Hi, sorry, but Federal law allows Universities and other federally funded non-profits (and I think even for-profits) to keep the intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc) developed with these funds. All the government asks for is a license back at some nominal fee. In fact, the goverment encourages patent filings and other "evidence" of new technology and ideas from federally funded research. As long as no patents have been filed, or the patents that have been filed can be broken by prior art, or you have NOT signed an NDA so the other side can claim you released their trade secrets, then you are safe. The hard part is even if none of these three things are true, the other side may sue you anyway. Open source needs a Legal Defense Fund of some kind to protect individual hackers from bully-boy companies and individuals who use the courts to protect their bogus patents and trade secrets. Matt O'Keefe The GFS Group
The NSA's charter does not include domestic surveillance, period. As I understand it, any NSA employee found to have participated in domestic surveillance is instantly fired. If you resent the NSA because of their role in suppressing US encryption technology, I think that's changed: they're too smart not to have known that cats been out of the bag for a long time. Your real beef should be with the FBI, which AFAIK has been the agency most opposed to any loosening of encryption regulations in the US. The FBI is charged with domestic surveillance, not the NSA. The FBI is pushing Internet "wiretaps" on the IETF and other sorts of restrictions to electronic freedom, not the NSA.
The NSA was formed for a very specific reason: before WWII, military intelligence on foreign governments was gathered by the Army and Navy. Interservice rivalries meant this intelligence information was often not shared. In particular, the Navy had extensive information about Japanese preparations for war in the Pacific and was aware that the Japanese embassy in Washington was destroying documents, a sure sign of impending hostilities. This information was not shared with the Army, which was charged with protecting Hawaii, and this is part of the reason the Army was caught completely unawares by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor (incompetence, arrogance, stupidity also played a role). [Henry Clausen was tasked by the War Department to investigate why we were taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor. His book, "Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement", tells this story.]
The NSA's mission is vital in providing information about foreign government's intentions in what remains a very dangerous world. If you aren't curious about the military intentions of North Korea, China, Iraq, and Russia (for example) given their history in the 20th century, then you are highly naive about the dangers facing both the US and its allies. The one job even libertarians give the government is national defense. Let's let the NSA do this job right.
And why is EPIC wasting its time with FOIA requests and other kinds of posturing when it could be doing something about strenghtening 4th amendment protections (prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant) for email communications. Its outrageous that the cops (or your boss) have to get a warrant to wiretap your phone, but don't need a warrant to search your email.
Hi, Peter is right about SANs being overhyped in the past. However, the hacks for shared disk access he describes are now being replaced by real shared disk file systems like GFS (Linux -- http://www.globalfilesystem.org ), CXFS (SGI), and CFS (Compaq's Cluster File System for Digital UNIX). These file systems allow a SAN network with a homogeneous OS to share disks as if they were local. The other recent development with SANs is that they are starting to get cheaper (FC adapter cards less than $300, FC hubs less than $100 per port) and the drivers have become reliable and reasonably robust. SANs can be constructed from RAID disks, of course, and as your disk access or capacity requirements increase the idea is you can just keep adding new disks and/or machines to your network. My group at the University of Minnesota has written GFS with the help of several others in the Linux community, and with alot of feedback from Linux kernel hacking luminaries like Stephen Tweedie. Also GFS is currently the only GPL'ed shared disk file system availble for Linux. Here are a few details about it: GFS runs on Linux 2.2 kernels and allows Linux machines to share storage devices on a network. The network medium can be parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, or whatever. GFS machines maintain locks around filesystem metadata operations to insure that only one machine at a time is modifying metadata: the metadata itself is distributed and the locking designed to reduce overhead so that high scalability (adding more clients) is possible -- we've achieved good performance with 8 machines connected across a FIbre Channel fabric to 8 JBODs with 4 Seagate FC drives each. We think our scalability is even higher, but don't have the hardware just yet to test out that theory:-) Distributed journaling (i.e., if one machine in the GFS SAN cluster fails other machine recover its journal to keep the file system metadata consistent) is now being implemented in GFS, and we expect to have that ready by early 2000. So what do shared disks give you? Better availability since if one machine fails the others can pick up the load. You can add disks, machines, or additional Fibre Channel switches to scale up your system. GFS includes a volume manager called pool that helps organize the network disks, and we are working on a mirroring implementation for this volume driver. We are also working on on-line resizing so that as you add more hardware to your SAN the Linux machines can simply slurp it into their existing file system organizations transparently. Finally, it gives you local disk performance with all the advantages of sharing and accessibility that network file systems provide. If this sounds interesting, check out our web site at http://www.globalfilesystem.org Matthew O'Keefe The GFS Group
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, sorry, but Federal law allows Universities and other federally funded non-profits (and I think even for-profits) to keep the intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc) developed with these funds. All the government asks for is a license back at some nominal fee. In fact, the goverment encourages patent filings and other "evidence" of new technology and ideas from federally funded research. As long as no patents have been filed, or the patents that have been filed can be broken by prior art, or you have NOT signed an NDA so the other side can claim you released their trade secrets, then you are safe. The hard part is even if none of these three things are true, the other side may sue you anyway. Open source needs a Legal Defense Fund of some kind to protect individual hackers from bully-boy companies and individuals who use the courts to protect their bogus patents and trade secrets. Matt O'Keefe The GFS Group
The NSA's charter does not include domestic surveillance, period. As I understand it, any NSA employee found to have participated in domestic surveillance is instantly fired. If you resent the NSA because of their role in suppressing US encryption technology, I think that's changed: they're too smart not to have known that cats been out of the bag for a long time. Your real beef should be with the FBI, which AFAIK has been the agency most opposed to any loosening of encryption regulations in the US. The FBI is charged with domestic surveillance, not the NSA. The FBI is pushing Internet "wiretaps" on the IETF and other sorts of restrictions to electronic freedom, not the NSA.
The NSA was formed for a very specific reason: before WWII, military intelligence on foreign governments was gathered by the Army and Navy. Interservice rivalries meant this intelligence information was often not shared. In particular, the Navy had extensive information about Japanese preparations for war in the Pacific and was aware that the Japanese embassy in Washington was destroying documents, a sure sign of impending hostilities. This information was not shared with the Army, which was charged with protecting Hawaii, and this is part of the reason the Army was caught completely unawares by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor (incompetence, arrogance, stupidity also played a role). [Henry Clausen was tasked by the War Department to investigate why we were taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor. His book, "Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement", tells this story.]
The NSA's mission is vital in providing information about foreign government's intentions in what remains a very dangerous world. If you aren't curious about the military intentions of North Korea, China, Iraq, and Russia (for example) given their history in the 20th century, then you are highly naive about the dangers facing both the US and its allies. The one job even libertarians give the government is national defense. Let's let the NSA do this job right.
And why is EPIC wasting its time with FOIA requests and other kinds of posturing when it could be doing something about strenghtening 4th amendment protections (prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant) for email communications. Its outrageous that the cops (or your boss) have to get a warrant to wiretap your phone, but don't need a warrant to search your email.
Hi, Peter is right about SANs being overhyped in the past. However, the hacks for shared disk access he describes are now being replaced by real shared disk file systems like GFS (Linux -- http://www.globalfilesystem.org ), CXFS (SGI), and CFS (Compaq's Cluster File System for Digital UNIX). These file systems allow a SAN network with a homogeneous OS to share disks as if they were local. The other recent development with SANs is that they are starting to get cheaper (FC adapter cards less than $300, FC hubs less than $100 per port) and the drivers have become reliable and reasonably robust. SANs can be constructed from RAID disks, of course, and as your disk access or capacity requirements increase the idea is you can just keep adding new disks and/or machines to your network. My group at the University of Minnesota has written GFS with the help of several others in the Linux community, and with alot of feedback from Linux kernel hacking luminaries like Stephen Tweedie. Also GFS is currently the only GPL'ed shared disk file system availble for Linux. Here are a few details about it: GFS runs on Linux 2.2 kernels and allows Linux machines to share storage devices on a network. The network medium can be parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, or whatever. GFS machines maintain locks around filesystem metadata operations to insure that only one machine at a time is modifying metadata: the metadata itself is distributed and the locking designed to reduce overhead so that high scalability (adding more clients) is possible -- we've achieved good performance with 8 machines connected across a FIbre Channel fabric to 8 JBODs with 4 Seagate FC drives each. We think our scalability is even higher, but don't have the hardware just yet to test out that theory :-) Distributed journaling (i.e., if one machine in the GFS SAN cluster fails other machine recover its journal to keep the file system metadata consistent) is now being implemented in GFS, and we expect to have that ready by early 2000. So what do shared disks give you? Better availability since if one machine fails the others can pick up the load. You can add disks, machines, or additional Fibre Channel switches to scale up your system. GFS includes a volume manager called pool that helps organize the network disks, and we are working on a mirroring implementation for this volume driver. We are also working on on-line resizing so that as you add more hardware to your SAN the Linux machines can simply slurp it into their existing file system organizations transparently. Finally, it gives you local disk performance with all the advantages of sharing and accessibility that network file systems provide. If this sounds interesting, check out our web site at http://www.globalfilesystem.org Matthew O'Keefe The GFS Group