The thing that made P2P ala Napster so great is that it was easy to search.
Napster is proprietary archie, proprietary ftp, and proprietary dynamic IP resolution, with a nice user interface. If you don't know what archie is, look it up on Google. (Hint: people were using it to search for files on thousands of machines. The only reason there wasn't much bandwidth is because bandwidth was scarce and many people had no sound cards.) Dynamic DNS has been done for a while now (several years, and it's an obvious service), and archie/ftp have been around for *many* years. Napster's *sole* innovation was a nice interface to an easily-installed package. Sure, that's really useful, and inspiring to other developers, but it is not some brand new networking paradigm.
And here's what Clay Shirky says on the O'Really web site:
Dynamic DNS is not P2P, because it tries to retrofit PCs into the traditional DNS system, and so on.
Let me get this straight, Clay: 1) Napster *is* peer-to-peer, because their host resolution protocol is not based on an IETF standard, 2) dynamic DNS *is not* peer-to-peer solely because it uses a datagram format specified in the ARPA/IETF RFCs? I'm sorry, Clay, but you're a fucking idiot.
Nearly all of the Internet protocols are peer-to-peer, and they always have been (the only dedicated-server to dedicated-client protocols that come to mind are DHCP and BOOTP, but they are kind of special in that regard). What you are talking about is distributed servers vs. centralized servers. So quit this mindless repetition of "P2P". You sound just like those faddists who started saying "B2B" a while back.
What's next, Clay? When I make a TCP/IP connection to a friend's computer, will I be using a TCP frame with a *true* SYN flag set. Will my use of a SYN flag to connect to a corporate mail server be an attempt to retrofit a P2P approach on the traditional protocol in a misguided attempt to impose my mindset on a protocol that is much more flexible and liberating?
Abusing nomenclature just because it sounds nice is asinine. Abusing it as the basis for faux technical articles on the O'Really web site is idiotic. Why don't you actually learn to write some networking code and at least *try* to learn some vague inkling of the technical basis of your statements.
Because the shift from centralized to distributed servers *is* important. It *is* a paradigm shift, and it does have tremendous implications for how people communicate and work.
When I say "distributed", and I explain to somebody what it means, they can suddenly understand that it means your life will be pervaded and supported by a ubiquitous fabric of computers and information. Distributed means that you don't connect to Joe's computer, you connect to Joe's service, and it does whatever Joe wants wherever he and his machines happen to be. It means forwarding high-priority emails from trusted people to Joe's pocket communicator (cellphone/digital tablet/PDA/tricorder). "Peer-to-peer", on the other hand, implies that I talk directly to Joe. It brings to mind the telephone model of peer-to-peer communication, which is *not* the distributed model. That's why it's important to use the right words. With the right word, the right slogan, you can convey a concept in a way that attracts people. It's the difference between "Walkman" and "portable tape player".
Where do you think hydrogen comes from? Ok, it comes from water, but it takes power to extract it...
Or catalyzed from hydrocarbon fuels, which is how they want to make it for cars. Then you wouldn't need to electrolyze water for hydrogen, and you wouldn't have to store hydrogen in large quantities. A cat-cracker/fuel cell combo is potentially much more efficient than an internal combustion engine. Plus it can run on chemically simpler fuels -- gasoline for internal combustion engines has lots of additives and compromises so that it burns properly.
CPRM is the BEST thing to happen to having secure systems.... You are protected by the DCMA since every directory listing is covered by your compilation copyright:-)
Get real. The CPRM drives will be protected by public key cryptography, and the megacorps will have all the keys. Remember, they don't want cryptography for its own sake, they want a monopoly on distribution, storage, and playback.
Most jurisdictions have laws that, contract or not, nobody can prevent you from performing your trade.
Better hope you never need to set foot outside that jurisdiction for the rest of your life. What if the jilted employer, through a front, runs a sweepstakes or other prize contest and your family "wins" an all-expenses-paid vacation to such a country? When you step off the airplane/ship for your vacation, you get sued for breach of contract and tossed in jail? Kinda takes the "un" out of "unenforceable", doesn't it? Also consider the fact that the "vacation" would be probably an order of magnitude cheaper that suing you in local courts.
And what if the local law changes tomorrow? The contract could suddenly become enforceable, and you are screwed.
My personal rule is to *never* agree to a contract I don't intend to honor. If they're gonna be sleazy, I at least want to make them work for it.
From the point of view of contract law, "sign or be fired" is an offer of valuable consideration (continued employment) in exchange for valuable consideration to the other party (non-competition with them). For duress to exist, the threatened action must be *unlawful* (and the threat is called extortion). Since termination is perfectly lawful -- in lieu of preexisting contract to the contrary -- there is no case for duress.
In fact, by arguing how badly you need continued employment, and how badly you would be hurt by losing it, you are strengthening the employer's case for its value, and thus for the enforceability of the contract.
People spend thousands to make their cars look faster with body kits and the like.
A rusty, beat up hemi 'Cuda is an awesome machine. But a Civic is still a piece of crap, even if you take the muffler off and weld on twenty pounds of chrome.
And people think that Windows is more advanced because it looks cleaner. It's not logical or fair, but it's true.
"Windows -- the rice boy operating system."
"I bought the latest icons from Symantec, and boy it runs about 30 MIPS faster."
I don't know whether they're commercially viable, but you can buy them. Nichia has been selling them (starting at kilobuck prices) for a while now. IIRC, volumes are going up and prices are coming down, but I might be thinking of the UV LED.
What the content providers really want is to impose their controls on the data they provide. E.g., they want to be able to impose policies like "single use", "pay-per-use", "time-limited", "give up to 4 copies to your friends", and so forth. They want to impose these policies using technology. That's fine by me: if customers find value in it, the content providers will get rich; if customers find insufficient value, content provider CEOs and VPs will find their bonuses shrinking when the stockholders hear they flushed millions of $$$ down the toilet.
To control content, the PC needs a tamper-resistant crypto module under the content provider's control. It could be a PCI card, a smart card, a parallel port dongle, a FireWire box, integrated with the motherboard chipset, yadda yadda yadda. The are only three requirements: 1) high bandwidth, and 2) tamper-resistance, and 3) easy access to a power supply. As long as these criteria are met, it really doesn't matter what location or form the cryptographic module takes.
It looks to me like the content control people listed every PC subsystem, and wrote off the ones that couldn't work. "RS-232 is too slow." "Smartcard reader is too expensive." "Video card OEMs would laugh at us." "Sound card OEMs would laugh at us." What they were left with was IDE/ATA: it has plenty of volume, power, and bandwidth, and hard drive OEMs might buy their stories.
This begs a question: why will the hard drive OEMs design, manufacture, and distribute their crypto module for free? What is in it for them? Designing custom, tamper-resistant silicon and firmware is expensive, and superfluous for data storage. Manufacturing the custom chips is expensive. (If a hard drive engineer told his boss he'd just added $2 to the manufacturing cost, he'd be picking his teeth up off the floor.) Supporting it will be tremendously expensive, requiring cooperation with OS vendors. Data loss and guilt-by-association could besmirch the OEM's reputation.
So here's my question(s): Have the hard drive pointy-haired bosses been sold swampland by the content providers? Will the crypto survive the merciless budget slashing manufacturing engineers at Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and friends? Do the content providers really believe hard drives need crypto, or are they just looking for a free ride from the OEMs?
1. Certain people are censoring email on the basis of it not carrying their advertising. This is accomplished by sending large volumes of email such that non-advertising messages are drowned out. Spam inherently censors everything but the spam, by the sheer number of advertising messages sent.
2. Another company -- using the same ISP as Peacefire -- was in the spam business. They make (or attempt to make) their money by facilitating spam. They misrepresent their product to unsophisticated customers, selling it as a legitimate marketing business, when in reality it works by censoring non-advertising messages.
3. The ISP knowingly, with full understanding of what they were doing, enabled the spammer to operate, and gave them quarter. The ISP directly profited from spam.
4. The ISP could not possibly have been ignorant of what was happening. MAPS made many efforts over a period of months to educate the ISP. They recevied that education, and with full awareness of the ramifications of their actions continued giving support and doing commerce with the spammers/censors.
5. AboveNet, and many others, to protect their networks from the spam/pro-commerce-censorship, cut off traffic from the ISP.
6. Peacefire, once they discovered this, continued to do business with the anti-social network-DoSing godless communist censorial ISP.
7. Either Peacefire doesn't understand that spam is censorship, or they are hypocrites. Or they're just mad about being cut off and flaming AboveNet on general principles.
Peacefire ostensibly opposes censorship. If I developed and distributed a program for clogging Islamic mail servers with so much garbage that useful messages couldn't get through, they'd be all over me bitching about how I was interfering with someone's $deity-given right to communicate. Then they'd jump all over my ISP for provide 'net access to such scum. I'd probably even get my own link on their homepage, right under NetNanny.
But when *their* ISP does that very thing, and all of a sudden it's "Not only are they on a different IP, the company doesn't even spam directly." Even when AboveNet whitelists them -- letting them off easy for consorting with known spammers -- they *still* keep whining.
Vixie has a blacklist, and they bitch about that. AboveNet has a whitelist, and they bitch about that. It's time for a baptism-by-fire-list. When somebody whines like Peacefire has been doing, their IPs get put on the firelist. As a precondition to using MAPS, ORBS, DUL, and friends, admins would have to agree to *never* block any traffic to a host on the firelist.
Peacefire seems to want every brain-dead AOLer to have unfettered access to port 25, so let them have it, but just for *.peacefire.org. Let them bask in the glory of a totally unfiltered broadband pipe. Let them handle every spam and DoS attack by themselves. Let them discuss problems one-at-a-time with the BoFH running a spamhaus in Lower Elbonia. Give them the totally open access they seem to want. Let their mailboxes fill up with chain letters, let their news spools overflow with 20k rants from the world's McElwains and Bloxys.
And when they discover that that is *not* what they really want, that a little control and upstream responsibility is a good thing, let them crawl back to Vixie and beg to be put back on the black list.
Moglen is enamoured with language ("regressing away from language", "infantilized, return to a pre-linguistic condition") and does not understand that it's not necessarily appropriate to all human-computer interaction.
What makes Windows and the Mac UI "regressive" and "infantilized" is not their GUI nature, but their WIMP-only nature. A GUI is a powerful tool, but it only goes so far. At some point, most heavy computer users need to express their desires in language. For example, my employer has an internal web page listing all the employees, with their phone number and a thumbnail photo in a table. What happens when you want to add or remove an employee from the table? With the drool and click interface, you have to manually rearrange the entire table. The person doing this hadn't even considered the possibility that a simple script could regenerate the page from a database: the impoverished Windows environment had trained her that manual repetition is the only way to accomplish work.
Contrast this with a Linux desktop: the machine I'm typing this on has GUI gadgets and widgets coming out of its ears. But they are not based on the read-only binary dictatorship of MSFT. My Gnome toolbar has a variety of icons and useful applets on it (try putting a volume control next to the Start button on the Windows toolbar). The clock applet I chose shows not just the time but the date, and in a large, easy-to-read font (the Windows clock is hard wired time-only, and is also hard wired to a single-pixel font that is virtually unreadable at 1600x1200). Whenever I have to do something over and over again, I write a little script. Sure, it takes several hours to become competent at scripting, but it pays off the first time you don't have to waste an hour repetitively clicking some unscriptable Windows junk. I administer this machine with Webmin, which provides a slick GUI interface, yet is written in easily altered perl. (Try adding blink tags to the Windows administration utilities.;-)
That solution is a subsidy, which is politically unattractive. It makes it look like the government is giving some people power for free. As soon as power rates spike, it will be legislated away, and the NIMBY people will have their cake and eat it too. OTOH, penalties are more psychologically acceptable.
I think the solution is to district the community based on the major substations of the power distribution infrastructure, and let each district vote either IMBY or NIMBY. The new plant gets built in one of the IMBY districts, and only the IMBY districts can make law or policy regarding the new plant. For example, the NIMBY districts would have to buy power at whatever rates the IMBY districts chose, and only if the plant has spare capacity the IMBY districts is willing to sell.
This is more fair:
People can choose not to have something they don't like (democracy), and
They have to pay for that choice at market prices (capitalism).
If they whine about their choice later, they'll have to argue against the twins Gods of Democracy and Capitalism.
It's also fair on another level. The people who hate power plants and other so-called eyesores the most are whiny yuppie types in upscale neighborhoods, and they won't notice if power is 15% more expensive. The industrial and lower-income neighborhoods don't care as much about power plants, and would be glad to have cheaper power.
Yes. As far as the software is concerned, a CompactFlash flash drive is the same as a CompactFlash rotating disk. You can pick the one that suits your needs.
So in essence, what you want is a tiny little harddisk, with a tiny little amount of space on it,... The IBM Microdrive has 340MB of space (there is a 1GB model but I couldn't find prices for it). That's enough space for a decent desktop OS install -- hardly tiny.
Flash memory, and other embedded memory solutions, have speeds and storage capacities rivalling those of your tiny drive,... The IBM 340MB drive is $260, whereas 224MB of flash memory costs $474. In high volume production, the 1GB drive will not be much more expensive than the 340MB model.
[Flash drives] consume many times less power. True, but the standby consumption of the IBM microdrive is only 20mA. That's not too shabby, although you wouldn't want to run it continuously on AA batteries. Unfortunately, the IBM website doesn't list the power consumption when the spindle is not spinning.
A tiny magnetic platter drive won't take much [abuse]. The IBM Microdrive takes 175G while spinning, 1500G when turned off. That's pretty good, especially if supplemented with shock absorbers. Since tiny hard drives don't need high speed, the designers can make a lot of concessions to durability. OTOH, flash is pretty much indestructable.
If you're waiting until PDAs come with minidrives, i would have to advise against holding your breath. If you cannot get the hard drive factory installed, just buy it yourself today. No breath holding needed.
Flash uses less power, but is much more expensive. Hard drives use more power and are less durable, but are cheaper and hold more. The best choice depends on the application.
... I make sure nothing is on any laptop or desktop.... All data should be on the servers...
This accomplishes nothing whatsoever for infosec -- it's just IT masturbation. Why? If your network is not encrypted, any idiot can be hired to attach a network sniffer and recover it later. Or not recover it, if your firewall allows enough packets through, and most practical firewalls do. Any you'll never know unless you're running a network traffic analyzer and conscientiously attending to its logs. It doesn't prevent any idiot from pointing a tiny video camera at a monitor, or planting a microphone in the executive conference room. It doesn't prevent printouts from being dumpster-dived (-dove?). It doesn't check whether client hosts are trustable (think Back Orifice, recording keyboards, TV-transmitter monitors, Trojan executables/OSes, et cetera ad naseum). It doesn't keep yahoos from faxing trade secrets to unknown destinations. It doesn't keep applications from writing local temporary files, nor OSes from paging things out to local hard drives.
Your approach is like having all the cowboys mend a small hole in the fence, while the gate stands open. It wastes their time, and the cows get out anyway. Guarding the doors and cultivating a security-conscious culture has a much better payback.
Yup, it's trivial to make. Thermite is just aluminum and iron oxide (rust), powdered and mixed. The problem is "How much do you use?" Getting enough heat to ruin the hard drive is easy. Getting enough heat to slag the computer, burn through the floor, and make a puddle of molten iron on a bed of glass is also easy. And heaven help you if you manage to get the cast aluminum hard-drive housings ignited (aluminum burns like magnesium, once you get it started).
if the company has provided you with the computer, it's *their* property to do with as they please
A professional holds their fiduciary duty higher than a bureaucrats paper. If upper management is dead set on throwing away resources, you can't stop them, but it is a professional's responsibility to make them aware of waste and attempt to remedy it.
then you deserve whatever punishment the company deems as a penalty for abusing company equipment
Translation: We don't care whether you get your job done as long as you don't violate Regulation 27B-6.
Make sure you explain you'll be completely responsible for that box from technical support to making sure it works with any priopritary protocols on the current network to making sure that it's secure.
Translation: We're not going to help you do your job because we have pieces of paper that say we don't have to. So there!
Actually, the most popular method of switching optical signals does use tiny mirrors. The other system (IIRC, by Hewlett-Packard and/or Agilent) uses tiny bubbles. No, I'm not making this up.
[A tiny mirror] is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Seems analogous to making a hard drive that ran by hammering grooves into silly putty with a tiny, tiny jackhammer.
Because it's illegal. Charging different prices to different people... is considered anti-competive and is a BIG no-no...
Illegal? On my planet, it is not only legal, it's standard operating procedure. For instance, my people hold these things called "yard sales" where prices are negotiated based on the purchaser's willingness to pay and the seller's assessment of their ability to wheedle more money out of the purchaser.;-)
Seriously, I don't understand why everybody's upset about Amazon's pricing. At worst, they are just determining the price elasticity curve of the market. Remember that all book and CD prices are totally arbitrary anyway. For example, the non-recurring expenses for production of a twenty year old music album have been paid for. Amazon's sole recurring expense for a CD is fixed (and much smaller than $1). Yet Seargent Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band (Beatles) costs $11.99, while Lost In The Ozone (Command Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) costs $9.97. Given identical marginal cost of production, why is the Beatles album 20% more expensive? Because that's what the market will bear.
<slashdot>Come on, people. It ain't called the bazaar for nothing!</slashdot>
That is a... a.... very yellow page. My retina/optic nerve/brain hurts after coming back to the pure white of/. If you're gonna link to something like that, warn us first.
In order to visit this site, you need to enable javascript.
<shrug> Could be worse. www.Sony.com comes up as a *black screen* with Javascript disabled (at least on Nescape). With a window title of "Welcome to Sony.com".
At least they spelled "Sony" right in the title.;-)
When Transmeta pushes that the CPU consumes vastly less power just makes Toshiba look bad if Toshiba can't make all the other components consume less power.
Also keep in mind that Toshiba is deeply committed to the Wintel paradigm. Toshiba *has* to support mobile Windows/Office 2000. That means they need:
Huge hard drives, to store the bloat (e.g., true color splash screens stored as *bitmaps*).
Big (128MB+) high-speed DRAMs, to hold the bloat (MFC/OLE/COM tends toward large working sets, and MSFT apps are bloated even taking MFC/OLE/COM into consideration).
Ultrafast CPUs, to support the bloat (software alpha-rendered desktop, for cryin' out loud!).
Full-color high-res LCDs, because MSFT software assumes color.
Transmeta, on the other hand, has lots of opportunities with unconventional Linux-based approaches:
Small binaries mean smaller, lower-power hard drives are acceptable. Durable flash drives even become affordable (<$300). Flash can also go from zero-power to fully active instantly, whereas hard drives take forever to spin up. If you can fit on a flash drive, it's a power and speed win, but Win2k will never fit on flash.
Because they can rewrite Linux's memory manager, they can save DRAM power like *crazy*. Suppose they had a 16MB DIMM and a 128MB DIMM. During periods of low use they could page everything out of the 128MB DIMM and turn off its refresh, thus dropping its power consumption to ~0. But the 128MB DIMM would be available for things like sorting a big spreadsheet. The VM subsystem could detect thrashing and enable the big DRAM as needed. OTOH, Toshiba cannot do anything to manage Wintel's memory usage -- they're stuck powering giant DRAMs all the time.
Linux software can be made to work usefully on a transflective grayscale screen (even X apps can only assume the existence of two colors, called black and white, although they could be any contrasting colors). Anybody remember the HP200LX palmtop? It had such a screen, and could run all day on a pair of AA batteries. Plus the screen was readable under all conditions except darkness, including bright sunlight. Toshiba is mad because Windows sticks them with backlit color screens, which moreover are unreadable with sunlight or glare.
I anticipate a new breed of notebook computers that are not designed around Microsoft's "desktop in a briefcase" paradigm. Rather, they'll be the "big iron" of PDAs, designed for long battery life and practical usefulness, not some cookie cutter assumption of what it takes to be a useful computer. Transmeta is well-positioned to take advantage of that market.
At the most basic level, [DeCSS] circumvents CSS protection and allows the disc to be read.
And that supposed circumvention is the heart of the matter. According to the letter of the DMCA, circumvention is descrambling without the authority of the copyright holder, or descrambling in such a way as to infringe the holder's rights. (Yep -- circumvention means two different things in different parts of the DMCA.)
With respect to the copyright holder's authority, their permission is granted when they order the production and sale to the public of a DVD, and by their advertising the disk as a movie to be viewed by the purchaser. Once a licensed DVD is sold, the new owner has the right under copyright law to view the content. It just like sticking quarters in a newspaper machine, opening the door, and removing a paper: I have the *right* to read that paper. Unless the copyright holder arranged some other binding contract before purchase, their only right is to prevent me from publishing copies of the newspaper.
Moving back to your argument. What does it say? It says that there is a large market for authorized DVD players.
No. My argument is that there are countless licensed disks (tens of millions?) in existence, owned by many (millions?) of people. And every licensed disk owner needs a player. So is that market substantially commercially significant? We don't need a poll to find out -- hunders of thousands of people have already shelled out hundreds of dollars apiece for players, and they started doing it even when the disk market was tiny and the selection limited!
Furthermore, a DVD by itself is worthless. If nobody had a player, there would be *no* commercial market for DVDs. Therefore, the existence of a DVD player in and of itself has commercial significance, by enabling a content market. Furthermore, anything that tended to make players ubiquitous would tremendously enhance the commercial market for DVDs. Ubiquity is a necessary prerequisite for a roaring media market, as has been demonstrated in the past by player pianos, phonograph players, cassette tape players, 8-track players, CD players, VHS players, 5.25 inch floppy drives, 3.5 inch floppy drives, and by the present geometric growth of DVD players. The enhancement of the media market alone means that every DVD player has a commercially siginificant purpose. This enhancement of media market is independent of a player price. With respect to movie sales, a no-cost player and an expensive player have the same commercial significance.
To summarize, not only are people are willing to buy players, the ownership of a player itself has commercial significance.
Moving back to your argument. What does it say? It says that there is a large market for authorized DVD players.
CSS was kept as a trade secret. No patent was issued for the algorithm, and algorithms are not subject to copyright or trademark. All businessmen know the risks of a trade secret: once it's public, people are no longer beholden to you for the secret.
Kinda puts DeCSS on shakey ground - if it's needed for playing DVDs, why not use one of the preexisting DVD players?
Under the DMCA, a microfiche projector is a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title". Since a person *cannot* access a microfiche without a projector, this would seem to be a forgone conclusion. This does not, however, stop me from building and selling a microfiche projector, since a projector has non-limited commercially significant purposes.
How many of you watch your DVDs on licenced players?
Un-ask your question. The CSS decoder of an off-the-shelf player is neither licensed nor unlicensed, the MPAA's claims notwithstanding. The algorithm is a former trade secret that is now public knowledge (although the particular machine code or circuit implementing it is probably copyrighted by the manufacturer).
Read the letter of the DMCA. It says a decoder is contraband if any of the following are true:
It is intended to access content contrary to the permission of a copyright holder,
It has limited commercially significant use other than access contrary to the permission of a copyright holder, or
It is marketed for use in accessing content contrary to the permission of a copyright holder.
My argument is that DeCSS has commercially significant use, both by what people would be willing to pay for equivalent decoders, and by encouragment of the disk market. Furthermore, the access provided by DeCSS is not infringing, because the MPAA *wants* you to watch the DVDs you bought from them.
That only leaves the first and third provisions, which are purely a matter of intent and advertising. As long as you intend for DeCSS to be used for law abiding purposes, and you clearly advertise it for those purposes, you're safe. 2600 may have trouble with the advertising bit -- anyone with a regular "Pay Phones of the World" section cannot have entirely pure intentions.;-)
I'm reading from this DMCA text, which hopefully is the right text. Correct me if I'm wrong.
There is a direct argument against the MPAA:
When I buy a DVD, I'm buying access to the content (implied warranty of merchantibility, laws against false advertising, and the first sale doctrine all support this).
The purchased access is under the copyright holder's authority (for a licensed DVD). Nothing I do to access a licensed DVD constitutes "circumvention", since it is always done with the coypright holder's permission.
Numerous licensed DVDs have been sold.
Strong DVD player sales inarguably demonstrate that numerous people will pay a lot for a player.
The current player market was driven by the disk market.
More people are buying more disks.
Therefore, the player market is strong and growing. Moreover, player prices are profitable -- the market is not due to a fire sale effect.
The DVD player market is therefore commercially significant.
Therefore, every DVD player has a commercially significant purpose other than circumvention. (Circumvention is defined as being without the copyright holder's permission/authority.)
Besides commercial significance, the only other requirements is intent: the manufacturer must not intend that the device's primary purpose is circumvention, and must not market it for use in circumvention.
What do you think of this argument? Am I missing anything, or are the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions without teeth (for defendents with good intentions)?
Slashdot Mirror
And here's what Clay Shirky says on the O'Really web site:
Let me get this straight, Clay: 1) Napster *is* peer-to-peer, because their host resolution protocol is not based on an IETF standard, 2) dynamic DNS *is not* peer-to-peer solely because it uses a datagram format specified in the ARPA/IETF RFCs? I'm sorry, Clay, but you're a fucking idiot.Nearly all of the Internet protocols are peer-to-peer, and they always have been (the only dedicated-server to dedicated-client protocols that come to mind are DHCP and BOOTP, but they are kind of special in that regard). What you are talking about is distributed servers vs. centralized servers. So quit this mindless repetition of "P2P". You sound just like those faddists who started saying "B2B" a while back.
What's next, Clay? When I make a TCP/IP connection to a friend's computer, will I be using a TCP frame with a *true* SYN flag set. Will my use of a SYN flag to connect to a corporate mail server be an attempt to retrofit a P2P approach on the traditional protocol in a misguided attempt to impose my mindset on a protocol that is much more flexible and liberating?
Abusing nomenclature just because it sounds nice is asinine. Abusing it as the basis for faux technical articles on the O'Really web site is idiotic. Why don't you actually learn to write some networking code and at least *try* to learn some vague inkling of the technical basis of your statements.
Because the shift from centralized to distributed servers *is* important. It *is* a paradigm shift, and it does have tremendous implications for how people communicate and work. When I say "distributed", and I explain to somebody what it means, they can suddenly understand that it means your life will be pervaded and supported by a ubiquitous fabric of computers and information. Distributed means that you don't connect to Joe's computer, you connect to Joe's service, and it does whatever Joe wants wherever he and his machines happen to be. It means forwarding high-priority emails from trusted people to Joe's pocket communicator (cellphone/digital tablet/PDA/tricorder). "Peer-to-peer", on the other hand, implies that I talk directly to Joe. It brings to mind the telephone model of peer-to-peer communication, which is *not* the distributed model. That's why it's important to use the right words. With the right word, the right slogan, you can convey a concept in a way that attracts people. It's the difference between "Walkman" and "portable tape player".
Or catalyzed from hydrocarbon fuels, which is how they want to make it for cars. Then you wouldn't need to electrolyze water for hydrogen, and you wouldn't have to store hydrogen in large quantities. A cat-cracker/fuel cell combo is potentially much more efficient than an internal combustion engine. Plus it can run on chemically simpler fuels -- gasoline for internal combustion engines has lots of additives and compromises so that it burns properly.
CPRM is the BEST thing to happen to having secure systems. ... You are protected by the DCMA since every directory listing is covered by your compilation copyright :-)
Get real. The CPRM drives will be protected by public key cryptography, and the megacorps will have all the keys. Remember, they don't want cryptography for its own sake, they want a monopoly on distribution, storage, and playback.
Most jurisdictions have laws that, contract or not, nobody can prevent you from performing your trade.
Better hope you never need to set foot outside that jurisdiction for the rest of your life. What if the jilted employer, through a front, runs a sweepstakes or other prize contest and your family "wins" an all-expenses-paid vacation to such a country? When you step off the airplane/ship for your vacation, you get sued for breach of contract and tossed in jail? Kinda takes the "un" out of "unenforceable", doesn't it? Also consider the fact that the "vacation" would be probably an order of magnitude cheaper that suing you in local courts.
And what if the local law changes tomorrow? The contract could suddenly become enforceable, and you are screwed.
My personal rule is to *never* agree to a contract I don't intend to honor. If they're gonna be sleazy, I at least want to make them work for it.
From the point of view of contract law, "sign or be fired" is an offer of valuable consideration (continued employment) in exchange for valuable consideration to the other party (non-competition with them). For duress to exist, the threatened action must be *unlawful* (and the threat is called extortion). Since termination is perfectly lawful -- in lieu of preexisting contract to the contrary -- there is no case for duress.
In fact, by arguing how badly you need continued employment, and how badly you would be hurt by losing it, you are strengthening the employer's case for its value, and thus for the enforceability of the contract.
So are you saying productivity should be measured by counting lines of output? ;-)
A rusty, beat up hemi 'Cuda is an awesome machine. But a Civic is still a piece of crap, even if you take the muffler off and weld on twenty pounds of chrome.
"Windows -- the rice boy operating system."
"I bought the latest icons from Symantec, and boy it runs about 30 MIPS faster."
;-)
I don't know whether they're commercially viable, but you can buy them. Nichia has been selling them (starting at kilobuck prices) for a while now. IIRC, volumes are going up and prices are coming down, but I might be thinking of the UV LED.
Hi Andre.
What the content providers really want is to impose their controls on the data they provide. E.g., they want to be able to impose policies like "single use", "pay-per-use", "time-limited", "give up to 4 copies to your friends", and so forth. They want to impose these policies using technology. That's fine by me: if customers find value in it, the content providers will get rich; if customers find insufficient value, content provider CEOs and VPs will find their bonuses shrinking when the stockholders hear they flushed millions of $$$ down the toilet.
To control content, the PC needs a tamper-resistant crypto module under the content provider's control. It could be a PCI card, a smart card, a parallel port dongle, a FireWire box, integrated with the motherboard chipset, yadda yadda yadda. The are only three requirements: 1) high bandwidth, and 2) tamper-resistance, and 3) easy access to a power supply. As long as these criteria are met, it really doesn't matter what location or form the cryptographic module takes.
It looks to me like the content control people listed every PC subsystem, and wrote off the ones that couldn't work. "RS-232 is too slow." "Smartcard reader is too expensive." "Video card OEMs would laugh at us." "Sound card OEMs would laugh at us." What they were left with was IDE/ATA: it has plenty of volume, power, and bandwidth, and hard drive OEMs might buy their stories.
This begs a question: why will the hard drive OEMs design, manufacture, and distribute their crypto module for free? What is in it for them? Designing custom, tamper-resistant silicon and firmware is expensive, and superfluous for data storage. Manufacturing the custom chips is expensive. (If a hard drive engineer told his boss he'd just added $2 to the manufacturing cost, he'd be picking his teeth up off the floor.) Supporting it will be tremendously expensive, requiring cooperation with OS vendors. Data loss and guilt-by-association could besmirch the OEM's reputation.
So here's my question(s): Have the hard drive pointy-haired bosses been sold swampland by the content providers? Will the crypto survive the merciless budget slashing manufacturing engineers at Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and friends? Do the content providers really believe hard drives need crypto, or are they just looking for a free ride from the OEMs?
It has nothing to do with mail. Nothing at all.
It *is* about email:
1. Certain people are censoring email on the basis of it not carrying their advertising. This is accomplished by sending large volumes of email such that non-advertising messages are drowned out. Spam inherently censors everything but the spam, by the sheer number of advertising messages sent.
2. Another company -- using the same ISP as Peacefire -- was in the spam business. They make (or attempt to make) their money by facilitating spam. They misrepresent their product to unsophisticated customers, selling it as a legitimate marketing business, when in reality it works by censoring non-advertising messages.
3. The ISP knowingly, with full understanding of what they were doing, enabled the spammer to operate, and gave them quarter. The ISP directly profited from spam.
4. The ISP could not possibly have been ignorant of what was happening. MAPS made many efforts over a period of months to educate the ISP. They recevied that education, and with full awareness of the ramifications of their actions continued giving support and doing commerce with the spammers/censors.
5. AboveNet, and many others, to protect their networks from the spam/pro-commerce-censorship, cut off traffic from the ISP.
6. Peacefire, once they discovered this, continued to do business with the anti-social network-DoSing godless communist censorial ISP.
7. Either Peacefire doesn't understand that spam is censorship, or they are hypocrites. Or they're just mad about being cut off and flaming AboveNet on general principles.
Peacefire ostensibly opposes censorship. If I developed and distributed a program for clogging Islamic mail servers with so much garbage that useful messages couldn't get through, they'd be all over me bitching about how I was interfering with someone's $deity-given right to communicate. Then they'd jump all over my ISP for provide 'net access to such scum. I'd probably even get my own link on their homepage, right under NetNanny.
But when *their* ISP does that very thing, and all of a sudden it's "Not only are they on a different IP, the company doesn't even spam directly." Even when AboveNet whitelists them -- letting them off easy for consorting with known spammers -- they *still* keep whining.
Vixie has a blacklist, and they bitch about that. AboveNet has a whitelist, and they bitch about that. It's time for a baptism-by-fire-list. When somebody whines like Peacefire has been doing, their IPs get put on the firelist. As a precondition to using MAPS, ORBS, DUL, and friends, admins would have to agree to *never* block any traffic to a host on the firelist.
Peacefire seems to want every brain-dead AOLer to have unfettered access to port 25, so let them have it, but just for *.peacefire.org. Let them bask in the glory of a totally unfiltered broadband pipe. Let them handle every spam and DoS attack by themselves. Let them discuss problems one-at-a-time with the BoFH running a spamhaus in Lower Elbonia. Give them the totally open access they seem to want. Let their mailboxes fill up with chain letters, let their news spools overflow with 20k rants from the world's McElwains and Bloxys.
And when they discover that that is *not* what they really want, that a little control and upstream responsibility is a good thing, let them crawl back to Vixie and beg to be put back on the black list.
What makes Windows and the Mac UI "regressive" and "infantilized" is not their GUI nature, but their WIMP-only nature. A GUI is a powerful tool, but it only goes so far. At some point, most heavy computer users need to express their desires in language. For example, my employer has an internal web page listing all the employees, with their phone number and a thumbnail photo in a table. What happens when you want to add or remove an employee from the table? With the drool and click interface, you have to manually rearrange the entire table. The person doing this hadn't even considered the possibility that a simple script could regenerate the page from a database: the impoverished Windows environment had trained her that manual repetition is the only way to accomplish work.
Contrast this with a Linux desktop: the machine I'm typing this on has GUI gadgets and widgets coming out of its ears. But they are not based on the read-only binary dictatorship of MSFT. My Gnome toolbar has a variety of icons and useful applets on it (try putting a volume control next to the Start button on the Windows toolbar). The clock applet I chose shows not just the time but the date, and in a large, easy-to-read font (the Windows clock is hard wired time-only, and is also hard wired to a single-pixel font that is virtually unreadable at 1600x1200). Whenever I have to do something over and over again, I write a little script. Sure, it takes several hours to become competent at scripting, but it pays off the first time you don't have to waste an hour repetitively clicking some unscriptable Windows junk. I administer this machine with Webmin, which provides a slick GUI interface, yet is written in easily altered perl. (Try adding blink tags to the Windows administration utilities. ;-)
That solution is a subsidy, which is politically unattractive. It makes it look like the government is giving some people power for free. As soon as power rates spike, it will be legislated away, and the NIMBY people will have their cake and eat it too. OTOH, penalties are more psychologically acceptable.
I think the solution is to district the community based on the major substations of the power distribution infrastructure, and let each district vote either IMBY or NIMBY. The new plant gets built in one of the IMBY districts, and only the IMBY districts can make law or policy regarding the new plant. For example, the NIMBY districts would have to buy power at whatever rates the IMBY districts chose, and only if the plant has spare capacity the IMBY districts is willing to sell.
This is more fair:
- People can choose not to have something they don't like (democracy), and
- They have to pay for that choice at market prices (capitalism).
If they whine about their choice later, they'll have to argue against the twins Gods of Democracy and Capitalism.It's also fair on another level. The people who hate power plants and other so-called eyesores the most are whiny yuppie types in upscale neighborhoods, and they won't notice if power is 15% more expensive. The industrial and lower-income neighborhoods don't care as much about power plants, and would be glad to have cheaper power.
Yes. As far as the software is concerned, a CompactFlash flash drive is the same as a CompactFlash rotating disk. You can pick the one that suits your needs.
So in essence, what you want is a tiny little harddisk, with a tiny little amount of space on it,... The IBM Microdrive has 340MB of space (there is a 1GB model but I couldn't find prices for it). That's enough space for a decent desktop OS install -- hardly tiny.
Flash memory, and other embedded memory solutions, have speeds and storage capacities rivalling those of your tiny drive,... The IBM 340MB drive is $260, whereas 224MB of flash memory costs $474. In high volume production, the 1GB drive will not be much more expensive than the 340MB model.
[Flash drives] consume many times less power. True, but the standby consumption of the IBM microdrive is only 20mA. That's not too shabby, although you wouldn't want to run it continuously on AA batteries. Unfortunately, the IBM website doesn't list the power consumption when the spindle is not spinning.
A tiny magnetic platter drive won't take much [abuse]. The IBM Microdrive takes 175G while spinning, 1500G when turned off. That's pretty good, especially if supplemented with shock absorbers. Since tiny hard drives don't need high speed, the designers can make a lot of concessions to durability. OTOH, flash is pretty much indestructable.
If you're waiting until PDAs come with minidrives, i would have to advise against holding your breath. If you cannot get the hard drive factory installed, just buy it yourself today. No breath holding needed.
Flash uses less power, but is much more expensive. Hard drives use more power and are less durable, but are cheaper and hold more. The best choice depends on the application.
This accomplishes nothing whatsoever for infosec -- it's just IT masturbation. Why? If your network is not encrypted, any idiot can be hired to attach a network sniffer and recover it later. Or not recover it, if your firewall allows enough packets through, and most practical firewalls do. Any you'll never know unless you're running a network traffic analyzer and conscientiously attending to its logs. It doesn't prevent any idiot from pointing a tiny video camera at a monitor, or planting a microphone in the executive conference room. It doesn't prevent printouts from being dumpster-dived (-dove?). It doesn't check whether client hosts are trustable (think Back Orifice, recording keyboards, TV-transmitter monitors, Trojan executables/OSes, et cetera ad naseum). It doesn't keep yahoos from faxing trade secrets to unknown destinations. It doesn't keep applications from writing local temporary files, nor OSes from paging things out to local hard drives.
Your approach is like having all the cowboys mend a small hole in the fence, while the gate stands open. It wastes their time, and the cows get out anyway. Guarding the doors and cultivating a security-conscious culture has a much better payback.
Yup, it's trivial to make. Thermite is just aluminum and iron oxide (rust), powdered and mixed. The problem is "How much do you use?" Getting enough heat to ruin the hard drive is easy. Getting enough heat to slag the computer, burn through the floor, and make a puddle of molten iron on a bed of glass is also easy. And heaven help you if you manage to get the cast aluminum hard-drive housings ignited (aluminum burns like magnesium, once you get it started).
A professional holds their fiduciary duty higher than a bureaucrats paper. If upper management is dead set on throwing away resources, you can't stop them, but it is a professional's responsibility to make them aware of waste and attempt to remedy it.
Translation: We don't care whether you get your job done as long as you don't violate Regulation 27B-6.
Translation: We're not going to help you do your job because we have pieces of paper that say we don't have to. So there!
Actually, the most popular method of switching optical signals does use tiny mirrors. The other system (IIRC, by Hewlett-Packard and/or Agilent) uses tiny bubbles. No, I'm not making this up.
You mean like IBM's work on atomic-force microscope data storage: tiny needles read and write pits on a plastic surface. ;-)
Illegal? On my planet, it is not only legal, it's standard operating procedure. For instance, my people hold these things called "yard sales" where prices are negotiated based on the purchaser's willingness to pay and the seller's assessment of their ability to wheedle more money out of the purchaser. ;-)
Seriously, I don't understand why everybody's upset about Amazon's pricing. At worst, they are just determining the price elasticity curve of the market. Remember that all book and CD prices are totally arbitrary anyway. For example, the non-recurring expenses for production of a twenty year old music album have been paid for. Amazon's sole recurring expense for a CD is fixed (and much smaller than $1). Yet Seargent Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band (Beatles) costs $11.99, while Lost In The Ozone (Command Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) costs $9.97. Given identical marginal cost of production, why is the Beatles album 20% more expensive? Because that's what the market will bear.
<slashdot>Come on, people. It ain't called the bazaar for nothing!</slashdot>
That is a ... a .... very yellow page. My retina/optic nerve/brain hurts after coming back to the pure white of /. If you're gonna link to something like that, warn us first.
<shrug> Could be worse. www.Sony.com comes up as a *black screen* with Javascript disabled (at least on Nescape). With a window title of "Welcome to Sony.com".
At least they spelled "Sony" right in the title. ;-)
Also keep in mind that Toshiba is deeply committed to the Wintel paradigm. Toshiba *has* to support mobile Windows/Office 2000. That means they need:
Transmeta, on the other hand, has lots of opportunities with unconventional Linux-based approaches:
I anticipate a new breed of notebook computers that are not designed around Microsoft's "desktop in a briefcase" paradigm. Rather, they'll be the "big iron" of PDAs, designed for long battery life and practical usefulness, not some cookie cutter assumption of what it takes to be a useful computer. Transmeta is well-positioned to take advantage of that market.
And that supposed circumvention is the heart of the matter. According to the letter of the DMCA, circumvention is descrambling without the authority of the copyright holder, or descrambling in such a way as to infringe the holder's rights. (Yep -- circumvention means two different things in different parts of the DMCA.)
With respect to the copyright holder's authority, their permission is granted when they order the production and sale to the public of a DVD, and by their advertising the disk as a movie to be viewed by the purchaser. Once a licensed DVD is sold, the new owner has the right under copyright law to view the content. It just like sticking quarters in a newspaper machine, opening the door, and removing a paper: I have the *right* to read that paper. Unless the copyright holder arranged some other binding contract before purchase, their only right is to prevent me from publishing copies of the newspaper.
No. My argument is that there are countless licensed disks (tens of millions?) in existence, owned by many (millions?) of people. And every licensed disk owner needs a player. So is that market substantially commercially significant? We don't need a poll to find out -- hunders of thousands of people have already shelled out hundreds of dollars apiece for players, and they started doing it even when the disk market was tiny and the selection limited!
Furthermore, a DVD by itself is worthless. If nobody had a player, there would be *no* commercial market for DVDs. Therefore, the existence of a DVD player in and of itself has commercial significance, by enabling a content market. Furthermore, anything that tended to make players ubiquitous would tremendously enhance the commercial market for DVDs. Ubiquity is a necessary prerequisite for a roaring media market, as has been demonstrated in the past by player pianos, phonograph players, cassette tape players, 8-track players, CD players, VHS players, 5.25 inch floppy drives, 3.5 inch floppy drives, and by the present geometric growth of DVD players. The enhancement of the media market alone means that every DVD player has a commercially siginificant purpose. This enhancement of media market is independent of a player price. With respect to movie sales, a no-cost player and an expensive player have the same commercial significance.
To summarize, not only are people are willing to buy players, the ownership of a player itself has commercial significance.
CSS was kept as a trade secret. No patent was issued for the algorithm, and algorithms are not subject to copyright or trademark. All businessmen know the risks of a trade secret: once it's public, people are no longer beholden to you for the secret.
Under the DMCA, a microfiche projector is a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title". Since a person *cannot* access a microfiche without a projector, this would seem to be a forgone conclusion. This does not, however, stop me from building and selling a microfiche projector, since a projector has non-limited commercially significant purposes.
Un-ask your question. The CSS decoder of an off-the-shelf player is neither licensed nor unlicensed, the MPAA's claims notwithstanding. The algorithm is a former trade secret that is now public knowledge (although the particular machine code or circuit implementing it is probably copyrighted by the manufacturer).
Read the letter of the DMCA. It says a decoder is contraband if any of the following are true:
My argument is that DeCSS has commercially significant use, both by what people would be willing to pay for equivalent decoders, and by encouragment of the disk market. Furthermore, the access provided by DeCSS is not infringing, because the MPAA *wants* you to watch the DVDs you bought from them.
That only leaves the first and third provisions, which are purely a matter of intent and advertising. As long as you intend for DeCSS to be used for law abiding purposes, and you clearly advertise it for those purposes, you're safe. 2600 may have trouble with the advertising bit -- anyone with a regular "Pay Phones of the World" section cannot have entirely pure intentions. ;-)
I'm reading from this DMCA text, which hopefully is the right text. Correct me if I'm wrong.
There is a direct argument against the MPAA:
What do you think of this argument? Am I missing anything, or are the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions without teeth (for defendents with good intentions)?