People will do what they want. Technology won't stop them. Won't help in stopping them. (...) Kids will skip school, nothing you can do to stop them. They skip school if you have RFID and Cameras everywhere. All that money wasted because people don't understand the problem, and think Technology is a panacea to every known social problem we have.
I do agree that the problem is that people don't understand the problem (if you excuse the redundancy), but that doesn't mean technology can help stop such behavior - just not how it is applied by such people.
My claim is that technology can and does solve (or at least, ameliorates) social problems, if correctly used.
Sociological problems are not "social" problems. They are people's socialization issues.
I'm sorry, but no. Socialization problems are socialization problems. Sociological problems are problems pertaining to the study itself. Using the word as an "improved" version of socialization is cargo cultism.
I understand where you're coming from, but I've always found that phrase to be problematic.
Clearly technology can have a social impact, so why couldn't it be used to fix social problems? It must not be because it's powerless, but because we fail to understand its effects clearly enough to apply it effectively.
(By the way, it's social problems. Sociological problems would be those problems related to the methodology of social research, not those related to the behaviors themselves.)
I value something that doesn't require a license, whether you're running a free "e-reader" on Linux, there's probably the only thing that won't have much in the way of tangible strings but even Linux has dropped the 386 processor from support.
Just like sharing music? Or sharing copyrighted material that the MPAA considers theirs if you somehow copy it to another format? Ever here of thePirateBay? Just ask Kim DotCom how it feels to host material in an electronic form. You think the Supreme Court has your best interests at heart? All it takes is the right justices or the right set of laws and your rights are gone here in the US and it's getting worse every year. The Media distributors and publishers are a huge lobby in this country pushing what is and isn't fair copyright and it will get to the point that they'll push for single use e-books that you can't own, share or read more than once unless you're willing to keep paying for it.
Breaking DRM != sharing content. It's a completely different kettle of fish. In particular, it happens only inside your machine, instead of being broadcast to the whole world.
As for the Supreme Court, as a I said, I'm not under their jurisdiction. But they did vote for the student selling textbooks, in detriment of the copyright holders.
How long do you think it will take for e-books to get the same treatment as a movie or a piece of music.. "It was distributed electronically." Therefore some intermediary who owns the rights will go after somebody for downloading an e-book they didn't pay for that "wasn't free." Unless Authors are willing to give their stuff away royalty free, just like some musicians are doing or selling it and saying it's "yours" then you can say it's yours but the lines are getting blurry.
As I said, I don't care. I wipe my ass to their claims that I don't own it.
Again on an operating system that's not tracking you? Linux perhaps? Good, that's an alternative perhaps but again, I consider that transient, more transient than good old fashioned bound (as in book binding). Call me old fashioned but that way if I lose it, it's because of something that I did or perhaps someone overtly did or by accident, not because some company or someone with less than stellar motives took it from me using a license model, yes "free" books aside but 9 times out of 10 you're reading those probably on an O/S that will track your habits and report them back to somebody. It's not fiction, it's a fact now unfortunately. Reading that on an iPad? Guess again.. http://gizmodo.com/5951173/apple-is-tracking-you-again-in-ios-6-and-how-to-turn-it-off
Calling ebooks bad because some particular readers are bad is like calling paper books bad because some publishers use rubbish paper.
I specifically mentioned readers with no networking, so mentioning the iPad is specious at best.
Call me old fashioned, but anything electronic is transient. Your jpegs, your images. Yeah you can back them up certainly but unless you keep upgrading or shifting with the digital times, it'll become so much like the Betamax or MFM or RLL hard drives.
The physical storage is transient; the content isn't. Conflating the two is misleading.
Yes, you need to upgrade, but you're on Slashdot, so clearly you use computers, so you need to upgrade them anyway.
Maybe yes, maybe no but I don't want anybody to know what I read or why I read it. It's none of their fucking business. Again, I don't want to have to worry about battery life sometimes or form factor or bookmarking something electronically or covering
It's easier to move a book from one shelf to another or to move it from one residence to another. You can pass them along without encumbrances like licenses or TOS or you can loan them to a friend and not have it tracked.
Easier to lose it too, or to get it destroyed. And harder to loan it to more than one friend at once, or read it yourself while someone else has it.
You may prefer paper books, but it's a subjective choice dependent on how much you value some things vs others, not clearly better either way.
Good for you, you'll be mindlessly protecting your interests against all that nasty DRM and protections that publishers and distributors will be thinking up. I have better things to do with my time, like read.
So, physical books just appear in your shelf, right? No time required to go to a shop, or pick them up? Well, personally I don't have such magical abilities, so getting a physical book takes me orders of magnitude more than un-DRMing them. Or would, if I bought DRM-ladden books, which I don't.
Remember in the US at least the DMCA allows them to protect their data with whatever means necessary and if you agree to that, then you're bound to it. Do you read all those license agreements? usually there's a clause "You agree to allow us to make changes to this agreement..." Which is usually a one-sided affair, regardless of mechanism, paper books don't have those strings attached leaving your nice little words aren't really worth the paper they're published on.
Yeah, I print those agreements and wipe my ass with them. Who the hell cares?
Not that I live in the US, anyway, but even there, when was the last time someone was convicted for breaking the DRM of their own books? I'm guessing "never".
Sometimes paper, the lowest common denominator for publishing, is the best format especially if you want to review it at your leisure without having to download an upgrade, remember to charge your e-reader or not get inundated with ads or tracked on what you're reading or have in your library. I'm not saying that open source e-readers are bad, I'm just saying the tablet your using (iPad, Android, Kindle et al.) has tracking on it, so that not necessarily your reading may be tracked but your reading list might be.
Yes, sometimes paper is the best option. I certainly don't disagree with that, nor did I ever, so I'm not sure why you're saying that.
As for ads and tracking, it takes five minutes to find a reader that has no ads or networking (kinda hard to track you with it).
If I want to read my copy of the "The Anarchist Cookbook" I don't certainly want the government knowing that Amazon or Google let them know I was reading it on my e-reader or that it's stored on my tablet (even with name obfuscation) That's one of the liberating things about a book, it's yours, nobody knows if and when at all if your reading it and you can hold it that is until some fascist decide to take it away from you.
Yeah, I agree that paper books are better if one wants to read subversive literature, especially if you live in a police state. Thankfully, you don't lose that ability even if you read most things on ebook readers.
Yes there are 'non drm' source but you're ignoring that Amazon and Apple will likely fall out as the kings in that market.
So? Apple was the first big company to kill DRM for music.
Oh and on your retarded USB example, it's no good without software, a reader. Yeah I can keep it, much like a dusty book on the shelf in the hope that someday my reader will be able to use it. So I plug it in 10 years later but that open source project has long since closed its doors and that tablet you were using went out with that last batch of kitty litter when old Felix died, so now you have to get some compatible e-reader that knows what to do with
Both PDF and EPUB (which is really just packaged HTML with a couple of domain specific changes) are open, standard formats that will be with us for much, much longer than ten years. And an open source project doesn't stop working just because it hasn't been developed in while. Hell, I was just running a twenty year old software on my laptop yesterday.
Besides, anyone doing backups should know you got to keep converting the formats, not just mindlessly copy bits around.
if it has a license or proprietary DRM, or is somehow wrapped that you can't directly read it) so now you find one but it tells you that you can't read it anymore because your "license" has expired.
It's your own fault for not breaking that DRM when you could have. My ebooks certainly don't go DRMed to my archive.
As the doctor in the joke said, "then don't do that". First, buying DRMed content is unethical - you're contributing to the problem. Second, if you happen to run across some PDF with DRM, you can probably take it out and shoot it using a Calibre plugin.
You have to run your e-book in some piece of software and unless you're willing to write your own e-reader you can assume that it's disposable content.
There are many Free Software PDF and ebook readers which have no DRM capabilities. I use Zathura, for example.
But anything you can do with software you can do to your digital content, even something as mundane as deleting it.
Again, that shows a remarkable lack of understanding of computer security, particularly the notion of privileges. My browser can read/etc/hosts, but can't delete it, even though "software" as a whole can. That's because I don't give it permissions to do so. Similarly, you can also not give your PDF and ebook readers permission to delete the file.
Besides, even if that wasn't true, it's anything you can do *with software*. But why exactly are you limited to that? Try this: copy the file to an USB drive, unplug it, and then run the PDF reader. Hard to delete that, innit?
Your average CCTV camera has a lower resolution than a 30 year old camcorder, and while there are attempts to bring the resolution up currently there is neither the bandwidth, storage, or processing power to capture/process all of that data cheaply enough to be widely distributed.
Sure there is, if instead of trying to stream high-def video to the mothership, the feed is processed on the spot and only the digested information (e.g., iris hashes) is sent.
Not everyone lives in some uncivilized shithole. The cops here got my brother's $25 cellphone back after it was stolen. And they didn't need a full SWAT team with heavy gear to take it from the kid who stole it, either.
As the sibling post said, they don't. But unlike cash, Bitcoin are extremely divisible (you can send 0.00000001 BTC to someone), so the same practical problems (not having enough coins and bills to pay for things) don't really apply.
There are economic consequences of having a fixed supply, of course, but that's a different issue.
Now I'll grant you that a malicious extension could modify a link somewhere that causes *my* JavaScript code to do something on behalf of the user, but even in that case, the risk is no greater than it would be with cookies.
Well, if you used cookies, you could set them as HttpOnly, which would prevent even your JavaScript code from accessing them.
That said, I was thinking more about that scheme vis-a-vis using HTTPS, and in particular in the case of a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem with JS crypto is that you can't securely deliver the code to the browser, so all bets are off if you have an attacker that can modify the stream.
Because I spent a lot of time on that software, and I'm not really interested in giving it away?
So, it's not that it can't, it's just that you don't want to. That's fine, but hardly the same.
None of the ones I saw met my needs. None of them even came close, actually. The token-based authentication that most websites use makes it way too easy to sniff a few packets and then impersonate someone, and regrettably, the exorbitant cost of multi-domain certificates makes SSL infeasible at this time. Therefore, my base requirement was a robust and fairly lightweight, pure-JavaScript means of signing each individual HTTP request with a shared secret key derived from the user's passphrase and an arbitrary nonce generated by the server. (Still on my to-do list is adding synchronized timestamping and/or regular nonce rotation to prevent replay attacks, but given the site design, the damage posed by such an action would be fairly minimal, so I'm in no hurry.)
Just curios: how does your system prevent an attacker from simply replacing/modifying your JavaScript code with a snippet that copies the user's passphrase to his/her server?
Have you read Matasano Security's critique of JavaScript cryptography? Last time it was discussed on Hacker News, the only real objection was that you could use a browser extension to implement the crypto - nobody had a solution for pure, extension-less cryptography.
It forces proprietary developers to spend time and money writing their own code instead of milking the free software cash-cow. If nothing else, that makes it worthwhile.
because that authentication system cannot necessarily be made open source
What? Why not? There are plenty of open source authentication systems. In fact, I'd say it's extremely reckless to use a security system that hasn't been widely vetted, and that requires available source.
Besides, it's not true that it would necessarily require open sourcing the authentication system. If you're using something with a service interface, then only the "bridge" that extends the webapp to talk to it should have to be open sourced.
Mind you, I prefer to give those changes back when possible, because it makes future upgrades easier, but when the changes involve many thousands of lines of code changes (e.g. rewriting every single SQL query in parameterized form), this is often not appreciated as much as one might expect.
Irrelevant. None of the (A)GPL licenses require you to give anything back. All you need to do is inform your users that a copy can be arranged if they ask for it, nothing more.
Nobody actually wants to outlaw them, though. If tech conferences don't have them anymore, it was their choice (even if possibly influenced by criticism).
Slashdot Mirror
People will do what they want. Technology won't stop them. Won't help in stopping them. (...) Kids will skip school, nothing you can do to stop them. They skip school if you have RFID and Cameras everywhere. All that money wasted because people don't understand the problem, and think Technology is a panacea to every known social problem we have.
I do agree that the problem is that people don't understand the problem (if you excuse the redundancy), but that doesn't mean technology can help stop such behavior - just not how it is applied by such people.
My claim is that technology can and does solve (or at least, ameliorates) social problems, if correctly used.
Sociological problems are not "social" problems. They are people's socialization issues.
I'm sorry, but no. Socialization problems are socialization problems. Sociological problems are problems pertaining to the study itself. Using the word as an "improved" version of socialization is cargo cultism.
I understand where you're coming from, but I've always found that phrase to be problematic.
Clearly technology can have a social impact, so why couldn't it be used to fix social problems? It must not be because it's powerless, but because we fail to understand its effects clearly enough to apply it effectively.
(By the way, it's social problems. Sociological problems would be those problems related to the methodology of social research, not those related to the behaviors themselves.)
I value something that doesn't require a license, whether you're running a free "e-reader" on Linux, there's probably the only thing that won't have much in the way of tangible strings but even Linux has dropped the 386 processor from support.
Yet Linux still runs just fine on 386 processors; just not the current versions. Here: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/
Just like sharing music? Or sharing copyrighted material that the MPAA considers theirs if you somehow copy it to another format? Ever here of thePirateBay? Just ask Kim DotCom how it feels to host material in an electronic form. You think the Supreme Court has your best interests at heart? All it takes is the right justices or the right set of laws and your rights are gone here in the US and it's getting worse every year. The Media distributors and publishers are a huge lobby in this country pushing what is and isn't fair copyright and it will get to the point that they'll push for single use e-books that you can't own, share or read more than once unless you're willing to keep paying for it.
Breaking DRM != sharing content. It's a completely different kettle of fish. In particular, it happens only inside your machine, instead of being broadcast to the whole world.
As for the Supreme Court, as a I said, I'm not under their jurisdiction. But they did vote for the student selling textbooks, in detriment of the copyright holders.
How long do you think it will take for e-books to get the same treatment as a movie or a piece of music.. "It was distributed electronically." Therefore some intermediary who owns the rights will go after somebody for downloading an e-book they didn't pay for that "wasn't free." Unless Authors are willing to give their stuff away royalty free, just like some musicians are doing or selling it and saying it's "yours" then you can say it's yours but the lines are getting blurry.
As I said, I don't care. I wipe my ass to their claims that I don't own it.
Again on an operating system that's not tracking you? Linux perhaps? Good, that's an alternative perhaps but again, I consider that transient, more transient than good old fashioned bound (as in book binding). Call me old fashioned but that way if I lose it, it's because of something that I did or perhaps someone overtly did or by accident, not because some company or someone with less than stellar motives took it from me using a license model, yes "free" books aside but 9 times out of 10 you're reading those probably on an O/S that will track your habits and report them back to somebody. It's not fiction, it's a fact now unfortunately. Reading that on an iPad? Guess again.. http://gizmodo.com/5951173/apple-is-tracking-you-again-in-ios-6-and-how-to-turn-it-off
Calling ebooks bad because some particular readers are bad is like calling paper books bad because some publishers use rubbish paper.
I specifically mentioned readers with no networking, so mentioning the iPad is specious at best.
Call me old fashioned, but anything electronic is transient. Your jpegs, your images. Yeah you can back them up certainly but unless you keep upgrading or shifting with the digital times, it'll become so much like the Betamax or MFM or RLL hard drives.
The physical storage is transient; the content isn't. Conflating the two is misleading.
Yes, you need to upgrade, but you're on Slashdot, so clearly you use computers, so you need to upgrade them anyway.
Maybe yes, maybe no but I don't want anybody to know what I read or why I read it. It's none of their fucking business. Again, I don't want to have to worry about battery life sometimes or form factor or bookmarking something electronically or covering
It's easier to move a book from one shelf to another or to move it from one residence to another. You can pass them along without encumbrances like licenses or TOS or you can loan them to a friend and not have it tracked.
Easier to lose it too, or to get it destroyed. And harder to loan it to more than one friend at once, or read it yourself while someone else has it.
You may prefer paper books, but it's a subjective choice dependent on how much you value some things vs others, not clearly better either way.
Good for you, you'll be mindlessly protecting your interests against all that nasty DRM and protections that publishers and distributors will be thinking up. I have better things to do with my time, like read.
So, physical books just appear in your shelf, right? No time required to go to a shop, or pick them up? Well, personally I don't have such magical abilities, so getting a physical book takes me orders of magnitude more than un-DRMing them. Or would, if I bought DRM-ladden books, which I don't.
Remember in the US at least the DMCA allows them to protect their data with whatever means necessary and if you agree to that, then you're bound to it. Do you read all those license agreements? usually there's a clause "You agree to allow us to make changes to this agreement..." Which is usually a one-sided affair, regardless of mechanism, paper books don't have those strings attached leaving your nice little words aren't really worth the paper they're published on.
Yeah, I print those agreements and wipe my ass with them. Who the hell cares?
Not that I live in the US, anyway, but even there, when was the last time someone was convicted for breaking the DRM of their own books? I'm guessing "never".
Sometimes paper, the lowest common denominator for publishing, is the best format especially if you want to review it at your leisure without having to download an upgrade, remember to charge your e-reader or not get inundated with ads or tracked on what you're reading or have in your library. I'm not saying that open source e-readers are bad, I'm just saying the tablet your using (iPad, Android, Kindle et al.) has tracking on it, so that not necessarily your reading may be tracked but your reading list might be.
Yes, sometimes paper is the best option. I certainly don't disagree with that, nor did I ever, so I'm not sure why you're saying that.
As for ads and tracking, it takes five minutes to find a reader that has no ads or networking (kinda hard to track you with it).
If I want to read my copy of the "The Anarchist Cookbook" I don't certainly want the government knowing that Amazon or Google let them know I was reading it on my e-reader or that it's stored on my tablet (even with name obfuscation) That's one of the liberating things about a book, it's yours, nobody knows if and when at all if your reading it and you can hold it that is until some fascist decide to take it away from you.
Yeah, I agree that paper books are better if one wants to read subversive literature, especially if you live in a police state. Thankfully, you don't lose that ability even if you read most things on ebook readers.
Yes there are 'non drm' source but you're ignoring that Amazon and Apple will likely fall out as the kings in that market.
So? Apple was the first big company to kill DRM for music.
Oh and on your retarded USB example, it's no good without software, a reader. Yeah I can keep it, much like a dusty book on the shelf in the hope that someday my reader will be able to use it. So I plug it in 10 years later but that open source project has long since closed its doors and that tablet you were using went out with that last batch of kitty litter when old Felix died, so now you have to get some compatible e-reader that knows what to do with
Both PDF and EPUB (which is really just packaged HTML with a couple of domain specific changes) are open, standard formats that will be with us for much, much longer than ten years. And an open source project doesn't stop working just because it hasn't been developed in while. Hell, I was just running a twenty year old software on my laptop yesterday.
Besides, anyone doing backups should know you got to keep converting the formats, not just mindlessly copy bits around.
if it has a license or proprietary DRM, or is somehow wrapped that you can't directly read it) so now you find one but it tells you that you can't read it anymore because your "license" has expired.
It's your own fault for not breaking that DRM when you could have. My ebooks certainly don't go DRMed to my archive.
Again, if I have a PDF with DRM in it
As the doctor in the joke said, "then don't do that". First, buying DRMed content is unethical - you're contributing to the problem. Second, if you happen to run across some PDF with DRM, you can probably take it out and shoot it using a Calibre plugin.
You have to run your e-book in some piece of software and unless you're willing to write your own e-reader you can assume that it's disposable content.
There are many Free Software PDF and ebook readers which have no DRM capabilities. I use Zathura, for example.
But anything you can do with software you can do to your digital content, even something as mundane as deleting it.
Again, that shows a remarkable lack of understanding of computer security, particularly the notion of privileges. My browser can read /etc/hosts, but can't delete it, even though "software" as a whole can. That's because I don't give it permissions to do so. Similarly, you can also not give your PDF and ebook readers permission to delete the file.
Besides, even if that wasn't true, it's anything you can do *with software*. But why exactly are you limited to that? Try this: copy the file to an USB drive, unplug it, and then run the PDF reader. Hard to delete that, innit?
Uhm, here in /., I think people are expected to know the different between executable and non-executable formats, the ability of APIs and such.
If you buy a PDF or EPUB file and don't allow it to run scripts, there's no way it can "delete itself", or run anything else, for that matter.
Yes, please enforce copyright infringement! Help the Pirate Bay!
Is that... is that your justification for pirating?
What makes you think one is needed?
Thank you, Captain Obvious!
Of course, adding a copyright license doesn't prevent anyone from using the code in a place without copyright, so that's completely irrelevant.
Don't make it public domain, because that's not valid everywhere. Use CC0 or WTFPL.
They just don't to GPL
They actually do, since they publish CUPS, though with proprietary exceptions.
It's just your impression. Yale, for example, has a 20 billion dollar fund, with returns that make a Wall Street investor jealous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Swensen
Your average CCTV camera has a lower resolution than a 30 year old camcorder, and while there are attempts to bring the resolution up currently there is neither the bandwidth, storage, or processing power to capture/process all of that data cheaply enough to be widely distributed.
Sure there is, if instead of trying to stream high-def video to the mothership, the feed is processed on the spot and only the digested information (e.g., iris hashes) is sent.
Yeah, but why would you want to save a species full of jerks, anyway?
Not everyone lives in some uncivilized shithole. The cops here got my brother's $25 cellphone back after it was stolen. And they didn't need a full SWAT team with heavy gear to take it from the kid who stole it, either.
As the sibling post said, they don't. But unlike cash, Bitcoin are extremely divisible (you can send 0.00000001 BTC to someone), so the same practical problems (not having enough coins and bills to pay for things) don't really apply.
There are economic consequences of having a fixed supply, of course, but that's a different issue.
Now I'll grant you that a malicious extension could modify a link somewhere that causes *my* JavaScript code to do something on behalf of the user, but even in that case, the risk is no greater than it would be with cookies.
Well, if you used cookies, you could set them as HttpOnly, which would prevent even your JavaScript code from accessing them.
That said, I was thinking more about that scheme vis-a-vis using HTTPS, and in particular in the case of a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem with JS crypto is that you can't securely deliver the code to the browser, so all bets are off if you have an attacker that can modify the stream.
That's fine; I rather work harder than help the slave owners.
In the same way that increasing the cost of whips would help the slaves.
Because I spent a lot of time on that software, and I'm not really interested in giving it away?
So, it's not that it can't, it's just that you don't want to. That's fine, but hardly the same.
None of the ones I saw met my needs. None of them even came close, actually. The token-based authentication that most websites use makes it way too easy to sniff a few packets and then impersonate someone, and regrettably, the exorbitant cost of multi-domain certificates makes SSL infeasible at this time. Therefore, my base requirement was a robust and fairly lightweight, pure-JavaScript means of signing each individual HTTP request with a shared secret key derived from the user's passphrase and an arbitrary nonce generated by the server. (Still on my to-do list is adding synchronized timestamping and/or regular nonce rotation to prevent replay attacks, but given the site design, the damage posed by such an action would be fairly minimal, so I'm in no hurry.)
Just curios: how does your system prevent an attacker from simply replacing/modifying your JavaScript code with a snippet that copies the user's passphrase to his/her server?
Have you read Matasano Security's critique of JavaScript cryptography? Last time it was discussed on Hacker News, the only real objection was that you could use a browser extension to implement the crypto - nobody had a solution for pure, extension-less cryptography.
It forces proprietary developers to spend time and money writing their own code instead of milking the free software cash-cow. If nothing else, that makes it worthwhile.
because that authentication system cannot necessarily be made open source
What? Why not? There are plenty of open source authentication systems. In fact, I'd say it's extremely reckless to use a security system that hasn't been widely vetted, and that requires available source.
Besides, it's not true that it would necessarily require open sourcing the authentication system. If you're using something with a service interface, then only the "bridge" that extends the webapp to talk to it should have to be open sourced.
Mind you, I prefer to give those changes back when possible, because it makes future upgrades easier, but when the changes involve many thousands of lines of code changes (e.g. rewriting every single SQL query in parameterized form), this is often not appreciated as much as one might expect.
Irrelevant. None of the (A)GPL licenses require you to give anything back. All you need to do is inform your users that a copy can be arranged if they ask for it, nothing more.
I find it extremely hard to believe that a court would consider a schema to be a "derivate work".
Nobody actually wants to outlaw them, though. If tech conferences don't have them anymore, it was their choice (even if possibly influenced by criticism).