"Digital Manners" or "Digital Domination"? Who wants Steve Ballmer or other rich and powerful people to be able to turn off their cell phone, camera, automobile, headlights and anything else with a Genuine Advantage embedded in it? On call doctors and industry people don't want to miss calls because it might have been rude to save someone's life or property. Imagine ambulances getting stuck in traffic because all the polite cars respect the mayor's motorcade. Government officials and cowards want the kill switches for airplanes, so there is market for it that may soon have the force of law. Please, God, give me better government than that. Only the US government would force everyone to pay a patent tribute to a private company when they require oppressive devices to be installed in all forms of digital equipment, transportation and communications.
The ninth circuit is about to lose a defender of free speech because he had the savvy to run a web site but not enough to know how it really works. His collection of "porn" are things that other people sent him, the kind of crap that clogs email systems everywhere. It is impossible to have an email address and not have it sent to you. Someone you know will send it along. His mistake was putting it where it could be seen by the same kinds of fanatics that are pushing the "war on porn" in the first place. Ignore the fact that they routinely get busted like Jimmy Swaggart did. Kozinski thought people would not find it because there was no link to the directory... ugh! He's exactly the kind of level headed person the courts need to rule fairly on these kinds of cases.
You don't realize how bad it is in a country like that until you live in a free society like ours. People there live in fear of the secret police -- fear that something they say may get them taken away in the middle of the night. I have seen people hauled off in their pajamas. I've seen what a system of government can do when it is not restrained by law.
Those were fine sentiments when he was appointed by Ronald Reagan, but it's bad news under a regime that wants to be above the law. There you will find your animals, those who want to live by tooth and claw.
No one likes corruption and everyone is fed up with Microsoft. Kroes has done a fine job of expressing some of the world's contempt, but anywhere there's technical competence people are angry about the ISO hijack. South African, Brazilian and Indonesian citizens have all piped up. World wide corruption has produced world wide derision which will be followed by rejection.
Do you really think $2 billion will compensate the entire EU for 20 years worth of monopoly rents by Microsoft? 2 years? Microsoft's billions in profit came from hundreds of billions of revenue much of it squandered on advertisements and corruption. People who would otherwise be employed in the industry are not going to get their career paths back. A free market will look very different.
The Commission must do its part. It must not rely on one vendor, it must not accept closed standards, and it must refuse to become locked into a particular technology - jeopardizing maintenance of full control over the information in its possession. When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first. These democratic principles are important. And an argument is particularly compelling when it is supported both by democratic principles and by sound economics. I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.
It would have been nice to see a renunciation of software patents and the bogus "intellectual property" phrase too, but this is very close to that. After laying out the case for secret file formats, she demolishes it. The text is available in html, pdf and, ironically, DOC but I wonder if anyone will bother to download it in that format.
You already see it's start with metered internet. Once they have that, they can offer you "free" sites. Everyone loves free, aren't they nice? Then they hike the price of visiting other sites to something stupid like $5/GB so that it's cheaper to buy physical media and presto - no more internet. They are already blaming "pirates", kiddie porn and terrorists. That's essentially a smear for their competition and anyone who disagrees with them.
If they get their way, things will really get ugly. All rights fall after free press does.
It's time the free software world merged PIM with social networking. The goal of Personal Information Managers is social network tracking and free software should be able to replace things like Facebook. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites really get their start because people in the non free software world don't have adequate PIM tools. The extras Facebook and MySpace have provided could easily be provided by free webservers and interface modules. Everyone would appreciate the granularity, control, security and privacy free software would grant them for their information.
The usual suspects are standing in the way. The M$ desktop monopoly leaves most people with an inadequate network stack and package management. ISPs block ports and do other stupid things to community sharing software. The US government is so without a clue that it's more a problem than a help. These things will be overcome.
Implying that we're all getting shipped off to the Gulag for using Azureus: Sensationalist
Ask someone in China behind the Golden Shield. If we build the same mechanisms and have similar laws, we will see the same abuse. Others have made the case very well without knowledge of internet press issues. You are not looking at the usual opinions of left wing radicals, you are looking at the whole spectrum of thoughtful society that's shocked and outraged. From WSJ reporters to Naval Academy graduates and Admirals. Fundamental rights and laws are being raped. The nubjobs doing it will cost us all dearly.
Deliberately confusing copyright with freedom of speech and trying to make a point that it should be eliminated because you don't like it, when the problem is really in the enforcement: Disingenuous.
The only confusion here is yours. Tell me how Virgin cutting me off is not a violation of free speech. What happens if every ISP honors RIAA blacklists? As more and more business is conducted on line, getting kicked offline will be more and more like stealing everything they have and throwing them onto the street.
I'll grant you that the problem is enforcement. Society should not waste it's time and money on copyright enforcement and that enforcement should never violate natural rights. Society should not trade it's freedom for entertainment. Free press is more important than all the games, movies and music owned by big publishers and other unfriendly assholes who think they are owed your home for sharing a few dozen songs.
the vast majority of it [P2P] revolves around copyright infringement
Irrelevant bullshit.
Someone who's writing looks exactly like the industry talking points laboriously repeated here should not be talking about sockpuppets.
Don't confuse copyright violation with the power record companies have just granted themselves and will abuse. It is as if they have put a kill switch on every press. You don't have to like their crappy music to get the ax, you just have to piss them off. They can make up the evidence as needed.
Now, I'll ask you to do something useful and justify the practice. What common good does copyright serve in an age of costless and limitless self publication? Is that more important than a free press?
but you must understand that the attack on P2P is really an attack on free press and has the same purpose as the other, more serious violations. The point is to shut down political opposition, which in turn threaten established economic interests. All weapons are being used to identify, intimidate, harass, silence and eliminate opposition. Cutting a person's net access is the modern equivalent of exile. It will happen to those identified by wiretaps. Those that persist face the threat of search, arrest and torture. If we allow those in power to consolidate these tools, we will not be able to remove them.
How obvious can an anti-trust and privacy case be? You just know that the internet will become an RIAA only music store for those 6.5 million people.
People with wealth and power are doing this because they think they can and they must. The political opinions expressed outside of broadcast media will eliminated along with economic threats to the music industry. People who believe in justice and the rule of law are an economic threat too, so this is all the same animal and that's why media consolidation and broadcast itself suck. Society must prevent this and may be able to because so many stand to win as a few lose.
That's what they did to Dell the first time Dell offered GNU/Linux back around 2000. They threatened their OEM pricing and other sabotage. The slap down and Dell's cave in response is part of the reason HP pulled ahead of them for a while.
It won't work today because Vista is a flop. Microsoft can threaten all they want but they don't have much a carrot to match their stick. Acer is not the first and they won't be the last in this rebellion.
the vast majority of people have no way to verify that their software is secure, even if it's open source. And even the people who do have the ability aren't going to. Are you really going to read through every line of code in the Linux kernel looking for backdoors?
Freedom means that you can do all of that and teams of people do for both cooperative and competitive reasons. All of the usual guards for non free software apply. People are watching their computers and will report suspicious communication. Then come all of the free software checks. The code gets checked upstream by the team that creates it and then downstream by many distributions that use it before finally being checked by the much larger number of users. The free software community is able to verify code from creation to desktop use and it's a fairly competitive place. For every kind of check you have in the non free world, you have more and better in the free world as well as greater competition and willingness to report wrongdoing. This makes it unlikely you will be caught by malicious code.
No one is going for the same old shit anymore. Vista IS a maintained XP. All they did was gloss the GUI and gum up the core with constant indexing and DRM madness. Every version of Windows has been like that but the market has wriggled free. Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs when GNU/Linux does the same or better for free? As hardware makers go, so customers will follow. Ballmer declared developers as all important, but only as "pawns and one night stands". The same reasoning applies to hardware makers, customers, and everyone else. The whole OOXML attack at ISO proves that nothing has changed at Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows users are already hosed.
ISPs are cooperating with publishers to kill the internet.
"Digital Manners" or "Digital Domination"? Who wants Steve Ballmer or other rich and powerful people to be able to turn off their cell phone, camera, automobile, headlights and anything else with a Genuine Advantage embedded in it? On call doctors and industry people don't want to miss calls because it might have been rude to save someone's life or property. Imagine ambulances getting stuck in traffic because all the polite cars respect the mayor's motorcade. Government officials and cowards want the kill switches for airplanes, so there is market for it that may soon have the force of law. Please, God, give me better government than that. Only the US government would force everyone to pay a patent tribute to a private company when they require oppressive devices to be installed in all forms of digital equipment, transportation and communications.
Physical access will get them what if whole disk encryption was used? Hasn't that been a feature of Bastile Linux for five years?
You don't know enough Republicans.
The ninth circuit is about to lose a defender of free speech because he had the savvy to run a web site but not enough to know how it really works. His collection of "porn" are things that other people sent him, the kind of crap that clogs email systems everywhere. It is impossible to have an email address and not have it sent to you. Someone you know will send it along. His mistake was putting it where it could be seen by the same kinds of fanatics that are pushing the "war on porn" in the first place. Ignore the fact that they routinely get busted like Jimmy Swaggart did. Kozinski thought people would not find it because there was no link to the directory ... ugh! He's exactly the kind of level headed person the courts need to rule fairly on these kinds of cases.
Like the fine article quotes him saying:
Those were fine sentiments when he was appointed by Ronald Reagan, but it's bad news under a regime that wants to be above the law. There you will find your animals, those who want to live by tooth and claw.
IP is a bogus phrase and you are too bitter about the demise of your favorite company and the things it stands for.
Ask the people who worked on DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, OS/2, Netscape, BeOS and so on about careers and keeping up with the latest technologies.
Advertising annoys the people targeted and has done Microsoft less good than product would. I consider that a waste.
No one likes corruption and everyone is fed up with Microsoft. Kroes has done a fine job of expressing some of the world's contempt, but anywhere there's technical competence people are angry about the ISO hijack. South African, Brazilian and Indonesian citizens have all piped up. World wide corruption has produced world wide derision which will be followed by rejection.
Do you really think $2 billion will compensate the entire EU for 20 years worth of monopoly rents by Microsoft? 2 years? Microsoft's billions in profit came from hundreds of billions of revenue much of it squandered on advertisements and corruption. People who would otherwise be employed in the industry are not going to get their career paths back. A free market will look very different.
It would have been nice to see a renunciation of software patents and the bogus "intellectual property" phrase too, but this is very close to that. After laying out the case for secret file formats, she demolishes it. The text is available in html, pdf and, ironically, DOC but I wonder if anyone will bother to download it in that format.
You already see it's start with metered internet. Once they have that, they can offer you "free" sites. Everyone loves free, aren't they nice? Then they hike the price of visiting other sites to something stupid like $5/GB so that it's cheaper to buy physical media and presto - no more internet. They are already blaming "pirates", kiddie porn and terrorists. That's essentially a smear for their competition and anyone who disagrees with them.
If they get their way, things will really get ugly. All rights fall after free press does.
AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo have already blocked email based on political content. We can be sure that ISPs will abuse "porn lists" too.
The right thing to do about kiddie porn is to catch the people who make it.
The right thing to do to censors is to show them out of office.
It's about preserving an obsolete business model.
Let's see:
If all of these things come about, the internet will be like cable TV and there will be no free press.
There is a lot of activity already. The easiest way for those to go forward will be for them to leverage already existing PIM applications and data.
It's time the free software world merged PIM with social networking. The goal of Personal Information Managers is social network tracking and free software should be able to replace things like Facebook. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites really get their start because people in the non free software world don't have adequate PIM tools. The extras Facebook and MySpace have provided could easily be provided by free webservers and interface modules. Everyone would appreciate the granularity, control, security and privacy free software would grant them for their information.
The usual suspects are standing in the way. The M$ desktop monopoly leaves most people with an inadequate network stack and package management. ISPs block ports and do other stupid things to community sharing software. The US government is so without a clue that it's more a problem than a help. These things will be overcome.
Ask someone in China behind the Golden Shield. If we build the same mechanisms and have similar laws, we will see the same abuse. Others have made the case very well without knowledge of internet press issues. You are not looking at the usual opinions of left wing radicals, you are looking at the whole spectrum of thoughtful society that's shocked and outraged. From WSJ reporters to Naval Academy graduates and Admirals. Fundamental rights and laws are being raped. The nubjobs doing it will cost us all dearly.
The only confusion here is yours. Tell me how Virgin cutting me off is not a violation of free speech. What happens if every ISP honors RIAA blacklists? As more and more business is conducted on line, getting kicked offline will be more and more like stealing everything they have and throwing them onto the street.
I'll grant you that the problem is enforcement. Society should not waste it's time and money on copyright enforcement and that enforcement should never violate natural rights. Society should not trade it's freedom for entertainment. Free press is more important than all the games, movies and music owned by big publishers and other unfriendly assholes who think they are owed your home for sharing a few dozen songs.
Irrelevant bullshit.
Someone who's writing looks exactly like the industry talking points laboriously repeated here should not be talking about sockpuppets.
These are the reasons corporate assholes fear a free press. They want to be above the law in every way and they don't want you to have a way to complain or do anything about it.
Don't confuse copyright violation with the power record companies have just granted themselves and will abuse. It is as if they have put a kill switch on every press. You don't have to like their crappy music to get the ax, you just have to piss them off. They can make up the evidence as needed.
Now, I'll ask you to do something useful and justify the practice. What common good does copyright serve in an age of costless and limitless self publication? Is that more important than a free press?
but you must understand that the attack on P2P is really an attack on free press and has the same purpose as the other, more serious violations. The point is to shut down political opposition, which in turn threaten established economic interests. All weapons are being used to identify, intimidate, harass, silence and eliminate opposition. Cutting a person's net access is the modern equivalent of exile. It will happen to those identified by wiretaps. Those that persist face the threat of search, arrest and torture. If we allow those in power to consolidate these tools, we will not be able to remove them.
How obvious can an anti-trust and privacy case be? You just know that the internet will become an RIAA only music store for those 6.5 million people.
People with wealth and power are doing this because they think they can and they must. The political opinions expressed outside of broadcast media will eliminated along with economic threats to the music industry. People who believe in justice and the rule of law are an economic threat too, so this is all the same animal and that's why media consolidation and broadcast itself suck. Society must prevent this and may be able to because so many stand to win as a few lose.
That's what they did to Dell the first time Dell offered GNU/Linux back around 2000. They threatened their OEM pricing and other sabotage. The slap down and Dell's cave in response is part of the reason HP pulled ahead of them for a while.
It won't work today because Vista is a flop. Microsoft can threaten all they want but they don't have much a carrot to match their stick. Acer is not the first and they won't be the last in this rebellion.
Freedom means that you can do all of that and teams of people do for both cooperative and competitive reasons. All of the usual guards for non free software apply. People are watching their computers and will report suspicious communication. Then come all of the free software checks. The code gets checked upstream by the team that creates it and then downstream by many distributions that use it before finally being checked by the much larger number of users. The free software community is able to verify code from creation to desktop use and it's a fairly competitive place. For every kind of check you have in the non free world, you have more and better in the free world as well as greater competition and willingness to report wrongdoing. This makes it unlikely you will be caught by malicious code.
I'm not Twitter but you probably believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Vista and SP1 too.
No one is going for the same old shit anymore. Vista IS a maintained XP. All they did was gloss the GUI and gum up the core with constant indexing and DRM madness. Every version of Windows has been like that but the market has wriggled free. Who's going back to paying M$ for SDKs when GNU/Linux does the same or better for free? As hardware makers go, so customers will follow. Ballmer declared developers as all important, but only as "pawns and one night stands". The same reasoning applies to hardware makers, customers, and everyone else. The whole OOXML attack at ISO proves that nothing has changed at Microsoft.