The object of an election isn't to vote for the winner. That's silly and circuituous logic. The object of an election is to vote for the candidate who best fits your ideas about how government should work.
Bush or Gore will win the 2000 election. That's a fact. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't vote Libertarian, or Green, or whatever most closely meets your own beliefs. Keep in mind that, if even a few percent of the vote are for a third-party candidate, that candidate, his or her party, and the whole concept of a many-party system will gain legitimacy and clout in 2004, and in elections to come. That translates into real action by the winner of this year's election - remember, much of presidential politics works by 'mandate,' the idea that the President's political capital stems from the belief that his ideas parallel those of the public. It also translates into a real chance at third parties winning, if not the Presidency, then congressional seats and local offices. A few percent means tens of millions of people. It means power. It means change.
Elections are a lot more complex than just which "white man in a suit" gets to live in the big white house for the next four years. They're the formal expression of the will of the people. Don't throw your vote away by voting for Bush or Gore if they don't really express the direction you'd like politics to move in.
A relative of mine is in the hardware business (the nuts-and-bolts type of hardware). He once showed me the reason why he doesn't sell a particular brand of deadbolt. This particular brand could be removed from its socket, from the outside, without any special tools, by manipulating the lock in a certain way. This behavior is in the lock by design - this particular lock company markets heavily to organizations needing to quickly and easily rekey their locks (think apartment complexes.) It's very easy to remove the lock mechanism from the outside so that it can be rekeyed, at the cost of rendering its security moot in the face of someone who knows how to jimmy it.
If this were the computer industry, I observed, a manufacturer that did something so blatantly stupid would be subject to public ridicule, written up in the industry press for their failure, and made to immediately change their broken-by-design design. As it is, thousands of apartment dwellers are behind doors that are, for all practical purposes, unlocked.
Maybe crooks don't know about the flaw. But if you're the one whose posessions are on the other side of the door, do you really want to take that chance?
King's implementation deviates in a few important ways from the canonical Street Performer Protocol:
No chance of getting back your donation if the author decides not to publish - as has already been pointed out in this thread, presumably your money belongs to King whether or not he actually publishes the last third of his book. The protocol calls for this money to revert back to the donor.
Not public domain - King is restricting resale of his novel. This is a bit silly in the context of the protocol. The point of the public-domain phase is to get the work distributed as much as possible, so that many people are exposed to it, maximizing the number who donate.
No hash - The protocol calls for a cryptographic hash of the work to be published, so that its integrity may be verified when it reaches the public eye. This one's perhaps excusable; King is an established author and we trust him enough to let him write the last third of the book after he gets all the donations in. It wouldn't work at all for a no-name author trying to make a mark, though.
Not a flat rate - This is the killer. King is implicitly assuming by providing a percentage that he'll be able to track how many people are reading the book. Ain't going to happen. Inevitably, mirrors will spring up, and every download from a mirror is essentially $0.75 right out of King's pocket. If he really wants to get into the spirit of this experiment, he should give up all hopes of controlling or tracking the myriad copies of his novel, and a flat rate on donations is the only way to truly dissociate himself from the old-media ideas of control.
This really is the future of publishing, and King has been known for bold experiments in the past (he wrote the Bachman books, including the novella The Running Man, under a pseudonym as an attempt to determine whether his stardom was an accident.) Hopefully with a little fine-tuning, he can lead the way for more authors using the Protocol to distribute their works.
They told me that I'd have to have a technician install my DSL.
Then they ship me the 'customer self-install kit' a few days before my appointment with the technician, which includes a DSL modem, ethernet card, crossover cable to connect the two, and a bunch of filter boxes that connect to the phones on the line with DSL to strip out the noise. I call up and ask if, since i've received the customer install kit, I can in fact do my own installation. No, I'm told, I'll have to have a technician install it, and there must have been some mistake in shipping me the kit.
The technician shows up this morning, and the only thing he does that I couldn't have done with a page of instructions was to plug a signal meter into the line with DSL on it and declare the quality sufficient. Then all he did was monkey around on my Windows machine installing the PPPoE software, signed on in the 'register new user' account, pulled up the online signup page, and let me type in my preferred username and password.
That signal meter reading apparently costs $99, because that's how much a technician install costs. Self-install is free.
So, my non-technical tip of the day: if you get DSL from Southwestern Bell, and they send you a self-install kit, self-install.
The technical tip for the day: PPPoE works just fine with SBC DSL. If you've got a development kernel, build it with 'packet socket' and 'PPP over ethernet' options enabled, and apply this patch to a recent version of pppd.
Different newspapers will often use different editorial styles in areas they specialize in. For instance, when I started my short stint working for my college's paper, the first thing the editors did was make me read the paper's style guide. It explained the proper wording and punctuation for things relevant to that paper (i.e., a member of the faculty is not 'Dr. John Doe,' they are 'John Doe, professor of whatever.' University-affiliated publications use this rule, but general news sources tend not to.)
The wording disagreement you found is a result of the same kind of editorial style decision. news.com chooses to call someone who illegally breaks into computer systems a "hacker;" for various reasons too involved to go into here, Slashdot calls the same person a "cracker." The decision to change wording to fit editorial style doesn't change the import of the story.
AOL has posted an Internet Draft on their proposed IM protocol. It is very similar in overall concept to the e-mail system - similarities such as introducing a new "IMX" record into DNS, the use of MIME as a message format, and providing each user with a unique myname@mydomain identifier, are some of the more obvious. It differs in a few ways - most notably, it is only a specification for server-to-server communication. Each server can, within the restrictions placed on it by its need to communicate with other servers, implement whatever server-to-client communication scheme it chooses. This means that protocols within individual IM services might be different - but nobody's getting locked out, since anyone with a domain can start their own IM service - just as anyone with a domain can send e-mail from that domain.
Of course, if someone has root on your system, then they can simply install a keystroke logger and watch you type your passphrase, and no matter if it's "ei!6k1n91jk;#" or "password," it's just as compromised. Moral: the security of PGP and similar programs is only as good as the security of the device that uses the private key.
The lawyer for the RIAA pointed out an analogy - unlawfully copying music is similar, ethically, to walking into a record store and walking out with a CD in hand. I tend to agree.
I can hear the clamoring of the/. hordes now: "Of course shoplifting is wrong, but copying music is different! Nobody loses anything when you copy music!"
Consider, though, what makes up the cost of a CD. Conservatively, let's say a particular CD costs $16, and again, conservatively, let's say that the cost of burning, packaging, distributing, and retailing the CD is $2. You shoplift this CD. Is that wrong? How much have you stolen? Have you stolen $2? Of course not! Anyone will recognize that you've stolen $16 - you walked out of a store with an item that had a price tag on it, declaring its value to be $16. So where does the other $14 come from? Simple: the value of the information on the CD. Monetarily, nearly all of your crime is stealing information. And the music industry still has that information - chances are, even the store you swiped the CD from does, too.
So what's the difference between the scenario above and fetching a copy of the album - maybe not the same bits, but largely the same information - over the Net?
$2.
Now, why is the one considered unethical, and the other considered "sharing" by so many of us? I'm about to turn quite cynical. It's because you're far more likely to be caught and held accountable for shoplifting. That's it. That's the only reason why many people who wouldn't dream of running from the corner record store with a CD in hand spend time grabbing copyrighted music over the net.
So what's the solution? Lower prices, for one - any retailer, even the owner of a CD shop, knows that items which are more valuable are more likely to be stolen. More importantly, though, catch and hold accountable those who are copying music without permission.
Anything that a teenager can find on the Net, a professional can, too. Contrary to what a bunch of people have been posting, there's nothing wrong about having a few officers of the law cruise the Net looking for unlawfully copied music being offered to the public. This should be obvious - if a policeman drives by your house and sees you sitting outside, having a garage sale, with a giant "STOLEN CDs" sign above a stack of boxes, then probably you've stolen those CDs. Similarly, if your list of files offered on Napster contains listings for files which purport to be songs not released freely to the public, then it's likely you're in violation of the law. Anticipating an objection - of course heightened enforcement will only drive illegal music copying underground. This doesn't matter to the music industry; they're not trying to totally wipe out the practice, just to cut it back to acceptable levels. If unlawful music sharing is reduced to the levels of, say, three or four years ago, the industry will be happy.
And a happy copyright industry doesn't lobby Congress for ill-advised, unconstitutional laws. It doesn't try to squash technology flat because of its potential for cutting into profit. It doesn't abuse its wealth and the legal system to try to hold progress right where it's at, its lawyers straining at the heels of tech, as hard as they can.
I'm not defending the music industry - they're an oligopoly, using their gargantuan market power to rip off both artists and the public. Their marketing degrades the music taste of the world. They charge too much. And they don't care one whit about individual rights - censorship of legitimate technologies (Think Rio. Think Napster. Think, peripherally, DeCSS.) is preferable to losing a few measly thousand dollars of profit. They are Evil.
And if copyright infringement by individiuals isn't slowed by real enforcement, against the individual purveyors of stolen goods, they'll Win. And that will be Bad.
If you ever think of me let it be around twilight When the world is settled down and the Last round of sunlight is waning in the sky And you sit and watch the night descending...
Of course, classifying her as 'country' is like casting - no, mistaking pearls for swine.
True, if I were an administrator of a blocking proxy, I might want my user(s) to not be able to find information about how to circumvent the proxy (not that that's going to stop a determined attacker, of course, but it's probably sufficient for a school environment.)
But block that information clearly. Cyber Patrol is blocking these pages in every category available to it, including "Nudity." Bypassing proxies is not nudity. Nor is it violence, or most of the other categories under which it's blocked. What it boils down to is if you want to use Cyber Patrol _at all_, you have to consent to this information being blocked. That sort of loss of control puts a very bad taste in my mouth.
Let's say I want to prove this about the sum of all the positive odd numbers up to some number n:
1 + 3 +... + n = (n + 1)^2 / 4
We know that, for n = 5, 1 + 3 + 5 = (5 + 1)^2 / 4 = 9, and so the formula is true for n = 5. Now assume that the formula is correct for all n. What happens if we work it for n + 2?
1 + 3 +... + n + (n + 2) = ((n + 2) + 1)^2 / 4 - substitute n+2 for n in the formulas (n + 1)^2 / 4 + (n + 2) = ((n + 2) + 1)^2 / 4 - substitute the assumed true value in for 1 + 3... + n (n + 1)^2 / 4 + (n + 2) = (n + 3)^2 / 4 - add n + 2 and 1 (n + 1)^2 + 4(n + 2) = (n + 3)^2 - Multiply through by 4 (n^2 + 2n + 1) + (4n + 8) = n^2 + 6n + 9 - multiply everything out n^2 + 6n + 9 = n^2 + 6n + 9 - add everything up. This is true for all n.
What all that means is that if the formula holds for n, then it must hold for n + 2. And since it holds for n + 2, it must hold for n + 2 + 2, and so on into infinity. I came up with one n (5) for which the formula works, so it must work for all odd numbers larger than five. I don't have to test all the odd numbers into infinity - the infinitely recursive nature of induction does that for me in something that can be expressed in a noninfinite amount of data (and a good thing, too - I don't have enough bandwidth to post an infinite-length comment to/.)
"Bear in mind that your signature on a public key certificate does not vouch for the integrity of that person, but only vouches for the integrity (the ownership) of that person's public key. You aren't risking your credibility by signing the public key of a sociopath, if you were completely confident that the key really belonged to him. Other people would accept that key as belonging to him because you signed it (assuming they trust you), but they wouldn't trust that key's owner. Trusting a key is not the same as trusting the key's owner."
This lesson is applicable to any public-key problem. VeriSign isn't to blame here - they did exactly what they were supposed to do.
Re:Kinesis is the worst keyboard I've ever used
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Personally, I would love to see a speech recognition product that lets me type with noises. Forget word/phrase recognition! It should be possible to make audio character recognition much more accurate. To me, this would be the real hand-saver. Open source, anyone?
I talked to a guy that teaches UI design; one of the things he mentioned was that voice interfaces for extensive text entry actually just shift the physical problems - your wrists get better, but you start losing your voice from all the speaking you have to do. It's probably easier to recover from, though.
Keep in mind - the EFF lawyers had just hours to prepare a defense. Read the transcripts: they were basically caught off balance (quite literally; remember they had just completed the preliminary injunction hearing in DVD-CCA v. Everybody) and eviscerated by the MPAA's attorneys, who had several weeks to do their homework.
This time disparity will go away at trial, and then you'll see the same team in action that helped kill the CDA. It'll be a spectacular fight, and the more cash the EFF has to fight it, the better we'll all fare in the long run.
Valenti's comments underscore one thing: this fight will be won or lost by the facts, and the forces of freedom happen to have the facts on their side.
The entire livid-dev archive needs to be introduced into the record of every court proceeding touching this case. It's a clear record of a group of people collaborating - not to pirate or defraud the movie industry, but to develop some software to play DVDs that they'd legally purchased.
"I know you've all waited a long time for this moment [when you'll be able to watch decrypted dvds]..." (Brackets are literal, not a partial paraphrase on my part) "...If I could just get some hollywood plus drivers for linux, I would probably be setting up my own linux machine in the living room:P"
"These rippers are not illegal providing they were developed without illegal access to the DVD specs, nor would opening up the source to them be illegal. (Note that the ONLY illegal access to the DVD documents is if you obtain the documents by deception, or you sign the NDA and then break it. If you find a copy of the specs in the street you can do whatever you want with them - including revealing them to other parties.) In most jurisdictions reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability is perfectly legal. There are perfectly legal uses for these DVD rippers too - backing up DVDs you own is perfectly legal, whatever the DVD consortium might say."
(Note: This is taken slightly out of context. The 'rippers' mentioned are framegrabbing, not CSS-decrypting (yet another feather in the cap for the argument that CSS is only about playback, not piracy.)
Amazon has received a patent for "one-click ordering," which is essentially the process by which they associate an identification cookie on the customer's machine with the customer's billing and shipping information, allowing the customer to only fill out this information once.
The idea is obvious, the implementation straightforward but time-consuming (Amazon will eagerly tell you that they have "thousands of hours" of work tied up in one-click, which is technically true - it takes thousands of hours of work to implement this obvious feature.)
Having obtained this rather dubious patent for such an obvious e-commerce service, they have turned around and sued Barnes and Noble, coincidentally their biggest competitor, for infringing upon it. If they succeed, they set a dangerously low standard for what is patentable in the world of e-commerce, and will permit the digital amalgams of basic physical customer service to be monopolized via the patent system. (When you think about it, this is electronically equivalent to your corner bookseller recognizing who you are and billing your charge account. It's a business practice that's been around for hundreds of years, but when you do it with a computer, you can get a patent.)
No, because the prosecution didn't enter the encrypted files into evidence - had they done so, they would have been required to turn the information over to Mitnick's defense team.
The problem is, did you "know or should [you] have known" that the information was obtained "through improper means?"
The problem with that assertion is the question of what constitutes "improper means," and more to the point, what constitutes knowledge of improper means.
If, for instance, I knew that the DVD industry's trade secret information had been gained by someone breaking down the door of their headquarters, crowbarring his way into the file room, and then stealing documentation on CSS, then clearly I should be enjoined from redistributing that information - it was gained by improper means, and I knew it.
I, and no doubt many of those who distributed the code, did not believe the reverse engineering that yielded forth the decryption algorithm and keys was somehow legally "improper." The DVD-CCA would like the legal system to equate reverse engineering of a software product with breaking and entering. But we think differently, and therefore, we did not know about any improper means.
It's true that ignorance of the law is no defense (and seeming to flout the law is a very poor one. Some of the statements on defendants' websites are voraciously stupid - one site in the NY cases even uses, and continues to use, the word "Moviez" and describes meetings on IRC for the purpose of copyright infringement.) But if you look at the precedents thrown about both by EFF and by the CCA, you see that revere engineering isn't a grey area of law - it's a horridly black-and-white splotched area, with precedents going every which way. There appears to be no general formula, under current legal precedent, to determine whether a particular instance of reverse engineering was proper or not - and the DMCA just muddles the waters a lot more. (What's "interoperability?" What's "a security system?")
The CCA, apparently, wants the judge to rule that the reverse engineering was improper (and the funny thing is, he can't, because he is not a Norweigan judge), and then retroactively apply that ruling to the defendants, saying in essence: "The reverse engineering was improper. Because I am saying this to you now, that is the law, and it was the law when you distributed the trade secret information, therefore, you should have been aware of that law, despite the fact that nobody had written it down yet."
When a layman thinks that an act is legal, but is aware of the possiblity of the act being construed as illegal, it's called a "chilling effect." When it has to do with information, it's a chill on free speech.
If this case finally tilts towards the CCA, it sets a very, very dangerous precedent - companies will be able to establish a de facto standard, and then sue and repress anyone who learns what the standard is and attempts to create their own device to adhere to the standard. It would be a judicial grant of monopoly power, right up there with the legislative grants of monopoly power (copyright and patent.) While copyright and patent are good things in the public interest, it's Congress that decides that.
A decision in favor of the CCA would have the effects of chilling free speech and abrogating a clearly legislative decision to the courts, and the fulcrum of the case is something that the judge cannot decide.
I think it's time for everyone to go home, but the CCA's cries of "hacking" are striking fear into the legal system. And that's what their real case is - exploitation of the fear of things not understood. You and I know that lawful reverse-engineering is one thing, and spreading viruses and cracking systems is another, very bad thing, but few people without technical knowlege do.
Unfortunately, those people are making the laws that everyone has to live by.
Do you want to kill the Crusoe? Because that's what your thirty-year-old delusions of assembly-code grandeur will do to it.
The point behind the Crusoe is not, not not NOT, to just be a better faster chip that optimizes better and consumes less power than those on the market now (though it is.)
The Crusoe's selling point is compatibility. Transmeta can churn out all sorts of chips, some optimized to sip current from batteries at a tenth of the rate of today's monsters, some designed to guzzle power even more and be speed demons. They can make radical changes to the basic design of the chip while doing this, and it won't matter, because though the way things are done internally may go topsy-turvy, the instruction set won't change, and the same programs can be run on each.
This neatly solves the drag placed on development by the need for backwards-compatibility (Want to run DOS 3.3 on your Athlon? You can if you feel like it.) Just like Windows, x86 chips have accumulated baggage - the sediment of silicon long since passed into figurative dust.
Transmeta has designed a beautiful thing - a chip that transcends backwards-compatibility. Writing to the bare metal on the Crusoe bolts it down, turns it into just another fixed-in-place bit-smashing engine. Kills it, in other words, removes what makes it an elegant hack.
Red Hat is losing money despite being a market leader. This is a proof of infeasibility, not feasibility.
By this same logic, Amazon is losing money despite being a market leader; therefore, E-commerce is doomed to failure. Both Red Hat and Amazon are choosing to lose money now, so that they can grow as companies and make even more money in the future. That doesn't mean the market isn't sufficient - it means there's so big a market out there that it's more profitable in the long run to expand to fill it than to start taking profit now.
That person therefore has not deprived you of any income. To say that he has "taken" something from you is spiteful. You gave a gift, and now you're annoyed because a recipient has benefited "too much" from it? If you're that mean-spirited, you shouldn't have given it.
I'm happy for the recipient for the benefits they're gaining from my software - but it wasn't a unilateral gift. If I GPL software, that means I intend for improvements based on my original work to come back to the codebase at large. If someone takes (by "takes," I don't mean "steals" or "misappropriates, I mean "makes a copy of") my code, then improves it, they should benefit from the fruits of their improvements - but I'm not getting paid one cent from their sales, unless they're willing to be charitable to me. I don't benefit from this arrangement, and so I GPL my code, so that improvements based on my code come back to me. I can benefit from this.
You have already reduced the market value of your work to zero by licensing it under the GPL.
My _work_, yes, is now without salable value. What I have increased the value of is me. Because I've released good free code, my reputation improves. People believe that I know what I'm doing. I can sell that, by hiring myself out to service my work, or by contracting with people to write additions to my software that they need. Heck, I could even get a job writing proprietary software from scratch - I have no problem with that, as long as I think there's money to be made by selling that product. I'm greedy, and so, money-grubbing capitalist that I am, I'll try to release lots of good free code so that my services are even more in demand, and I can charge higher fees for them as a result.
Your arguments are well-thought-out; you're one of the most intelligent critics of the GPL I've heard in a long time, but you're crippled by your assumption that the only way to make money from software you've written is to package it up, slap a proprietary license on it, and sell it. But that's wrong.
Perhaps the biggest problem the GPL causes is that it promotes fragmentation and incompatibility by preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those who are publishing open source.
How many forks of *BSD are there now? How many forks of the Linux kernel?
The GPL doesn't foster fragmentation, it darn near prohibits it. The reason UNIX fragmented in the late eighties/early nineties is that every venedor added in their own, proprietary enhancements to the OS - the point, of course, was to add value and differentiate your product from those of your competitors. A good thing, usually, but in this case differentiation brought headaches the world over, created problems that are still being dealt with today, and blew the market into lots of tiny shreds.
If the initial product is released under the GPL, then this game of oneupmanship simply can't be played. Any feature that one vendor adds can be implemented by all of the others. Unfortunately, this would seem to kill the competitive advantage in bringing material improvements to the product - that would be, economically speaking, an affront to the principles of the free market. If I give a product out to the public, I should stand to benefit in some way from it, and if my competitors can take my work and distribute it themselves, then I lose that benefit.
It's not that cut-and-dried, though. Nobody can make a profit, in the long run, selling GPL'd software - the money is in service and support, and in coding applications to customers' specifications. Now the various free software vendors do have a clear incentive to improve what they're selling - not only does it help to expand their market as a whole, but it also adds to their reputation. Reputation means dollar signs when your business is providing a service - ask Bob Young and Marc Ewing. (One of the things I feel is missing from the GPL is some form of identity-of-author preservation, so that those who release enhancements are assured that their reputations will benefit. Right now, this is handled informally - the community knows who is contributing what code - but there's the potential for reputation theft via misrepentation of authorship.)
The net result: the services of programmers who "advance the state of the art" the most are, due to the reputation they gain, in the most demand, and so these programmers make the most money. The market for GPL'd software grows, and the codebase stays fairly unfragmented.
A commercial market for GPL code is feasible - Red Hat is proving this *today.*
The notion that code must be "protected" from being "taken proprietary" is one of the most common bogeymen raised by RMS and other advocates of the GPL.
The point isn't the fear that my code will be somehow stolen from me by corporate raiders - the point is that if I release code under a non-viral license, someone can take my code, add on to it, and then release it under their own commercial license. They benefit from my work; I and the community at large do not benefit from theirs. This is sure nice of me to let them do this, but it's not in my self-interest. And it fragments things all to hell. Now that someone has extended my code and propritized (is that a word?) the result, there are *two* choices out there - my still-free software, and somebody else's better software that (presumably) costs money. Some users will fork over the dough for the added value, some will continue to use my program. That's the very *anatomy* of a fork right there - the division of one piece of software and its user base into multiple incompatible camps. This hurts everyone. Interoperability decreases with time between the users that stuck with my program and those who went commercial, and people are discouraged from using either program. This hurts the commercial company, which loses sales, and it hurts me, because my user base that finds my bugs and submits improvments has shrunk.
Linux and the GPL may have prevented the meltdown of the UNIX market from fragmentation and the eventual standardization on NT. If that had happened, Microsoft wouldn't have any competitors for you to feel protective of.
Your argument (which hinges entirely on the assumption that the reverse-engineering of CSS was improper) is shaky at best, but might hold water if it didn't break down entirely at point 3. Norweigan law renders the no-reverse-engineering clause in the Xing EULA powerless when the reverse engineering is undertaken for purposes of interoperability. (EFF has a request for judicial notice of this law online.)
You can't force American law onto actions performed in Norway by a Norweigan citizen. 'As far as the US court is concerned,' he executed a contract under Norweigan contract law, and Norweigan contract law makes what he did legally valid.
The information about CSS was not improperly obtained, as much as the DVD-CCA would like you, the public, and especially the judge to believe it was. Once the fruits of this reverse engineering were made public, the DVD Forum's cries of 'trade secret' became entirely empty, because a trade secret is just that - a secret. You can fight the distribution of a trade secret revealed through theft, breach of contract, and so on, but when it's revealed through proper means, it loses all legal protection.
I suggest you peruse the EFF's new archives on the DVD case - the Chicago lock case makes especially fascinating reading (synopsis: Locksmiths in Chicago reverse engineered a lock company's special, secretly designed locks, then began to service the locks using their newfound knowledge. The lock company, which had previously had a monopoly on servicing the locks, sued the locksmiths, and lost.)
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The object of an election isn't to vote for the winner. That's silly and circuituous logic. The object of an election is to vote for the candidate who best fits your ideas about how government should work.
Bush or Gore will win the 2000 election. That's a fact. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't vote Libertarian, or Green, or whatever most closely meets your own beliefs. Keep in mind that, if even a few percent of the vote are for a third-party candidate, that candidate, his or her party, and the whole concept of a many-party system will gain legitimacy and clout in 2004, and in elections to come. That translates into real action by the winner of this year's election - remember, much of presidential politics works by 'mandate,' the idea that the President's political capital stems from the belief that his ideas parallel those of the public. It also translates into a real chance at third parties winning, if not the Presidency, then congressional seats and local offices. A few percent means tens of millions of people. It means power. It means change.
Elections are a lot more complex than just which "white man in a suit" gets to live in the big white house for the next four years. They're the formal expression of the will of the people. Don't throw your vote away by voting for Bush or Gore if they don't really express the direction you'd like politics to move in.
A relative of mine is in the hardware business (the nuts-and-bolts type of hardware). He once showed me the reason why he doesn't sell a particular brand of deadbolt. This particular brand could be removed from its socket, from the outside, without any special tools, by manipulating the lock in a certain way. This behavior is in the lock by design - this particular lock company markets heavily to organizations needing to quickly and easily rekey their locks (think apartment complexes.) It's very easy to remove the lock mechanism from the outside so that it can be rekeyed, at the cost of rendering its security moot in the face of someone who knows how to jimmy it.
If this were the computer industry, I observed, a manufacturer that did something so blatantly stupid would be subject to public ridicule, written up in the industry press for their failure, and made to immediately change their broken-by-design design. As it is, thousands of apartment dwellers are behind doors that are, for all practical purposes, unlocked.
Maybe crooks don't know about the flaw. But if you're the one whose posessions are on the other side of the door, do you really want to take that chance?
- No chance of getting back your donation if the author decides not to publish - as has already been pointed out in this thread, presumably your money belongs to King whether or not he actually publishes the last third of his book. The protocol calls for this money to revert back to the donor.
- Not public domain - King is restricting resale of his novel. This is a bit silly in the context of the protocol. The point of the public-domain phase is to get the work distributed as much as possible, so that many people are exposed to it, maximizing the number who donate.
- No hash - The protocol calls for a cryptographic hash of the work to be published, so that its integrity may be verified when it reaches the public eye. This one's perhaps excusable; King is an established author and we trust him enough to let him write the last third of the book after he gets all the donations in. It wouldn't work at all for a no-name author trying to make a mark, though.
- Not a flat rate - This is the killer. King is implicitly assuming by providing a percentage that he'll be able to track how many people are reading the book. Ain't going to happen. Inevitably, mirrors will spring up, and every download from a mirror is essentially $0.75 right out of King's pocket. If he really wants to get into the spirit of this experiment, he should give up all hopes of controlling or tracking the myriad copies of his novel, and a flat rate on donations is the only way to truly dissociate himself from the old-media ideas of control.
This really is the future of publishing, and King has been known for bold experiments in the past (he wrote the Bachman books, including the novella The Running Man , under a pseudonym as an attempt to determine whether his stardom was an accident.) Hopefully with a little fine-tuning, he can lead the way for more authors using the Protocol to distribute their works.Then they ship me the 'customer self-install kit' a few days before my appointment with the technician, which includes a DSL modem, ethernet card, crossover cable to connect the two, and a bunch of filter boxes that connect to the phones on the line with DSL to strip out the noise. I call up and ask if, since i've received the customer install kit, I can in fact do my own installation. No, I'm told, I'll have to have a technician install it, and there must have been some mistake in shipping me the kit.
The technician shows up this morning, and the only thing he does that I couldn't have done with a page of instructions was to plug a signal meter into the line with DSL on it and declare the quality sufficient. Then all he did was monkey around on my Windows machine installing the PPPoE software, signed on in the 'register new user' account, pulled up the online signup page, and let me type in my preferred username and password.
That signal meter reading apparently costs $99, because that's how much a technician install costs. Self-install is free.
So, my non-technical tip of the day: if you get DSL from Southwestern Bell, and they send you a self-install kit, self-install.
The technical tip for the day: PPPoE works just fine with SBC DSL. If you've got a development kernel, build it with 'packet socket' and 'PPP over ethernet' options enabled, and apply this patch to a recent version of pppd.
My /etc/ppp/options looks like this:
defaultroute /etc/ppp/pppoe.so
plugin
name mylogin
And my /etc/ppp/pap-secrets looks like this:
mylogin * mypass
To bring up the ppp link, i just type pppd eth0.
The wording disagreement you found is a result of the same kind of editorial style decision. news.com chooses to call someone who illegally breaks into computer systems a "hacker;" for various reasons too involved to go into here, Slashdot calls the same person a "cracker." The decision to change wording to fit editorial style doesn't change the import of the story.
AOL has posted an Internet Draft on their proposed IM protocol. It is very similar in overall concept to the e-mail system - similarities such as introducing a new "IMX" record into DNS, the use of MIME as a message format, and providing each user with a unique myname@mydomain identifier, are some of the more obvious. It differs in a few ways - most notably, it is only a specification for server-to-server communication. Each server can, within the restrictions placed on it by its need to communicate with other servers, implement whatever server-to-client communication scheme it chooses. This means that protocols within individual IM services might be different - but nobody's getting locked out, since anyone with a domain can start their own IM service - just as anyone with a domain can send e-mail from that domain.
Of course, if someone has root on your system, then they can simply install a keystroke logger and watch you type your passphrase, and no matter if it's "ei!6k1n91jk;#" or "password," it's just as compromised. Moral: the security of PGP and similar programs is only as good as the security of the device that uses the private key.
I can hear the clamoring of the /. hordes now: "Of course shoplifting is wrong, but copying music is different! Nobody loses anything when you copy music!"
Consider, though, what makes up the cost of a CD. Conservatively, let's say a particular CD costs $16, and again, conservatively, let's say that the cost of burning, packaging, distributing, and retailing the CD is $2. You shoplift this CD. Is that wrong? How much have you stolen? Have you stolen $2? Of course not! Anyone will recognize that you've stolen $16 - you walked out of a store with an item that had a price tag on it, declaring its value to be $16. So where does the other $14 come from? Simple: the value of the information on the CD. Monetarily, nearly all of your crime is stealing information. And the music industry still has that information - chances are, even the store you swiped the CD from does, too.
So what's the difference between the scenario above and fetching a copy of the album - maybe not the same bits, but largely the same information - over the Net?
$2.
Now, why is the one considered unethical, and the other considered "sharing" by so many of us? I'm about to turn quite cynical. It's because you're far more likely to be caught and held accountable for shoplifting. That's it. That's the only reason why many people who wouldn't dream of running from the corner record store with a CD in hand spend time grabbing copyrighted music over the net.
So what's the solution? Lower prices, for one - any retailer, even the owner of a CD shop, knows that items which are more valuable are more likely to be stolen. More importantly, though, catch and hold accountable those who are copying music without permission.
Anything that a teenager can find on the Net, a professional can, too. Contrary to what a bunch of people have been posting, there's nothing wrong about having a few officers of the law cruise the Net looking for unlawfully copied music being offered to the public. This should be obvious - if a policeman drives by your house and sees you sitting outside, having a garage sale, with a giant "STOLEN CDs" sign above a stack of boxes, then probably you've stolen those CDs. Similarly, if your list of files offered on Napster contains listings for files which purport to be songs not released freely to the public, then it's likely you're in violation of the law. Anticipating an objection - of course heightened enforcement will only drive illegal music copying underground. This doesn't matter to the music industry; they're not trying to totally wipe out the practice, just to cut it back to acceptable levels. If unlawful music sharing is reduced to the levels of, say, three or four years ago, the industry will be happy.
And a happy copyright industry doesn't lobby Congress for ill-advised, unconstitutional laws. It doesn't try to squash technology flat because of its potential for cutting into profit. It doesn't abuse its wealth and the legal system to try to hold progress right where it's at, its lawyers straining at the heels of tech, as hard as they can.
I'm not defending the music industry - they're an oligopoly, using their gargantuan market power to rip off both artists and the public. Their marketing degrades the music taste of the world. They charge too much. And they don't care one whit about individual rights - censorship of legitimate technologies (Think Rio. Think Napster. Think, peripherally, DeCSS.) is preferable to losing a few measly thousand dollars of profit. They are Evil.
And if copyright infringement by individiuals isn't slowed by real enforcement, against the individual purveyors of stolen goods, they'll Win. And that will be Bad.
If you ever think of me let it be around twilight
When the world is settled down and the
Last round of sunlight is waning in the sky
And you sit and watch the night descending...
Of course, classifying her as 'country' is like casting - no, mistaking pearls for swine.
Now nobody evil can patent it. Give it a year, and you can't patent it.
You're good.
But block that information clearly. Cyber Patrol is blocking these pages in every category available to it, including "Nudity." Bypassing proxies is not nudity. Nor is it violence, or most of the other categories under which it's blocked. What it boils down to is if you want to use Cyber Patrol _at all_, you have to consent to this information being blocked. That sort of loss of control puts a very bad taste in my mouth.
1 + 3 + ... + n = (n + 1)^2 / 4
We know that, for n = 5, 1 + 3 + 5 = (5 + 1)^2 / 4 = 9, and so the formula is true for n = 5. Now assume that the formula is correct for all n. What happens if we work it for n + 2?
1 + 3 + ... + n + (n + 2) = ((n + 2) + 1)^2 / 4 - substitute n+2 for n in the formulas ... + n
(n + 1)^2 / 4 + (n + 2) = ((n + 2) + 1)^2 / 4 - substitute the assumed true value in for 1 + 3
(n + 1)^2 / 4 + (n + 2) = (n + 3)^2 / 4 - add n + 2 and 1
(n + 1)^2 + 4(n + 2) = (n + 3)^2 - Multiply through by 4
(n^2 + 2n + 1) + (4n + 8) = n^2 + 6n + 9 - multiply everything out
n^2 + 6n + 9 = n^2 + 6n + 9 - add everything up. This is true for all n.
What all that means is that if the formula holds for n, then it must hold for n + 2. And since it holds for n + 2, it must hold for n + 2 + 2, and so on into infinity. I came up with one n (5) for which the formula works, so it must work for all odd numbers larger than five. I don't have to test all the odd numbers into infinity - the infinitely recursive nature of induction does that for me in something that can be expressed in a noninfinite amount of data (and a good thing, too - I don't have enough bandwidth to post an infinite-length comment to /.)
"Bear in mind that your signature on a public key certificate does not vouch for the integrity of that person, but only vouches for the integrity (the ownership) of that person's public key. You aren't risking your credibility by signing the public key of a sociopath, if you were completely confident that the key really belonged to him. Other people would accept that key as belonging to him because you signed it (assuming they trust you), but they wouldn't trust that key's owner. Trusting a key is not the same as trusting the key's owner."
This lesson is applicable to any public-key problem. VeriSign isn't to blame here - they did exactly what they were supposed to do.
I talked to a guy that teaches UI design; one of the things he mentioned was that voice interfaces for extensive text entry actually just shift the physical problems - your wrists get better, but you start losing your voice from all the speaking you have to do. It's probably easier to recover from, though.
This time disparity will go away at trial, and then you'll see the same team in action that helped kill the CDA. It'll be a spectacular fight, and the more cash the EFF has to fight it, the better we'll all fare in the long run.
Join the EFF.
Here are the facts.
The entire livid-dev archive needs to be introduced into the record of every court proceeding touching this case. It's a clear record of a group of people collaborating - not to pirate or defraud the movie industry, but to develop some software to play DVDs that they'd legally purchased.
Some terrific quotes from the archive:
Jon Johansen on his reasons for DeCSS
The legal issues, months before anybody sued anybody
(Note: This is taken slightly out of context. The 'rippers' mentioned are framegrabbing, not CSS-decrypting (yet another feather in the cap for the argument that CSS is only about playback, not piracy.)A fairly clear statement of intent from a list member:
The idea is obvious, the implementation straightforward but time-consuming (Amazon will eagerly tell you that they have "thousands of hours" of work tied up in one-click, which is technically true - it takes thousands of hours of work to implement this obvious feature.)
Having obtained this rather dubious patent for such an obvious e-commerce service, they have turned around and sued Barnes and Noble, coincidentally their biggest competitor, for infringing upon it. If they succeed, they set a dangerously low standard for what is patentable in the world of e-commerce, and will permit the digital amalgams of basic physical customer service to be monopolized via the patent system. (When you think about it, this is electronically equivalent to your corner bookseller recognizing who you are and billing your charge account. It's a business practice that's been around for hundreds of years, but when you do it with a computer, you can get a patent.)
The FSF has a page on the boycott.
No, because the prosecution didn't enter the encrypted files into evidence - had they done so, they would have been required to turn the information over to Mitnick's defense team.
The problem with that assertion is the question of what constitutes "improper means," and more to the point, what constitutes knowledge of improper means.
If, for instance, I knew that the DVD industry's trade secret information had been gained by someone breaking down the door of their headquarters, crowbarring his way into the file room, and then stealing documentation on CSS, then clearly I should be enjoined from redistributing that information - it was gained by improper means, and I knew it.
I, and no doubt many of those who distributed the code, did not believe the reverse engineering that yielded forth the decryption algorithm and keys was somehow legally "improper." The DVD-CCA would like the legal system to equate reverse engineering of a software product with breaking and entering. But we think differently, and therefore, we did not know about any improper means.
It's true that ignorance of the law is no defense (and seeming to flout the law is a very poor one. Some of the statements on defendants' websites are voraciously stupid - one site in the NY cases even uses, and continues to use, the word "Moviez" and describes meetings on IRC for the purpose of copyright infringement.) But if you look at the precedents thrown about both by EFF and by the CCA, you see that revere engineering isn't a grey area of law - it's a horridly black-and-white splotched area, with precedents going every which way. There appears to be no general formula, under current legal precedent, to determine whether a particular instance of reverse engineering was proper or not - and the DMCA just muddles the waters a lot more. (What's "interoperability?" What's "a security system?")
The CCA, apparently, wants the judge to rule that the reverse engineering was improper (and the funny thing is, he can't, because he is not a Norweigan judge), and then retroactively apply that ruling to the defendants, saying in essence: "The reverse engineering was improper. Because I am saying this to you now, that is the law, and it was the law when you distributed the trade secret information, therefore, you should have been aware of that law, despite the fact that nobody had written it down yet."
When a layman thinks that an act is legal, but is aware of the possiblity of the act being construed as illegal, it's called a "chilling effect." When it has to do with information, it's a chill on free speech.
If this case finally tilts towards the CCA, it sets a very, very dangerous precedent - companies will be able to establish a de facto standard, and then sue and repress anyone who learns what the standard is and attempts to create their own device to adhere to the standard. It would be a judicial grant of monopoly power, right up there with the legislative grants of monopoly power (copyright and patent.) While copyright and patent are good things in the public interest, it's Congress that decides that.
A decision in favor of the CCA would have the effects of chilling free speech and abrogating a clearly legislative decision to the courts, and the fulcrum of the case is something that the judge cannot decide.
I think it's time for everyone to go home, but the CCA's cries of "hacking" are striking fear into the legal system. And that's what their real case is - exploitation of the fear of things not understood. You and I know that lawful reverse-engineering is one thing, and spreading viruses and cracking systems is another, very bad thing, but few people without technical knowlege do.
Unfortunately, those people are making the laws that everyone has to live by.
ESR wrote a response to the lawsuit; I'm not aware of any comments made by Perens.
The point behind the Crusoe is not, not not NOT, to just be a better faster chip that optimizes better and consumes less power than those on the market now (though it is.)
The Crusoe's selling point is compatibility. Transmeta can churn out all sorts of chips, some optimized to sip current from batteries at a tenth of the rate of today's monsters, some designed to guzzle power even more and be speed demons. They can make radical changes to the basic design of the chip while doing this, and it won't matter, because though the way things are done internally may go topsy-turvy, the instruction set won't change, and the same programs can be run on each.
This neatly solves the drag placed on development by the need for backwards-compatibility (Want to run DOS 3.3 on your Athlon? You can if you feel like it.) Just like Windows, x86 chips have accumulated baggage - the sediment of silicon long since passed into figurative dust.
Transmeta has designed a beautiful thing - a chip that transcends backwards-compatibility. Writing to the bare metal on the Crusoe bolts it down, turns it into just another fixed-in-place bit-smashing engine. Kills it, in other words, removes what makes it an elegant hack.
Don't do it. Please.
By this same logic, Amazon is losing money despite being a market leader; therefore, E-commerce is doomed to failure. Both Red Hat and Amazon are choosing to lose money now, so that they can grow as companies and make even more money in the future. That doesn't mean the market isn't sufficient - it means there's so big a market out there that it's more profitable in the long run to expand to fill it than to start taking profit now.
That person therefore has not deprived you of any income. To say that he has "taken" something from you is spiteful. You gave a gift, and now you're annoyed because a recipient has benefited "too much" from it? If you're that mean-spirited, you shouldn't have given it.
I'm happy for the recipient for the benefits they're gaining from my software - but it wasn't a unilateral gift. If I GPL software, that means I intend for improvements based on my original work to come back to the codebase at large. If someone takes (by "takes," I don't mean "steals" or "misappropriates, I mean "makes a copy of") my code, then improves it, they should benefit from the fruits of their improvements - but I'm not getting paid one cent from their sales, unless they're willing to be charitable to me. I don't benefit from this arrangement, and so I GPL my code, so that improvements based on my code come back to me. I can benefit from this.
You have already reduced the market value of your work to zero by licensing it under the GPL.
My _work_, yes, is now without salable value. What I have increased the value of is me. Because I've released good free code, my reputation improves. People believe that I know what I'm doing. I can sell that, by hiring myself out to service my work, or by contracting with people to write additions to my software that they need. Heck, I could even get a job writing proprietary software from scratch - I have no problem with that, as long as I think there's money to be made by selling that product. I'm greedy, and so, money-grubbing capitalist that I am, I'll try to release lots of good free code so that my services are even more in demand, and I can charge higher fees for them as a result.
Your arguments are well-thought-out; you're one of the most intelligent critics of the GPL I've heard in a long time, but you're crippled by your assumption that the only way to make money from software you've written is to package it up, slap a proprietary license on it, and sell it. But that's wrong.
How many forks of *BSD are there now? How many forks of the Linux kernel?
The GPL doesn't foster fragmentation, it darn near prohibits it. The reason UNIX fragmented in the late eighties/early nineties is that every venedor added in their own, proprietary enhancements to the OS - the point, of course, was to add value and differentiate your product from those of your competitors. A good thing, usually, but in this case differentiation brought headaches the world over, created problems that are still being dealt with today, and blew the market into lots of tiny shreds.
If the initial product is released under the GPL, then this game of oneupmanship simply can't be played. Any feature that one vendor adds can be implemented by all of the others. Unfortunately, this would seem to kill the competitive advantage in bringing material improvements to the product - that would be, economically speaking, an affront to the principles of the free market. If I give a product out to the public, I should stand to benefit in some way from it, and if my competitors can take my work and distribute it themselves, then I lose that benefit.
It's not that cut-and-dried, though. Nobody can make a profit, in the long run, selling GPL'd software - the money is in service and support, and in coding applications to customers' specifications. Now the various free software vendors do have a clear incentive to improve what they're selling - not only does it help to expand their market as a whole, but it also adds to their reputation. Reputation means dollar signs when your business is providing a service - ask Bob Young and Marc Ewing. (One of the things I feel is missing from the GPL is some form of identity-of-author preservation, so that those who release enhancements are assured that their reputations will benefit. Right now, this is handled informally - the community knows who is contributing what code - but there's the potential for reputation theft via misrepentation of authorship.)
The net result: the services of programmers who "advance the state of the art" the most are, due to the reputation they gain, in the most demand, and so these programmers make the most money. The market for GPL'd software grows, and the codebase stays fairly unfragmented.
A commercial market for GPL code is feasible - Red Hat is proving this *today.*
The notion that code must be "protected" from being "taken proprietary" is one of the most common bogeymen raised by RMS and other advocates of the GPL.
The point isn't the fear that my code will be somehow stolen from me by corporate raiders - the point is that if I release code under a non-viral license, someone can take my code, add on to it, and then release it under their own commercial license. They benefit from my work; I and the community at large do not benefit from theirs. This is sure nice of me to let them do this, but it's not in my self-interest. And it fragments things all to hell. Now that someone has extended my code and propritized (is that a word?) the result, there are *two* choices out there - my still-free software, and somebody else's better software that (presumably) costs money. Some users will fork over the dough for the added value, some will continue to use my program. That's the very *anatomy* of a fork right there - the division of one piece of software and its user base into multiple incompatible camps. This hurts everyone. Interoperability decreases with time between the users that stuck with my program and those who went commercial, and people are discouraged from using either program. This hurts the commercial company, which loses sales, and it hurts me, because my user base that finds my bugs and submits improvments has shrunk.
Linux and the GPL may have prevented the meltdown of the UNIX market from fragmentation and the eventual standardization on NT. If that had happened, Microsoft wouldn't have any competitors for you to feel protective of.
You can't force American law onto actions performed in Norway by a Norweigan citizen. 'As far as the US court is concerned,' he executed a contract under Norweigan contract law, and Norweigan contract law makes what he did legally valid.
The information about CSS was not improperly obtained, as much as the DVD-CCA would like you, the public, and especially the judge to believe it was. Once the fruits of this reverse engineering were made public, the DVD Forum's cries of 'trade secret' became entirely empty, because a trade secret is just that - a secret. You can fight the distribution of a trade secret revealed through theft, breach of contract, and so on, but when it's revealed through proper means, it loses all legal protection.
I suggest you peruse the EFF's new archives on the DVD case - the Chicago lock case makes especially fascinating reading (synopsis: Locksmiths in Chicago reverse engineered a lock company's special, secretly designed locks, then began to service the locks using their newfound knowledge. The lock company, which had previously had a monopoly on servicing the locks, sued the locksmiths, and lost.)