Anyone with a little bit of math background and a voracious crypto reading habit can be a communications security hard-ass. Get back to me when you're a sigint hardass with a GS rating or a military rank, m'kay?
and also as someone who has worked in a DoD-funded research lab, and also as someone who secured data in that lab using PGP...Nothing happened to me for using PGP to secure a couple of files. In fact, I don't think anyone even noticed. Security in those places isn't as tight as you're making it out to be.
A DoD lab != a DoD funded lab. Take this simple test: did your lab have a Commanding Officer as well as a civilian administrator? If the answer is no, you weren't working at a government lab. Security is -tighter- than I made it out to be. I know of one division head who's not allowed to see what his managers are working on because of a -minor- clearance issue. Unless you were handed a big, fat manual with DoD crypto guidelines spelled out in long words, you simply aren't qualified to say what the guidelines are or aren't. Hell, I know -when-, -where- and -how- PGP got on the official taboo list. The "why" isn't hard to figure out on your own.
Do the power analysis--it would take an optimal computer about one year at a constant 250 megawatts of power to break a 128-bit cipher.
If brute forced, sure. Big if. C'mon...I'm not into crypto and I can suss this one out.
If the NSA is so advanced that it has perfect computers running at a cryogenically-cool 3.2 Kelvins and hooked up to its own nuclear power plant just to flip the bits, I'd really like to know about it.
You aren't alone...bet the Chinese and a few Middle Eastern nations want to know the same thing. I just wonder what you -do- know about declassified NSA info (like its budget. Or recruiting objectives.). It's clear you don't know squat about what goes on -under- the kimono...
I'm not being facetious here. If you have any hard facts to back up your assertion, I'd like to hear them.
Actually, you -are- being facetious. You're a PGP partisan, not an cointel/sigint analyst, so snide bluster is -all- you got.
Getting back to the point, PGP is secure for day to day use, as the Fat Boys Institute does not have the money, the manpower or the mandate to do what the Nasty Snitch Association does.
Stop jerking your knee for a minute and think. The largest threat to national security these days are terrorist organizations who are likely to use inexpensive (free) cryptography. This means PGP was the largest cryptographic threat to national security. Do some math of your own.
OK, just to verify your credibility, what happens to your security clearance if you get caught using PGP to secure data in a govt. defense lab? Please explain why the sigint hardcases don't seem to mind theoretically weaker crypto that isn't PGP? Discuss!
You'd learn more about the practical aspects of cryptography if you paid more attention to the spooks than the big-brains.
The quote is mine. I'm not a cypherpunk, or even a programmer. I'm simply an industry analayst (And a multi-platform sysadmin).
It was taken out of context. Here is the relevant part of the original mail in all it's unedited glory:
It's all about money. Ask any government engineer or defense contractor: computational time is measured in money.
Right now, it's widely known that the NSA can crack PGP, and do so in perhaps as little as one day (probably a lot, lot longer, but we're talking worse case scenarios.) However, the cost of maintaining the computational rescources to crack that code aren't cheap. I'd suspect that unless someone is plotting to set off a nuke in Times Square or planning to invade Canada, the NSA won't touch it. The FBI simply does not have the money, and the spector of J. Hoover means that congress won't be too keen on allocating them money to buy fancy new machines to ferret out the secrets of private citizens. If Monica had encrypted her email and sent it via anonymizer.com, the feds would never have been able to get their grubby mitts on it. (And if the feds can get a hold of it, then disgruntled boyfriends, corporate spooks, or stalkers can, too.)
The problem is that the tools that enable privacy are way too difficult to employ.
Hello. The quote was mine, and taken far out of context.
<em>This would be news to professional cryptographers.</em>
My info comes from the spook side rather than the big-brain side of the equation. I'm no cypherpunk, but it sounded like it was not brute forced, but required a lot of time on the big iron regardless.
It's not easy -or- cheap, and despite what Katz wrote, I was using it as an example as to why personal encryption was secure. Yes, they -can- break it, but it's too damn expensive to be used in routine law enforcement, and since everyone still remembers J. Edgar, it's doubtfull the FBI will get the funding to crack crypto.
"Love the Mac, Hate Apple" has long been the Macintosh afficionado's creedo. Apple is a short-sighted, mean spirited and callow corporation that's about as despicable as they come. Their current attitude towards independant resellers and users, especially in terms of tech support and making good on defective equipment, is nothing short of "slimy".
Unfortunately, Apple also has the habit of producing revolutionary products that are so much more than the sum of their creator. So, even tho they killed HyperCard, the Newton, OpenDoc and a myriad of other interesting and worthy technologies, even though their legal department is staffed by the Barney Fife brigade and can zero in the big guns on their own foot with uncanny accuracy, people are still loyal.
This is why there are so many Apple/Macintosh rumors sites: Mac users, especially professionals, cannot trust Apple to behave in a predictable, professional manner. Unfortunately, their products are of the caliber where we need to make an effort to get around the limitations of the company to use the best damn computing tools on the planet.
Do you all think that digital movies may eventually bypass the traditional cineplex and be delivered straight to your home?
If Television, Cable Television, VCRs and a vidoe rental and sales industry, and Pay-per-view haven't obsoleted the ciniplex, then movies over the internet won't, either. Duh.
This "Gee whiz" fanboy approach to new technology is irritating. Do try to -think- about how the technology will fit into the scheme of things before going "Ugh! Shiny new happy thing! All will use shiny new happything! Old thing bad! Ugh!"
The civilization that we have today, and the long march toward freedom and justice that began in Philedelphia by "white farmers" more than 200 years ago, was created beacuse of, not in spite of, the constituition.
Our darkest days have occurred when we turn our back on the careful balance of freedom and responsibility embodied in the Constituition for expediency.
President Jackson decided that the Constituition was in the way of modern politics, and said "The Supreme Justice has made his decision, now let's see him enforce it." He then marched the Cherokee off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
I'd like to see someone suggest a real solution of balance which would 1) Not be Draconian to legal consumers
The first step would be returning to the 14 year expiry of copyright. 95 years is draconian and deprives the nation of -true- innovation and progress.
2)be fair to the Companies' rights
The companies' "rights" as enshrined in law are so ludicrously far reaching these days they are laughably unenforceable. When the rights are in equal measure to the public interest, we'll talk again about "fairness".
3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
The most brutally obvious answer is: "Give it away for free". Structure revenue models around other profit centers, such as service, support and hardware. Keep R&D costs under control, and base your development efforts on easily implemented open standards and community effort.
Oops! Mistook the filing date ('80) for the dated granted ('89). IIRC, Allan Touring had some opinions on the matter which influenced Bush as well...it's been a while since I've delved into the origins of the GUI. Hell, when you think about it, some Usenet readers and BBSs store and retrieve information along lines uncomfortably close to the BT patent, as does any program that acts as a front end interface for a database.
Any Mac afficionado worth her single-button mouse knows the name Vannevar Bush and his concept of hypermedia, which detailed most of what's covered in that patent, only this was well before the second world war. Ted Nelson has worked for most of the second half of the twentieth century bringing Bush's vision into fruition using computer science. The technology he developed is called "hypertext", and has been implemented in everything from the old Xerox Star to the Apple's Hypercard. Hypercard has been around since '87, and does pretty much what the BT patent describes.
Prior art, bay-bee! Can't wait to see the AOL (doing GUI-centric internetworking before internetworking was cool) lawyers put the smack-down on these idiots.
"If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement, there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free," Valenti said.
You mean...like radio and broadcast TV? And libraries! Godless libraries, treating information as something other than a commodity...shame! SHAME! Don't they know they are promoting illegal and immoral behavior? Don;t they realize they are undermining the sacred trust of intellectual property? Libraries lead to lawlessness! Burn them all to the ground, I say!
The lighting was genius and very cutting edge. It made use of clever monochromatic and multichromatic effects to impart a surreal and usually appropriate mood to any given scene. The Grim and dank purple of th alien homeworld, the stark and gray of the alien work camps, the eerie, alien tones in the skyscraper scene all were used to good effect.
Unfortunately, the lighting director's wonderful work is easily lost by the incompetent camera operators (how many out-of focus scenes can -you- find?) Poor cinematography, third rate makeup and special effects, and a grating, distracting and incongruous soundtrack. Bad, bad, bad directing means that the only redeeming value of the movie was lost utterly in an avalanch of suck.
yet your version of satirical interjectivity comes at a point where the realisticly interpreted nature of the piece is no longer at question and thus should not be recognized as satirical literature, but alas, merely a bad joke.
Point taken, so allow me to rephrase:
Bad jokes. Live them. Love them. Learn to recognize them.
I could not help but notice that you are endorsing the dissemination of culture over the internet by selling Napster merchandise!
My brother, scrawny code-geek he is, would desparately like to wear apparel celebrating the technology behind sharing of files over the internet. To my mind, this would make an ideal birthday gift. The problem is, we both loathe Napster. It's slow, inefficient, and tied to a central database that Metallica and their legal eagles can subpeona. Thus, he downloads all of your songs using Gnutella, a peer-based network based around public domain software rather than a central service based around proprietary code. If you would be so kind as to design a decent "Gnutella" t-shirt, I would be ecstatic! Since there is no trademark, and no-one to sue or be sued, you can promote Gnutella -and- turn a tidy profit! A shirt in "L" size would be ideal.
As for myself, I find an IP-based file sharing scheme to be too invasive of my privacy, which is why I endorse FreeNet, a system that offers technological guarantees of anonymity. Like Gnutella, it is a "free software" project with no enforced trademark. I'd be delighted if you could design a snazzy FreeNet hat I could purchase from you.
While you are at it, "NFS", "FTP", and "IRC" T-shirts commemorationg the death of the music industry and the overpaid hacks and lapdogs churning out artless product for it would be spiff-a-riffic.
Irony! It's all about irony. While the Digital Divas were busy shoe-horning outmoded and censorious print media copyright concepts onto the web, they got smacked by a -real- intellectual property violation.
In the age where a photo or HTML or metallica song can be replicated and shared with less effort than getting up to grab a beer from the fridge, the ticket to making content profitable on the web is marketing. You create a unique service, and you market the hell out of it. A well developed brand is infinitely more valuable than the "rights" to the content associated with that brand.
So while getting all indignant about "theft" and "abuse" and "piracy" (read: sharing), and organizing pointless excercises in corporate snottiness with the Gray Day, the Digital Divas have got a lesson on how profoundly things have changed.
The only intellectiual property worth a damn in the digital age is the trademark. Good thing it's also the only one still reasonably defensible in court. Go, Divas, go!
Lars sez that that it's all bout control. He's right. The MPAA, the RIAA, the SPAA all exist for one purpose: to give corporations and commercial entities absolute control over culture, usually with copyright being used as the bludgeon.
Here's the deal, tho...copyright law was not devised to give an absolute monopoly to those who create and distribute intellectual property. It was designed to take that monopoly -away-.
The Statute of Anne, enacted by British Parliment in 1710, marks not only the beginning of copyright law, but the fabled "Age of Reason". The Statute of Anne broke the absolute publishing monopolies granted to the Stationers, with the express intent to facilitate learning and a free exchange of ideas. Authors were granted rights to their own works, and given control of them for a period of 30 years, after which the rights would pass into the public domain. Considering the information infrastructure in 1710, this enabled philosophy, mathematics, history, science and other scholarly works to spread like wildfire through the intellectual community, ushering in the modern age.
The US constituition has a provision for copyright lifted whole from British copyright law, with the same stated purpose: to encourage the dissemination of ideas and knowledge. Over the past century, the freedoms of US citizens in regards to the public domain have been whittled away to nearly nothing by corporate special interest, returning us to a situation similar to England's Stationers prior to the statute of Anne, with important cultural and educational works .
Here's the deal: culture is participatory. People share books, movies, music, photos, magazine articles, what have you. The free flow of information and ideas is instinctual. Does lars think all of his drum work, all of the guitar riffs created by his band members, even the style of his entire band, was created in a vacuum? What if the old blues men went to court to assert "control" of how their work was being used?
I have as much sympathy for lars and their record label as I do for buggywhip manufacturers. Civilization has -changed-...technology has taken back the ground lost to copyright and reinstated the public domain by fait accomplii. It's -possible- to "fuck with" new technologies that share culture and the free flow of ideas with guaranteed anonymity, and it's something totalitarian regimes like China and Singapore are working very, very hard on. Does Metallica feel so comfortable in the company of tyrants?
Believe it. ssh isn't a common neccessity for 99.9% of desktop users, so no big loss there (and there -are- ssh clients available, anyway.)
The Mac's ability to switch between sets of network configurations with a mere mouseclick trumps most Linux configuration tools I've seen, and tools like transmit (nagware) and green (freeware) rule my universe. Transmit is a ftp client that groks the mac UI: drag and drop files to and from multiple remote servers easier than meta-moderating. Sweet program. Green is a free-ware mail client that is at once stable, capable and -free-. (As in beer. Open source really hasn't hit the Mac scene yet, but we're working on it.)
Actually, Apple already released a fully-modern OS that was unix based...it's called A/UX and rocked the block on the MacIIfx, with it's "Phenomenally fast" 50mhz '030. It had a full-bore Mac interface, too. It's sadly been out of comission since the early nineties, mostly because backwards compatibility and ease-of-administration are the big Macintosh selling points.
OK, kids, anyone who's been on the scene longer than Linux kjnows the real scoop:
A hacker is someone who gets inside and groks systems. This is usually done with permission and to the benefit of the system, but not always. There are bad hackers and good hackers. Get over it.
A cracker is someone who breaks software copy protection. Period, the end. Most of them are pretty pissed at being lumped in with virus writers and "skript kiddeez".
The "hacker" vs. "cracker" debate is an excuse to co-opt language for political ends. I have little patience for political revisionism of common usage, -especially- when the revision is built on an ignorance of our own past.
We're back to the essential negrepontian schism: atoms vs. bits. Record companies for the last 90 years or so have made money by selling wax or plastic devices which would make a sound when fitted to the proper machine. They paid musicians (most of the time) for music to put on these wax and plastic devices.
The problem now is civilization has moved beyond the need for wax or plastic devices that are fitted to machines to store and play sounds. A sound can be played anywhere in the world where there is a phone line and a computer, and it can be stored on one or a million different physical devices in less time than it takes for me to type this. So, the entire premise that allowed a recording industry to come into being, by manufacturing, marketing and distributing devices that store and play sound when fitted to a machine, has evaporated. Selling CDs is starting to look a lot like selling buggy whips.
There are two ways we can handle this. 1) Force society to comply unwillingly with the needs of industry, with laws and force. 2) Figure out how to adapt to the new reality, and make our millions from new opportunities and paradigms.
The RIAA and their lackies are working very, very, very hard on option 1. Folks like George Clinton, Ice T, and Public Enemy are working very hard on option number 2.
The "culture wars" have bee raging since the birth of hip-hop and sampling, and was kicked to a whole new level in the nineties. 808 State and Negativeland were -destroyed- because the industry doesn't understand that culture is participatory, not pure consumption. The industry doesn't even understand that music is art, not product. Geffen sued Niel Young for deviating from his typical "stoner rock" formula...and -won-.
So! The people are happy with the new MP3/napster/gnutella paradigm. The musicians are (mostly) happy with the new paradigm. The recording industry wants to clamp down with laws and lawsuits and police raids. Since they have all the money, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
My question is simply this: how can Metallica in good conscience associate themselves with the stifling of freedom and new technology, when their success is founded on the free dissemenation of music through new technology? (Remember those bootleg casettes back in the '80s?). You're already one of the very, very, very few whom the record companies have allowed to become rich: do you -really- need another 30 pieces of silver?
In the HHGTtG series, you deal with a culture accustomed to instantaneous access to hip information -and- time-travel. It seemed to spiral in on itself, with time being as inconsequential a barrier to getting the best possible parties that geography is in the age of highways and jets.
In the contested twilight of the 20th century, we can go out on any given weekend, and find people dressed up in zoot-suits swing dancing, decked out in bell-bottoms at a disco, and rushing about outdoors attired in the shining armor of medevil knights, whacking each other with sticks.
Has the internet and recursive nostalgia brought us to a point where modern culture is every inch as silly and fractal as the one you created?
Also: I have the phrase "Don't Panic!" marching cheerily across my web-access cell phone's display when not in use. Did you expect to see the technology you envisioned with "The Guide" come to pass in your lifetime? Are you terrified someone might come up with an infinite improbability drive sometime before dinner?
Car Craft put a 500hp V-8 in a Chevette...just 'cuz they could. It kicked major ass, and was a great exapmple of the hacker mentality hard at work in the hot-rodding scene.
This month's Hot Rod has an article about a guy who dropped a turbocharged Thunderbird engine and a lot of custom intercooler crap into a '71 pinto. Again, way fast and way neat. Beige boxes (or '69 Chevelles and '78 Camaros and '84 Mustangs...the automotive equivalent of beige boxes) suck. Freak power rules.
The main problems with the modern interface is that it is tied to closely with the decrepit old computing paradigm that runs just about everything: the dichotomomy that separates applications from OS, and OS from the user environment.
Linux isn't likely to help much, because as a Unix derivative, it is a programmer-centric system that clearly delineates individual exectuables from the rest of the system. Great for folks who know and love programming, especially C and Perl, lousy for people trying to interact with data in a logical, consistent and sophisticated manner.
The largest enemy of a good interface are proprietary data formats. It requires you to operate an application rather than edit data. Tools are tools, and should be applicable to any given set of data depending on what you want to do with it. The single largest obstacle to effectively managing data from a user-centric perspective is modality. You are in a text editing mode...save, quit, open up gimp, import the text and now you are in a graphics editing mode, so you can flow the text into a pretty png. If you screw up, begin all over again. In an ideal interface, the user could not distinguish between an application, like gimp, and a set of tools available to her regardless of what else she's doing with the system.
An ideal interface can recognize what data is, and offer you the proper tools to work with it. Here's an example from the mac: highlight http://slashdot.org. You can drag the highlighted text to the desktop, where it becomes a URL icon. You can change the name of the URL file you just created: call it "News For Nerds". Double click on it, and the browser of your choice opens up and takes you to slashdot. Drag the icon into a text editing window, and it pastes in http://slashdot.org wherever the cursor is. The Mac groks data and how it's used. So should any modern OS: a dot-three extension is a sad and sorry substitute: like nailing two sheets of plywood to the top of your car and calling it a Concorde jet. Linux, and other Unices, don't implement this, because they assume that anything that isn't an executable is text. They can't grok data, and rely on the user or an application to tell them what to do in all instances.
I don't know if we can fix this in Linux without a deep and honest appraisal of the limitations inherent to Unix-like systems. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a poor copy of the Windows GUI, considering the tools we have to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with a little bit of math background and a voracious crypto reading habit can be a communications security hard-ass. Get back to me when you're a sigint hardass with a GS rating or a military rank, m'kay?
and also as someone who has worked in a DoD-funded research lab, and also as someone who secured data in that lab using PGP...Nothing happened to me for using PGP to secure a couple of files. In fact, I don't think anyone even noticed. Security in those places isn't as tight as you're making it out to be.
A DoD lab != a DoD funded lab. Take this simple test: did your lab have a Commanding Officer as well as a civilian administrator? If the answer is no, you weren't working at a government lab. Security is -tighter- than I made it out to be. I know of one division head who's not allowed to see what his managers are working on because of a -minor- clearance issue. Unless you were handed a big, fat manual with DoD crypto guidelines spelled out in long words, you simply aren't qualified to say what the guidelines are or aren't. Hell, I know -when-, -where- and -how- PGP got on the official taboo list. The "why" isn't hard to figure out on your own.
Do the power analysis--it would take an optimal computer about one year at a constant 250 megawatts of power to break a 128-bit cipher.
If brute forced, sure. Big if. C'mon...I'm not into crypto and I can suss this one out.
If the NSA is so advanced that it has perfect computers running at a cryogenically-cool 3.2 Kelvins and hooked up to its own nuclear power plant just to flip the bits, I'd really like to know about it.
You aren't alone...bet the Chinese and a few Middle Eastern nations want to know the same thing. I just wonder what you -do- know about declassified NSA info (like its budget. Or recruiting objectives.). It's clear you don't know squat about what goes on -under- the kimono...
I'm not being facetious here. If you have any hard facts to back up your assertion, I'd like to hear them.
Actually, you -are- being facetious. You're a PGP partisan, not an cointel/sigint analyst, so snide bluster is -all- you got.
Getting back to the point, PGP is secure for day to day use, as the Fat Boys Institute does not have the money, the manpower or the mandate to do what the Nasty Snitch Association does.
Stop jerking your knee for a minute and think. The largest threat to national security these days are terrorist organizations who are likely to use inexpensive (free) cryptography. This means PGP was the largest cryptographic threat to national security. Do some math of your own.
SoupIsGood Food
OK, just to verify your credibility, what happens to your security clearance if you get caught using PGP to secure data in a govt. defense lab? Please explain why the sigint hardcases don't seem to mind theoretically weaker crypto that isn't PGP? Discuss!
You'd learn more about the practical aspects of cryptography if you paid more attention to the spooks than the big-brains.
SoupIsGood Food
It was taken out of context. Here is the relevant part of the original mail in all it's unedited glory:
SoupIsGood Food
Hello. The quote was mine, and taken far out of context.
<em>This would be news to professional cryptographers.</em>
My info comes from the spook side rather than the big-brain side of the equation. I'm no cypherpunk, but it sounded like it was not brute forced, but required a lot of time on the big iron regardless.
It's not easy -or- cheap, and despite what Katz wrote, I was using it as an example as to why personal encryption was secure. Yes, they -can- break it, but it's too damn expensive to be used in routine law enforcement, and since everyone still remembers J. Edgar, it's doubtfull the FBI will get the funding to crack crypto.
SoupIsGood Food
"Love the Mac, Hate Apple" has long been the Macintosh afficionado's creedo. Apple is a short-sighted, mean spirited and callow corporation that's about as despicable as they come. Their current attitude towards independant resellers and users, especially in terms of tech support and making good on defective equipment, is nothing short of "slimy".
Unfortunately, Apple also has the habit of producing revolutionary products that are so much more than the sum of their creator. So, even tho they killed HyperCard, the Newton, OpenDoc and a myriad of other interesting and worthy technologies, even though their legal department is staffed by the Barney Fife brigade and can zero in the big guns on their own foot with uncanny accuracy, people are still loyal.
This is why there are so many Apple/Macintosh rumors sites: Mac users, especially professionals, cannot trust Apple to behave in a predictable, professional manner. Unfortunately, their products are of the caliber where we need to make an effort to get around the limitations of the company to use the best damn computing tools on the planet.
SoupIsGood Food
Do you all think that digital movies may eventually bypass the traditional cineplex and be delivered straight to your home?
If Television, Cable Television, VCRs and a vidoe rental and sales industry, and Pay-per-view haven't obsoleted the ciniplex, then movies over the internet won't, either. Duh.
This "Gee whiz" fanboy approach to new technology is irritating. Do try to -think- about how the technology will fit into the scheme of things before going "Ugh! Shiny new happy thing! All will use shiny new happything! Old thing bad! Ugh!"
SoupIsGood Food
You obviously go to better parties than I do.
I'm a reclusive misanthropist, I don't go to parties. There is a startlingly profound difference between "go to" and "somehow wind up at".
SoupIsGood Food
The civilization that we have today, and the long march toward freedom and justice that began in Philedelphia by "white farmers" more than 200 years ago, was created beacuse of, not in spite of, the constituition.
Our darkest days have occurred when we turn our back on the careful balance of freedom and responsibility embodied in the Constituition for expediency.
President Jackson decided that the Constituition was in the way of modern politics, and said "The Supreme Justice has made his decision, now let's see him enforce it." He then marched the Cherokee off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
SoupIsGood Food
The first step would be returning to the 14 year expiry of copyright. 95 years is draconian and deprives the nation of -true- innovation and progress.
2)be fair to the Companies' rights
The companies' "rights" as enshrined in law are so ludicrously far reaching these days they are laughably unenforceable. When the rights are in equal measure to the public interest, we'll talk again about "fairness".
3) somehow prevent the pirates from illegally stealing software.
The most brutally obvious answer is: "Give it away for free". Structure revenue models around other profit centers, such as service, support and hardware. Keep R&D costs under control, and base your development efforts on easily implemented open standards and community effort.
SoupIsGood Food
Oops! Mistook the filing date ('80) for the dated granted ('89). IIRC, Allan Touring had some opinions on the matter which influenced Bush as well...it's been a while since I've delved into the origins of the GUI. Hell, when you think about it, some Usenet readers and BBSs store and retrieve information along lines uncomfortably close to the BT patent, as does any program that acts as a front end interface for a database.
SoupIsGood Food
Any Mac afficionado worth her single-button mouse knows the name Vannevar Bush and his concept of hypermedia, which detailed most of what's covered in that patent, only this was well before the second world war. Ted Nelson has worked for most of the second half of the twentieth century bringing Bush's vision into fruition using computer science. The technology he developed is called "hypertext", and has been implemented in everything from the old Xerox Star to the Apple's Hypercard. Hypercard has been around since '87, and does pretty much what the BT patent describes.
Prior art, bay-bee! Can't wait to see the AOL (doing GUI-centric internetworking before internetworking was cool) lawyers put the smack-down on these idiots.
SoupIsGood Food
"If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement, there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free," Valenti said.
You mean...like radio and broadcast TV? And libraries! Godless libraries, treating information as something other than a commodity...shame! SHAME! Don't they know they are promoting illegal and immoral behavior? Don;t they realize they are undermining the sacred trust of intellectual property? Libraries lead to lawlessness! Burn them all to the ground, I say!
SoupIsGood Food
The lighting was genius and very cutting edge. It made use of clever monochromatic and multichromatic effects to impart a surreal and usually appropriate mood to any given scene. The Grim and dank purple of th alien homeworld, the stark and gray of the alien work camps, the eerie, alien tones in the skyscraper scene all were used to good effect.
Unfortunately, the lighting director's wonderful work is easily lost by the incompetent camera operators (how many out-of focus scenes can -you- find?) Poor cinematography, third rate makeup and special effects, and a grating, distracting and incongruous soundtrack. Bad, bad, bad directing means that the only redeeming value of the movie was lost utterly in an avalanch of suck.
SoupIsGood Food
yet your version of satirical interjectivity comes at a point where the realisticly interpreted nature of the piece is no longer at question and thus should not be recognized as satirical literature, but alas, merely a bad joke.
Point taken, so allow me to rephrase:
Bad jokes. Live them. Love them. Learn to recognize them.
SOOOOOP.
Um, the Offspring are overpaid hacks churing out a an artless and completely uninteresting prouct. You ever hear their music?
Satire. Love it. Live it. Learn to recognize it.
Soup-O-Rama!
Esteemed sirs:
I could not help but notice that you are endorsing the dissemination of culture over the internet by selling Napster merchandise!
My brother, scrawny code-geek he is, would desparately like to wear apparel celebrating the technology behind sharing of files over the internet. To my mind, this would make an ideal birthday gift. The problem is, we both loathe Napster. It's slow, inefficient, and tied to a central database that Metallica and their legal eagles can subpeona. Thus, he downloads all of your songs using Gnutella, a peer-based network based around public domain software rather than a central service based around proprietary code. If you would be so kind as to design a decent "Gnutella" t-shirt, I would be ecstatic! Since there is no trademark, and no-one to sue or be sued, you can promote Gnutella -and- turn a tidy profit! A shirt in "L" size would be ideal.
As for myself, I find an IP-based file sharing scheme to be too invasive of my privacy, which is why I endorse FreeNet, a system that offers technological guarantees of anonymity. Like Gnutella, it is a "free software" project with no enforced trademark. I'd be delighted if you could design a snazzy FreeNet hat I could purchase from you.
While you are at it, "NFS", "FTP", and "IRC" T-shirts commemorationg the death of the music industry and the overpaid hacks and lapdogs churning out artless product for it would be spiff-a-riffic.
SoupIsGood Food
Irony! It's all about irony. While the Digital Divas were busy shoe-horning outmoded and censorious print media copyright concepts onto the web, they got smacked by a -real- intellectual property violation.
In the age where a photo or HTML or metallica song can be replicated and shared with less effort than getting up to grab a beer from the fridge, the ticket to making content profitable on the web is marketing. You create a unique service, and you market the hell out of it. A well developed brand is infinitely more valuable than the "rights" to the content associated with that brand.
So while getting all indignant about "theft" and "abuse" and "piracy" (read: sharing), and organizing pointless excercises in corporate snottiness with the Gray Day, the Digital Divas have got a lesson on how profoundly things have changed.
The only intellectiual property worth a damn in the digital age is the trademark. Good thing it's also the only one still reasonably defensible in court. Go, Divas, go!
SoupIsGood Food
Lars sez that that it's all bout control. He's right. The MPAA, the RIAA, the SPAA all exist for one purpose: to give corporations and commercial entities absolute control over culture, usually with copyright being used as the bludgeon.
Here's the deal, tho...copyright law was not devised to give an absolute monopoly to those who create and distribute intellectual property. It was designed to take that monopoly -away-.
The Statute of Anne, enacted by British Parliment in 1710, marks not only the beginning of copyright law, but the fabled "Age of Reason". The Statute of Anne broke the absolute publishing monopolies granted to the Stationers, with the express intent to facilitate learning and a free exchange of ideas. Authors were granted rights to their own works, and given control of them for a period of 30 years, after which the rights would pass into the public domain. Considering the information infrastructure in 1710, this enabled philosophy, mathematics, history, science and other scholarly works to spread like wildfire through the intellectual community, ushering in the modern age.
The US constituition has a provision for copyright lifted whole from British copyright law, with the same stated purpose: to encourage the dissemination of ideas and knowledge. Over the past century, the freedoms of US citizens in regards to the public domain have been whittled away to nearly nothing by corporate special interest, returning us to a situation similar to England's Stationers prior to the statute of Anne, with important cultural and educational works .
Here's the deal: culture is participatory. People share books, movies, music, photos, magazine articles, what have you. The free flow of information and ideas is instinctual. Does lars think all of his drum work, all of the guitar riffs created by his band members, even the style of his entire band, was created in a vacuum? What if the old blues men went to court to assert "control" of how their work was being used?
I have as much sympathy for lars and their record label as I do for buggywhip manufacturers. Civilization has -changed-...technology has taken back the ground lost to copyright and reinstated the public domain by fait accomplii. It's -possible- to "fuck with" new technologies that share culture and the free flow of ideas with guaranteed anonymity, and it's something totalitarian regimes like China and Singapore are working very, very hard on. Does Metallica feel so comfortable in the company of tyrants?
SoupIsGood Food
Believe it. ssh isn't a common neccessity for 99.9% of desktop users, so no big loss there (and there -are- ssh clients available, anyway.)
The Mac's ability to switch between sets of network configurations with a mere mouseclick trumps most Linux configuration tools I've seen, and tools like transmit (nagware) and green (freeware) rule my universe. Transmit is a ftp client that groks the mac UI: drag and drop files to and from multiple remote servers easier than meta-moderating. Sweet program. Green is a free-ware mail client that is at once stable, capable and -free-. (As in beer. Open source really hasn't hit the Mac scene yet, but we're working on it.)
SoupIsGood Food
Actually, Apple already released a fully-modern OS that was unix based...it's called A/UX and rocked the block on the MacIIfx, with it's "Phenomenally fast" 50mhz '030. It had a full-bore Mac interface, too. It's sadly been out of comission since the early nineties, mostly because backwards compatibility and ease-of-administration are the big Macintosh selling points.
SoupIsGood Food
OK, kids, anyone who's been on the scene longer than Linux kjnows the real scoop:
A hacker is someone who gets inside and groks systems. This is usually done with permission and to the benefit of the system, but not always. There are bad hackers and good hackers. Get over it.
A cracker is someone who breaks software copy protection. Period, the end. Most of them are pretty pissed at being lumped in with virus writers and "skript kiddeez".
The "hacker" vs. "cracker" debate is an excuse to co-opt language for political ends. I have little patience for political revisionism of common usage, -especially- when the revision is built on an ignorance of our own past.
SoupIsGood Food
We're back to the essential negrepontian schism: atoms vs. bits. Record companies for the last 90 years or so have made money by selling wax or plastic devices which would make a sound when fitted to the proper machine. They paid musicians (most of the time) for music to put on these wax and plastic devices.
The problem now is civilization has moved beyond the need for wax or plastic devices that are fitted to machines to store and play sounds. A sound can be played anywhere in the world where there is a phone line and a computer, and it can be stored on one or a million different physical devices in less time than it takes for me to type this. So, the entire premise that allowed a recording industry to come into being, by manufacturing, marketing and distributing devices that store and play sound when fitted to a machine, has evaporated. Selling CDs is starting to look a lot like selling buggy whips.
There are two ways we can handle this. 1) Force society to comply unwillingly with the needs of industry, with laws and force. 2) Figure out how to adapt to the new reality, and make our millions from new opportunities and paradigms.
The RIAA and their lackies are working very, very, very hard on option 1. Folks like George Clinton, Ice T, and Public Enemy are working very hard on option number 2.
The "culture wars" have bee raging since the birth of hip-hop and sampling, and was kicked to a whole new level in the nineties. 808 State and Negativeland were -destroyed- because the industry doesn't understand that culture is participatory, not pure consumption. The industry doesn't even understand that music is art, not product. Geffen sued Niel Young for deviating from his typical "stoner rock" formula...and -won-.
So! The people are happy with the new MP3/napster/gnutella paradigm. The musicians are (mostly) happy with the new paradigm. The recording industry wants to clamp down with laws and lawsuits and police raids. Since they have all the money, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
My question is simply this: how can Metallica in good conscience associate themselves with the stifling of freedom and new technology, when their success is founded on the free dissemenation of music through new technology? (Remember those bootleg casettes back in the '80s?). You're already one of the very, very, very few whom the record companies have allowed to become rich: do you -really- need another 30 pieces of silver?
SoupIsGood Food
In the HHGTtG series, you deal with a culture accustomed to instantaneous access to hip information -and- time-travel. It seemed to spiral in on itself, with time being as inconsequential a barrier to getting the best possible parties that geography is in the age of highways and jets.
In the contested twilight of the 20th century, we can go out on any given weekend, and find people dressed up in zoot-suits swing dancing, decked out in bell-bottoms at a disco, and rushing about outdoors attired in the shining armor of medevil knights, whacking each other with sticks.
Has the internet and recursive nostalgia brought us to a point where modern culture is every inch as silly and fractal as the one you created?
Also: I have the phrase "Don't Panic!" marching cheerily across my web-access cell phone's display when not in use. Did you expect to see the technology you envisioned with "The Guide" come to pass in your lifetime? Are you terrified someone might come up with an infinite improbability drive sometime before dinner?
SoupIsGood Food
Car Craft put a 500hp V-8 in a Chevette...just 'cuz they could. It kicked major ass, and was a great exapmple of the hacker mentality hard at work in the hot-rodding scene.
This month's Hot Rod has an article about a guy who dropped a turbocharged Thunderbird engine and a lot of custom intercooler crap into a '71 pinto. Again, way fast and way neat. Beige boxes (or '69 Chevelles and '78 Camaros and '84 Mustangs...the automotive equivalent of beige boxes) suck. Freak power rules.
SoupIsGood Food
The main problems with the modern interface is that it is tied to closely with the decrepit old computing paradigm that runs just about everything: the dichotomomy that separates applications from OS, and OS from the user environment.
Linux isn't likely to help much, because as a Unix derivative, it is a programmer-centric system that clearly delineates individual exectuables from the rest of the system. Great for folks who know and love programming, especially C and Perl, lousy for people trying to interact with data in a logical, consistent and sophisticated manner.
The largest enemy of a good interface are proprietary data formats. It requires you to operate an application rather than edit data. Tools are tools, and should be applicable to any given set of data depending on what you want to do with it. The single largest obstacle to effectively managing data from a user-centric perspective is modality. You are in a text editing mode...save, quit, open up gimp, import the text and now you are in a graphics editing mode, so you can flow the text into a pretty png. If you screw up, begin all over again. In an ideal interface, the user could not distinguish between an application, like gimp, and a set of tools available to her regardless of what else she's doing with the system.
An ideal interface can recognize what data is, and offer you the proper tools to work with it. Here's an example from the mac: highlight http://slashdot.org. You can drag the highlighted text to the desktop, where it becomes a URL icon. You can change the name of the URL file you just created: call it "News For Nerds". Double click on it, and the browser of your choice opens up and takes you to slashdot. Drag the icon into a text editing window, and it pastes in http://slashdot.org wherever the cursor is. The Mac groks data and how it's used. So should any modern OS: a dot-three extension is a sad and sorry substitute: like nailing two sheets of plywood to the top of your car and calling it a Concorde jet. Linux, and other Unices, don't implement this, because they assume that anything that isn't an executable is text. They can't grok data, and rely on the user or an application to tell them what to do in all instances.
I don't know if we can fix this in Linux without a deep and honest appraisal of the limitations inherent to Unix-like systems. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a poor copy of the Windows GUI, considering the tools we have to work with.
SoupIsGood Food