised that the RIAA et al. won't like it.
But let's not disclose facts inconvenient to our arguments, right?
It is very, very counterproductive to cast the DMCA fiasco in terms of Republican's vs. Democrats. I do not like Republicans and will never forgive them the twelve Reagan-Bush years that gave us such treasures as an ongoing war on drugs (which is in fact a war on our youth and our civili liberties), Iran-Contra, Desert Storm, and so forth, but Jeff DeMaagd is absolutely right in pointing out that Orin Hatch, who may deserve our contempt for many of his stances and policies, is AFAIK the only congressman to come forward and publically admit that the DMCA was a mistake. For that he wins some respect from me.
Of course, talk is cheap. Until Hatch actually translates his regret into action and works to repeal the law he will remain nothing more than Yet Another Political Windbag.
However, I reiterate, this isn't about Conservatives vs. Liberals (a conservative congress wrote and passed the law, and a relatively liberal president signed it), this is about Corporatism vs. Individualism and the rights of the common man vs. the raw might of those synthetic capitalist beings we call corporations. Until we set aside our differences on other agendas and unite to lobby and effect change on those issues we do agree on, such as individual liberty, the civil rights of the common man, and the need to overturn the DMCA, those who benefit from such draconian laws will continue to ride roughshod over the rest of us.
Seriously though, I found Debian a bit too staid, and before I found out about sid, woody, etc., I had picked up progeny.
I too found Debian too staid, back in the days when there were only two options: running the stable (but archaic) version or running the unstable (bleeding edge "your system may not boot today") version, but all that changed some time ago.
Debian has improved vastly... so much so that when Mandrake 8.0 wouldn't install on my notebook and had problems on my desktop I gave it a new look and haven't looked back yet.
Debian now has three choices:
1) The stable but staid release
2) The testing release (which is more stable that most other distro's final releases, but keeps you very current nevertheless)
3) the bleeding edge unstable release.
(to give you an idea of the difference between #2 and #3, testing gives you X 4.0.3 with KDE 2.1.2 while #3 gives you X 4.1 and KDE 2.2-beta. Even unstable is usable, though from time to time packages break, which is why I prefer to run Testing instead).
I am actually using "testing" in several production environments with less stress and more solidity than I had running Mandrake 7.2, Suse (forget the exact version) or red hat.
With debian the trade off is doing the work up front (its installation is nowhere near as easy as Mandrake, for example, though it has improved dramatically) vs. doing it later (when it is time to apply those security patches or upgrade... if you've tried using any of the other distributions' upgrade utilities you understand the pain first hand. Debian relieves that pain... making upgrades as snappy and easy as typing two commands: "apt-get udpate" and "apt-get dist-upgrade"). Of course, on systems with diskspace enough for two installations (most these days with 40 GB IDE drives selling at less than $200) I cheat and install with Mandrake, then install debian and copy over the configuraitons I need. On my laptop I cheated with Progeny, then pointed/etc/apt/sources.list at Debian testing and did a dist-upgrade to run stock Debian testing, so even the upfront work can be eased significantly.
The real payoff... upgrades and maintenance over time, which with Debian has already lightened my workload immensly.
Slashdot routinely promotes (or promoted) DVDs, movies, music CDs, and other products from the two industries which have attacked the Free Software movement more aggressively and more effectively than Microsoft ever has: the Recording Industry Association of Amaerica (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
While I boycott both of those industries, and have for over a year and a half now, it is because I personally have chosen to give up immediate consumer gratification in order to remain at least somewhat true to my conscience.
Slashdot, on the other hand, bemoans the attacks on one hand and actively markets their products on the other, indirectly putting even more money into the pockets of those who are financing litigious thuggary against free software volunteers. Despicable, but they have presumably decided that playing both sides against the middle enhances their bottom line in some fashion, perhaps through increased readership, add revinue, or some other less obvious mechanism. Or perhaps the editors are simply as unable to go without their instant consumer gratification as most of America is and thus are attending the opening night of movies like Final Fantasy the movie because they cannot be bothered to wait (when nearly every penny opening night goes to the hollywood studios rather than the local theatre, as opposed to seeing the movie 4 weeks later when nearly every penny goes to the local theatre instead) because they simply cannot live a day without their bread and circuses, never mind social, political, or economic consiquences.
Sites like slashdot and kuro5hin (which has seriously declined over the last few weeks, sufficiently so that I removed links to it on my own website) are not where we should be looking for "leadership" or even significant support. If any of us are really serious about reclaiming our rights we need to organize our own political action groups, and/or support existing ones such as the FSF and the EFF. K5, slashdot, and their ilk have shown themselves to be fair weather activists at best, ready to run back to the couch and submit to the mindless drone of the television and whatever the media moguls are feeding us at the first hint of seeing something new or shiny.
As I understand it, many European countries (including Russia) require by law that the consumer be able to make at least one copy of any data or software sold as a backup. By preventing this, Adobe ebooks is actually illegal software in these countries (wouldn't it be delicious irony if the CEO of Adobe were imprisoned while on a European vacation for selling illegal products... but I digress).
Wouldn't the same thing apply to these CDs... by implimenting copy protection schemes which prevent the customer from making legal, fair use copies they are, in fact, violating the law of several European countries and therefor cannot sell those CDs there? If such a CD should be bought in one of those locations *cough* Amazon *cough* then wouldn't the publisher(s) be subject to civil and perhaps criminal prosecution?
Rot-13 wasn't really used as encryption on USENET. There was no secret key or password, no confidential information so protected (if some foolish neophyte did post a "private" message using rot-13 they were profoundly mistaken in its use, and doubtless learned a humiliating lesson... just like Adobe).
Rot-13 was used to prevent the accidental reading of a USENET posting which might be offensive to the reader. Things like explicitly sexual or graphic stories would typically be rot-13ed, with a plaintext note prepended saying, in effect, "the following may be very offensive to you so I've encoded it with rot-13, use the 'r' key in your newsreader to decode and view the text if you're sure you want to read what follows."
For a company to adopt such a scheme, with such a history, as a fundamental part of its so-called content protection product is to defraud its customers, in particular the content providors who have been misled to believe their content is, in fact, protected. To then seek to hide their incompetence behind an ill-considered law such as the DMCA and arrest the whistle blower on criminal charges is, itself, profoundly criminal.
Imagine if safety issues were involved, such as incompetently written medical software, and the whistle blower we being treated like this. There would be a justifiable public outcry and demand that the perpetrators of the fraud should be punished, perhaps even imprisoned. This is no different -- public fraud has been committed and those guilty are misusing our corrupt legal system to incarcerate the person who has publicly exposed them. Unconscionable, as are the despicable/. posts I see here supporting the arrests as somehow "appropriate" or "technically ok." At no level is this kind of injustice tolerable or ever even remotely alright, whether it is cloaked in the thin guise of ethically bankrupt American law or not.
It does not take a pollster to tell you that users of a "free as in beer" operating system are on the whole not interested in buying new hardware every few years. We may be cheap, but we have incredibly high standards as well. These don't tend to mix well.
I use GNU/Linux because of its features, stability, speed, and, most importantly, the freedom it imparts on me to do my personal and work-related projects in the manner I choose, rather than that to which my vendor constrains me. I do not use it for price (although free as in beer is a nice frosting on the freedom-in-general cake).
I am also not cheap when it comes to hardware (and I suspect most of us who work in IT as a living are not, just as most of us who are still in school and living on a college budget are). I have a renderfarm of two dual 733 MHz GNU/Linux boxes at home for my blender projects, along with a dual 1 GHz GNU/Linux box as my primary workstation for video capture, editing, and as a third ad-hoc node on the renderfarm when it isn't busy doing something else. All with very nice video, huge amounts of memory, obscene amounts of disk space, etc. I do recycle old equipment... my old K6/233 machine is now my firewall (gotta love OpenBSD and GNU/Linux for that).
I am preparing to purchase a good color printer to replace the epson which has since died and refused to respond to treatment (nozzle declogging, etc.). The printer will likely be an HP, although that is not yet certain.
What is certain is that every piece of hardware, from the standalone Sony analog->firewire converter to the Hauppauge capture board to the nVidia video card to the Intel NetportExpress printserver absolutely must work with GNU/Linux, either via vendor support or third party, volunteer efforts. Otherwise I do not purchase the hardware, period.
I do not own a copy of Windows (I build my own machines, thereby saving money, getting better components, and avoiding the payment of the Microsoft OEM tax), nor do I plan to ever own a copy of windows. Nor does my mother, my sister, my cousin, or any number of other people I have built and installed computers for.
They all run GNU/Linux, and any hardware purchases they make have as a necessary and uncompromising requirement that it work with their system, and not require them to go out and buy software they neither want nor need.
In all these cases it is usability, reliability, and freedom which resulted in the choice of software and hardware used, not price. Indeed, price was only a factor in one of the installations (which, being free, naturally contributed to reaching the same decision).
Users aren't stupid, nor are they blind and uncomprehending of the implications of Microsoft's new licensing policies,.NET architecture, and XP product registration-key requirements once they are told about it. Nor is GNU/Linux (or *BSD if you prefer) beyond the average person's ability to grasp, if they are given time, encouragement, and friendly help along the way.
The problem is that mainstream media hasn't made that reality abundently clear to everyone yet, so many are as yet unaware of the truly draconian conditions Microsoft is placing on the use of their software, nor are they aware of the relatively modest amount of effort required to learn how to use a new operating system.
This is slowly changing though, despite Microsoft's best anti-Free Software FUD efforts. I know several other non-techie types who want me to install GNU/Linux for them, if ever I get the time. They have come to me... no evangelizing required. Once again price isn't the issue -- they already own the requisite licenses. Freedom, reliability, and quality are the issue, and Free Software wins on all those counts hands-down, a few antisocial punks and Taco's rant notwithstanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the inexepensive whores we elected to office and their clients, the RIAA, MPAA, and various other Copyright Cartels and Information Barons are not stupid. Anyone with even a modicum of foresight can see the brain drain that is looming on the horizon for the United States as the Copyright Cartels and their lackeys, the United States Government, get down to strictly and ubiquitiously enforcing a law which defines criminality so widely that nearly every citizen is in some respect "guilty" and bans common (and necessary) engineering practices such as reverse engineering.
... an action that might have led to actual military conflict had China not backed down, and something which entailed economic risks for the west which were completely out of proportion to the "damage" being done by such violations.
In a relatively "free" market situation those most threatened, in this case programmers, software engineers, and security experts, would simply take their expertise elsewhere (Europe, Australia, or Latin America for example) until the United States feels the economic pinch of having no one willing to take the risk of writing software within its borders and mends its way.
These Cartels are worldwide, and their influence is really unmatched by anyone. The Disneys, Time-Warners, and Bertelsmanns of the world had the entire industrialized world on the brink of opening a trade war with China over copyright violations
They are using this influece to strike pre-emptively, to get the whole G8 world on board before a brain drain of this kind can occur. What good does it do me, or anyone else, to give up one's comfortable life and flee the potential of having the FBI break down my door and imprison me for, say, having recorded music digitally off the radio or having downloaded MP3s if, by moving, I simply trade one set of thugs for another?
If the laws are similar everywhere, nothing is disrupted, there is no brain drain, the United States never feels the natural consiquences of what they've done, and any pressures to reform the law or put an end to the Ludditesque witch hunts which have followed are neatly defused.
I fear that the future is quite ugly for all intelligent, free thinking people everywhere.
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Ugh! I need to proofread better. The above should read
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Did you forget the sarcasm tags or do you really feel that way about our country? Calm down.
Having lived in the United States most of my life (including the last 8 years or so), and having lived for many years elsewhere (including Europe and Japan), and having travelled around the entire globe on two seperate occasions, I am under no illusion whatsoever that our country is the "freest" country on Earth: it isn't by a very long shot. Nor is it the worst place on earth.
It does, however, have much more in common with most "third world" countries I have visited than with the democracies of western Europe or even Japan. Western Europe (the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany in particular) has a much higher level of personal freedom than is accorded Americans by our government, and while Japan for various cultural regions isn't a bastion of democracy, it joins western Europe in providing basic amenities to all of its citizens (that dirty word "socialism" again).
The squalor one sees in the major cities of the Unites States (including tens of miles of it not too far south of my own home in Chicago) is matched only in places like Delhi, Mexico City, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, and the like. Not by Tokyo, not by Berlin, not by Paris, not even by London.
Corruption? Yes, it exists everywhere, but not with the flagrance of the United States. Again, to come close to matching the kind of things one sees here, such as the DMCA and dissappearance of engineers who upset large corporations, you must travel to places like Indonesia, El Salvador, and Russia.
The only thing keeping the United States out of the list of "third world" nations is our raw wealth, 98 per cent of which is controlled by less than 1 per cent of our population.
Factor in human rights, political corruption, environmental policies and by many people's reconing the United States would already qualify for third world status, our notorious wealth notwithstanding.
"Calm down." Good Lord, that is what Americans have been doing for over thirty years, and that is why we have become fat, slothful, and too lazy to even consider speaking out to defend our own basic rights, much less the rights of foreign visitors taken into custody by our own, home grown, secret police, and then held incommunicado for days, weeks, months, sometimes years, and in at least one instance executed in direct violation of international norms and the Geneva Convention without having ever been allowed to speak with his consulate.
Don't believe me? Do some research. The information is there, it just isn't being spoon fed to you on the evening news by Dan Rather.
Once you've informed yourself a little bit I suggest you get out and see a some of the world outside of this one country you seem to place so much blind faith and trust in (and no, the hotel room, the lobby, the taxi, and the office of your branch office in Madrid don't count, any more than they would if that were all you'd seen of the United States. Then again, perhaps it is that very deficiency which prompted your knee-jerk reaction to my earlier post. Or perhaps it hit a nerve, being so close to home.)
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Now it has turned out that I'll be doing my post-doctorate studies in the US next year and the Sklyarov case got me thinking if I might be in trouble because of my DeCSS mirroring. After all the MPAA lawyers argued that I was in breach of DCMA.
... unlike most civilized countries we are very bad about letting foreign nationals see their consulates or government representatives (we have even executed people without ever granting them this right, which is supposedly guaranteed by the Geneva Convention). We may be wealthy, but in most respects we are very much a third world nation, one whose corrupt politicians now have it in for programmers and free speech proponents such as yourself.
Why on earth would you do something so foolish as to come to the United States, particularly after Dmitry Sklyarov has disappeared into our Gulag for violating the very same law?
Any ideas?
Yes. Go somewhere else to do your graduate work. Do not risk imprisonment in the United States
Unless you would like to become another martyr for the disappearing liberties of a fat and lazy people who couldn't be bothered to care for themselves, much less some foreigh "troublemaker," I would strongly suggest finding a less oppressive country in which to study and not take the risk.
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So, because everyone isn't touting your particular cause you feel they shouldn't tout any cause, or fight any injustice? Not to be rude, but what have you been smoking?
... only a small group is being actively persecuted. The message to the majority is simple: don't rock the boat or you might be next. By showing interest in only your parochial problems (or cause celebre) and dismissing everyone else's issues and injustices you place yourself squarely amongst those who are allowing, indeed facilitating, all of these abuses, including the very ones you rail against.
The War on Drugs is appalling. The obliteration of the fourth amendment that resulted was predicted and dismissed back in the early 80's in almost exactly the same way the obliteration of the first amendment was predicted when the DMCA was passed in the late 90's. The result, a terribble erosion of our fundamental rights with nary a complaint from the mindless, spoonfed masses.
The government has a very long and very dark history of picking minorities (blacks, native americans, youthful males with long hair, recreational drug users, high school misfits, and now programmers) and stomping their rights in the name of a photo opportunity or two, and an opportunity to feed whatever the public hysteria of the moment happens to be.
Saying "I don't care, they aren't part of my group" is exactly what enables this sort of serial, unconstitutional abuse to succeed. At any given moment the majority of the people are fat, well fed, and happy
Grow up, and look beyond your own interests for a moment. You'll be shocked at the number of people who, because of what they are going through, are more likely to be open to your point of view on your particular issues as well, through bitter personal experience. But not if you dismiss their problems while touting your own (which are as irrelevant to them as their's are to you).
Injustice must be resisted and fought, everywhere, in every context, or we shall all lose our freedom. This is a bitter lesson our parent's never bothered to teach us, and now things have progressed sufficiently far that we're all going to have the opportunity to learn it the hard way. Would that it were otherwise.
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If this weren't so tragic it would be funny. Corporate America is essentially whining "Mommy! The world doesn't work the way I want it to, make it go away!" Unfortunately there is a very good chance that the cheap whores we've elected, or had appointed to office "on our behalf," will do exactly what these losers (in every sense of the word) want.
... the oxygen I breath may be produced by your tree, but I breath it nevertheless. Why? Because it is so abundant that no amount of pro-capitalist or anti-socialist posturing, demagaugary, or hysteria is going to get anyone to seriously consider paying for the air they breath. The only way something like that would happen is if breathable air were to become scarce, as it would be for colonists in space, or citizens of a world so polluted that nature's natural sources of oxygen became unusable.
Capitalism relies on scarcity to function. Scarcity of food, scarcity of land, scarcity of medicine, scarcity of products. If something is not scarce, but rather abundant, then no "free" market can form around it. The air we breath is an obvious example of something so abundant and readilly available that no one would consider paying just to breath it. Water in many places is similar. Now, of course, even something as abundant as air can have value added (the oxygen cafes in California come to mind, as do pressurized oxygen systems for aircraft and scuba divers), but as it stands, in its raw state, its value is orthogonal to the capitalist system. Not valueless, for none of us would live ten minutes without it (making it perhaps one of the most valuable things around), but intractible as far as applying the Capitalist paradigm to it.
Socialism and Communism presuppose a level of abundance at least sufficient to provide "everyone" with certain basic products. As the physical world rarely has such abundance, such systems falter and even fail because of their conflict with our physical reality and the scarcity of the products and services their adherents generally want, things like food, electricity, and such. On the other hand, every nation on the planet practices communism in its pure form every day with respect to air
So to with information in the internet age. Take away the virtually free replication and distribution of information and we would be back to where we were twenty years ago, where information was scarce not because of its inherent nature, but because of the limited means available to distribute and share it. At one time this wasn't the case, when a culture's entire informational wealth was handed down from elder to youth in the form of folk lore, tribal rights, music, and so forth.
The internet was designed to allow information to flow freely, to be shared as widely as needed, and to become as ubiquitious, and as plentiful, as air. It has to a large part succeeded, so much so that the Information Barrons and Copyright Cartels have been falling over themselves bribing lawmakers in nearly every developed nation to pass some equivelent of the DMCA, the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act, and various anti-hacking and anti-speech laws.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as capitalism, on the internet, where information is as abundant as air, will have consiquences at least as bad as those efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as commmunism, on a world of physical scarcity. Legislation designed to do so will be at least as draconian as that which once governed the Soviet Union, perhaps even more so as even the Soviets never tried to charge for, nor ubiquitiously monitor, their citizen's use of oxygen.
We've already seen the kind of "free" world the Copyright Cartels and Information Barrons are persuing through their use of the DMCA to silence speech, drag 14-year old programmers from their homes in the middle of the night *cough* Motion Picture Association of America *cough*, and imprison visiting software engineers for exposing fraudulant marketing of products by large American corporations *cough* Adobe *cough*.
Is it really surprising the same people are now trying to make the most liberating and empowering medium ever created, the internet, simply go away?
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Making the entire book available is a nice gesture by O'Reilly.
... perhaps that has changed as FDLed documentation has continued to sell, and thus make O'Reilly a profit, anyway).
... I recall being very surprised at which publishers had given the FSF constructive feedback when they were writing the FDL, but no longer recall which Houses they were. This is an important point as the goal was to create a license which would allow publishers to make a profit while preserving the freedom of the information contained within the books being sold).
This wasn't a "gesture" by O'Reilly so much as a gesture by the Book's author. O'Reilly will agree to publish authors who insist on it to release their work under the FDL, but the authors must explicity request this (O'Reilly doesn't volunteer the information that they allow it, and to all appearances would prefer authors not do so. At least, that has been their stance in the past according to several people I spoke with
The Free Software Foundation is really pushing for all documentation about Free Software to be released under the FDL, which they crafted with the help of some very big publishers (I want to say Random House but I don't think that is correct
O'Reilly does deserve some credit for allowing authors to do this (and some criticism for being relatively mum about the option when signing authors), but the Author is clearly the one who deserves our highest praise, the best form of which would be purchasing his book and supporting his decision as well as underscoring O'Reilly's wisdom in allowing it.
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Be that as it may, the statistic you question does appear to be in reference to guns being used in offenses:
While not beyond the realm of possibility that one might cook the statistics by including gun possession and misdefining possession as "use," were that the case I think we would be hearing about it from the pro-gun control side of the issue, loudly. It would, in fact, be an outright lie to use the word "used" in conjunction with mere passive possession, so while I don't comletely rule out your scenerio for pro-gun people cooking the stats, I do consider it to be very, very unlikely in this particular case.
I don't know exactly where I come down on this debate, except to say that the more I watch my own government in action in Washington, particularly with respect to the DMCA and Dmitry, the less inclined I am to trust their motives in taking away my right to own a firearm. On the other hand, living in downtown Chicago I don't have such a right anyway (handguns are illegal in the city, and other firearms strongly discouraged)[1], so any arguments pro- or con- are necessarilly rather theoretical from my standpoint.
[1]Of course, only the police and the criminals (by definition
I don't see why you think forcing companies who orphan software (and forced upgrades to incompatible systems is certainly a form of orphanage) to GPL the product is so bad.
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The original intent of copyright was that it be for a limited time. Only an ethically corrupt and morally bankrupt lawyer would interpret "life plus seventy five years" or "ninety years" (both significantly longer than the average human lifespan) to be 'limited' in any real sense of the word beyond the most technical (and in that technical sense a billion years would be a limited time, and clearly out of bounds of what the constitution was intended to allow).
Originally copyrights were 17 years in length, at which time the copyrighted material became public domain. Forcing Microsoft and other makers of proprietary software to GPL their products after they've been orphaned would actually be kinder (from their point of view) than returning copyright limits to their original length (which, IMnsHO is exactly what should be done) as GPLed software couldn't be used in a competing proprietary product the way public domain (or FreeBSD Licensed) code can.
Such a resolution would certainly be in the spirit of what was intended with copyright law when the constitution was written, and would do a lot to restore the shattered balance of the consumers' rights versus those of the copyright holder. Having said that, I'd much prefer the entire morass of Windows code remain proprietary and disappear into that proprietary black hole that has swallowed so many unreleased copyrighted material, never to see the light of day even after the copyright has expired and it would have entered the public domain. Losing that code could only be a service to humankind, but I digress
...if Sklyarov as a foreign traveller still enjoys the same 1st amendment rights as US citizens while speaking in the US?
... an impeachable offense if there ever was one, but unfortunately I don't think supreme court justices can be impeached. Then there are the concentration ... excuse me, "boot" ... camps we run for drug offendors, about which the less said the better it seems, and the silence surrounding these shadowy affairs is disturbing to say the least. Did I say "concentration camp?" I meant "happy camp."), and our first amendment rights so eroded that the answer to your question must be "that is a damn good question!"
My first reaction to your question was to say "of course!" but then the laws have become so twisted in the last twenty years or so in order to support the War on Drugs (for example, laws which clearly violate the 4th amendment have been upheld by the courts because of "compelling state interest," which basically means the supreme court acknowledges that the laws violate the constitution, but think they're a good idea anyway and so refrain from striking them down
As an American I assume all of the basic rights (speech, bear arms, religion, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, due process, etc.) apply to everyone equally, citizen or not. However, the law does appear to treat foreigners somewhat differently than citizens (playing it fast and loose with due process for deportation, for example) that I am forced to wonder just how deep into the system those differences carry.
According to commonly accepted American mores everyone should have the same rights regardless of creed, ethnicity, or citizenship (sans voting, of course, which is reserved for citizens). However, it becomes clearer each day that the mores of America are at severe odds with the mores of our government, the cheap whores who occupy its highest offices, and the lawyers who draft and interpret the legislation. Where that will lead who knows, but I must admit I find the Shakespearean Solution rather appealing these days ("hang all the [IP] lawyers").
As much as I hate the DMCA and all it stands for (the repression of speech, the creation of "thought crimes," the criminalization of standard engineering practices, and the elevation of corporate greed and profits above the basic rights of the individual to name a few), it is in no way Dmitry's responsibility to suffer in prison to defened our (America's) rights.
Where were we when the DMCA was being passed? Where were we when the 2600 case was being fought? How many of us did anything beyond bitching on slashdot? How many of us joined the EFF? How many of us have written our representatives to express our displeasure? For that matter, how many of us voted in the last election (Floridians are excepted, as their votes were only selectively counted anyway)?
It is our responsibility (those of us who are residents and citizens of the United States) to put an end to this obscenity (the DMCA) and the injustice it incurrs. Not a visiting Russian programmer whos only real crime is to speak out against a large company's flawed, perhaps even fraudulant, product.
Dmitry should do what he needs to get get free, and get clear of this repressive nation, and we should support him in doing so, not expect him to fight our battles for us (however tempting it may be). However, we should not be shy in using this situation to put the case forward to those who do not understand the issues, and to make it known far and wide what has happened so that neither the government nor Adobe ever live this abuse of power down.
A complete synopsis of the email exchange released by the Center for Defense Information reveals that the flaws in Microsoft's SQL server were serious, and seriously affected both the American and Russian systems for tracking nuclear materials.
Nuclear material may or may not have been misplaced or diverted. What is certain, however, is that currently neither country has complete track of its materials as a direct result of the aforementioned software bugs in Microsoft's SQL server, and the cost of reinventorying the materials will cost on the order of one billion US dollars for the United States alone. Furthermore, if materials have been diverted from within the US inventory, the diversion will not be identified by the reinventorying methods available. This situation is unambiguously a result of the problems both teams have had with Microsoft's SQL server, coupled with the fact that the bugs weren't identified until the project was well underway.
You may deny, deny, deny as much as you like, but the public record is clear and unambiguous, and, once again, the fault lies squarely on Microsoft's incompetent shoulders.
Its not that he found the problem, people always do that. He was selling software that cracks it for $99. Did everyone forget that?
No. His employer was selling the software for $99 in a country where the software was not only legal, but in which, in order for Adobe's software to be at all legal, the existence of the program was required.
Dmitry doesn't "own" the company that employs him, he works there. Would any of us want to be held accountable for our employer's behavior, however benign. While throwing Bill Gates in jail for Microsoft's behavior might seem reasonable, clearly throwing some low-level Microsoft programmer in jail for incompetent programming, or writing a piece of software used to illegally leverage Microsoft's monopoly, wouldn't be at all acceptable.
Yet that is very analogous to what happened here. The guy gave a speech on how software he helped develop (and was being sold by his employer in Russia, which last I checked isn't subject to US law). He gave no specifics, merely made it clear that Adobe's copy protection is virtually nonexistent. For that constitutionally protected speech he was carted off by the FBI, held without bail, and denied access to his Consulate while who-knows-what psychological games were played with his mind (not to mention outright interrogation techniques).
It never ceases to amaze me what levels pro-copyright zealots will stoop to in order to defend the indefensible.
The problem is people hate account security and won't use it. They don't like the bother of having to log out, closing everything they were doing, and log in as someone else just to install a new app. Heck, half the *linux* users I know log in as root all the time!
... even my mother doesn't mind logging into her GNU/Linux box), it is no excuse for building a system which even the most conscientious user cannot secure because the design (or lack thereof) simply makes it impossible.
... I've had numerous Windows users ask me how they can secure their system ("firewall" I tell them and, if they are serious, "switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD, because even a firewall can't effectively protect a system as ridden with exploits as Windows." You'd be surprised at how many of them fall over themselves to install and learn a new system.)
Be that as it may (and you certainly know a different breed of GNU/Linux users than I
It is one thing for foolish users to undermine or gut existing security features. It is another to make the features non-existent, then blame the users with "well, it's what they would have done on their own anyway." People aren't generally as stupid as we like to think
I'm all for M$ bashing - when they deserved to be bashed (and there are plenty of areas where they deserve this). But in this case, the article is nothing more than anti-M$ propoganda.
No. The article is either pro-Microsoft spin couched as innefectual criticism or profoundly incompetently written. If you check the referenced source material you'll find that, in fact, there were severe bugs related solely to Microsoft's SQL Server which have not only compromised the Russian nuclear tracking system, but even more severely compromised the American nuclear tracking system. What is worse, the Russians were wise enough to keep their manual system intact as a check, despite ridecule from their American colleagues. The United States, on the other hand, has had no manual system or check of any kind in place. Verifying the American stockpiles will cost on the order of a Billion US Dollars and will not detect any material which has already been diverted.
Los Alamos has verified the bugs, both in the version of SQL server the Russians were using and in the version Microsoft recommended they upgrade to.
Microsoft spin and apologist propoganda aside, this fiasco is real, has truly shocking and horrifying security implications for the entire planet, and is absolutely inexcusable. Of course, inexcusable lapses on the part of Microsoft and the quality of their proprietary products is hardly new or surprising, but it remains news so long as their shoddy products continue to dominate the market through marketing misrepresentation and public ignorance of the facts.
Here in Chicago I got email today about the noon protest(s), which the EFF had announced in previous days was "on hold." Alas I got busy putting together a couple of new machines ande didn't see the email until the protests were over, so while I was all set last Friday to take a couple of hours off around noon-time and join the protests, I ended up missing them altogether as a direct result of the EFF's notice to hold off. I am understandably quite annoyed.
... they almost certainly expected this outcry when they had Dmitry arrested, and this action to diminish any protests was almost certainly calculated for just that effect. What is annoying is the EFF's role in taking that bait hook, line, and sinker.
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The EFF's conduct (disclaimer: I am a paying member of the EFF) in this aspect of the entire issue was unhelpful, to say the least. Which is probably exactly what Adobe intended by scheduling the talks for today, while Dmitry rots in an undisclosed jail somewhere.
Adobe's attourney-goons and PR droids aren't stupid
The appropriate approach would have been to continue the call for protests and have the protests go on while negotiating. This is typically what is done by other groups, Unions, etc. Caving before-the-fact and calling off protests just to get the other side to the negotiating table is not how one goes about strengthening one's hand, or one's cause
If a silicon-based one was possible, Earth was the perfect planet for it.
Well, perhaps not. If carbon life is 100,000 times more likely to develop than silocon life (for reasons mentioned elsewhere sucn as silicon's weaker binding properties and lower reactiveness in simple compounds), and earth has 10,000 times more silicon than carbon, then under those conditions carbon based life is still 10 times more likely to develop than silocon based life. This by no means rules out silocon based life at all. Indeed, perhaps the presence of carbon, even in smaller amounts than silicon, was sufficient for carbon based life to evolve first, preventing any silicon life from ever developing (or outcompeting it in the primordial soup, which amounts to much the same thing).
In which case earth would not be the perfect place for silicon based life to develop, as it has been "poisoned" by the presence of carbon. This does not remotely prove, or even strongly imply, that silicon life can't and won't develop elsewhere. It merely suggests that, in earthlike conditions, carbon life is much, much more likely to develop. Even that is uncertain, as we have but one data sample, namely the Earth. The opposite could well be true: maybe silicon life is ten times more likely to develop than carbon based life, but we are one of the "ten percent" which have, nevertheless, developed carbon based life. Without additional datapoints (other worlds) the best we can do is make suppositions about this sort of thing, and any supposition we do make is necessarilly suspect.
I'm sure a lot of people here are going to go out and blame Microsoft for the Outlook-virus-of-the-week. But the fact is, Microsoft is just giving the user what they want.
Good Lord.
This reminds me, almost word for word, of statements typically made by rapists and child molesters. While the situation is vastly different (thankfully), the behavior of the guilty party, Microsoft, is appallingly similar: refuse responsibility for one's own actions and blame the victim.
The cause of these (now almost cliched) viruses is, quite simply, the appallingly lax security in the Microsoft Operating System and mail utilities, a lack of which is unequaled anywhere else in the computing world. Whether by design, negligence, or simple incompetence the fact remains: if you run any version of Windows, IIS, or Outlook, you are vulnerable to this sort of thing regardless of how savvy or cautious a user you are, and there is little or nothing you can do to protect yourself. Indeed, by the time you know of the exploit (assuming you are savvy enough to keep up on such things, which IMHO is asking far more of the user than simply learning a few basic commands a la GNU/Linux or DOS, much less a few GUI variations from with Windows paradigm a la Mac, KDE, or Gnome) chances are the malicious crackers have been exploiting it for weeks or even months.
Contrast this with the rest of the computing world, in which exploits are published and fixed as soon as they are found (and usually found by the product developers and/or testers before they are exploited), and in which the basic security paradigms allow one to secure the system in as paranoid a fashion as the situation requires, and the mind truly boggles at Microsoft's inability to at least match the quality of competing products such as Mac OS/X, the various *BSD flavors, and GNU/Linux.
It is bad enough that Microsoft appears incapable of building a secure system. It is even worse that they knowingly market an insecure and unstable system as though it were secure and stable (were there still any kind of "truth in advertising" requirements they would certainly be paying hefty fines for falsly marketing their products). It is unconscionable that they refuse to accept responsibility for their own engineering, choosing instead to blame the victims of its failure: their customers.
Hatch also threatened that if they don't quit being an ass about fair use he'll codify a law explicitly laying down what fair use is and what rights consumers have, and promised that the RIAA et al. won't like it.
But let's not disclose facts inconvenient to our arguments, right?
It is very, very counterproductive to cast the DMCA fiasco in terms of Republican's vs. Democrats. I do not like Republicans and will never forgive them the twelve Reagan-Bush years that gave us such treasures as an ongoing war on drugs (which is in fact a war on our youth and our civili liberties), Iran-Contra, Desert Storm, and so forth, but Jeff DeMaagd is absolutely right in pointing out that Orin Hatch, who may deserve our contempt for many of his stances and policies, is AFAIK the only congressman to come forward and publically admit that the DMCA was a mistake. For that he wins some respect from me.
Of course, talk is cheap. Until Hatch actually translates his regret into action and works to repeal the law he will remain nothing more than Yet Another Political Windbag.
However, I reiterate, this isn't about Conservatives vs. Liberals (a conservative congress wrote and passed the law, and a relatively liberal president signed it), this is about Corporatism vs. Individualism and the rights of the common man vs. the raw might of those synthetic capitalist beings we call corporations. Until we set aside our differences on other agendas and unite to lobby and effect change on those issues we do agree on, such as individual liberty, the civil rights of the common man, and the need to overturn the DMCA, those who benefit from such draconian laws will continue to ride roughshod over the rest of us.
Seriously though, I found Debian a bit too staid, and before I found out about sid, woody, etc., I had picked up progeny.
... so much so that when Mandrake 8.0 wouldn't install on my notebook and had problems on my desktop I gave it a new look and haven't looked back yet.
... if you've tried using any of the other distributions' upgrade utilities you understand the pain first hand. Debian relieves that pain ... making upgrades as snappy and easy as typing two commands: "apt-get udpate" and "apt-get dist-upgrade"). Of course, on systems with diskspace enough for two installations (most these days with 40 GB IDE drives selling at less than $200) I cheat and install with Mandrake, then install debian and copy over the configuraitons I need. On my laptop I cheated with Progeny, then pointed /etc/apt/sources.list at Debian testing and did a dist-upgrade to run stock Debian testing, so even the upfront work can be eased significantly.
... upgrades and maintenance over time, which with Debian has already lightened my workload immensly.
I too found Debian too staid, back in the days when there were only two options: running the stable (but archaic) version or running the unstable (bleeding edge "your system may not boot today") version, but all that changed some time ago.
Debian has improved vastly
Debian now has three choices:
1) The stable but staid release
2) The testing release (which is more stable that most other distro's final releases, but keeps you very current nevertheless)
3) the bleeding edge unstable release.
(to give you an idea of the difference between #2 and #3, testing gives you X 4.0.3 with KDE 2.1.2 while #3 gives you X 4.1 and KDE 2.2-beta. Even unstable is usable, though from time to time packages break, which is why I prefer to run Testing instead).
I am actually using "testing" in several production environments with less stress and more solidity than I had running Mandrake 7.2, Suse (forget the exact version) or red hat.
With debian the trade off is doing the work up front (its installation is nowhere near as easy as Mandrake, for example, though it has improved dramatically) vs. doing it later (when it is time to apply those security patches or upgrade
The real payoff
Slashdot routinely promotes (or promoted) DVDs, movies, music CDs, and other products from the two industries which have attacked the Free Software movement more aggressively and more effectively than Microsoft ever has: the Recording Industry Association of Amaerica (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
While I boycott both of those industries, and have for over a year and a half now, it is because I personally have chosen to give up immediate consumer gratification in order to remain at least somewhat true to my conscience.
Slashdot, on the other hand, bemoans the attacks on one hand and actively markets their products on the other, indirectly putting even more money into the pockets of those who are financing litigious thuggary against free software volunteers. Despicable, but they have presumably decided that playing both sides against the middle enhances their bottom line in some fashion, perhaps through increased readership, add revinue, or some other less obvious mechanism. Or perhaps the editors are simply as unable to go without their instant consumer gratification as most of America is and thus are attending the opening night of movies like Final Fantasy the movie because they cannot be bothered to wait (when nearly every penny opening night goes to the hollywood studios rather than the local theatre, as opposed to seeing the movie 4 weeks later when nearly every penny goes to the local theatre instead) because they simply cannot live a day without their bread and circuses, never mind social, political, or economic consiquences.
Sites like slashdot and kuro5hin (which has seriously declined over the last few weeks, sufficiently so that I removed links to it on my own website) are not where we should be looking for "leadership" or even significant support. If any of us are really serious about reclaiming our rights we need to organize our own political action groups, and/or support existing ones such as the FSF and the EFF. K5, slashdot, and their ilk have shown themselves to be fair weather activists at best, ready to run back to the couch and submit to the mindless drone of the television and whatever the media moguls are feeding us at the first hint of seeing something new or shiny.
As I understand it, many European countries (including Russia) require by law that the consumer be able to make at least one copy of any data or software sold as a backup. By preventing this, Adobe ebooks is actually illegal software in these countries (wouldn't it be delicious irony if the CEO of Adobe were imprisoned while on a European vacation for selling illegal products ... but I digress).
... by implimenting copy protection schemes which prevent the customer from making legal, fair use copies they are, in fact, violating the law of several European countries and therefor cannot sell those CDs there? If such a CD should be bought in one of those locations *cough* Amazon *cough* then wouldn't the publisher(s) be subject to civil and perhaps criminal prosecution?
Wouldn't the same thing apply to these CDs
Exactly (and I agree). I was trying to underscore your point, not rebut it. :-)
Rot-13 wasn't really used as encryption on USENET. There was no secret key or password, no confidential information so protected (if some foolish neophyte did post a "private" message using rot-13 they were profoundly mistaken in its use, and doubtless learned a humiliating lesson ... just like Adobe).
/. posts I see here supporting the arrests as somehow "appropriate" or "technically ok." At no level is this kind of injustice tolerable or ever even remotely alright, whether it is cloaked in the thin guise of ethically bankrupt American law or not.
Rot-13 was used to prevent the accidental reading of a USENET posting which might be offensive to the reader. Things like explicitly sexual or graphic stories would typically be rot-13ed, with a plaintext note prepended saying, in effect, "the following may be very offensive to you so I've encoded it with rot-13, use the 'r' key in your newsreader to decode and view the text if you're sure you want to read what follows."
For a company to adopt such a scheme, with such a history, as a fundamental part of its so-called content protection product is to defraud its customers, in particular the content providors who have been misled to believe their content is, in fact, protected. To then seek to hide their incompetence behind an ill-considered law such as the DMCA and arrest the whistle blower on criminal charges is, itself, profoundly criminal.
Imagine if safety issues were involved, such as incompetently written medical software, and the whistle blower we being treated like this. There would be a justifiable public outcry and demand that the perpetrators of the fraud should be punished, perhaps even imprisoned. This is no different -- public fraud has been committed and those guilty are misusing our corrupt legal system to incarcerate the person who has publicly exposed them. Unconscionable, as are the despicable
It does not take a pollster to tell you that users of a "free as in beer" operating system are on the whole not interested in buying new hardware every few years. We may be cheap, but we have incredibly high standards as well. These don't tend to mix well.
... my old K6/233 machine is now my firewall (gotta love OpenBSD and GNU/Linux for that).
.NET architecture, and XP product registration-key requirements once they are told about it. Nor is GNU/Linux (or *BSD if you prefer) beyond the average person's ability to grasp, if they are given time, encouragement, and friendly help along the way.
... no evangelizing required. Once again price isn't the issue -- they already own the requisite licenses. Freedom, reliability, and quality are the issue, and Free Software wins on all those counts hands-down, a few antisocial punks and Taco's rant notwithstanding.
I use GNU/Linux because of its features, stability, speed, and, most importantly, the freedom it imparts on me to do my personal and work-related projects in the manner I choose, rather than that to which my vendor constrains me. I do not use it for price (although free as in beer is a nice frosting on the freedom-in-general cake).
I am also not cheap when it comes to hardware (and I suspect most of us who work in IT as a living are not, just as most of us who are still in school and living on a college budget are). I have a renderfarm of two dual 733 MHz GNU/Linux boxes at home for my blender projects, along with a dual 1 GHz GNU/Linux box as my primary workstation for video capture, editing, and as a third ad-hoc node on the renderfarm when it isn't busy doing something else. All with very nice video, huge amounts of memory, obscene amounts of disk space, etc. I do recycle old equipment
I am preparing to purchase a good color printer to replace the epson which has since died and refused to respond to treatment (nozzle declogging, etc.). The printer will likely be an HP, although that is not yet certain.
What is certain is that every piece of hardware, from the standalone Sony analog->firewire converter to the Hauppauge capture board to the nVidia video card to the Intel NetportExpress printserver absolutely must work with GNU/Linux, either via vendor support or third party, volunteer efforts. Otherwise I do not purchase the hardware, period.
I do not own a copy of Windows (I build my own machines, thereby saving money, getting better components, and avoiding the payment of the Microsoft OEM tax), nor do I plan to ever own a copy of windows. Nor does my mother, my sister, my cousin, or any number of other people I have built and installed computers for.
They all run GNU/Linux, and any hardware purchases they make have as a necessary and uncompromising requirement that it work with their system, and not require them to go out and buy software they neither want nor need.
In all these cases it is usability, reliability, and freedom which resulted in the choice of software and hardware used, not price. Indeed, price was only a factor in one of the installations (which, being free, naturally contributed to reaching the same decision).
Users aren't stupid, nor are they blind and uncomprehending of the implications of Microsoft's new licensing policies,
The problem is that mainstream media hasn't made that reality abundently clear to everyone yet, so many are as yet unaware of the truly draconian conditions Microsoft is placing on the use of their software, nor are they aware of the relatively modest amount of effort required to learn how to use a new operating system.
This is slowly changing though, despite Microsoft's best anti-Free Software FUD efforts. I know several other non-techie types who want me to install GNU/Linux for them, if ever I get the time. They have come to me