Well, it's a freedom of speech question -- it's where you have to draw the line between a true threat and a possible one. It's very similar to the case of the pro-life group with the web site that resembled a hitlist of doctors that performed abortions, with 'X's through those that were killed or shot at by assailents. Is it free speech or is it a threat? It's a tough call.
However, what SHOULD have been done, given the additional information, is the gov't person talking to Flashback *first*, asking them to remove the pages of the threat; Flashback could have looked, determined if it was such, and taken appropriate action; if they decided it wasn't, they could have easily written a letter back to this person saying so, and any further action by this person would then easily be seen as threatening legal action.
Instead, the gov't offical bypassed Flashback completely, and took more drastic measures, suggesting that there was an alterior motive for this; maybe he didn't like MOST of the material at Flashback which does sound like an peaceful anti-government-like site. Which any politican should of course be wary about, but trying to shut down completely is very much an abuse of power.
As stated in the summary, there's no legal precident, no direct government shutdown, or anything - just that the gov't person wrote enough ISPs to basically blacklist the site. Is this censorship? Not directly... I don't know what freedom of speech they have in Swed but I'd assume that it's about as open as the US. This could be thought of in so many ways:
Privately owned companies have a right to refuse business with you; you can't buy a car in the states if your credit rating is terrible, for example. Of course, the reasons must be anti-discrimatory -- I can't say "Only men may by things from me", lest I get equal rights protectors on me. What's weird here is that every business that serves the ISP need for this site refuses his business with no other viable alternative except for going out of the country...an interesting twist on indirect censorship...
Which raises another question - the fact that the gov't person wrote things to these ISPs to deny the site service consistute as libel? Certainly the site appears to be doing nothing wrong against the law in Sw, but one person in a power position doesn't like what they say and takes action to prevent it? Certainly there's some significant damage here particulary if they are a small ISP and thus a for-profit business.
Finally, one has to wonder to what extent freedom of speech is covered. Assuming a similar freedom of speech right as in the states that would be in Sw, is having unrestricted access to a medium part of that freedom, given necessary concerns on finacal and technological ability? (I don't think we can go and say that net access is a universal right, as that would mean we'd have to completely wire every house in the US with net access, and that would be expensive!!). If I have the ability and the money to use a public medium to deliever a message which is covered by freedom of speech, would an effective blockage of that medium (even though other, less effective mediums are available) a violation of freedom of speech? I figure that in the US, the answer to this would be no, given the currect thought in the US gov't, but this is a nation-by-nation decision.
I wouldn't say that content on the web is doomed.
But high quality delivery of content is doomed -- I'm talking here about your 192kb encoded MP3s, full decrypted DVD files, and so forth, the types of quality that you can easily match with a physical product. The problem with high-quality is in terms of both size and inability to protect the copyright despite technology and legislative barriers. If you were planning on putting something up on the web that was high-quality and expected to make money off of it in addition to a
physical medium of the same or better quality, you've lost money in the end.
What those that create the content should realize that most people on the web would like to sample products and test them before purchasing the better physical product. If a music publisher were to give away *free* 96kbyte-encoded mp3s (which IMO are close to FM radio quality) on the web, hoping to entice those that listen to them to buy the full album, they'll have a better chance than if they offered the same selections as 192kbyte mp3s; the former file size would be much smaller so that those with dialups can easily get them, and the encoding would be good enough to be able to judge the quality of the music for a potental future purchase. (Of course, consider that the average napster-using college student is going to snarf everything and buy nothing, but without napster, it's pretty much the same situation, they won't have cash to be buying overpriced CDs).
Same with, say, television. I wouldn't mind having to watch any broadcasted episode of (for example) Farscape or the Invisible Man from Sci-Fi in crappy 240x180 window size, mono sound, streaming video assuming it was distributed free, since I have some interest in the shows but am not a devotee, but I *will* pay good money for quality (DVD) reruns of Babylon 5. Maybe there's a particular episode of Farscape that I also want in high quality format -- the free option will allow me to locate it, verify that I want it, then go off to the store and buy it.
You still have problems with those that get the physical medium then digitize it and distribute it, but that's a problem with anything digital. I'm sure that while rumors, software companies have been compensating for pirated software losses for years (some possibly using it to their advantage:) ), and the content providers of today (music, movies, television and press) need to realize that they can't avoid such losses... if instead they worked to making better relations with net users as opposed to trying to shun them, they actually might see their bottom lines increase.
Just because it's called a CIO or CTO (or whatever other TLA you can name), doesn't mean that it's the same 'job' at any company; the only things that would be in common as such to make sure the company has the right PR is that the person is very high up in the ranks and makes some of the most important decisions regarding technology choices in the company. There's no law or standard that states that a company has to have certain positions labeled and filled -- the only thing the gov't cares about is if they pay their taxes.
I wouldn't suggest neural networks for controlling house lights, save for the possibility of heating/cooling systems.
Neural networks are meant to try to 'black box' complex behavior into a nice package, with the ability to learn and adapt from past and present behavior. While the running of a household is certainly a complex pattern, it's TOO complex with too many variables to be effective. NNs can also over or under predict, and I'm sure there are things that you do not want to go on or off without your input.
A NN *could* help with efficient heating and cooling of your house, of course; you'd need to have a large data set of times, indoor and outdoor temps along with windspeeds (or wind chill factors) for about a year to get an effective yearly cycle in place, then with the time and conditions, it should be easy to have the network control the temperature and minimize energy use while maintaining a comfortable room. This is because all those factors can be realized as a complex yet predictable pattern (as there is no human element involved), and thus a trained NN should be able to do the trick.
What you'd probably want for the rest of the house is the use of a rules-based logic or fuzzy logic.
This is more adaptable to individual users (specifying their own rules), and it is more than adequet for house control.
In addition to this, I'm pretty sure that in the email RFC, there's an option that you can include with emails for return-reciepts -- the only problem is that few if any clients appears to support such features (with numbers much lower on windows sides). Of course, I may be completely mistaken here.
I'm not sure if the printing statement is too harsh. First, particularly in my field, the web is a research tool so we do need to use it and print content for the web for work related purposes. Secondly, if you have it in place that it's understood that web usage is similar to personal calls, then printing a page is similar to using office pens to write down info during a personal phone call on office paper; no printing period is too draconian. A good example, if I order something from an estore while at the office (say, WebVan for dinner tonight), I'm probably going to want a reciept of some time, so I'd print that out. One page, at most, no major drain when you know office memoes about the latest baby shower are printed on reams of paper.
Just state that personal printing from the web should be limited to a few pages, with no *color* printing, abuses will be handled on a case by case basis as necessary.
I'm sure that the intent of the bill was to apply to web sites that collect information, but as the quoted materials states "collection of personal information", would that also include email addresses, even if they are publically available on web pages?
As an interesting test, those that can should create a new email alias and use it as their email address here (easy enough to still read mail that goes through it, but allows detection of where that email came from). If you get any spam-like advertizing through that address, assuming you are canadian, you might have a case here...
Remember that RIAA has gotten a hand slap for overchanging CD prices, thought that's pretty much all it was. With all the controversy over CD costs and online music, the music industry will be in the FTC's sights for some time, and increasing the costs of both cds and napster above rate of inflation rates will set off bells at FTC HQ.
I do agree, that if you are sitting on a 56k modem, $5/mnth isn't that great of a bargain compared to a cable or dsl line, but it still is a savings. And, IMO, if you are having that much trouble with your dailup line, there's something wrong with your ISP or your modem setup, both which you can change. The easiest way to look at this is that you STILL download a new album overnight assuming no major failure, and 30 albums/mnth for $5...
Now, as for bitrates and size, I would think that those that are just downloading to hear music aren't going to care about bitrates -- they just want to hear said tracks. On the other hand, those that are audiophiles are probably going to download the 128k files and make a decision to buy the album or not from those, since the CD will be better quality than the mp3. That leaves those that download the 196 or higher bitrates but won't buy the album; I would figure that these are the people that are already going to have the large bandwidth and storage mediums that they don't have to worry about this.
I do agree that a flat $5 month for all users is questionable given the difference between usage patterns, but trying to charge based on transfer rate will also raise problems. Do you set the change at the time that the user creates the account? If so, I'll create the account on a dail-up and then go use work or home broadband to get everything I need. Do you charge by bytes sent? Then there is a loss of anonymousity as napster can now easily track who downloads what since they have to keep track of bytes.
I don't agree, for two reasons. First, it's still the issue of that without paying anything, most average joes would not use napster because they feel they may be violating the law, so even if it was based on Napster code but didn't have the fee, I don't think people would use it. (You also have to consider that the average joe knows squat about how to find and use open-source projects -- if it didn't come from tucows, where did it come from?). The other issue is the legal force that is RIAA -- you'd be naive to think if they don't have their lawyers working out a way to take down freenet, gnutella, and any other open source project if/when the material traded starts to heavily impinge on RIAA earnings. Any open source solution that does bypass the fee of Napster, in addition, will be further shot down (and IMO, they have every right to take such actions). But in this latter case, it boils down to the game of whack-a-mole, as taking down one open-source project may create 2 more.
Sure, when napster first came out, it was free, could have gotten nearly any song ever made, yada yada yada. But all this meant was that the creators/musicans of the songs never got to see a cent from all that downloading, which I know a good majority felt was wrong (yet some still continued to use napster). Now Napster's going to a *SMALL* fee ($5/mnth is a bargain!) for unlimited, legal access to a good library of music (and hoping to increase it), the musicans will get a cut (abet small), and most people appear to be B&M about this. It really doesn't make sense, though the main reason I'll get to in a bit.
Face it, there were basically only two ways that the Napster and digital music on the net would have worked out: either we get this sort of settlement between the RIAA companies and Napster, or we start the world's largest game of whack-a-mole to remove all illegal music distribution sites on the net (And if you think that freenet or gnutella would offer protection, I very much doubt it, since it would be the operators of the various servers/peers that would be threatened, not necessarily the creators of the program). IMO, the first option of working out a deal is a much better prospect.
I know most of the complaining comes down to money: physical music CDs are too expensive, and early Napster was free. For starving college kids, the choice is easy. But let's say that all the other RIAA companies jump on with BMG and the $5/mnth service continues with lots of sign-upers. At $5/mnth, that's about equal to 3 to 5 CDs a YEAR in terms of price, and I know that's a bargain. Because of that, CD sales might flounder as more people sign on -- on the other hand, CD sales could continue steady or rise if people use Napster to pre-test albums. If the former case occurs, two things would have to happen: either the napster fee would have to be increased (which would cause a lot of people to drop out, and therefore the last possible resort), or the cost of CDs will go down, which is beneficial for everyone, since the music industry appears to be operating right of the supply-demand interestion-- lowering costs will increase sales and increase revenue. If the latter case happens, with increased sales, the only thing that the RIAA people could do is to continue to embrace Napster and possibly lower fees to entice more people to it.
Remember, the boundary right now for most average people is the question of legality of downloading music as such. The fee-based Napster takes away any such threat, and I would expect to see a massive rush of people joining Napster for this service when it's made available.
A K5 system for slashdot would not work; too many ppl read here compared to K5, and there would be a problem balancing everything.
My suggestion is basically that instead of just one person moderating stories from various sections is to give it to at least 3 story moderators, and if the story gets a majority of
those moderators go-aheads, then it's posted. This would slow down how fast some stories would be posted, but it would remove same-day repeats, bogus links, and the like. It may be necessary to add more story moderators to handle the load, but that's really not a problem.
And of course, my other beef with story moderation is that there ought to be a way to understand why a submission was turned down; just give the moderators a popup list of why to reject a story: was it duplicated? was the write up by the submitter poor? is it not 'news for nerds'? You'd only have to have 5 or 6 different selections here, and I'd be much happier knowning why what I feel are more important stories are being dropped by moderators.
That's what I was implying, that a compentent programmer would say "Hey, that looks like it doesn't do anything", and would be able to work out exactly what the easter egg is , and could strip it, even it if it was as complex as one which ran through every source file to split it up. An easter egg as such in GPL code has no guarentee to survive in each generation of the code.
The question becomes, is a company that wants a free base to start to release a commercial product from going to have a) compenent programmers that could find it, and b) the time that would be necessarily to strip out that code? The larger the code base, the less likely that it will be found *AND* fixed.
This reminds me of a similar story that was up at the rinkworks computer stupidities section: a professor had developed a set of programs (in the 80s, so archaic language), and released freely to academia. A few years later, at a convention, he saw a company demoing their product that looked suspciously like his, save that his name wasn't there. In the middle of the public demo, he asked the demostrator to hit a certain key combo; the demostrated blurbed that it wouldn't do anything, the professor demanded it, and the demostrated did so, bringing up a nice little easter egg screen that basically had the professors name all over it. Ooops.
Maybe GPL'd code needs something similar: not necessarily a backdoor but some easter egg that isn't easy to strip from the code but is sufficient enough that if someone did what this story talked about, it should be relatively easy to find a fingerprint of the source. "strings" works, but only if the GPL abuser forgets to check this, though I can think of several ways to hide snippets of strings in #define's throughout the code that look meaningly alone but can be incriminating when put together.
Mind you, it's not perfect, but this is where the GPL has a weakness -- without court order it's nearly impossible to prove that GPL code was used incorrectly. For all we know, Win2000 may be a wrapper around a linux kernel ( doubtful, of course), but the possibility is there.
Actually, there WERE y2k problems, but they all occured much earlier than 12/31/99. I remember when they started to report about credit cards failing to be recognized back in '98 because they had 00 or higher experiation dates. That started the concept of other possible y2k bugs, but the credit card issues were dealt with rather quickly.
But again, it's just like computer security. If you have a well secured computer, you will never know if you needed it or not, but you prevent problems that might have if you don't have any security all together.
Many cable ISPs and DSL providers are going the way of waving the equipment fee, assuming that the cost is easily adsorbed by the monthly fee. My telocity connection, for example, only incurred a $25 overnight shipping charge for their modem, with a reported cost of equipment and installation being around $250. Of course, the equipment is 'leased' in this case, but it's probably similar for other cases as well.
Of course, being from Radio Shack, I'd be very wary in the first place.
I realize that as this article states, there will be NO way to record it. And thus if a court heard a case that the consumers priveledge to time-shift was taken away by this, the cable industry would be screwed. Instead, I'm suggesting the alternative means that if the cable industry was smart, they would work on implementing so that EVERY show could be time-shift, just preventing some from being stored permanently.
That's what the gist of my arguement is. Since you are paying for that content (as well as millions of others) it's considered to be premium, and therefore has value. And if it has value, there's a good chance of someone taking it and offering it to those on a mass basis without paying for it, thus violating copyright. That needs to be protected. But you also have to protect time shifting, for exactly the reasons you stated. You paid for that programming, you ought to be able to at least time shift it (Keep it, that may be arguable, though $30/month compared with Napster $5/month, is an interesting comparison). Which is why if the HDTV recorders included the ability to store data only on an internal medium with propriatary encryption/storage, you can still do time shifting of said programs but could not distribute the digital copies.
I don't LIKE this idea, but I do have to acknowledge that copyright holders should be able to protect their works to some extent without trampling fair use. And as I stated before, it shouldn't be on the consumer side where they fight this.
Make the playback analog. Or remember that most likely the digital communications between devices will be encrypted with keys (and you don't get those keys if you don't promise to honor the copy bit for the hardward markers), which with or without this device, you still have the possiblity of interception and decryption (of course, the latter being illegal by DMCA).
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
I knew the copy bit was coming -- the fight's been set for a long time, and it's not over, since thise was mainly a filing of the method with teh FTC. And one can start to argue fair use, etc etc. First, we're still not at a point where we know what HDTV format will be used to send out info; sets and equipment for recieving are STILL too expensive, and the TV broadcasters are dragging their heels: the complete switch is to be done by 2006, and we're nowhere close.
But all that aside, I do agree that this bit is necessary particularly for cable and premium channel -- broadcast channels should NOT be allowed to set this bit at all because they don't make their money sending data out ot the consumer, they make it in commercials. On the other hand the consumer is paying for the content on the cable stations (ehhh, somewhat), and since it's not broadcasted freely to everyone, there is need to copyright protection. Particularly in the case of premium stations like HBO, etc. However, there should be significant penalties for abusing the don't set bit -- Nick at Nite, for example, has no reason to use it.
What needs to be developed, besides the HDTV equivalent of he VCR, is the TIVO like thing where programs with the 'don't copy' bit set can be recorded locally on the machine but in no way can be pulled to any other device or media. Yes, that means propriatary hardware, but this would take care of fair use time shifting problems for the cable people.
But this is going to the Supreme Court at some point. I'm hoping someone follows the Aussie lead and take DVD region encoding to the Court, and the deCSS case will be taken there as well. The entertainment industry is trying to fight piracy from the wrong end, and instead should be looking more to the problem of offshore data pirates. Once the implications of these 'restrictions' hit JQ Public, there is going to be a major outroar on this.
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However, what SHOULD have been done, given the additional information, is the gov't person talking to Flashback *first*, asking them to remove the pages of the threat; Flashback could have looked, determined if it was such, and taken appropriate action; if they decided it wasn't, they could have easily written a letter back to this person saying so, and any further action by this person would then easily be seen as threatening legal action.
Instead, the gov't offical bypassed Flashback completely, and took more drastic measures, suggesting that there was an alterior motive for this; maybe he didn't like MOST of the material at Flashback which does sound like an peaceful anti-government-like site. Which any politican should of course be wary about, but trying to shut down completely is very much an abuse of power.
Privately owned companies have a right to refuse business with you; you can't buy a car in the states if your credit rating is terrible, for example. Of course, the reasons must be anti-discrimatory -- I can't say "Only men may by things from me", lest I get equal rights protectors on me. What's weird here is that every business that serves the ISP need for this site refuses his business with no other viable alternative except for going out of the country...an interesting twist on indirect censorship...
Which raises another question - the fact that the gov't person wrote things to these ISPs to deny the site service consistute as libel? Certainly the site appears to be doing nothing wrong against the law in Sw, but one person in a power position doesn't like what they say and takes action to prevent it? Certainly there's some significant damage here particulary if they are a small ISP and thus a for-profit business.
Finally, one has to wonder to what extent freedom of speech is covered. Assuming a similar freedom of speech right as in the states that would be in Sw, is having unrestricted access to a medium part of that freedom, given necessary concerns on finacal and technological ability? (I don't think we can go and say that net access is a universal right, as that would mean we'd have to completely wire every house in the US with net access, and that would be expensive!!). If I have the ability and the money to use a public medium to deliever a message which is covered by freedom of speech, would an effective blockage of that medium (even though other, less effective mediums are available) a violation of freedom of speech? I figure that in the US, the answer to this would be no, given the currect thought in the US gov't, but this is a nation-by-nation decision.
What those that create the content should realize that most people on the web would like to sample products and test them before purchasing the better physical product. If a music publisher were to give away *free* 96kbyte-encoded mp3s (which IMO are close to FM radio quality) on the web, hoping to entice those that listen to them to buy the full album, they'll have a better chance than if they offered the same selections as 192kbyte mp3s; the former file size would be much smaller so that those with dialups can easily get them, and the encoding would be good enough to be able to judge the quality of the music for a potental future purchase. (Of course, consider that the average napster-using college student is going to snarf everything and buy nothing, but without napster, it's pretty much the same situation, they won't have cash to be buying overpriced CDs).
Same with, say, television. I wouldn't mind having to watch any broadcasted episode of (for example) Farscape or the Invisible Man from Sci-Fi in crappy 240x180 window size, mono sound, streaming video assuming it was distributed free, since I have some interest in the shows but am not a devotee, but I *will* pay good money for quality (DVD) reruns of Babylon 5. Maybe there's a particular episode of Farscape that I also want in high quality format -- the free option will allow me to locate it, verify that I want it, then go off to the store and buy it.
You still have problems with those that get the physical medium then digitize it and distribute it, but that's a problem with anything digital. I'm sure that while rumors, software companies have been compensating for pirated software losses for years (some possibly using it to their advantage :) ), and the content providers of today (music, movies, television and press) need to realize that they can't avoid such losses... if instead they worked to making better relations with net users as opposed to trying to shun them, they actually might see their bottom lines increase.
Just because it's called a CIO or CTO (or whatever other TLA you can name), doesn't mean that it's the same 'job' at any company; the only things that would be in common as such to make sure the company has the right PR is that the person is very high up in the ranks and makes some of the most important decisions regarding technology choices in the company. There's no law or standard that states that a company has to have certain positions labeled and filled -- the only thing the gov't cares about is if they pay their taxes.
Neural networks are meant to try to 'black box' complex behavior into a nice package, with the ability to learn and adapt from past and present behavior. While the running of a household is certainly a complex pattern, it's TOO complex with too many variables to be effective. NNs can also over or under predict, and I'm sure there are things that you do not want to go on or off without your input.
A NN *could* help with efficient heating and cooling of your house, of course; you'd need to have a large data set of times, indoor and outdoor temps along with windspeeds (or wind chill factors) for about a year to get an effective yearly cycle in place, then with the time and conditions, it should be easy to have the network control the temperature and minimize energy use while maintaining a comfortable room. This is because all those factors can be realized as a complex yet predictable pattern (as there is no human element involved), and thus a trained NN should be able to do the trick.
What you'd probably want for the rest of the house is the use of a rules-based logic or fuzzy logic. This is more adaptable to individual users (specifying their own rules), and it is more than adequet for house control.
In addition to this, I'm pretty sure that in the email RFC, there's an option that you can include with emails for return-reciepts -- the only problem is that few if any clients appears to support such features (with numbers much lower on windows sides). Of course, I may be completely mistaken here.
Ask Scotty...duh... :D
(Or, maybe the monolith has chosen chickens as the next enlightened species... :)
Just state that personal printing from the web should be limited to a few pages, with no *color* printing, abuses will be handled on a case by case basis as necessary.
As an interesting test, those that can should create a new email alias and use it as their email address here (easy enough to still read mail that goes through it, but allows detection of where that email came from). If you get any spam-like advertizing through that address, assuming you are canadian, you might have a case here...
Now, as for bitrates and size, I would think that those that are just downloading to hear music aren't going to care about bitrates -- they just want to hear said tracks. On the other hand, those that are audiophiles are probably going to download the 128k files and make a decision to buy the album or not from those, since the CD will be better quality than the mp3. That leaves those that download the 196 or higher bitrates but won't buy the album; I would figure that these are the people that are already going to have the large bandwidth and storage mediums that they don't have to worry about this.
I do agree that a flat $5 month for all users is questionable given the difference between usage patterns, but trying to charge based on transfer rate will also raise problems. Do you set the change at the time that the user creates the account? If so, I'll create the account on a dail-up and then go use work or home broadband to get everything I need. Do you charge by bytes sent? Then there is a loss of anonymousity as napster can now easily track who downloads what since they have to keep track of bytes.
Face it, there were basically only two ways that the Napster and digital music on the net would have worked out: either we get this sort of settlement between the RIAA companies and Napster, or we start the world's largest game of whack-a-mole to remove all illegal music distribution sites on the net (And if you think that freenet or gnutella would offer protection, I very much doubt it, since it would be the operators of the various servers/peers that would be threatened, not necessarily the creators of the program). IMO, the first option of working out a deal is a much better prospect.
I know most of the complaining comes down to money: physical music CDs are too expensive, and early Napster was free. For starving college kids, the choice is easy. But let's say that all the other RIAA companies jump on with BMG and the $5/mnth service continues with lots of sign-upers. At $5/mnth, that's about equal to 3 to 5 CDs a YEAR in terms of price, and I know that's a bargain. Because of that, CD sales might flounder as more people sign on -- on the other hand, CD sales could continue steady or rise if people use Napster to pre-test albums. If the former case occurs, two things would have to happen: either the napster fee would have to be increased (which would cause a lot of people to drop out, and therefore the last possible resort), or the cost of CDs will go down, which is beneficial for everyone, since the music industry appears to be operating right of the supply-demand interestion-- lowering costs will increase sales and increase revenue. If the latter case happens, with increased sales, the only thing that the RIAA people could do is to continue to embrace Napster and possibly lower fees to entice more people to it.
Remember, the boundary right now for most average people is the question of legality of downloading music as such. The fee-based Napster takes away any such threat, and I would expect to see a massive rush of people joining Napster for this service when it's made available.
My suggestion is basically that instead of just one person moderating stories from various sections is to give it to at least 3 story moderators, and if the story gets a majority of those moderators go-aheads, then it's posted. This would slow down how fast some stories would be posted, but it would remove same-day repeats, bogus links, and the like. It may be necessary to add more story moderators to handle the load, but that's really not a problem.
And of course, my other beef with story moderation is that there ought to be a way to understand why a submission was turned down; just give the moderators a popup list of why to reject a story: was it duplicated? was the write up by the submitter poor? is it not 'news for nerds'? You'd only have to have 5 or 6 different selections here, and I'd be much happier knowning why what I feel are more important stories are being dropped by moderators.
The question becomes, is a company that wants a free base to start to release a commercial product from going to have a) compenent programmers that could find it, and b) the time that would be necessarily to strip out that code? The larger the code base, the less likely that it will be found *AND* fixed.
Maybe GPL'd code needs something similar: not necessarily a backdoor but some easter egg that isn't easy to strip from the code but is sufficient enough that if someone did what this story talked about, it should be relatively easy to find a fingerprint of the source. "strings" works, but only if the GPL abuser forgets to check this, though I can think of several ways to hide snippets of strings in #define's throughout the code that look meaningly alone but can be incriminating when put together.
Mind you, it's not perfect, but this is where the GPL has a weakness -- without court order it's nearly impossible to prove that GPL code was used incorrectly. For all we know, Win2000 may be a wrapper around a linux kernel ( doubtful, of course), but the possibility is there.
But again, it's just like computer security. If you have a well secured computer, you will never know if you needed it or not, but you prevent problems that might have if you don't have any security all together.
Of course, being from Radio Shack, I'd be very wary in the first place.
I don't LIKE this idea, but I do have to acknowledge that copyright holders should be able to protect their works to some extent without trampling fair use. And as I stated before, it shouldn't be on the consumer side where they fight this.
Nit: DMCA was passed by a anonymous voice vote. For all practical purposes, it is unanimous, but we have no idea whom the dissenters were because that was not recored.
But all that aside, I do agree that this bit is necessary particularly for cable and premium channel -- broadcast channels should NOT be allowed to set this bit at all because they don't make their money sending data out ot the consumer, they make it in commercials. On the other hand the consumer is paying for the content on the cable stations (ehhh, somewhat), and since it's not broadcasted freely to everyone, there is need to copyright protection. Particularly in the case of premium stations like HBO, etc. However, there should be significant penalties for abusing the don't set bit -- Nick at Nite, for example, has no reason to use it.
What needs to be developed, besides the HDTV equivalent of he VCR, is the TIVO like thing where programs with the 'don't copy' bit set can be recorded locally on the machine but in no way can be pulled to any other device or media. Yes, that means propriatary hardware, but this would take care of fair use time shifting problems for the cable people.
But this is going to the Supreme Court at some point. I'm hoping someone follows the Aussie lead and take DVD region encoding to the Court, and the deCSS case will be taken there as well. The entertainment industry is trying to fight piracy from the wrong end, and instead should be looking more to the problem of offshore data pirates. Once the implications of these 'restrictions' hit JQ Public, there is going to be a major outroar on this.