This could be explained by an error of translation, but the florin (the gold coin of Florence) was not coined until 1252. I doubt that they would have been in sufficient circulation within ten or fifteen years for them to be a standard currency of gambling at Irrendorf, even assuming that the gambling took place toward the very end of Udo's life. Given the florin's size and value, it also seems to me unlikely that an abbot would win 32 of them at a time.
Plus, there is no Harvard Journal of Historical Mathematics, or if there is, Harvard's libraries don't know about it.
My medieval history studies finally serve me well...
That's entirely false. If you read the bill, it only prohibits forging addresses in the case of bulk unsolicited email. How often do you conceal your identity in sending bulk email to people with whom you've had no prior relationship whatsoever?
Two ways:
1) Government finds someone in the U.S. doing spam; it goes after them.
2) An individual finds someone in the U.S. or not doing spam, sues them under the civil liability provisions of the bill, all their U.S. assets are attached and used to pay the damages (esp. if they don't show up to court).
Although not every fly-by-night spammer will have U.S. assets, they could never visit the U.S. or operate a U.S. business, their assets in banks owned by U.S. companies might be seized,etc. You'd have to be a pretty small-time operator to be completely secure from U.S. jurisdiction.
"E) intentionally sells or distributes any computer program that--
`(i) is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages in a manner prohibited by subparagraph (D) of this paragraph;
`(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information; or
`(iii) is marketed by the violator or another person acting in concert with the violator and with the violator's knowledge for use in concealing the source or routing information of such messages'"
This is about as benign an anti-software law as you can get. It only criminalizes software that is produced "primarily" for forging addresses, that has only limited commercially significant use otherwise (so you don't need to worry about general email tools), and that is marketed specifically for this purpose by the distributor or his agent.
In other words, this isn't criminalizing sendmail and a shell script; this is only going after programs which the seller markets as spamware and don't have any other value. This is lightyears more sophisticated than the $*@#! DMCA.
Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (Introduced in the House)
HR 1017 IH
107th CONGRESS
1st Session
H.R. 1017
To prohibit the unsolicited e-mail known as `spam' .
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
March 14, 2001
Mr. GOODLATTE (for himself, Mr. SMITH of Texas, and Mr. BOUCHER) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
A BILL
To prohibit the unsolicited e-mail known as `spam' .
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Anti-Spamming Act of 2001'.
SEC. 2. PROTECTION FROM FRAUDULENT UNSOLICITED E-MAIL.
Section 1030 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) in subsection (a)(5)--
(A) by striking `or' at the end of subparagraph (B); and
(B) by inserting after subparagraph (C) the following:
`(D) intentionally and without authorization initiates the transmission of a bulk unsolicited electronic mail message to a protected computer with knowledge that such message falsifies an Internet domain, header information, date or time stamp, originating e-mail address, or other identifier; or
`(E) intentionally sells or distributes any computer program that--
`(i) is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages in a manner prohibited by subparagraph (D) of this paragraph;
`(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information; or
`(iii) is marketed by the violator or another person acting in concert with the violator and with the violator's knowledge for use in concealing the source or routing information of such messages';
(2) in subsection (c)(2)(A)--
(A) by inserting `(i)' after `in the case of an offense'; and
(B) by inserting after `an offense punishable under this subparagraph;' the following: `or (ii) under subsection (a)(5)(D) or (a)(5)(E) of this section which results in damage to a protected computer';
(3) in subsection (c)(2)--
(A) by adding at the end the following:
`(D) in the case of a violation of subsection (a)(5) (D) or (E), actual monetary loss and statutory damages of $15,000 per violation or an amount of up to $10 per message per violation whichever is greater; and'; and
(B) by striking `and' at the end of subparagraph (A);
(4) in subsection (e)--
(A) by striking `and' at the end of paragraph (8);
(B) by striking the period at the end of paragraph (9); and
(C) by adding at the end the following:
`(10) the term `initiates the transmission' means, in the case of an electronic mail message, to originate the electronic mail message, and excludes the actions of any interactive computer service whose facilities or services are used by another person to transmit, relay, or otherwise handle such message;
`(11) the term `Internet domain' means a specific computer system (commonly referred to as a `host') or collection of computer systems attached to or able to be referenced from the Internet which are assigned a specific reference point on the Internet (commonly referred to as an `Internet domain name') and registered with an organization recognized by the Internet industry as a registrant of Internet domains;
`(12) the term `unsolicited electronic mail message' means any substantially identical electronic mail message other than electronic mail initiated by any person to others with whom such person has a prior relationship, including prior business relationship, or electronic mail sent by a source to recipients where such recipients, or their designees, have at any time affirmatively requested to receive communications from that source; and
(for some reason, the lameness filter interprets numbers as capital letters... Why is it so good at filtering out ISO-formatted time strings and so bad at catching goatse.cx?)
Shortly after leaving prison, Mr. Draper was hired by Apple Computer, at a time when the company had only 15 employees. He developed a telephone-dialing card for the original Apple II computer. But Apple never marketed it for fear that it could be used as a powerful computer-controlled blue box.
Now that's a product that could have shaken the industry, at least in hindsight. How would the world of networking have been different if the world's most popular personal computer inn the early 1980s had shipped with a modem? Would we already have universal broadband by now?:)
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
Strawman. We're not talking about some vague "other universes", we're talking about our Universe. I too could make up a whole set of data to support my point, but that wouldn't make it valid.
Not at all. Your argument was that in a universe bound by laws, those laws must be uniform. My argument is that if you don't put a bound on the complexity of the laws, all universes must be bound by laws -- not as a scientific principle, but as a tautology. This means it's without content.
Again, how can you say this is "unusual"? Have you been to any of these other universes?
I apologize. What I should have said was, "There's no reason for us to assume that a universe is bound by a small (or even finite) number of laws, or that they would be within human comprehension. The fact that it is, is spiffy."
And how does our expectations of simplicity constitute evidence of simplicity?
Well, it's certainly possible that our expectation is wrong, but given that "simple" is a completely arbitrary term, the fact that some people feel accustomed to simple rules for the universe does give us some reason to go along with their description.
Of course not, that's another strawman argument.
I can't see any connection between the two arguments you've labeled "straw men" that could be serving as your definition.:) So at this point I'm convinced you're a troll. I suppose the line between a troll and a very opinionated person isn't well-defined; it all depends on whether you're writing in bad faith, which isn't something I can check from my end. Heck, I might be some kind of reverse-psychology troll pretending to be a clueless newbie and laughing at you all behind my hand. Ah well; another night, another few precious minutes wasted on slashdot.
I'm not entirely sure this isn't a troll,but... it's either this or finish an essay on Bertrand Russell.
What is your criterion for direct evidence? Part of the idea of a black hole is that I can't really see it in front of me, since it's black. Any good view of evidence would treat visual perceptions as different in degree, rather than kind, from evidence of the sort that these telescopes have turned up. I see tables in front of me all the time, but the way by which I should argue for the existence of tables and the way by which I should argue for the existence of black holes is precisely the same.
What you say about laws applying everywhere is absolutely meaningless. I can create a list of laws for *any* universe that I can describe, no matter how chaotic it may appear -- there may be a whole lot of non-computable functions in those laws, and the list might not be finite, but that doesn't mean that universe is any less bound by laws.
What's unusual about the laws in this universe is that there seem to be relatively few of them, and they're relatively simple -- at least compared to what they might be. There's no reason, though, why they *must* be so simple, or must be equally simple everywhere; the fact that we expect them to be is merely more evidence of the simplicity.
AFAIK, the only thing you're truly entitled to is the information it has about _you_. There are plenty of cases where the government justifies keeping information private on the grounds that releasing it can do harm (case panics, etc.) or be a threat to national security.
That's a pretty fine line to be treading. The real reason why the public has a right to know isn't that we pay NASA's salary, but that our representatives oversee NASA and tell them what to do. The purpose of democracy is to force accountability on the government, and if mistakes can be kept secret, there's no accountability.
Obviously, there are certain types of information that we don't want the government putting on the Web right away (e.g., troop movements). But it's pretty dangerous to give the government a blank check to keep damning and/or embarrassing material secret forever under the pretext that it would "cause panics" if it were released. If there's no regular declassification procedure and if no one can review their decision without seeing the documents, then merely upsetting information could be labeled as panic-causing, and even the narrowest exceptions for national security would be abused.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. kept all kinds of things secret, and tried to prevent the New York Times from publishing diplomatically embarrassing documents from the Pentagon Papers under the pretext of national security; luckily, the Supreme Court saw through it. Even though the release may have hurt us by showing all the nasty stuff we did in pre-war Vietnam, it was the kind of information the public had the greatest need to know -- so that we could hold accountable the people who had acted in our name.
True -- according to their "Career Opportunities" page (that's a laugh), "Network Commerce Inc. is a rapidly growing e-commerce company headquartered in Seattle with over 600 employees in three states and the U.K." Since they've laid off 209 people since October, and since the WARN law is triggered when you lay off 33% of your work force in a 90-day period, they're pretty close to the level...
Does the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington read slashdot?
IANAL (yet), but according to the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act, companies with more than 100 employees that do mass layoffs are required to give sixty days of notice before people are laid off -- presumably so things like this don't happen. How large was this company? Is there anything to prevent employees of smaller companies (or companies experiencing smaller layoffs) from getting screwed?
Now that we've heard that the RBL is censorware, why not
develop censorware on the model of the RBL? The RBL's defenders say that because it's open, there's no real compulsion, since network
administrators are free to block what they want. It seems to me that the
same arguments could be made in favor of an RBL-like censorware list, as
long as the list were kept open. If we like open lists and we like the
RBL, why don't we treat censorware in the same way?
The main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know
what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we
can't know whether we're being duped. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the
web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice
(e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never
find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior
knowledge that it's legitimate. And website owners can't know when their sites are
wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.
But filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; a
filterware company's marketable product, their added value, comes from the
quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, then all
filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive
to come up with a good list, someone else could just copy it.
I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of
them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy
perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law
sending censorware companies out of business when there doesn't seem to be
any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that
I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from
'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to
monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering
software -- and now we're seeing that spread to schools and libraries.
Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents or schools might
take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give
them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I
think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free
access to the few sites that censorware wrongly blocks and in doing
so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the
Internet.
I don't see any easy escape from this, but one possibility would use the
open-source model. The reason why we celebrate the use of open-source
software is because we believe that software open to public scrutiny will
be of higher quality than if it were closed-source. Why don't we apply
the same reasoning to blocking software and blocking lists? Lists are
currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies
who maintain it have to make money.
Imagine, though, if a non-profit
foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and
put together a filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could
submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check
them before adding them to the list.
Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no
incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable.
Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant
attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see
whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had
too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might
not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start
their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The
open filter list would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors,
and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's
request. The result would be a system in which errors were
self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of
choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.
I see two potential problems with this model that would have to be
addressed. The first is that the lists would not be adequately maintained
without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ
people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable
sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative
billionaire (or Paul Vixie type) would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the
Web forever.
Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB
text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be
publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for
objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the
categories were reasonably vague, then
they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type
'porn' into Google and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't
make my search any easier.
I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I
think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an
open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the
public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering
sites. If we don't have any alternative, then Peacefire and their
supporters are going to be fighting a losing battle.
IANAL (yet), but it seems to me that although the law's got a pretty good shot at surviving the courts as far as schools go, libraries will be a tougher sell. The Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act in part because "[i]n order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve."
It seems to me that the federal government could easily make the argument that censorware is the least restrictive means for stopping students (who are minors) from viewing indecent speech; since the goal they outlined was preserving the rights of adults, the students are probably out of luck. Plus, since schools have special powers over students, there's generally little protection for those who would want to look at various banned materials through school computers.
Libraries, on the other hand, serve a general public (i.e., people over 18) and would probably be subject to a much greater degree of scrutiny. There, any filtering would impinge on adult speech (although it's possible that they would turn it off for 18-and-over). One court has already found that libraries can't use filterware to stop adults from viewing legal material, and it based its decision in part on that clause from the CDA opinion.
The upshot of this is that, unless the courts decide to change their minds, students will just have to use the public libraries more often...
(I wonder, though, whether it might be possible to challenge individual software programs one-by-one rather than go after the law on its face -- after all, it shouldn't be too hard to show that each one blocks perfectly legitimate sites and thus impermissibly restricts speech...)
Medieval tech. more interesting than Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 2
Although I'm not familiar with Johnson's scholarship, as someone who studies mostly medieval history, I'm naturally skeptical of claims about how great the Renaissance was. Like everything else, the periodization is problematic (did it start in Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, or with Petrarch in 1370s, or with Dante in 1320s, or...), and part of that has to do with a geographic split -- things that we associate with "Renaissance" happened in the North later and in different ways than in Italy.
But if you're going to stick with a one-period Renaissance, you should also pay attention to the Carolingian Renaissance or the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century -- both periods in which we're discovering powerful intellectual advances. In general, most people have dismissed Europe prior to the printing press as a pure backwater and Dark Ages -- but this doesn't wash with the developments spurred by Greek and Arabic knowledge filtering back to the West, in logic with Abelard in the 12th century and in physics continuing with Grosseteste and Bacon to Bradwardine in the 14th century. A number of people have argued that the ongoing Commercial Revolution helped spur a more exact and mathematical view of the world. Even if art's what you want, the development of perspective by Giotto and Cimabue came way before the 15th century. Margaret Wertheim's Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, which Katz liked, has a lot to say about perspective.
Besides, if you're looking for the cultural impact of technology, why restrict your focus to the Renaissance? Some of the most important technologies were introduced to Europe centuries earlier, such as the watermill (which was around in late Rome), the stirrup (which enabled shock combat on horseback), the heavy plow (which enabled the tilling of the fertile northern soils), the new horse collar (which allowed horses to pull the plows without choking to death), and the three-field system of planting beans to replenish the soil (which increased the food supply by half, added protein to the diet of the poor and resulted in an immense expansion of European population). All of these had vast social consequences -- not perhaps as culturally sexy as the printing press or Michelangelo, but with far greater impact on people's lives. Personally, I'd rather that the Net's effects be more like the former than the latter.
If you're interested in the subject of medieval learning, math and technology, I'd recommend Alexander Murray's Reason and Society in the Middle Ages and Lynn White's Medieval Technology and Social Change -- although the latter has come under fire for White's tendency to worship the stirrup. I've also heard good things about Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine, although I haven't read it.
I disagree with Michael. I respect Auerbach greatly, but I think the issues facing ICANN in the future are going to be primarily legal and political rather than technical, and I think Lessig has far more experience in this regard. Whatever ICANN does today is going to set a precedent for Internet governance down the road, and the power of policymakers on the Net will only grow with the increasing role of the Net in everyday life. Having a law professor who understands the dangers of legislative capture by private interests can't be a bad thing. Also, I think Lessig is more likely to work for consensus within the board.
Harvard hasn't been sued or booted Napster off their servers yet, and the Dean sounds like they never will -- look at this editorial from the Harvard Crimson...
The reason why we celebrate the use of open-source software is because we believe that software open to public scrutiny will be of higher quality than if it were closed-source. The same reasoning should apply to Internet-filter software and filter lists.
It seems to me that the main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we can't know whether we're being defrauded as consumers when we buy a filtering product. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice (e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior knowledge that it's legitimate. Furthermore, website owners can't know whether they're being defamed or in other ways injured when their sites are wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.
However, filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; CyberPatrol's marketable product, their added value, comes from the quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, or if we had laws that allowed for the lists to be openly copied -- laws that would protect people like Jansson and Skala -- then all filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive to come up with a good list, because any effort a company put into their list would be lost when someone else made a competing product using the same publicly-accessible list.
I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law sending CyberPatrol out of business when there doesn't seem to be any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from 'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering software.
Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents might take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free access to the few sites that CyberPatrol & Co. wrongly block and in doing so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the Internet.
Then how should we control commercial filter programs? It might be possible for an independent certification authority (a government agency?) to verify lists and give them a commercially valuable "stamp of approval," but this approach has its fair share of problems. First, the work would be massively redundant, since it would be checking every site blocked by every blocking product -- it would be far more efficient to combine the verified lists into a single trusted list. Second, the independent agency wouldn't be entirely accountable, since the list would remain secret and its own competence would be indeterminate. If it were private, it could be hijacked by commercial interests, and if it were a government agency, there might be constitutional/political concerns with it labeling certain sites. A certification authority would help, but it would be a second-best solution. The only way I see to escape from these problems would be to make everyone a certification authority -- to follow the open-source model. Lists are currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies who maintain it have to make money. Imagine, though, if a non-profit foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and got programmers to put together an open-source filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check them before adding them to the list.
Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable. Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The open-source filter software would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors, and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's request. The result would be a system in which errors were self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.
I see three potential problems with the open-source model that would have to be addressed. The first is that that the lists would not be adequately maintained without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative billionaire would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the Web forever. Besides, submissions from the public (or at least from trusted members of the public) would make the job of the list-keepers that much easier, since they would only have to read through submissions, not find stuff on their own. Their work would certainly not exceed that of a certification authority.
Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the categories were reasonably vague (for example, CyberPatrol uses "Extremist / Militant" rather than "pipe bomb," "smoke bomb," and "nuclear bomb") then they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type 'porn' or 'pipe bomb' into Altavista and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't make my search any easier.
I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering sites. In fact, the availability of a free open-source alternative might just drive commercial filters out of business on its own, since the open lists could advertise their accountability and reliability in comparison to commercial, secret lists. If we don't have any alternative, though, then the political will to deal with censorware will never exist, and people like Jansson and Skala are going to be fighting a losing battle.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be explained by an error of translation, but the florin (the gold coin of Florence) was not coined until 1252. I doubt that they would have been in sufficient circulation within ten or fifteen years for them to be a standard currency of gambling at Irrendorf, even assuming that the gambling took place toward the very end of Udo's life. Given the florin's size and value, it also seems to me unlikely that an abbot would win 32 of them at a time.
Plus, there is no Harvard Journal of Historical Mathematics, or if there is, Harvard's libraries don't know about it.
My medieval history studies finally serve me well...
That's entirely false. If you read the bill, it only prohibits forging addresses in the case of bulk unsolicited email. How often do you conceal your identity in sending bulk email to people with whom you've had no prior relationship whatsoever?
Two ways:
1) Government finds someone in the U.S. doing spam; it goes after them.
2) An individual finds someone in the U.S. or not doing spam, sues them under the civil liability provisions of the bill, all their U.S. assets are attached and used to pay the damages (esp. if they don't show up to court).
Although not every fly-by-night spammer will have U.S. assets, they could never visit the U.S. or operate a U.S. business, their assets in banks owned by U.S. companies might be seized,etc. You'd have to be a pretty small-time operator to be completely secure from U.S. jurisdiction.
Look at the way it handles spamware:
"E) intentionally sells or distributes any computer program that--
`(i) is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages in a manner prohibited by subparagraph (D) of this paragraph;
`(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information; or
`(iii) is marketed by the violator or another person acting in concert with the violator and with the violator's knowledge for use in concealing the source or routing information of such messages'"
This is about as benign an anti-software law as you can get. It only criminalizes software that is produced "primarily" for forging addresses, that has only limited commercially significant use otherwise (so you don't need to worry about general email tools), and that is marketed specifically for this purpose by the distributor or his agent.
In other words, this isn't criminalizing sendmail and a shell script; this is only going after programs which the seller markets as spamware and don't have any other value. This is lightyears more sophisticated than the $*@#! DMCA.
Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (Introduced in the House)
HR 1017 IH
107th CONGRESS
1st Session
H.R. 1017
To prohibit the unsolicited e-mail known as `spam' .
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
March 14, 2001
Mr. GOODLATTE (for himself, Mr. SMITH of Texas, and Mr. BOUCHER) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
A BILL
To prohibit the unsolicited e-mail known as `spam' .
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Anti-Spamming Act of 2001'.
SEC. 2. PROTECTION FROM FRAUDULENT UNSOLICITED E-MAIL.
Section 1030 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) in subsection (a)(5)--
(A) by striking `or' at the end of subparagraph (B); and
(B) by inserting after subparagraph (C) the following:
`(D) intentionally and without authorization initiates the transmission of a bulk unsolicited electronic mail message to a protected computer with knowledge that such message falsifies an Internet domain, header information, date or time stamp, originating e-mail address, or other identifier; or
`(E) intentionally sells or distributes any computer program that--
`(i) is designed or produced primarily for the purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk unsolicited electronic mail messages in a manner prohibited by subparagraph (D) of this paragraph;
`(ii) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information; or
`(iii) is marketed by the violator or another person acting in concert with the violator and with the violator's knowledge for use in concealing the source or routing information of such messages';
(2) in subsection (c)(2)(A)--
(A) by inserting `(i)' after `in the case of an offense'; and
(B) by inserting after `an offense punishable under this subparagraph;' the following: `or (ii) under subsection (a)(5)(D) or (a)(5)(E) of this section which results in damage to a protected computer';
(3) in subsection (c)(2)--
(A) by adding at the end the following:
`(D) in the case of a violation of subsection (a)(5) (D) or (E), actual monetary loss and statutory damages of $15,000 per violation or an amount of up to $10 per message per violation whichever is greater; and'; and
(B) by striking `and' at the end of subparagraph (A);
(4) in subsection (e)--
(A) by striking `and' at the end of paragraph (8);
(B) by striking the period at the end of paragraph (9); and
(C) by adding at the end the following:
`(10) the term `initiates the transmission' means, in the case of an electronic mail message, to originate the electronic mail message, and excludes the actions of any interactive computer service whose facilities or services are used by another person to transmit, relay, or otherwise handle such message;
`(11) the term `Internet domain' means a specific computer system (commonly referred to as a `host') or collection of computer systems attached to or able to be referenced from the Internet which are assigned a specific reference point on the Internet (commonly referred to as an `Internet domain name') and registered with an organization recognized by the Internet industry as a registrant of Internet domains;
`(12) the term `unsolicited electronic mail message' means any substantially identical electronic mail message other than electronic mail initiated by any person to others with whom such person has a prior relationship, including prior business relationship, or electronic mail sent by a source to recipients where such recipients, or their designees, have at any time affirmatively requested to receive communications from that source; and
2001-03-18 03:28:46
(for some reason, the lameness filter interprets numbers as capital letters... Why is it so good at filtering out ISO-formatted time strings and so bad at catching goatse.cx?)
Shortly after leaving prison, Mr. Draper was hired by Apple Computer, at a time when the company had only 15 employees. He developed a telephone-dialing card for the original Apple II computer. But Apple never marketed it for fear that it could be used as a powerful computer-controlled blue box.
Now that's a product that could have shaken the industry, at least in hindsight. How would the world of networking have been different if the world's most popular personal computer inn the early 1980s had shipped with a modem? Would we already have universal broadband by now? :)
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, ever since I tried to arrange a Mozart sonata in middle school and found I'd have to pay through the nose for the sheet music. The great works of classical music -- just like the great novels and paintings -- are part of the world's heritage, and since their original creators are long dead, there's no reason why they shouldn't be electronically available.
But this project is important for more than just personal access to music -- it might also be very useful in academic research. I'm a medieval history major, and my professors have been raving about the availability of digitized versions of medieval texts -- you can search for a word or build a concordance in no time flat, and that's brought a number of new discoveries to light that before would just have been lost amid the thousands of parchment manuscripts.
What I wonder is whether this same effect might be seen by university music departments if something like Mutopia becomes very successful. If the entire works of J.S. Bach are available in a single library in a standard format, you could probably teach a computer to search for chord patterns, etc., and develop new ways of analyzing the score that require far less effort than just reading it through (especially for someone as prolific as Bach). If your library is big enough, you could even compare the styles of various composers and identify connections and links that before would have been entirely missed.
Of course, that would require some serious work, which means serious funding. The Mutopia "how to contribute" page talks only about music, not about cash; would there be a way to turn the project into a larger effort? This is something that universities, private charitable foundations, corporations looking for feel-good gifts, or anyone who supports the local symphony might be happy to sponsor. (And who knows? Maybe NEA would be happy to join in -- it would certainly be less controversial than Mapplethorpe photos.)
While Project Gutenberg may be too general to recieve this kind of support, a specific and research-focused project might go further than we expect.
You can find it here...
Not at all. Your argument was that in a universe bound by laws, those laws must be uniform. My argument is that if you don't put a bound on the complexity of the laws, all universes must be bound by laws -- not as a scientific principle, but as a tautology. This means it's without content.
Again, how can you say this is "unusual"? Have you been to any of these other universes?
I apologize. What I should have said was, "There's no reason for us to assume that a universe is bound by a small (or even finite) number of laws, or that they would be within human comprehension. The fact that it is, is spiffy."
And how does our expectations of simplicity constitute evidence of simplicity?
Well, it's certainly possible that our expectation is wrong, but given that "simple" is a completely arbitrary term, the fact that some people feel accustomed to simple rules for the universe does give us some reason to go along with their description.
Of course not, that's another strawman argument.
I can't see any connection between the two arguments you've labeled "straw men" that could be serving as your definition.:) So at this point I'm convinced you're a troll. I suppose the line between a troll and a very opinionated person isn't well-defined; it all depends on whether you're writing in bad faith, which isn't something I can check from my end. Heck, I might be some kind of reverse-psychology troll pretending to be a clueless newbie and laughing at you all behind my hand. Ah well; another night, another few precious minutes wasted on slashdot.
Good night.
I'm not entirely sure this isn't a troll,but... it's either this or finish an essay on Bertrand Russell.
What is your criterion for direct evidence? Part of the idea of a black hole is that I can't really see it in front of me, since it's black. Any good view of evidence would treat visual perceptions as different in degree, rather than kind, from evidence of the sort that these telescopes have turned up. I see tables in front of me all the time, but the way by which I should argue for the existence of tables and the way by which I should argue for the existence of black holes is precisely the same.
What you say about laws applying everywhere is absolutely meaningless. I can create a list of laws for *any* universe that I can describe, no matter how chaotic it may appear -- there may be a whole lot of non-computable functions in those laws, and the list might not be finite, but that doesn't mean that universe is any less bound by laws.
What's unusual about the laws in this universe is that there seem to be relatively few of them, and they're relatively simple -- at least compared to what they might be. There's no reason, though, why they *must* be so simple, or must be equally simple everywhere; the fact that we expect them to be is merely more evidence of the simplicity.
That's a pretty fine line to be treading. The real reason why the public has a right to know isn't that we pay NASA's salary, but that our representatives oversee NASA and tell them what to do. The purpose of democracy is to force accountability on the government, and if mistakes can be kept secret, there's no accountability.
Obviously, there are certain types of information that we don't want the government putting on the Web right away (e.g., troop movements). But it's pretty dangerous to give the government a blank check to keep damning and/or embarrassing material secret forever under the pretext that it would "cause panics" if it were released. If there's no regular declassification procedure and if no one can review their decision without seeing the documents, then merely upsetting information could be labeled as panic-causing, and even the narrowest exceptions for national security would be abused.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. kept all kinds of things secret, and tried to prevent the New York Times from publishing diplomatically embarrassing documents from the Pentagon Papers under the pretext of national security; luckily, the Supreme Court saw through it. Even though the release may have hurt us by showing all the nasty stuff we did in pre-war Vietnam, it was the kind of information the public had the greatest need to know -- so that we could hold accountable the people who had acted in our name.
True -- according to their "Career Opportunities" page (that's a laugh), "Network Commerce Inc. is a rapidly growing e-commerce company headquartered in Seattle with over 600 employees in three states and the U.K." Since they've laid off 209 people since October, and since the WARN law is triggered when you lay off 33% of your work force in a 90-day period, they're pretty close to the level... Does the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington read slashdot?
IANAL (yet), but according to the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act, companies with more than 100 employees that do mass layoffs are required to give sixty days of notice before people are laid off -- presumably so things like this don't happen. How large was this company? Is there anything to prevent employees of smaller companies (or companies experiencing smaller layoffs) from getting screwed?
The main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we can't know whether we're being duped. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice (e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior knowledge that it's legitimate. And website owners can't know when their sites are wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.
But filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; a filterware company's marketable product, their added value, comes from the quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, then all filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive to come up with a good list, someone else could just copy it.
I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law sending censorware companies out of business when there doesn't seem to be any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from 'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering software -- and now we're seeing that spread to schools and libraries.
Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents or schools might take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free access to the few sites that censorware wrongly blocks and in doing so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the Internet.
I don't see any easy escape from this, but one possibility would use the open-source model. The reason why we celebrate the use of open-source software is because we believe that software open to public scrutiny will be of higher quality than if it were closed-source. Why don't we apply the same reasoning to blocking software and blocking lists? Lists are currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies who maintain it have to make money.
Imagine, though, if a non-profit foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and put together a filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check them before adding them to the list.
Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable. Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The open filter list would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors, and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's request. The result would be a system in which errors were self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.
I see two potential problems with this model that would have to be addressed. The first is that the lists would not be adequately maintained without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative billionaire (or Paul Vixie type) would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the Web forever.
Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the categories were reasonably vague, then they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type 'porn' into Google and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't make my search any easier.
I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering sites. If we don't have any alternative, then Peacefire and their supporters are going to be fighting a losing battle.
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http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron
It seems to me that the federal government could easily make the argument that censorware is the least restrictive means for stopping students (who are minors) from viewing indecent speech; since the goal they outlined was preserving the rights of adults, the students are probably out of luck. Plus, since schools have special powers over students, there's generally little protection for those who would want to look at various banned materials through school computers.
Libraries, on the other hand, serve a general public (i.e., people over 18) and would probably be subject to a much greater degree of scrutiny. There, any filtering would impinge on adult speech (although it's possible that they would turn it off for 18-and-over). One court has already found that libraries can't use filterware to stop adults from viewing legal material, and it based its decision in part on that clause from the CDA opinion.
The upshot of this is that, unless the courts decide to change their minds, students will just have to use the public libraries more often...
(I wonder, though, whether it might be possible to challenge individual software programs one-by-one rather than go after the law on its face -- after all, it shouldn't be too hard to show that each one blocks perfectly legitimate sites and thus impermissibly restricts speech...)
But if you're going to stick with a one-period Renaissance, you should also pay attention to the Carolingian Renaissance or the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century -- both periods in which we're discovering powerful intellectual advances. In general, most people have dismissed Europe prior to the printing press as a pure backwater and Dark Ages -- but this doesn't wash with the developments spurred by Greek and Arabic knowledge filtering back to the West, in logic with Abelard in the 12th century and in physics continuing with Grosseteste and Bacon to Bradwardine in the 14th century. A number of people have argued that the ongoing Commercial Revolution helped spur a more exact and mathematical view of the world. Even if art's what you want, the development of perspective by Giotto and Cimabue came way before the 15th century. Margaret Wertheim's Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, which Katz liked, has a lot to say about perspective.
Besides, if you're looking for the cultural impact of technology, why restrict your focus to the Renaissance? Some of the most important technologies were introduced to Europe centuries earlier, such as the watermill (which was around in late Rome), the stirrup (which enabled shock combat on horseback), the heavy plow (which enabled the tilling of the fertile northern soils), the new horse collar (which allowed horses to pull the plows without choking to death), and the three-field system of planting beans to replenish the soil (which increased the food supply by half, added protein to the diet of the poor and resulted in an immense expansion of European population). All of these had vast social consequences -- not perhaps as culturally sexy as the printing press or Michelangelo, but with far greater impact on people's lives. Personally, I'd rather that the Net's effects be more like the former than the latter.
If you're interested in the subject of medieval learning, math and technology, I'd recommend Alexander Murray's Reason and Society in the Middle Ages and Lynn White's Medieval Technology and Social Change -- although the latter has come under fire for White's tendency to worship the stirrup. I've also heard good things about Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine, although I haven't read it.
I disagree with Michael. I respect Auerbach greatly, but I think the issues facing ICANN in the future are going to be primarily legal and political rather than technical, and I think Lessig has far more experience in this regard. Whatever ICANN does today is going to set a precedent for Internet governance down the road, and the power of policymakers on the Net will only grow with the increasing role of the Net in everyday life. Having a law professor who understands the dangers of legislative capture by private interests can't be a bad thing. Also, I think Lessig is more likely to work for consensus within the board.
Harvard hasn't been sued or booted Napster off their servers yet, and the Dean sounds like they never will -- look at this editorial from the Harvard Crimson...
It seems to me that the main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we can't know whether we're being defrauded as consumers when we buy a filtering product. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice (e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior knowledge that it's legitimate. Furthermore, website owners can't know whether they're being defamed or in other ways injured when their sites are wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.
However, filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; CyberPatrol's marketable product, their added value, comes from the quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, or if we had laws that allowed for the lists to be openly copied -- laws that would protect people like Jansson and Skala -- then all filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive to come up with a good list, because any effort a company put into their list would be lost when someone else made a competing product using the same publicly-accessible list.
I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law sending CyberPatrol out of business when there doesn't seem to be any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from 'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering software.
Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents might take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free access to the few sites that CyberPatrol & Co. wrongly block and in doing so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the Internet.
Then how should we control commercial filter programs? It might be possible for an independent certification authority (a government agency?) to verify lists and give them a commercially valuable "stamp of approval," but this approach has its fair share of problems. First, the work would be massively redundant, since it would be checking every site blocked by every blocking product -- it would be far more efficient to combine the verified lists into a single trusted list. Second, the independent agency wouldn't be entirely accountable, since the list would remain secret and its own competence would be indeterminate. If it were private, it could be hijacked by commercial interests, and if it were a government agency, there might be constitutional/political concerns with it labeling certain sites. A certification authority would help, but it would be a second-best solution. The only way I see to escape from these problems would be to make everyone a certification authority -- to follow the open-source model. Lists are currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies who maintain it have to make money. Imagine, though, if a non-profit foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and got programmers to put together an open-source filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check them before adding them to the list.
Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable. Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The open-source filter software would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors, and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's request. The result would be a system in which errors were self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.
I see three potential problems with the open-source model that would have to be addressed. The first is that that the lists would not be adequately maintained without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative billionaire would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the Web forever. Besides, submissions from the public (or at least from trusted members of the public) would make the job of the list-keepers that much easier, since they would only have to read through submissions, not find stuff on their own. Their work would certainly not exceed that of a certification authority.
Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the categories were reasonably vague (for example, CyberPatrol uses "Extremist / Militant" rather than "pipe bomb," "smoke bomb," and "nuclear bomb") then they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type 'porn' or 'pipe bomb' into Altavista and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't make my search any easier.
I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering sites. In fact, the availability of a free open-source alternative might just drive commercial filters out of business on its own, since the open lists could advertise their accountability and reliability in comparison to commercial, secret lists. If we don't have any alternative, though, then the political will to deal with censorware will never exist, and people like Jansson and Skala are going to be fighting a losing battle.
Today's New York Times Magazine has an interesting piece by James Gleick on Amazon, software patents, the whole shebang...