Maybe you don't have anything to hide, but you still have files which can be deleted. What's wrong with allowing read-only access to the world, but only RW access to the right password? Seems a bit of a D'OH moment to me...
No, this is definitely confusing the issue. The case is not about free-speech, it's about reverse-engineering and NDAs.
Xing (sp?) signed an NDA with the DVD folks to say that they would not release the CSS algorithm (a trade secret of the DVD folks). Xing screwed up, and made it available. Someone (Jon Johansen) used that screwup to reverse engineer CSS. Now Jon Johansen is within his rights to reverse-engineer - Xing made it possible to do this, and he did it. Since he now has access to the CSS algorithm without signing an NDA, and without doing any illegal activities, he can skywrite it and have it tattooed on his bum, and there's nothing the DVD folks can do about it, cos there's no laws against it in Norway.
Meantime 2600 and co are distributing DeCSS. They don't have to meet any NDA, they just have to follow Jon Johansen's copyright agreements (in this case the GPL). Unless the material doesn't meet import regulations by being obscene or whatever, they're OK. Trouble is, the DMCA makes it illegal to trade in this (IIRC), so they need to get that sorted. A perfectly reasonable temporary solution is offshore hosting - then they can't touch you. Long-term, other bad laws/precedents have been enacted b4, and have been repealed - the issue is to show that this portion of the DMCA is unconstitutional (as you Americans say).
The one place that is caught bang to rights is Xing. They screwed up their CSS implementation and consequently made the CSS algorithm easily available to anyone who cared to look. Xing can therefor have the ass sued off them by anyone, and all they can do is plead guilty and hope they don't get hit too bad.
And yet the amount that artists receive is negligible, whilst the record companies think a record's flopped if they've posted less than 10% profit!
It's disingenuous (or 'just plain wrong', to put it another way) to say that the record company pays for marketing, playlisting, etc. Certainly they pay initially. But then they charge that to the artist(s) concerned, so it doesn't actually cost them anything! The promotion costs are then indented against the artist's next record, so if the artist's next album doesn't make enough of a profit (and bear in mind that the artist is on a crap deal where they only get a few cents per CD sold), then the artist ends up owing the record company, in spite of the fact that the company may still have made a decent profit on the record! And that's why only the most extremely successful artists make enough to retire on - the rest get stuck in share-cropping hell, trying to cover their existing debts. This has remarkable parallels with the indenture system of the feudal society, and with how smugglers of illegal immigrants get their victims to 'pay off their travel'.
The concert tour was actually the main way for artists to make money - artists never used to make anything on recordings, so they played live, and the proceeds from that went directly to them instead of to the record company. Even the Beatles didn't start making real money on recordings until much later in their career, although no doubt it gives the surviving members a nice cash boost each year now. This is doubly true for session musicians, who may only be paid for a week's work recording an album, but get 6 months guaranteed work off a tour.
Artists are starting to get wise to these problems, and are getting more bolshy with their record companies. I'm sure this accounts for the rise in 'manufactured' groups of boy- and girl-bands (911, Spice Girls, Take That, etc, etc). These guys are just doing it bcos the record companies are paying them more than McDonalds would, not bcos they actually _want_ to be real musicians, and certainly not bcos they're at all talented.
As for CD sales - no doubt many groups don't make much in sales, just as many paperback books don't really go anywhere. The problem - cost. In the UK, £15 for a new CD release is about average. Now that's a fair amount of money, and I'm reluctant to spend that on a CD when I don't know if I'll like it - hence the appeal of being able to listen to extracts on Napster or suchlike, or having the CD available on the trial stands in the shop (I found one of my favourite CDs, by Porcupine Tree, just by sticking on the demo headphones in a music shop). It's almost worse when you know there's only one good song on the whole CD (eg. Mariah Carey's Music Box) - is it worth paying £15 for one song? If you can't afford to write off the cost of a CD, you will never experiment with new artists or genres, and consequently sales will suffer.
Grab.
Re:None, because Napster fucked it up for everyone
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> > Every encryption scheme can be broken given time. > > Which is why you don't bother encrypting.
'Given time' is the essence of encryption. The office crypto textbook says you should plan crypto so that given a Moore's Law increase in processing power for the most powerful machine currently available, for the next 10 years (say) your crypto won't be crackable in less than a certain time. Say you've designed for a year's worth of distributed.net processing to be needed to crack the crypto. That means that all the distributed.net machines are going to have to work non-stop for a year to crack A SINGLE SONG. End of game.
A better approach which I'd love to see is to incorporate a variable-quality system of encryption. If you download the music, by default you get a 22k mono recording, and you have to pay to get the key for it to play it at full quality, or maybe have a limit that it'll play full-quality first time, but after that only at radio quality until you get the key. Link the key to the hard drive so folks can't swap keys, and you're away. To allow HD upgrades, maybe charge $5 to move all your keys to the new HD - the program would check that all the keys are linked to the same old HD and any keys which didn't match the majority would be ditched, so you can't just pass keys around and expect them to be fooled by paying the $5 HD upgrade fee. Get this kind of system going, and you're away - it'd work just like feature-limited shareware software.
I know it's not 100% foolproof as it stands, but it's better than unencrypted Napster (which doesn't give any return to the artists) or the RIAA.
Undermining the security of the state?! What, you mean those film-makers, playwrights and musicians? Hell, let's protect ourselves from them, we don't want ppl going around attacking each other with dangerous scripts... I'm sorry, but think 'sticks and stones'. If a society can't take ppl voicing their opinion, then it's not worth having. Think of the British Muslims declaring a fatwa against Rushdie, with their viewpoint of "We're entitled to our views, but we don't think you should be entitled to yours".
You seem to have forgotten that the ramp up in anti-Communist hysteria nearly caused nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russian president hadn't had the balls to see that it wasn't worth it, we'd all be toast. Headlines along the lines of "Russians lose their nerve", when in fact the Americans were being bloody stupid. Playing chicken is fine if you want to kill yourself, but playing chicken with the whole world is beyond any measure of insanity.
Is this the same Plaid Cymru that went out and burned the houses of English folk who'd committed the heinous crime of buying a house in Wales? Great bunch of guys...
Get real. Skinheads are folks with short (or shaven) hair. Neo-Nazis are folks who attack coloured people. Some Neo-Nazis are skinheads. Some skinheads are neo-Nazis. But not all skinheads are neo-Nazis, or vice versa. On a purely technical basis, Shaq and Magic Johnson would fit into the skinhead category!
To get back to the story - this is old news. The RIP bill has always been a problem, but since the government here has a huge majority, there was never any question that it would get passed. Every government comes up with crap laws sometimes - we just have to hope that the next lot will sort it out, or that the more ridiculous elements will be dropped, at least.
And I quote from the article: "Some opponents of the RIP bill are pointing out that the technology provided for in the bill is already out of date and fairly simple to circumvent." So hey - all we need to do is use PGP, and they're automatically screwed. ISPs will start setting up their configuration CDs so that they select encryption as standard, and that's that. Add in IPv6, and basically the British government's going to be SOL on spying. Ah well, sorry guys, ain't life a bitch...
Recently there was some trouble in Britain, when it was found that Margaret Thatcher had asked the Canadian government to spy on opposition party members, in exchange for which the British secret services spied on Canadian targets.
I can appreciate scanning for threats such as child pornography (never mind the argument about whether it exists - that's another point), and targetting known criminals or likely suspects. But what is the NSA's policy on monitoring _political_ targets? If asked to bug Newt Gingrich or some other senior politician, would the NSA have the power to refuse? And if it did refuse, would it use another agency (Britain's MI5, for instance) to gather the same information, on a quid pro quo basis?
It's always easy to take advantage of mugs. Anyone who's prepared to blow cash on this as a spur-of-the-moment purchase, they've obviously got so much money that it isn't an issue for them. So I'd not be too upset for them.;-)
It's not like it's news, either. Web-based fraud (dummy websites fleecing customers) has been around for ages now. It just goes to prove the common sense rules of buying off the Internet - make sure that the company exists, that they can get what you're after, and that there's a real-world address or phone number to chase them with if the shit hits the fan. And never, ever, EVER buy stuff from companies in other countries unless you're prepared to lose that money.
So how dumb does that lawyer look now, after slagging off the judge and saying he's biased?! Maybe that wasn't quite the smartest move of your life, sonny...
Trouble is, America has a long history of shitting on common sense. Folks cutting themselves on knives and potato peelers and suing (for god's sake!)? Folks sueing tobacco companies (like the smokers only realised recently that it was bad for them)? Folks complaining about what their kids see on TV (if you're that worried, switch it off!)? All brought on by an out-of-control legal system of ambulance-chasers after their moment of glory (and their huge wallets), and screw anyone who gets in the way. And the juries who establish damages aren't any better - they're all after their 15 minutes of fame, so they set ridiculous penalties to ensure they get on the news.
In the UK, we look at the news and say, "It could only happen in America" whenever this sort of shit goes down. It's not racist - you entirely justify all that.
Nice idea!:-) Of course, there's the "Harrison Bergeron" version too (the film, not the short story). They've picked some fat-ass guy at random to be the President, and his answer to a bit of sabre-rattling and pointed diplomatic notes from China (IIRC) is to tell his staff to nuke the other guys. Getting put up against the wall in this case might be the lesser of two evils compared to trying to survive mutually assured destruction...
And how do you make sure that everyone's keeping in touch? I went on a walking holiday a few years ago, came back, and found the Soviet Union had had a revolution in the 2 weeks while I was away. If they'd drafted me then, I'd have been SOL! And there's so much going on in the world, you can only track so much. The best you can do is try to get as good a person as you can, and hope they'll be OK, and that's the purpose of voting! If you Americans all fall for the flashy media tricks, then you entirely deserve the unprincipled scum you get as leaders. I ask you - who in their right mind would change their vote based on TV ads? But you Americans do. Is it just me, or does this indicate a certain shallowness to a good section of the society?
Britain isn't perfect, I know that. We've got a slick media guy in at the moment. But everyone's found out pretty quickly that he's got no substance, so I'm betting he'll be out next time around.
You want a better approach for leadership? Hold "continuation votes" every 6 months. Get it wrong there (say, less than 40% vote for you, to give it some margin for error) and you're out and there's another election. No hanging around for 4 years that way!
I'm not sure why it's such a big deal that someone can find out that you sent an email. Can someone explain it to me? Doesn't sound like much of an invasion of privacy to me. A bigger deal is to prevent someone pretending to be you and getting access to your personal details, in which case we positively WANT IDs on email to protect our privacy!
On the keeping your email safe, everyone knows PGP is vulnerable to brute-force cracks by the government and anyone else - its main purpose now is to stop casual scanners/sniffers from being able to read your stuff easily. So if you're that bothered about the CIA reading your mail, there's 1K and 2K encryption available - use that and they'll never get you. They'll know you sent it, and who you sent it to, but that's all, and there's no way to get around that.
And I'm sorry Jon, but the prof got what he deserved. If I downloaded porn at work, I'd get reprimanded or fired, regardless of whether I was doing a stonkingly good job. Stuff allowed you by your employer is a PRIVILEGE, not some inalienable right! If you only use it for small stuff like eBay, then no worries. But if you go in for multi-megabyte downloads, porn, Napster and endless MP3s on your work machine, then expect to get roasted. And maybe the machine was at his house, but it's still his work's machine. Maybe it just goes to prove the adage, "he who sups with the Devil should use a long spoon" - if you want to mess with that sort of stuff, better be careful.:-) Just shows the prof was crap at computers and didn't know about clearing the cache; or worse yet, he kept them all in a convenient folder marked "Hot Babes" or something... The 11th Commandment - don't get caught!
Well, I spose half the cities and towns in the US are up shit creek then, since the early settlers weren't original enough to pick new names, and often re-used names of towns or cities in Britain or wherever else they came from (and you guys haven't got much more original since;-)
Boston, Cambridge, New York, New Jersey, Greenwich Village, etc, etc, etc...
You want a truly bizarre one? New South Wales, in Australia, is called that bcos it reminded Captain James Cook of the Welsh coastline, EXCEPT IN REVERSE (so the land becomes sea and vice versa)!!
For some stuff it's pretty trivial. If all you need to do is write a little bit of stuff to I/O ports in a particular order, then there's sod all to it. But that won't tell you much about the hardware.
The problem comes with stuff like WinModem cards. Here, as WinModem victims know all too well, the hardware is pretty dumb, and all the intelligence is in the driver. That driver's had a helluva lot of work put in on it (don't believe me - how long's it taking those guys to duplicate it then?) so releasing it as open-source would essentially release everything about the card, and provide other WinModem competitors with a ready-made template for their driver. OK, maybe they just make the source available but don't release it GPLed, and rely on copyright to stop other companies nicking it? Tough shit - once it's out then it's out! Have you guys not heard of Gnutella? Once it's in the wild, it doesn't matter about copyright or lawyers, it's gone!!! In a lot of high-tech places, the real leading-edge stuff isn't even patented, cos that would tell competitors how to go about doing it, so they could copy you. Maybe you'd be in the right, maybe you'd even win in a court case, but any good lawyer could spin out a case like that for years until it's broken you, so forget it.
Want another place where open-source will never, ever reach? Programmable chips (microcontrollers, programmable logic, etc). Nearly all manufacturers (Microchip are one major exception) keep the programming algorithms secret, protected by NDAs. So there can NEVER, EVER be a universal GPL'ed chip programmer, cos the very act of distributing the source code violates the NDAs by revealing how it's done.
I suggest the "I won't use it unless it's completely free" lobby smell the coffee. Free's nice, but it's not the only game in town. There isn't a computer newbie that I know of who'd want to do kernel recompiles just to add a new joystick or something, so I think Linux needs binary driver support, and fast, otherwise it can't be taken seriously as any sort of a desktop option. If you're seriously worried about system stability, only buy stuff with GPL'ed drivers. For the rest of the world, it's better to have driver support than not to have it, and bugs may happen but the manufacturer's testing should sort most of them, and if a product's known to be buggy (eg. RDRAM now!) then no-one buys it unless they're real suckers.
I'm curious how Jon Katz has carte blanche to write this drivel - maybe I'm not well enough up on/. history. We get to moderate down folks who spout crap in the threads. Anyone else fancy a thread-topic moderation system too?
Let's face it, Katz isn't adding any more to any of the discussions than the average petrified Portman merchant. He's just a troll with higher status. His opinions are not original, informative, amusing, helpful or useful in promoting discussion (except discussions starting "Isn't this a dumb thread?"). Unlike other guys who start threads based on interesting questions, news articles, whatever, to create a pool of interesting information, Katz's articles serve only to glorify Katz - it's self-indulgence, nothing more.
Anyway, I've had enough of this shite. I promised myself I wouldn't diss anything just bcos of who wrote it, but I've had enough. Filter time...
Depends on what subject you take. If you're just doing a degree to say "I've got a degree, so I'm obviously at a certain level of intelligence", as required to be a lawyer/accountant, etc., then your degree has no value. So long as you scrape through the exams, it doesn't matter if none of it sunk in and you spent all your time pissing up the wall.
But if you went to college/uni to study engineering/science, where you have to _learn_ stuff so that you can use it later on - if you got rid of them then you'd be in a world of hurt. You think you'd have your PCs without the skill of the designers? And d'you think chip and mobo designers "just happen"? They've spent years at uni doing courses in electronics to learn how to design this gear. Mind you, it's only the start - you can never stop learning - but it's a prerequisite to work in the industry. If you didn't have that, each company would have to train its employees from scratch, and if you're doing that then where do you stop? Do you have to start by teaching them to read?! Sci/tech degrees ensure that folks working in the industry have certain key skills.
The software community under the blissful illusion that anyone can do it without any training, and to a certain extent that's right. But this is only true for the 'easy' area of PC applications, user interfaces, etc. When you get into embedded systems where one mistake could mean someone dying, you'd better hope to god that the guys involved know what they're doing. An enthusiastic amateur is fine if all you're doing is a file system - if the shit hits the fan, you can always release a patch. But if it's a life-support system, the last think you want is J. Random Hacker working on it - if it goes wrong, PEOPLE DIE, and you can't release a patch for that!
So if anyone says that colleges could be done away with, I'd agree with them for a lot of courses like art, philosophy, literature, history, women's studies, sport, etc, etc. But when it comes to engineering, I'd say they've got their head up their arse.
The trouble is, you can have something like Lint go through and say 'that looks dodgy'. But you still can't prove that the code is doing what you want.
Our company has an in-house testing tool. We write long (LONG!) lists of test scenarios in Excel, then use the tool to check that the outputs of each function are what we expect. This has 2 flaws: (1) the tests may themselves be wrong, or (2) the design requirements for the function may be wrong. If the tests are wrong, either a bug can get through or a valid bit of code gets flagged up as being wrong. If the design is wrong (eg. the design asks for us to add 1 instead of subtract 1) then it'll be coded wrong too, and we'll never see it.
So the layer above this is to put all the functions of a module together, and then do some more higher-level tests on that. And then put all the modules together, and do some more tests on that. And you've got a pretty good chance that your code is right after all that, but you're still not sure.
As for automatically generating the tests - where from? Do you have an explicit, computer-parsable set of requirements for your project? Have you ever seen, or even heard of such a thing? Ever? I'm afraid it just doesn't exist. The design is done by humans, and the test scenarios are extracted from the design by humans. Humans are fallible. Shit happens. The best you can do is test as best you can. And if you're thinking about getting the test scenarios from the code - well, d'oh! if you're testing the code with tests extracted from the code, nothing's ever going to fail!:-)
We're writing safety-related and safety-critical software for car engine controllers. We're going on to other stuff like drive-by-wire. We can't afford errors, so there's oodles of testing. But shit does happen, so all we can do is say "well we tested it the best we could". Nothing is ever 100% safe, and 100% testing is provably impossible. So the problem is getting folks to make sure the designs are right, then that the code meets the designs. Open-source seems to fulfill that requirement pretty well. The problem is for older things like 'sendmail', where a design doesn't actually exist - newer projects like Apache would (I imagine) have proper design documentation.
Come one guys. I had an Amiga, loved the sucker. But it's old.
I'm a great fan of the old C64 too - you still can't quite emulate C64 stuff properly on a PC (or maybe you can given the kickass new processors, but anyway). And some of the games (Wizball!) were cool. But the graphics and sound which were so good back then are just dated and blocky now. Amiga's gone the same way. Starglider 2 was way cool at the time - a filled 3-D flightsim at that kind of refresh rate just didn't happen until then. But now it's just another 3-D game, big deal.
It was great at the time, and you can look back on it and say it was a fabulous idea. But without investment to keep it up-to-date it just didn't move, and the competition in the PC market put their processor development into warp drive. Meantime we got specialist graphics companies doing graphics cards for the PC, and the competition there pushed development as well.
I don't deny they were good in their time. But to insist that they're better than current machines is as daft as classic car enthusiasts saying 50's cars have better handling and performance than modern cars - every measurable standard says it ain't the case. The PET was a revolution in its time too, so should we now release a PET2000, with 500Meg of RAM, hard drive and Linux OS? It blatantly wouldn't be the same thing - it would only share the name. Amiga's the same - what differentiated it essentially was the hardware (the OS was nice, but it was just riding on the hardware, and it wasn't too stable). If the hardware's no different from a modern PC, all you've got is a PC running a different OS, and I don't see anyone claiming that a Linux PC needs a different name just cos it's not running Windoze.
The problem isn't getting these folks to buy computers - as you say, they can afford cable, and TVs, and cars. The problem is getting them to care about education, and education is what gets you into computing.
It's not a digital divide, it's an educational divide. And if you'd rather watch wrestling on cable, then that's your choice - just don't bitch to me that you can't afford a PC and the world's against you.
But the space shuttle was never designed to be a good, cheap or efficient way to get into space. It was designed as an exercise in throwing money at aerospace, essentially. Another guy at the same time came up with a proposal which would cost 100 million (from memory) per launch, using rockets similar to Ariane et al which he nicknamed the "big dumb booster". Hmm - guess which one the corrupt military bureocracy of the US went for?
The Pentagon is just a third-world dictatorship with better funding...
Huh? They're robots, following a program. If your Windows program comes up against one of Windows' many bugs, does it evolve round it? Has your PC evolved so that a 4-second press on the power button doesn't stop it? I could come up with any number of examples against this, but there's no point.
Maybe, conceptually, in several decades time we'll be good enough at nanotech and have sophisticated enough strategies to start making evolutionary nanobots. But it strikes me that trying to make plans for that now is like a society based on the horse-and-cart making rules for right-of-way on spaceships. It's all so far in the future that we've got no concept of how it'll affect us. Think about the Internet. You reckon there's any laws which cover it properly and fairly? Copyright, trademark and other laws were drafted in an era of physical objects. The whole area of information-based technology was maybe an interesting philosophical discussion, but there was no way anyone could make laws to cover it, cos there was no way of doing it then. And just like the Internet has thrown up all sorts of new ways of screwing ppl over, nanotech could well do the same, and we just can't think of all the ways it could be used now.
I'd recommend reading Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" for some thoughts on a society based on nanotech. It's one possible outcome - there's any number of other ways it could go.
3 tracks on 2 CDs?!?! I hope they were long tracks!
I don't see how software need be treated any differently to music or books. You buy a CD, it's yours. You buy a book, it's yours. If you find the book's got a page missing, or the CD won't play, you take it back and ask for another one, or get your money back.
(Incidentally, I'm not saying it has to be bug-free - hey, shit happens. But there's levels of shit happening, and some shit is just unacceptable. But MS's lousy coding habits and a lack of coordination generally aren't the theme of the thread, so I'll avoid creep.)
On the CD analogy, there was a shop in my town at uni that sold old demo CDs that had been round the radio stations. They'd sell for £2-4 for 15-20 or so tracks, and there's be a real mix of all sorts of stuff. Half or more would be crap (or not to my taste anyway), about a quarter to a third would be moderate, and there'd usually be a couple of really good ones. At that price I don't mind a few duff ones.
Now the MS analogy. MS's habit of tying stuff together means that you have to buy everything in one big lump, even if you only want some of it. Would you accept having to buy one CD at random from each shelf in the shop, plus a dozen CDs containing lift music, just so you could get the Pink Floyd CD you really wanted? Didn't think so. In my case, I actually prefer IE to Netscape (heretic, but what the hell), but Outlook is definitely in the "lift music" category - OK in short bursts, but soul-destroying over time. But if I want Windows on my machine, I have to get it preinstalled with Outlook too. I don't want it, but I'm forced to pay for it anyway with the license agreements, and even if I could find someone to sell Outlook to (if anyone actually liked it), they're all linked together so I can't.
On the subject of licensing being suited to companies, maybe companies do buy a lot of licenses. Companies are also the main buyers of new cars, too, but I've not seen a car license agreement yet, and they don't have a problem disposing of their old fleets of cars.
Bootlegging can only survive in an environment where the goods concerned are unreasonably expensive or difficult to get hold of. And too much software (esp. Microsoft) falls into the first category. Music's suffering the same problem. Software also has the extra problem that it may not be worth the money if it crashes frequently and is riddled with bugs (spare a thought for the poor early adopters of NT).
If MS software were reasonably priced - say £10 for a Win98 CD - then I'd be perfectly prepared to spend out on it, and so would many other ppl.
You're quite right though, we have developed a rampant disregard for copyright, IP, etc. We go by something more fundamental called "common sense", bcos we're currently years ahead of the lawmakers. If lawyers can say, "Oh, you don't own that copy of the software, you're just licensing it and we can take it back off you if we want" (which is what many license agreements amount to), then that violates common sense. Would you accept Penguin going into your house and taking all your paperbacks away, if you lent a book to a friend? And note that authors and publishing companies seem to have no problem making a living within the copyright laws. In fact, the UK publishing companies have set up a price-fixing cartel which should be investigated sometime soon, but the price isn't fixed _too_ high, so there's not too many complaints. CD prices are fixed higher, so there are complaints. And MS prices are fixed highest of all, and there's outright revolution!
I don't deny that ppl should make a living off their work, but there's a difference between 'making a living' and 'chiseling them for all the money we can get, cos we're a monopoly'. It's that kind of attitude that's got MS into their present situation (see news reports today).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you don't have anything to hide, but you still have files which can be deleted. What's wrong with allowing read-only access to the world, but only RW access to the right password? Seems a bit of a D'OH moment to me...
Grab.
No, this is definitely confusing the issue. The case is not about free-speech, it's about reverse-engineering and NDAs.
Xing (sp?) signed an NDA with the DVD folks to say that they would not release the CSS algorithm (a trade secret of the DVD folks). Xing screwed up, and made it available. Someone (Jon Johansen) used that screwup to reverse engineer CSS. Now Jon Johansen is within his rights to reverse-engineer - Xing made it possible to do this, and he did it. Since he now has access to the CSS algorithm without signing an NDA, and without doing any illegal activities, he can skywrite it and have it tattooed on his bum, and there's nothing the DVD folks can do about it, cos there's no laws against it in Norway.
Meantime 2600 and co are distributing DeCSS. They don't have to meet any NDA, they just have to follow Jon Johansen's copyright agreements (in this case the GPL). Unless the material doesn't meet import regulations by being obscene or whatever, they're OK. Trouble is, the DMCA makes it illegal to trade in this (IIRC), so they need to get that sorted. A perfectly reasonable temporary solution is offshore hosting - then they can't touch you. Long-term, other bad laws/precedents have been enacted b4, and have been repealed - the issue is to show that this portion of the DMCA is unconstitutional (as you Americans say).
The one place that is caught bang to rights is Xing. They screwed up their CSS implementation and consequently made the CSS algorithm easily available to anyone who cared to look. Xing can therefor have the ass sued off them by anyone, and all they can do is plead guilty and hope they don't get hit too bad.
And yet the amount that artists receive is negligible, whilst the record companies think a record's flopped if they've posted less than 10% profit!
It's disingenuous (or 'just plain wrong', to put it another way) to say that the record company pays for marketing, playlisting, etc. Certainly they pay initially. But then they charge that to the artist(s) concerned, so it doesn't actually cost them anything! The promotion costs are then indented against the artist's next record, so if the artist's next album doesn't make enough of a profit (and bear in mind that the artist is on a crap deal where they only get a few cents per CD sold), then the artist ends up owing the record company, in spite of the fact that the company may still have made a decent profit on the record! And that's why only the most extremely successful artists make enough to retire on - the rest get stuck in share-cropping hell, trying to cover their existing debts. This has remarkable parallels with the indenture system of the feudal society, and with how smugglers of illegal immigrants get their victims to 'pay off their travel'.
The concert tour was actually the main way for artists to make money - artists never used to make anything on recordings, so they played live, and the proceeds from that went directly to them instead of to the record company. Even the Beatles didn't start making real money on recordings until much later in their career, although no doubt it gives the surviving members a nice cash boost each year now. This is doubly true for session musicians, who may only be paid for a week's work recording an album, but get 6 months guaranteed work off a tour.
Artists are starting to get wise to these problems, and are getting more bolshy with their record companies. I'm sure this accounts for the rise in 'manufactured' groups of boy- and girl-bands (911, Spice Girls, Take That, etc, etc). These guys are just doing it bcos the record companies are paying them more than McDonalds would, not bcos they actually _want_ to be real musicians, and certainly not bcos they're at all talented.
As for CD sales - no doubt many groups don't make much in sales, just as many paperback books don't really go anywhere. The problem - cost. In the UK, £15 for a new CD release is about average. Now that's a fair amount of money, and I'm reluctant to spend that on a CD when I don't know if I'll like it - hence the appeal of being able to listen to extracts on Napster or suchlike, or having the CD available on the trial stands in the shop (I found one of my favourite CDs, by Porcupine Tree, just by sticking on the demo headphones in a music shop). It's almost worse when you know there's only one good song on the whole CD (eg. Mariah Carey's Music Box) - is it worth paying £15 for one song? If you can't afford to write off the cost of a CD, you will never experiment with new artists or genres, and consequently sales will suffer.
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> > Every encryption scheme can be broken given time.
>
> Which is why you don't bother encrypting.
'Given time' is the essence of encryption. The office crypto textbook says you should plan crypto so that given a Moore's Law increase in processing power for the most powerful machine currently available, for the next 10 years (say) your crypto won't be crackable in less than a certain time. Say you've designed for a year's worth of distributed.net processing to be needed to crack the crypto. That means that all the distributed.net machines are going to have to work non-stop for a year to crack A SINGLE SONG. End of game.
A better approach which I'd love to see is to incorporate a variable-quality system of encryption. If you download the music, by default you get a 22k mono recording, and you have to pay to get the key for it to play it at full quality, or maybe have a limit that it'll play full-quality first time, but after that only at radio quality until you get the key. Link the key to the hard drive so folks can't swap keys, and you're away. To allow HD upgrades, maybe charge $5 to move all your keys to the new HD - the program would check that all the keys are linked to the same old HD and any keys which didn't match the majority would be ditched, so you can't just pass keys around and expect them to be fooled by paying the $5 HD upgrade fee. Get this kind of system going, and you're away - it'd work just like feature-limited shareware software.
I know it's not 100% foolproof as it stands, but it's better than unencrypted Napster (which doesn't give any return to the artists) or the RIAA.
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Undermining the security of the state?! What, you mean those film-makers, playwrights and musicians? Hell, let's protect ourselves from them, we don't want ppl going around attacking each other with dangerous scripts... I'm sorry, but think 'sticks and stones'. If a society can't take ppl voicing their opinion, then it's not worth having. Think of the British Muslims declaring a fatwa against Rushdie, with their viewpoint of "We're entitled to our views, but we don't think you should be entitled to yours".
You seem to have forgotten that the ramp up in anti-Communist hysteria nearly caused nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russian president hadn't had the balls to see that it wasn't worth it, we'd all be toast. Headlines along the lines of "Russians lose their nerve", when in fact the Americans were being bloody stupid. Playing chicken is fine if you want to kill yourself, but playing chicken with the whole world is beyond any measure of insanity.
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Is this the same Plaid Cymru that went out and burned the houses of English folk who'd committed the heinous crime of buying a house in Wales? Great bunch of guys...
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Get real. Skinheads are folks with short (or shaven) hair. Neo-Nazis are folks who attack coloured people. Some Neo-Nazis are skinheads. Some skinheads are neo-Nazis. But not all skinheads are neo-Nazis, or vice versa. On a purely technical basis, Shaq and Magic Johnson would fit into the skinhead category!
To get back to the story - this is old news. The RIP bill has always been a problem, but since the government here has a huge majority, there was never any question that it would get passed. Every government comes up with crap laws sometimes - we just have to hope that the next lot will sort it out, or that the more ridiculous elements will be dropped, at least.
And I quote from the article: "Some opponents of the RIP bill are pointing out that the technology provided for in the bill is already out of date and fairly simple to circumvent." So hey - all we need to do is use PGP, and they're automatically screwed. ISPs will start setting up their configuration CDs so that they select encryption as standard, and that's that. Add in IPv6, and basically the British government's going to be SOL on spying. Ah well, sorry guys, ain't life a bitch...
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Recently there was some trouble in Britain, when it was found that Margaret Thatcher had asked the Canadian government to spy on opposition party members, in exchange for which the British secret services spied on Canadian targets.
I can appreciate scanning for threats such as child pornography (never mind the argument about whether it exists - that's another point), and targetting known criminals or likely suspects. But what is the NSA's policy on monitoring _political_ targets? If asked to bug Newt Gingrich or some other senior politician, would the NSA have the power to refuse? And if it did refuse, would it use another agency (Britain's MI5, for instance) to gather the same information, on a quid pro quo basis?
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It's always easy to take advantage of mugs. Anyone who's prepared to blow cash on this as a spur-of-the-moment purchase, they've obviously got so much money that it isn't an issue for them. So I'd not be too upset for them. ;-)
It's not like it's news, either. Web-based fraud (dummy websites fleecing customers) has been around for ages now. It just goes to prove the common sense rules of buying off the Internet - make sure that the company exists, that they can get what you're after, and that there's a real-world address or phone number to chase them with if the shit hits the fan. And never, ever, EVER buy stuff from companies in other countries unless you're prepared to lose that money.
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So how dumb does that lawyer look now, after slagging off the judge and saying he's biased?! Maybe that wasn't quite the smartest move of your life, sonny...
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Trouble is, America has a long history of shitting on common sense. Folks cutting themselves on knives and potato peelers and suing (for god's sake!)? Folks sueing tobacco companies (like the smokers only realised recently that it was bad for them)? Folks complaining about what their kids see on TV (if you're that worried, switch it off!)? All brought on by an out-of-control legal system of ambulance-chasers after their moment of glory (and their huge wallets), and screw anyone who gets in the way. And the juries who establish damages aren't any better - they're all after their 15 minutes of fame, so they set ridiculous penalties to ensure they get on the news.
In the UK, we look at the news and say, "It could only happen in America" whenever this sort of shit goes down. It's not racist - you entirely justify all that.
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Nice idea! :-) Of course, there's the "Harrison Bergeron" version too (the film, not the short story). They've picked some fat-ass guy at random to be the President, and his answer to a bit of sabre-rattling and pointed diplomatic notes from China (IIRC) is to tell his staff to nuke the other guys. Getting put up against the wall in this case might be the lesser of two evils compared to trying to survive mutually assured destruction...
And how do you make sure that everyone's keeping in touch? I went on a walking holiday a few years ago, came back, and found the Soviet Union had had a revolution in the 2 weeks while I was away. If they'd drafted me then, I'd have been SOL! And there's so much going on in the world, you can only track so much. The best you can do is try to get as good a person as you can, and hope they'll be OK, and that's the purpose of voting! If you Americans all fall for the flashy media tricks, then you entirely deserve the unprincipled scum you get as leaders. I ask you - who in their right mind would change their vote based on TV ads? But you Americans do. Is it just me, or does this indicate a certain shallowness to a good section of the society?
Britain isn't perfect, I know that. We've got a slick media guy in at the moment. But everyone's found out pretty quickly that he's got no substance, so I'm betting he'll be out next time around.
You want a better approach for leadership? Hold "continuation votes" every 6 months. Get it wrong there (say, less than 40% vote for you, to give it some margin for error) and you're out and there's another election. No hanging around for 4 years that way!
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I'm not sure why it's such a big deal that someone can find out that you sent an email. Can someone explain it to me? Doesn't sound like much of an invasion of privacy to me. A bigger deal is to prevent someone pretending to be you and getting access to your personal details, in which case we positively WANT IDs on email to protect our privacy!
:-) Just shows the prof was crap at computers and didn't know about clearing the cache; or worse yet, he kept them all in a convenient folder marked "Hot Babes" or something... The 11th Commandment - don't get caught!
On the keeping your email safe, everyone knows PGP is vulnerable to brute-force cracks by the government and anyone else - its main purpose now is to stop casual scanners/sniffers from being able to read your stuff easily. So if you're that bothered about the CIA reading your mail, there's 1K and 2K encryption available - use that and they'll never get you. They'll know you sent it, and who you sent it to, but that's all, and there's no way to get around that.
And I'm sorry Jon, but the prof got what he deserved. If I downloaded porn at work, I'd get reprimanded or fired, regardless of whether I was doing a stonkingly good job. Stuff allowed you by your employer is a PRIVILEGE, not some inalienable right! If you only use it for small stuff like eBay, then no worries. But if you go in for multi-megabyte downloads, porn, Napster and endless MP3s on your work machine, then expect to get roasted. And maybe the machine was at his house, but it's still his work's machine. Maybe it just goes to prove the adage, "he who sups with the Devil should use a long spoon" - if you want to mess with that sort of stuff, better be careful.
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Well, I spose half the cities and towns in the US are up shit creek then, since the early settlers weren't original enough to pick new names, and often re-used names of towns or cities in Britain or wherever else they came from (and you guys haven't got much more original since ;-)
Boston, Cambridge, New York, New Jersey, Greenwich Village, etc, etc, etc...
You want a truly bizarre one? New South Wales, in Australia, is called that bcos it reminded Captain James Cook of the Welsh coastline, EXCEPT IN REVERSE (so the land becomes sea and vice versa)!!
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For some stuff it's pretty trivial. If all you need to do is write a little bit of stuff to I/O ports in a particular order, then there's sod all to it. But that won't tell you much about the hardware.
The problem comes with stuff like WinModem cards. Here, as WinModem victims know all too well, the hardware is pretty dumb, and all the intelligence is in the driver. That driver's had a helluva lot of work put in on it (don't believe me - how long's it taking those guys to duplicate it then?) so releasing it as open-source would essentially release everything about the card, and provide other WinModem competitors with a ready-made template for their driver. OK, maybe they just make the source available but don't release it GPLed, and rely on copyright to stop other companies nicking it? Tough shit - once it's out then it's out! Have you guys not heard of Gnutella? Once it's in the wild, it doesn't matter about copyright or lawyers, it's gone!!! In a lot of high-tech places, the real leading-edge stuff isn't even patented, cos that would tell competitors how to go about doing it, so they could copy you. Maybe you'd be in the right, maybe you'd even win in a court case, but any good lawyer could spin out a case like that for years until it's broken you, so forget it.
Want another place where open-source will never, ever reach? Programmable chips (microcontrollers, programmable logic, etc). Nearly all manufacturers (Microchip are one major exception) keep the programming algorithms secret, protected by NDAs. So there can NEVER, EVER be a universal GPL'ed chip programmer, cos the very act of distributing the source code violates the NDAs by revealing how it's done.
I suggest the "I won't use it unless it's completely free" lobby smell the coffee. Free's nice, but it's not the only game in town. There isn't a computer newbie that I know of who'd want to do kernel recompiles just to add a new joystick or something, so I think Linux needs binary driver support, and fast, otherwise it can't be taken seriously as any sort of a desktop option. If you're seriously worried about system stability, only buy stuff with GPL'ed drivers. For the rest of the world, it's better to have driver support than not to have it, and bugs may happen but the manufacturer's testing should sort most of them, and if a product's known to be buggy (eg. RDRAM now!) then no-one buys it unless they're real suckers.
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I'm curious how Jon Katz has carte blanche to write this drivel - maybe I'm not well enough up on /. history. We get to moderate down folks who spout crap in the threads. Anyone else fancy a thread-topic moderation system too?
Let's face it, Katz isn't adding any more to any of the discussions than the average petrified Portman merchant. He's just a troll with higher status. His opinions are not original, informative, amusing, helpful or useful in promoting discussion (except discussions starting "Isn't this a dumb thread?"). Unlike other guys who start threads based on interesting questions, news articles, whatever, to create a pool of interesting information, Katz's articles serve only to glorify Katz - it's self-indulgence, nothing more.
Anyway, I've had enough of this shite. I promised myself I wouldn't diss anything just bcos of who wrote it, but I've had enough. Filter time...
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Depends on what subject you take. If you're just doing a degree to say "I've got a degree, so I'm obviously at a certain level of intelligence", as required to be a lawyer/accountant, etc., then your degree has no value. So long as you scrape through the exams, it doesn't matter if none of it sunk in and you spent all your time pissing up the wall.
But if you went to college/uni to study engineering/science, where you have to _learn_ stuff so that you can use it later on - if you got rid of them then you'd be in a world of hurt. You think you'd have your PCs without the skill of the designers? And d'you think chip and mobo designers "just happen"? They've spent years at uni doing courses in electronics to learn how to design this gear. Mind you, it's only the start - you can never stop learning - but it's a prerequisite to work in the industry. If you didn't have that, each company would have to train its employees from scratch, and if you're doing that then where do you stop? Do you have to start by teaching them to read?! Sci/tech degrees ensure that folks working in the industry have certain key skills.
The software community under the blissful illusion that anyone can do it without any training, and to a certain extent that's right. But this is only true for the 'easy' area of PC applications, user interfaces, etc. When you get into embedded systems where one mistake could mean someone dying, you'd better hope to god that the guys involved know what they're doing. An enthusiastic amateur is fine if all you're doing is a file system - if the shit hits the fan, you can always release a patch. But if it's a life-support system, the last think you want is J. Random Hacker working on it - if it goes wrong, PEOPLE DIE, and you can't release a patch for that!
So if anyone says that colleges could be done away with, I'd agree with them for a lot of courses like art, philosophy, literature, history, women's studies, sport, etc, etc. But when it comes to engineering, I'd say they've got their head up their arse.
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Find an automated test environment that _works_.
:-)
The trouble is, you can have something like Lint go through and say 'that looks dodgy'. But you still can't prove that the code is doing what you want.
Our company has an in-house testing tool. We write long (LONG!) lists of test scenarios in Excel, then use the tool to check that the outputs of each function are what we expect. This has 2 flaws: (1) the tests may themselves be wrong, or (2) the design requirements for the function may be wrong. If the tests are wrong, either a bug can get through or a valid bit of code gets flagged up as being wrong. If the design is wrong (eg. the design asks for us to add 1 instead of subtract 1) then it'll be coded wrong too, and we'll never see it.
So the layer above this is to put all the functions of a module together, and then do some more higher-level tests on that. And then put all the modules together, and do some more tests on that. And you've got a pretty good chance that your code is right after all that, but you're still not sure.
As for automatically generating the tests - where from? Do you have an explicit, computer-parsable set of requirements for your project? Have you ever seen, or even heard of such a thing? Ever? I'm afraid it just doesn't exist. The design is done by humans, and the test scenarios are extracted from the design by humans. Humans are fallible. Shit happens. The best you can do is test as best you can. And if you're thinking about getting the test scenarios from the code - well, d'oh! if you're testing the code with tests extracted from the code, nothing's ever going to fail!
We're writing safety-related and safety-critical software for car engine controllers. We're going on to other stuff like drive-by-wire. We can't afford errors, so there's oodles of testing. But shit does happen, so all we can do is say "well we tested it the best we could". Nothing is ever 100% safe, and 100% testing is provably impossible. So the problem is getting folks to make sure the designs are right, then that the code meets the designs. Open-source seems to fulfill that requirement pretty well. The problem is for older things like 'sendmail', where a design doesn't actually exist - newer projects like Apache would (I imagine) have proper design documentation.
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Come one guys. I had an Amiga, loved the sucker. But it's old.
I'm a great fan of the old C64 too - you still can't quite emulate C64 stuff properly on a PC (or maybe you can given the kickass new processors, but anyway). And some of the games (Wizball!) were cool. But the graphics and sound which were so good back then are just dated and blocky now. Amiga's gone the same way. Starglider 2 was way cool at the time - a filled 3-D flightsim at that kind of refresh rate just didn't happen until then. But now it's just another 3-D game, big deal.
It was great at the time, and you can look back on it and say it was a fabulous idea. But without investment to keep it up-to-date it just didn't move, and the competition in the PC market put their processor development into warp drive. Meantime we got specialist graphics companies doing graphics cards for the PC, and the competition there pushed development as well.
I don't deny they were good in their time. But to insist that they're better than current machines is as daft as classic car enthusiasts saying 50's cars have better handling and performance than modern cars - every measurable standard says it ain't the case. The PET was a revolution in its time too, so should we now release a PET2000, with 500Meg of RAM, hard drive and Linux OS? It blatantly wouldn't be the same thing - it would only share the name. Amiga's the same - what differentiated it essentially was the hardware (the OS was nice, but it was just riding on the hardware, and it wasn't too stable). If the hardware's no different from a modern PC, all you've got is a PC running a different OS, and I don't see anyone claiming that a Linux PC needs a different name just cos it's not running Windoze.
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The problem isn't getting these folks to buy computers - as you say, they can afford cable, and TVs, and cars. The problem is getting them to care about education, and education is what gets you into computing.
It's not a digital divide, it's an educational divide. And if you'd rather watch wrestling on cable, then that's your choice - just don't bitch to me that you can't afford a PC and the world's against you.
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But the space shuttle was never designed to be a good, cheap or efficient way to get into space. It was designed as an exercise in throwing money at aerospace, essentially. Another guy at the same time came up with a proposal which would cost 100 million (from memory) per launch, using rockets similar to Ariane et al which he nicknamed the "big dumb booster". Hmm - guess which one the corrupt military bureocracy of the US went for?
The Pentagon is just a third-world dictatorship with better funding...
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Huh? They're robots, following a program. If your Windows program comes up against one of Windows' many bugs, does it evolve round it? Has your PC evolved so that a 4-second press on the power button doesn't stop it? I could come up with any number of examples against this, but there's no point.
Maybe, conceptually, in several decades time we'll be good enough at nanotech and have sophisticated enough strategies to start making evolutionary nanobots. But it strikes me that trying to make plans for that now is like a society based on the horse-and-cart making rules for right-of-way on spaceships. It's all so far in the future that we've got no concept of how it'll affect us. Think about the Internet. You reckon there's any laws which cover it properly and fairly? Copyright, trademark and other laws were drafted in an era of physical objects. The whole area of information-based technology was maybe an interesting philosophical discussion, but there was no way anyone could make laws to cover it, cos there was no way of doing it then. And just like the Internet has thrown up all sorts of new ways of screwing ppl over, nanotech could well do the same, and we just can't think of all the ways it could be used now.
I'd recommend reading Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" for some thoughts on a society based on nanotech. It's one possible outcome - there's any number of other ways it could go.
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3 tracks on 2 CDs?!?! I hope they were long tracks!
I don't see how software need be treated any differently to music or books. You buy a CD, it's yours. You buy a book, it's yours. If you find the book's got a page missing, or the CD won't play, you take it back and ask for another one, or get your money back.
(Incidentally, I'm not saying it has to be bug-free - hey, shit happens. But there's levels of shit happening, and some shit is just unacceptable. But MS's lousy coding habits and a lack of coordination generally aren't the theme of the thread, so I'll avoid creep.)
On the CD analogy, there was a shop in my town at uni that sold old demo CDs that had been round the radio stations. They'd sell for £2-4 for 15-20 or so tracks, and there's be a real mix of all sorts of stuff. Half or more would be crap (or not to my taste anyway), about a quarter to a third would be moderate, and there'd usually be a couple of really good ones. At that price I don't mind a few duff ones.
Now the MS analogy. MS's habit of tying stuff together means that you have to buy everything in one big lump, even if you only want some of it. Would you accept having to buy one CD at random from each shelf in the shop, plus a dozen CDs containing lift music, just so you could get the Pink Floyd CD you really wanted? Didn't think so. In my case, I actually prefer IE to Netscape (heretic, but what the hell), but Outlook is definitely in the "lift music" category - OK in short bursts, but soul-destroying over time. But if I want Windows on my machine, I have to get it preinstalled with Outlook too. I don't want it, but I'm forced to pay for it anyway with the license agreements, and even if I could find someone to sell Outlook to (if anyone actually liked it), they're all linked together so I can't.
On the subject of licensing being suited to companies, maybe companies do buy a lot of licenses. Companies are also the main buyers of new cars, too, but I've not seen a car license agreement yet, and they don't have a problem disposing of their old fleets of cars.
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Sorry Cally, I must be behind the times.
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Bootlegging can only survive in an environment where the goods concerned are unreasonably expensive or difficult to get hold of. And too much software (esp. Microsoft) falls into the first category. Music's suffering the same problem. Software also has the extra problem that it may not be worth the money if it crashes frequently and is riddled with bugs (spare a thought for the poor early adopters of NT).
If MS software were reasonably priced - say £10 for a Win98 CD - then I'd be perfectly prepared to spend out on it, and so would many other ppl.
You're quite right though, we have developed a rampant disregard for copyright, IP, etc. We go by something more fundamental called "common sense", bcos we're currently years ahead of the lawmakers. If lawyers can say, "Oh, you don't own that copy of the software, you're just licensing it and we can take it back off you if we want" (which is what many license agreements amount to), then that violates common sense. Would you accept Penguin going into your house and taking all your paperbacks away, if you lent a book to a friend? And note that authors and publishing companies seem to have no problem making a living within the copyright laws. In fact, the UK publishing companies have set up a price-fixing cartel which should be investigated sometime soon, but the price isn't fixed _too_ high, so there's not too many complaints. CD prices are fixed higher, so there are complaints. And MS prices are fixed highest of all, and there's outright revolution!
I don't deny that ppl should make a living off their work, but there's a difference between 'making a living' and 'chiseling them for all the money we can get, cos we're a monopoly'. It's that kind of attitude that's got MS into their present situation (see news reports today).
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