The quasi-private industry of defense contractors and military engineering companies have been a key element in the military development of the United States. What role do you see for the private sector in advancing our capabilities for cyberwarfare and cyberdefense?
Far more disturbing than the wastefulness of this bill, is that those proposing it seem to think it will cost nothing at all. If you look at the projected fiscal impact of this bill, they expect it to require only one new employee over a period of five years.
Introduce a controversial system, pretend that a trained monkey can run it, get it past the front door, and then watch the costs balloon. Has anyone else seen this pattern of IT development in government before?
I'm disturbed by one of the more evasive answers (question #7):
As to your final question, while there certainly is a right to fair use, it is not a violation of that right to make products that cannot be copied. Although such features may prove unpopular to some, ultimately it is for the marketplace to decide the viability of those products.
I fail to see the logic in this statement. Essentially, the reply is, "This right exists, but it is not a violation of that right if the consumer's ability to exercise that right is removed."
While I am fairly libertarian, and I agree that market-driven solutions are often the best, this discussion centers around consumer's legal rights regarding a purchased product. I am disturbed that the Department of Justice's answer is, "If people are willing to buy products which do not allow them to exercise their rights to Fair Use, then we're fine with it."
Suppose people buy those products because no alternative exists? It is one thing to suggest customers boycott copy-protected CDs; that is a valid argument. But suppose Windows Longhorn is found to violate fair use rights by restricting a user's data? Are we to believe that consumers, who will undoubtedly purchase new Windows machines, are implying permission to restrict their rights to use those machines?
I am thankful the Department of Justice is only one piece in a web of checks and balances, and that there are other avenues through which the American people can seek a balance in copyright law, because it appears to me these fine men are not seeing part of the picture.
So many responses to my post... glad to see people are taking this issue seriously.
I dislike using street crime as an example, because there really isn't anything you can do if someone pulls a gun on you in a dark alley. You simply don't have enough time to react; if you _were_ carrying a gun, it'd be useless.
However, the right to own a firearm has a lot less to do with street safety than it does with being secure in your own home. If someone breaks into my house, I should have every right to fire a gun at them, because I have no choice but to assume that my life could be in jeopardy before the police are able to arrive.
The Reason article points out a very good example: a man whose home had been repeatedly burglarized, and whose town had no police presence, caught two men breaking into his house. He fired a shotgun at them, wounding one and killing the other. The burglar who survived served 18 months before being released; the resident is serving a life sentence, and is being sued by the surviving burglar. That's just silly. But that's what happens when you have gun control like the UK.
A final note: nobody is completely objective, especially on a topic as controversial as this one. But instead of saying, "Oh, that article isn't valid because it was printed by Reason," judge the article by the facts and arguments it makes. If you actually read it from beginning to end, the writer lists an impressive quantity of statistics and figures which are hard to refute.
Rates of violent crimes in the United Kingdom have been steadily rising for years, while rates in the United States have been steadily falling. There is a considerable argument to be made that gun control is to blame for an increase in violence in Britain.
The logic is simple: criminals will always find ways to get guns, whether legally or not. If the average civilian cannot own a gun for self-defense, the chances that a criminal will use a gun against a civilian become much higher.
Nobody can honestly blame the government for being concerned about network security. They recognize a valid threat to a growing part of our country's infrastructure, and geek ethics be damned, they're probably going to want to do something about it.
The article does well to point out that the verdict is not yet in; the Feds have yet to figure out what should be done.
If ever there were an opportunity to demonstrate to the Powers That Be the inherent value of OSS/FS, this is it.
The Office of Homeland Security, bureaucratic as it may be, is going to be looking at this issue carefully. There's a good chance they will decide, "We can't issue mandates to private businesses, but we can set internal policy, and we can make recommendations." Suppose the Office recommended OSS/FS platforms, as opposed to proprietary software, precisely because of its security strengths. They might even be convinced of the need for extra funding to OSS/FS security-based groups.
I think this battlefield, the struggle to win the heart of Tom Ridge, could turn out to be far more important to the OSS/FS communities than the fight for the desktop.
John is a teenager. His parents bought him a Gateway laptop for his first year at college.
John opens his laptop to find some really cool songs sitting in 'My Documents'. Wow! That's cool!
John tries to play a song, and gets a notice that he needs to pay first. John is a college student. John doesn't like paying.
John opens up the latest flavor of P2P filesharing software and downloads the damn song for free.
Of course, I'm sure the fact that consumers are rallying around the concept of free MP3s, while by and large still buying CDs, doesn't really mean anything. Research shows if we put padlocks on all our content, and then throw it in consumers' faces every chance we get, we might still be able to inflate our profits to pre-Napster levels!
I pay that much for a Linux machine, reasonably equipped, closely watched, with no (artificial) limits on bandwidth or storage. I'm just asked to keep usage reasonable.
Hosts like this can be found all over the place if you ask the right people or check the right web sites. Just don't be suckered in by cute web pages; word of mouth is one of the best ways to judge.
I'm using Scopeware Vision Beta 1 right now. It's total crap. The interface looks thrown together and amateurish, and the 'Vision Activity Console' (whatever that means) is sitting here practically hung while it is 'Waiting to Index' my files. It's been like this for fifteen minutes.
w00t. I can feel the Information Superhighway blowing my hair back. What a crock.
It sounds as if someone stumbled across one or two mildly interesting ways of sorting through W2K/WXP's Indexing Service, threw some college-level 3D graphics at it, then used so many buzzwords to get himself into the New York Times that it would make a Microsoft salesman blush.
The article mentions that in order to support such a complicated undertaking -- each character has anywhere from 100 to 8000 behavioral logic nodes to govern its behavior -- the creators of Massive used fuzzy logic to make their creations act.
As far as I understand, fuzzy logic -- using probabilities instead of binary values -- has been given the shaft in most of the computing world. People can't wrap their heads around a concept that's termed 'fuzzy', no matter how solid the mathematics behind it are. Maybe this sort of accomplishment will open new doors for research involving fuzzy logic in computing systems.
Most Congressmen still don't understand what the DMCA means in terms of restricting technological research. For them, the debate was framed entirely within the context of fighting online piracy, and as far as most of them are concerned, the DMCA fought online piracy very well.
So now a couple politicians realize that countries like China are using censorware to restrict the inherent freedoms of their citizens--freedoms which the US believes every man has, not just its own citizens--and they want to fund research to help political dissidents get around censorware. I'm willing to bet they have no idea that the DMCA, which they approved, prevents exactly this kind of research from being done in the US.
If anything, this sort of legislative contradiction is A Good Thing. It may help Congress understand why the DMCA is fundamentally flawed, in both conception and implementation.
Organizations like Reporters Without Borders always have some sort of political slant to them, regardless of what their official position is. (The fact that the site's hosted out of France might give you a hint which way they might lean.)
The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court.
Journalists being arrested (and, most likely, promptly released on bail) because they refuse to release their sources. That's fine. That means our legal system is still working to determine the precise weight of journalistic freedom against a victim's right to a fair trial.
Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings.
So? If they were trespassing on high-security areas of government bulidings, what the hell did they expect?
I hope the Slashdot audience will take two seconds to look at this ranking critically and realize exactly how little it really means. America still guarantees an degree of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that even many European countries don't enjoy.
Companies are already distrustful of Microsoft; they resent having to pay such high licensing fees for the systems they need to keep their businesses running. Requiring that customers pay additional fees just to keep those systems secure will increase the pressure on cash-strapped (or just financially responsible) companies to make the switch towards alternatives like Linux.
Face it, Microsoft; people resent a monopolist. You can't continue to browbeat your customer base forever, and the more you do, the more will abandon you in the end.
I'm perplexed that you people are unable to tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse. I'm not excusing what the FBI did, I'm not excusing the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. I simply explained that there is a difference between American agents performing espionage against Russian citizens (who were in turn hacking American computers), and Russian citizens being arrested for violating an American law while in Russia. Granted, I think what happened to Sklyarov is wrong, but it's still a different issue.
And to all you who think America is a big evil empire: grow up, take a couple PoliSci courses, and find something worthwhile to argue about.
Precisely. Keep in mind that the FSB (Federal Security Service) is basically Russia's reincarnation of the KGB. They would do everything in their power, including hacking into American computers, if it were considered a necessity for one of their own missions. The fact that they are publicly denouncing this behavior is analogous to the Chinese complaining about our spy planes near their borders.
They play spy games on us, we play spy games on them. That's simply how it works. The only difference is that in America, the FBI actually discloses things like this when their investigation is finished. In Russia, if the FSB hacked your computer, they'd never say. Period.
Here, you have government espionage going on from within the US, against someone in Russia. If they break any laws, tough shit, they're espionage. It's not like Russia can do anything about it, especially since they would like to remain a favored American trading partner.
Meanwhile, if you are a private American citizen, break some Russian laws over here, then fly to Moscow, they'd probably arrest you a la Sklyarov. Dmitry Sklyarov did the reverse: he broke American laws in Russia, then entered America's borders, and was arrested.
International law has always been spotty on these matters, and the Internet has aggravated the situation even worse. But it's hard to draw a parallel between Sklyarov did and what the FBI did, because they are very different circumstances.
One must remember that if a copyright owner _were_ accused of damaging someone's computer, it would still be up to the plaintiff to prove that the copyright owner violated one of the safeguards in the Berman bill. Considering that most copyright owners who will use this bill are corporations with millions invested in lawyers, any individual who wishes to sue them under one of the bill's safeguards will find himself fighting an uphill legal battle against some of the country's best lawyers.
As we've seen in the past, simply the threat of legal difficulties is enough to make people settle a case they might have every reason to win. If this bill passes, we may see the media companies using their vast legal strength to strongarm people away from valid lawsuits.
This is exactly what I want to hear Vint's take on. Special interests are in the process of bastardizing crucial parts of the Internet to protect their own business models. Does Vint see an end in sight? Is it something he'd rather not think about?
Who cares that the project is already drastically overbudget and behind schedule? Does it really matter that there is evidence of money being skimmed off the top? Has anyone noticed that some of the subcontractors for the project have since gone out of business?
Nah. Just blame the computer geeks.
Migration path is everything.
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
AMD's x86-64 architecture will allow companies to upgrade individual parts of their software systems to 64-bit without having to replace everything else. That's the key to AMD's future success; it makes the migration path to 64-bit that much easier (and that much cheaper).
Itanium flopped before; chances are good it will flop again.
UCSD is overreacting; this can be overturned.
on
That Link Is Illegal
·
· Score: 2
They cited a section of the USA PATRIOT Act that prohibits giving "material support" to known terrorist groups, the definition of which includes "communications equipment".
However, providing a hyperlink to their web site (the same sort of hyperlink which can be found on any search engine) should not, and probably will not, qualify as either communications equipment or any other form of material support.
This is simply another case of California public schools imposing their own political views and their own ideological censorship upon their students. This occurs regularly in that state's public university system. Normally it happens to conservatives, but this time a liberal group has been targeted (and look at how much more press it's getting).
"Centralized security control"? Sure, Microsoft can do that. Until one of your domain servers gets 0wned.
Frankly, this doesn't come as a shock. Government agencies like the USDOI have always been of the attitude that if they pay more, and do less, it's better in the long run. But if they plan on running their entire networks on Microsoft servers, I plan on watching the news for hack reports.
Slashdot Mirror
The quasi-private industry of defense contractors and military engineering companies have been a key element in the military development of the United States. What role do you see for the private sector in advancing our capabilities for cyberwarfare and cyberdefense?
Far more disturbing than the wastefulness of this bill, is that those proposing it seem to think it will cost nothing at all. If you look at the projected fiscal impact of this bill, they expect it to require only one new employee over a period of five years.
Introduce a controversial system, pretend that a trained monkey can run it, get it past the front door, and then watch the costs balloon. Has anyone else seen this pattern of IT development in government before?
...a lakh is 100,000.
I'm disturbed by one of the more evasive answers (question #7):
I fail to see the logic in this statement. Essentially, the reply is, "This right exists, but it is not a violation of that right if the consumer's ability to exercise that right is removed."
While I am fairly libertarian, and I agree that market-driven solutions are often the best, this discussion centers around consumer's legal rights regarding a purchased product. I am disturbed that the Department of Justice's answer is, "If people are willing to buy products which do not allow them to exercise their rights to Fair Use, then we're fine with it."
Suppose people buy those products because no alternative exists? It is one thing to suggest customers boycott copy-protected CDs; that is a valid argument. But suppose Windows Longhorn is found to violate fair use rights by restricting a user's data? Are we to believe that consumers, who will undoubtedly purchase new Windows machines, are implying permission to restrict their rights to use those machines?
I am thankful the Department of Justice is only one piece in a web of checks and balances, and that there are other avenues through which the American people can seek a balance in copyright law, because it appears to me these fine men are not seeing part of the picture.
So many responses to my post... glad to see people are taking this issue seriously.
I dislike using street crime as an example, because there really isn't anything you can do if someone pulls a gun on you in a dark alley. You simply don't have enough time to react; if you _were_ carrying a gun, it'd be useless.
However, the right to own a firearm has a lot less to do with street safety than it does with being secure in your own home. If someone breaks into my house, I should have every right to fire a gun at them, because I have no choice but to assume that my life could be in jeopardy before the police are able to arrive.
The Reason article points out a very good example: a man whose home had been repeatedly burglarized, and whose town had no police presence, caught two men breaking into his house. He fired a shotgun at them, wounding one and killing the other. The burglar who survived served 18 months before being released; the resident is serving a life sentence, and is being sued by the surviving burglar. That's just silly. But that's what happens when you have gun control like the UK.
A final note: nobody is completely objective, especially on a topic as controversial as this one. But instead of saying, "Oh, that article isn't valid because it was printed by Reason," judge the article by the facts and arguments it makes. If you actually read it from beginning to end, the writer lists an impressive quantity of statistics and figures which are hard to refute.
Rates of violent crimes in the United Kingdom have been steadily rising for years, while rates in the United States have been steadily falling. There is a considerable argument to be made that gun control is to blame for an increase in violence in Britain.
The logic is simple: criminals will always find ways to get guns, whether legally or not. If the average civilian cannot own a gun for self-defense, the chances that a criminal will use a gun against a civilian become much higher.
Reason did a very good article on this a little while ago: Gun Control's Twisted Outcome.
Nobody can honestly blame the government for being concerned about network security. They recognize a valid threat to a growing part of our country's infrastructure, and geek ethics be damned, they're probably going to want to do something about it.
The article does well to point out that the verdict is not yet in; the Feds have yet to figure out what should be done.
If ever there were an opportunity to demonstrate to the Powers That Be the inherent value of OSS/FS, this is it.
The Office of Homeland Security, bureaucratic as it may be, is going to be looking at this issue carefully. There's a good chance they will decide, "We can't issue mandates to private businesses, but we can set internal policy, and we can make recommendations." Suppose the Office recommended OSS/FS platforms, as opposed to proprietary software, precisely because of its security strengths. They might even be convinced of the need for extra funding to OSS/FS security-based groups.
I think this battlefield, the struggle to win the heart of Tom Ridge, could turn out to be far more important to the OSS/FS communities than the fight for the desktop.
John is a teenager. His parents bought him a Gateway laptop for his first year at college.
John opens his laptop to find some really cool songs sitting in 'My Documents'. Wow! That's cool!
John tries to play a song, and gets a notice that he needs to pay first. John is a college student. John doesn't like paying.
John opens up the latest flavor of P2P filesharing software and downloads the damn song for free.
Of course, I'm sure the fact that consumers are rallying around the concept of free MP3s, while by and large still buying CDs, doesn't really mean anything. Research shows if we put padlocks on all our content, and then throw it in consumers' faces every chance we get, we might still be able to inflate our profits to pre-Napster levels!
Idiots.
I pay that much for a Linux machine, reasonably equipped, closely watched, with no (artificial) limits on bandwidth or storage. I'm just asked to keep usage reasonable.
Hosts like this can be found all over the place if you ask the right people or check the right web sites. Just don't be suckered in by cute web pages; word of mouth is one of the best ways to judge.
Enough of that silly Java stuff.
Get Twisted.
I'm using Scopeware Vision Beta 1 right now. It's total crap. The interface looks thrown together and amateurish, and the 'Vision Activity Console' (whatever that means) is sitting here practically hung while it is 'Waiting to Index' my files. It's been like this for fifteen minutes.
w00t. I can feel the Information Superhighway blowing my hair back. What a crock.
It sounds as if someone stumbled across one or two mildly interesting ways of sorting through W2K/WXP's Indexing Service, threw some college-level 3D graphics at it, then used so many buzzwords to get himself into the New York Times that it would make a Microsoft salesman blush.
Thanks to nathanh for explaining something I couldn't even remember properly :)
The article mentions that in order to support such a complicated undertaking -- each character has anywhere from 100 to 8000 behavioral logic nodes to govern its behavior -- the creators of Massive used fuzzy logic to make their creations act.
As far as I understand, fuzzy logic -- using probabilities instead of binary values -- has been given the shaft in most of the computing world. People can't wrap their heads around a concept that's termed 'fuzzy', no matter how solid the mathematics behind it are. Maybe this sort of accomplishment will open new doors for research involving fuzzy logic in computing systems.
Most Congressmen still don't understand what the DMCA means in terms of restricting technological research. For them, the debate was framed entirely within the context of fighting online piracy, and as far as most of them are concerned, the DMCA fought online piracy very well.
So now a couple politicians realize that countries like China are using censorware to restrict the inherent freedoms of their citizens--freedoms which the US believes every man has, not just its own citizens--and they want to fund research to help political dissidents get around censorware. I'm willing to bet they have no idea that the DMCA, which they approved, prevents exactly this kind of research from being done in the US.
If anything, this sort of legislative contradiction is A Good Thing. It may help Congress understand why the DMCA is fundamentally flawed, in both conception and implementation.
Organizations like Reporters Without Borders always have some sort of political slant to them, regardless of what their official position is. (The fact that the site's hosted out of France might give you a hint which way they might lean.)
The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court.
Journalists being arrested (and, most likely, promptly released on bail) because they refuse to release their sources. That's fine. That means our legal system is still working to determine the precise weight of journalistic freedom against a victim's right to a fair trial.
Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings.
So? If they were trespassing on high-security areas of government bulidings, what the hell did they expect?
I hope the Slashdot audience will take two seconds to look at this ranking critically and realize exactly how little it really means. America still guarantees an degree of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that even many European countries don't enjoy.
Companies are already distrustful of Microsoft; they resent having to pay such high licensing fees for the systems they need to keep their businesses running. Requiring that customers pay additional fees just to keep those systems secure will increase the pressure on cash-strapped (or just financially responsible) companies to make the switch towards alternatives like Linux.
Face it, Microsoft; people resent a monopolist. You can't continue to browbeat your customer base forever, and the more you do, the more will abandon you in the end.
I'm perplexed that you people are unable to tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse. I'm not excusing what the FBI did, I'm not excusing the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. I simply explained that there is a difference between American agents performing espionage against Russian citizens (who were in turn hacking American computers), and Russian citizens being arrested for violating an American law while in Russia. Granted, I think what happened to Sklyarov is wrong, but it's still a different issue.
And to all you who think America is a big evil empire: grow up, take a couple PoliSci courses, and find something worthwhile to argue about.
Precisely. Keep in mind that the FSB (Federal Security Service) is basically Russia's reincarnation of the KGB. They would do everything in their power, including hacking into American computers, if it were considered a necessity for one of their own missions. The fact that they are publicly denouncing this behavior is analogous to the Chinese complaining about our spy planes near their borders.
They play spy games on us, we play spy games on them. That's simply how it works. The only difference is that in America, the FBI actually discloses things like this when their investigation is finished. In Russia, if the FSB hacked your computer, they'd never say. Period.
Here, you have government espionage going on from within the US, against someone in Russia. If they break any laws, tough shit, they're espionage. It's not like Russia can do anything about it, especially since they would like to remain a favored American trading partner.
Meanwhile, if you are a private American citizen, break some Russian laws over here, then fly to Moscow, they'd probably arrest you a la Sklyarov. Dmitry Sklyarov did the reverse: he broke American laws in Russia, then entered America's borders, and was arrested.
International law has always been spotty on these matters, and the Internet has aggravated the situation even worse. But it's hard to draw a parallel between Sklyarov did and what the FBI did, because they are very different circumstances.
One must remember that if a copyright owner _were_ accused of damaging someone's computer, it would still be up to the plaintiff to prove that the copyright owner violated one of the safeguards in the Berman bill. Considering that most copyright owners who will use this bill are corporations with millions invested in lawyers, any individual who wishes to sue them under one of the bill's safeguards will find himself fighting an uphill legal battle against some of the country's best lawyers.
As we've seen in the past, simply the threat of legal difficulties is enough to make people settle a case they might have every reason to win. If this bill passes, we may see the media companies using their vast legal strength to strongarm people away from valid lawsuits.
This is exactly what I want to hear Vint's take on. Special interests are in the process of bastardizing crucial parts of the Internet to protect their own business models. Does Vint see an end in sight? Is it something he'd rather not think about?
Who cares that the project is already drastically overbudget and behind schedule? Does it really matter that there is evidence of money being skimmed off the top? Has anyone noticed that some of the subcontractors for the project have since gone out of business?
Nah. Just blame the computer geeks.
AMD's x86-64 architecture will allow companies to upgrade individual parts of their software systems to 64-bit without having to replace everything else. That's the key to AMD's future success; it makes the migration path to 64-bit that much easier (and that much cheaper).
Itanium flopped before; chances are good it will flop again.
They cited a section of the USA PATRIOT Act that prohibits giving "material support" to known terrorist groups, the definition of which includes "communications equipment".
However, providing a hyperlink to their web site (the same sort of hyperlink which can be found on any search engine) should not, and probably will not, qualify as either communications equipment or any other form of material support.
This is simply another case of California public schools imposing their own political views and their own ideological censorship upon their students. This occurs regularly in that state's public university system. Normally it happens to conservatives, but this time a liberal group has been targeted (and look at how much more press it's getting).
"Centralized security control"? Sure, Microsoft can do that. Until one of your domain servers gets 0wned.
Frankly, this doesn't come as a shock. Government agencies like the USDOI have always been of the attitude that if they pay more, and do less, it's better in the long run. But if they plan on running their entire networks on Microsoft servers, I plan on watching the news for hack reports.