The thing that should really scare any sort of publisher (/. in this example) is that once you've censored one post, you may no longer be considered a "common carrier", and then you can be sued for any other post that someone finds offensive for a variety of different reasons. IANAL, but it seems that the loss of common carrier status is more of a danger to the publisher than the effect on their readers of a few instances of censorship (for whatever reason).
I agree with you that it's probably OK for a publisher to remove an occasional, damaging comment. I'm just pointing out that such an action may cause more problems than it solves.
/* (Found in xscreensaver/hacks/screenhack.h) */ /* Found in Don Hopkins'.plan file: * * The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to * device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVax framebuffer * on acid. A truely portable X application is required to act like the * persistent customer in the Monty Python ``Cheese Shop'' sketch. Even * the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions, like: * * WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY? * display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0"); * WHAT IS YOUR ROOT? * root = RootWindow(display, DefaultScreen(display)); * AND WHAT IS YOUR WINDOW? * win = XCreateSimpleWindow(display, root, 0, 0, 256, 256, 1, * BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)), * WhitePixel(display, DefaultScreen(display))) * OH ALL RIGHT, YOU CAN GO ON. * * WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY? * display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0"); * WHAT IS YOUR COLORMAP? * cmap = DefaultColormap(display, DefaultScreen(display)); * AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR? * favorite_color = 0; / * Black. * / * / * Whoops! No, I mean: * / * favorite_color = BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)); * / * AAAYYYYEEEEE!! (client dumps core & falls into the chasm) * / * * WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY? * display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0"); * WHAT IS YOUR VISUAL? * struct XVisualInfo vinfo; * if (XMatchVisualInfo(display, DefaultScreen(display), * 8, PseudoColor, &vinfo) != 0) * visual = vinfo.visual; * AND WHAT IS THE NET SPEED VELOCITY OF AN XConfigureWindow REQUEST? * / * Is that a SubStructureRedirectMask or a ResizeRedirectMask? * / * WHAT?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT? * AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!! (server dumps core & falls into the chasm) */
Technically I don't think anyone other than the Social Security Administration can require the use of your SSN. Other groups have to generate you a different number for identification purposes if you request it. I remember seeing this on financial aid forms, etc. I'm sure there are a bunch of hoops to go through to do this, however.
That one's scary. I have no problems with a company patenting the devices they used to determine the genome information - obviously that's their competitive advantage. But I don't see how anyone can patent a naturally-occurring gene anymore than you can patent other natural processes, such as surface tension or erosion. The Human Genome Project is involved in discovery of existing information, not creation of new technology. And (theoretically, at least) you can't patent information, you can only patent a device.
You make a good point considering intent, but I think you've misconstrued part of my post. I'm not saying that any variation on this crime should be considered the same as the crime. What I'm trying to point out is that the two variations we're discussing (linking to copyrighted material which may be available to make illegal copies, and pointing to a copying device which may make illegal copies of copyrighted material) are similar enough that making variation A (the mp3 linking) illegal would be just as silly as making variation B (the copier room at the library) illegal. In both cases a crime is committed by those who illegally reproduce copyrighted material. This does not automatically make it a crime for someone to point you to a way to commit copyright infringement, however, and that's what the court in this case is asserting.
Now, if there is an applicable law which states that this linking is illegal, then of course the defendant could be prosecuted under that law. My original point was that the presence of a law against illegal copying does not explicitly mean that the law also can be applied against pointing people to a place where they can commit copyright infringement. If you asked me for directions on the street, and I told you how to get to the bank, and then you robbed it, that doesn't make me a robber, for example. Of course, there's still the question of intent.
As far as intent goes, I would much rather have more specific laws rather than depend on the arbitrary interpretation of vague laws by the judiciary. You pointed out some very good examples of laws that were too broad - expelling children from school for any drugs, for example. In these cases, we don't need to make exceptions to the laws on the basis of intent, we just need more specific laws so that exceptions are unnecessary. This is again the same point I was making before - it is wrong to interpret a law to make more things illegal than are explicitly stated in the law. If there is a specific law forbidding something, then breaking the law is illegal regardless of intent. Contrariwise, if there is no law, then you haven't done anything that was illegal by definition, even if you did it with bad intentions.
Dear Senator or Representative (personalized for each recipient):
I'm writing you as a consequence of a web page (http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate/) set up by Microsoft corporation to encourage innovation in the software industry. This is a laudable goal, although I'm surprised to see it supported by Microsoft. Microsoft is not widely regarded as an innovative force in the software industry. Rather than designing, implementing, and releasing innovative products at a competitive price, Microsoft has instead chosen to consolidate its position in the industry by threatening, colluding against, and sometimes outright buying its competitors while providing substandard products in terms of security, usability, and compatibility with accepted technical standards. By doing so, they have captured 90% of the market for desktop computer software in this country, and 25-33% of the market for server software.
If a car company acted in this manner, or perhaps the telephone company, you can bet that they would be under investigation by Federal and state anti-trust regulators. And as it turns out, Microsoft _is_ under investigation as well by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Although it appears that Microsoft set up their "Freedom to Innovate" site in order to marshal grass-roots support for their position in the DOJ's case against them, I am using the site to send you the opposite message: please ensure freedom to innovate in the software industry for _all companies_ by supporting the DOJ case against Microsoft. Only when the software industry is free from fear of reprisals by Microsoft can true innovation occur.
Innovation is already starting to happen - for example, many computer makers such as IBM, Dell, and Compaq have begun to offer Linux as an option on their machines as their customers have demanded. Do you think that they would have been allowed to do this by Microsoft if the trial were not occurring? In the past Microsoft has threatened computer makers with being blacklisted from selling Microsoft windows on their machines if they also sold products from Microsoft's competition, such as Netscape. Please encourage this recent trickle of innovation to become the torrent that our nation needs - support the DOJ in their efforts to get a just verdict and reasonable remedies for the harm Microsoft has done the software industry.
Is promoting copyright abuse by others illegal, though? Is it as illegal as the original copyright abuse was? I'll agree that it sounds like the guy knew what he was doing: pointing people to mp3s which were illegally available on the web. Whether or not he had a guilty mind, however, shouldn't affect the law.
The law should either specifically state that assisting others in breaking copyright law is illegal, or else it isn't. If it is illegal, then that sign at my local library that points to the Copier Room needs to come down too. In some cases, promoting a crime is illegal - for example, inciting a riot. But those cases are normally spelled out in the law which involves the original crime. What does the Berne Convention have to say about encouraging copyright violation? That is probably the relevant law in this case.
It seems like the music industry is going about this backwards anyway - there are likely many more sites that link to mp3 sites than sites that actually provide the mp3s themselves. If they were really interested in stopping the problem, they would go after sites which provide the mp3s in the first place, and the problem of people linking to mp3s would be solved. It appears that they're trying to annoy people with a marginal connection to the copyright violation rather than solving the copyright problem at its root.
That's what I was wondering about. The article mentions illegally using AOL to "post" the virus. If they are using "post" in the Usenet sense, then his culpability is much less than if he "post"ed it by mailing it to someone (the old-fashioned meaning of post). Of course, breaking into AOL (if that's what happened) is illegal in and of itself.
Another question is: if this guy only mailed (assuming that it was initially an email and not a news posting) Melissa to one other person, and this other person's computer then started off the chain reaction of email, is the original author liable for all of the damage worldwide, or just the damage to the one machine he sent an email to? You could argue that after that original email, it is downstream recipients of those messages which are in turn attacking other machines. I'm not saying this is a good argument necessarily, but it is an argument.
For example, say a dishonest building contractor uses cheap cement in a building. Then some kids come up and throw rocks at the side of the building. The rocks damage the facade of the building, but then (because the construction was so bad in the first place) the slight damage they've caused to the outside of the building cascades into a complete structural collapse. In this (admittedly far-fetched) case, are those kids responsible for destroying a building? Many people would also assign some blame to the poor construction of the building in the first place.
Likewise, I think it would be fair to assign some blame to those who wrote and deployed such a rickety and insecure email system. There's professional negligence at the root of Melissa at least as much as there is evil intent on the part of the macro virus writer.
This still requires a warrant. As other posters have pointed out, "fishing expeditions" are just as illegal with this law as they were before the law. So no one can legally install a hardware sniffer on your machine without the same sort of warrant necessary to wiretap your phone, for example. This isn't really a big change.
What the authorities are trying to prevent is the sort of situation that occurred with Kevin Mitnick. (I'm not an authority on Mr. Mitnick; I'm sure someone here will correct me if I get the facts a little wrong.) My understanding is that he had encrypted files on his machines which could have been used as evidence against him. However, he refused to surrender the password/keys necessary to get at the files (I can't argue with that, from a 5th Amendment point of view). This new law allows the government to install a hardware monitor on your machine hopefully before you encrypt all of your data. After that, even though you think you are encrypting all of your files, that may no longer be the case. Or perhaps your files are encrypted, but the password and/or keys are stored by the monitoring device, so that there's no wasted time getting information out of the suspect in order to decrypt their files.
Either way, no more messy 5th Amendment issues to cause headaches for law enforcement.
Is the author unhappy that these info appliances don't save everything to the desktop? The last time I saved a file on a windows machine, I put it in a directory with all the other files for that particular project. A hierarchical directory structure is a Good Thing, it isn't just a crazy techie Linux thing, and I think the author is creating a bit of a straw man in this case.
Possibly more important than mutation is genetic crossover, where organisms swap parts of their genome. I've been reading "Artificial Life" by Steven Levy recently, and some of the researchers in his book were able to get the same evolutionary improvements in their creatures with mostly crossover and only a little mutation. In some cases they had mutation turned off all the way and evolution still ground right along. I recommend the book to anyone who's interested in the subject - it makes a great introduction to the topic and covers a lot of ground.
I didn't think of that possibility. However, if you use sufficient redundancy, then not all of the people processing that block will be running a hacked client. As long as there is one legitimate client which records a positive result back at d.net, then you can demonstrate that anybody else who said that block was a negative is running a broken (hacked) client. It would be necessary to send the redundant blocks to different clients simultaneously in order to make sure that any hacked clients are discovered before the user of the hacked client has an opportunity to cash in on their ill-gotten gains.
You could also seed the work units with positives and check to see which clients record those as negative results, and then ban those clients before they cause you to miss a real positive result. Seeding the work units like this means you have to be able to generate more than one positive result, which would be doable in SETI because a number of different results could be the pattern we're looking for. In other words, there are many possible positive results. Seeded positives might be impossible to use in key cracking because there should only be one key to the puzzle and if we already knew the key, we wouldn't need a contest to find it. The only solution that I can see for d.net would be for the client to not return a positive/negative result but just return the processed block for final interpretation as positive or negative back at the d.net server. Unfortunately this moves back into the "security through obscurity" model.
Well, if they've got so many more volunteers than are strictly necessary, why not hand out blocks multiple times and check that all the clients give the same results? If you detect any differences, run that block on a trusted machine at SETI@Home HQ and ban the clients that returned the bogus blocks.
Granted, you aren't going to be able to detect hacked clients returning unchecked blocks very easily this way, because you won't have too many positive blocks to compare the results with. But you could seed the raw data with some known positive blocks to catch clients that are returning incorrect (unchecked) negative results. And if a hacked client is sophisticated enough to return a positive result for a positive block and a negative result for all other blocks, isn't that the same behavior as an unmodified client?
Yes, this extra redundancy would slow the project down, but it sounds like there is more than enough computing power available. If SETI@Home explained that redundant processing was necessary to ensure valid results, I'm sure most users wouldn't have a problem with it. If you're interested in SETI@Home in the first place, you already know that good science and/or good data analysis isn't done overnight and requires a lot of procedural safeguards to get the right results.
It's great that the Libertarian party has principles, and I'll admit that most Libertarians I talk to seem to have a good grasp on those principles. But however wonderful those principles are, you can't assume that the U.S. was founded with your principles in mind but has since strayed from them. The U.S. Constitution indicates that the principles of government include ensuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare (that's welfare the concept, not welfare the government program). The U.S. has never really followed Libertarian principles in the past; perhaps the American Confederation which briefly preceded the U.S. was closer to these ideals, but the U.S. has always had other concerns beyond simply national defense and domestic justice.
I can't argue with many of the specific complaints that you brought up (many of them are indeed bad things), but none of those problems are unsolvable without a Libertarian government, they just require that our current government change its laws. A Libertarian government wouldn't be immune to passing bad laws either.
That does NOT mean the government has a right to: Dictate what we can and cannot eat and drink (FDA)
I do disagree with this one. The FDA couldn't care less if you enjoy a snack of leaded paint chips in a light motor oil. However, they do care if a company sells this treat labeled as "crunchy watercress salad in a light viniagrette". This is in the interest of protecting individuals from large corporations, which falls under ensuring domestic tranquility.
Can anyone comment on how secure these anonymizers are legally? For example, anon.penet.fi was an anonymizer used by a lot of people until their records were subpoenad to track down a subscriber for a case. It seems to me that the only way an anonymizer could really be protected is if it maintained no logs at all and kept no information regarding their users. Then their servers could be seized but no useful information would be gained as far as their user base. Are there any anonymizers available now which work this way?
Actually, it's not what you think - my comment started at 2, as will this one I expect. If you have enough highly-ranked posts you can increase your default score from 1 to 2. This was a lot easier a month or two ago when there was more moderation == more chances to be marked up. I'm not sure how long it takes for the lack of positive moderation to shift your default score back to 1. I haven't had any posts moderated up in a while but I still end up defaulting at 2. Since this post is completely off-topic, I expect my default will change soon:)
That being said, I preferred/. a few months ago with more moderation, rather than less. More moderation increased the delta between good posts and bad posts, so that it was pretty clear when the comment quality was falling off rapidly. Now with less moderation, good posts usually get marked up and poor posts sometimes get marked down, but not often enough. Result: you have to dive deeper into the 1 and 0 level posts to make sure you see all the good comments.
Universal published their content on the web with no access restrictions. If people go to that content and download it, I don't see a problem as long as the referring site didn't misrepresent the actual source of the content. A previous article on/. discussed displaying someone else's site in your frame with your advertisements. This wouldn't be OK, because in a way that misrepresents the source of the content. But if the Movie-List says "Go get movie trailers from Universal", then no one is deceived and I don't see how Universal can complain. Apparently in this case Movie-List didn't list the source of the content, so their case isn't as strong. But if the source is attributed, I don't see a problem.
As another poster mentioned, there's no reason that Universal can't set up a technical solution - generate random URLs for each visitor, only serve the content to browsers referred from one of their sites, etc. But if they make content freely available on the 'net with no access restrictions, I don't see how they can complain if people download it. What if I just typed in a random URL and happened to hit one of their trailers without going through their site?
This happens a lot. I have a Linux Today slashbox set up at the top of my/. page, and I always wonder why the/. folks don't do the same to get the news at the same time. Maybe it's journalistic courtesy - if somebody else gets the scoop, you let them have it for a while before publishing your own article?
I'd certainly like to see some of the details filled in on this plan, as the NYT was fairly vague about it. This is probably because the plan isn't close to final yet. What sort of "patterns of patterns" are being monitored here? Other than detecting quantity-based attacks such as smurfs and mailbombs, I don't see what this monitoring can accomplish. Most attackers of other systems will look more or less like authorized users in terms of the quantity of bandwidth they use in their attacks. Only by inspecting the actual contents of their packets could you find out what their actions are, and there are way too many packets flying around for that. Also, how is this monitoring system planning to differentiate between authorized users doing potentially dangerous things (rebooting a server, etc) and unauthorized users doing the same thing?
Implementation issues aside, this doesn't necessarily decrease the security or privacy of Internet use. With the proper tools anyone could monitor Internet packets right now, whether or not there is a sophisticated government effort to do so. Plaintext email and other unencrypted data will be no less secure under the FBI's plan, and packets to and from your host to the rest of the 'net will just be logged in one more place than they were before. The loss of privacy and security is not as severe as you would think; mostly because there wasn't a whole lot of privacy and security on the 'net to begin with. There's an understanding that you don't monitor traffic that isn't yours, but there's no guarantee that everyone who can see your traffic is high-minded enough to abide by that understanding.
This is not to say that I support the government's monitoring plan - I don't think it will work, for reasons listed above. And of course I object to my traffic being preemptively monitored by a government party without a warrant or a court order. But I'm not sure even in the worst case there would be as much loss of privacy as there would be loss of the illusion of privacy. If this leads to more pervasive use of strong cryptography, wonderful.
A new PC can probably boot from a CD, depending on its BIOS. Not all PC's can, however; booting from a CD-ROM drive isn't always supported in older machines' BIOS. With those older machines, just running Linux or a *BSD won't help you boot from a CD if your BIOS won't allow it.
What this article means: the original SAFE bill was a big step forward in allowing exports of U.S. crypto. This new version of the bill contains amendments made by the House Armed Services Committee. This particular version of SAFE doesn't include many of the pro-encryption points made in the first version. The House Rules Committee gets to decide which version of the bill goes to vote before the full House - the original, the crippled Armed Services Committee version, or some other version.
What this article doesn't mean: the entire House have totally reversed themselves on what they will support and are now strongly anti-crypto. The President will assume full control of crypto exports and this control can't be challenged in court. These things should not be read out of this article.
My opinion: It may be the case that SAFE will be watered down somewhat when it reaches the floor of the full House. Depending on the political realities of getting legislation through the House, some amount of compromise is probably unavoidable. The original SAFE bill was a big step forward though, and I don't think that momentum can be totally erased or even slowed for long. There are too many legitimate uses for encryption, and U.S. companies are only going to lose more money in the international market if they can't compete with strong crypto. The government may not want to encourage individual use of cryptography (and may even want to discourage it, depending on your level of paranoia) but there will be enough money in the business uses of encryption that export controls will have to be relaxed.
Disclaimer: I work for a large nameless company which would be very happy to export strong crypto. No more mainaining two product lines!
He can fire the entire cabinet. He could have fired Ken Starr. We didn't have a near-impeachment, we had an impeachment. He just wasn't convicted. Actually Nixon DID order the people investigating him fired, a couple of times. It was two reporters who got the goods on him because they couldn't be fired by him
As I said, the President can fire investigators now that the independent counsel law has been allowed to expire by Congress. But before it expired (which was within the last couple of months, IIRC), the President could not have fired Ken Starr. I wasn't aware that Nixon had fired investigators, but I imagine that his actions led directly to the independent counsel act in the first place. Now that it has expired, we'll probably wish we still had it someday.
It's true that the President can fire some of the people who could have him removed from office, (namely those in the Executive branch which you mentioned) but he can't fire all of the people who could remove him - for example, Congress. I'm sorry if I read your original post incorrectly; I understood it to mean that the President could fire any and all threats to his remaining in office, which is not correct.
It's true that there was an impeachment this year - I was incorrect to call it a near-impeachment.
Perhaps I was sloppy in my wording. The president can suspend constitutional rights by declaring a state of emergency, or rebellion.
That I can agree with that - for example, Pres. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus (show cause for imprisonment) during the Civil War. He probably suspended other rights as well, that's just the first one I thought of. I won't argue with that interpretation; I just don't think it's correct to say that the President can suspend the entire Constitution. No one can unilaterally do that.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the U.S. debt to the U.N., or just the U.S. debt in general. I don't know about the back debt to the U.N. I did hear on the news the other day that the U.S. annual contribution to the U.N. was supposed to be around 300 million dollars. The source who was being interviewed mentioned that this was less than 1% of the U.S. budget. To be fair, the interviewee was a member of a pro-U.N. organization.
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The thing that should really scare any sort of publisher (/. in this example) is that once you've censored one post, you may no longer be considered a "common carrier", and then you can be sued for any other post that someone finds offensive for a variety of different reasons. IANAL, but it seems that the loss of common carrier status is more of a danger to the publisher than the effect on their readers of a few instances of censorship (for whatever reason).
I agree with you that it's probably OK for a publisher to remove an occasional, damaging comment. I'm just pointing out that such an action may cause more problems than it solves.
/* (Found in xscreensaver/hacks/screenhack.h) */ .plan file:
/* Found in Don Hopkins'
*
* The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to
* device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVax framebuffer
* on acid. A truely portable X application is required to act like the
* persistent customer in the Monty Python ``Cheese Shop'' sketch. Even
* the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions, like:
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR ROOT?
* root = RootWindow(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* AND WHAT IS YOUR WINDOW?
* win = XCreateSimpleWindow(display, root, 0, 0, 256, 256, 1,
* BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)),
* WhitePixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)))
* OH ALL RIGHT, YOU CAN GO ON.
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR COLORMAP?
* cmap = DefaultColormap(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR?
* favorite_color = 0; / * Black. * /
* / * Whoops! No, I mean: * /
* favorite_color = BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display));
* / * AAAYYYYEEEEE!! (client dumps core & falls into the chasm) * /
*
* WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?
* display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
* WHAT IS YOUR VISUAL?
* struct XVisualInfo vinfo;
* if (XMatchVisualInfo(display, DefaultScreen(display),
* 8, PseudoColor, &vinfo) != 0)
* visual = vinfo.visual;
* AND WHAT IS THE NET SPEED VELOCITY OF AN XConfigureWindow REQUEST?
* / * Is that a SubStructureRedirectMask or a ResizeRedirectMask? * /
* WHAT?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?
* AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!! (server dumps core & falls into the chasm)
*/
Technically I don't think anyone other than the Social Security Administration can require the use of your SSN. Other groups have to generate you a different number for identification purposes if you request it. I remember seeing this on financial aid forms, etc. I'm sure there are a bunch of hoops to go through to do this, however.
That one's scary. I have no problems with a company patenting the devices they used to determine the genome information - obviously that's their competitive advantage. But I don't see how anyone can patent a naturally-occurring gene anymore than you can patent other natural processes, such as surface tension or erosion. The Human Genome Project is involved in discovery of existing information, not creation of new technology. And (theoretically, at least) you can't patent information, you can only patent a device.
You make a good point considering intent, but I think you've misconstrued part of my post. I'm not saying that any variation on this crime should be considered the same as the crime. What I'm trying to point out is that the two variations we're discussing (linking to copyrighted material which may be available to make illegal copies, and pointing to a copying device which may make illegal copies of copyrighted material) are similar enough that making variation A (the mp3 linking) illegal would be just as silly as making variation B (the copier room at the library) illegal. In both cases a crime is committed by those who illegally reproduce copyrighted material. This does not automatically make it a crime for someone to point you to a way to commit copyright infringement, however, and that's what the court in this case is asserting.
Now, if there is an applicable law which states that this linking is illegal, then of course the defendant could be prosecuted under that law. My original point was that the presence of a law against illegal copying does not explicitly mean that the law also can be applied against pointing people to a place where they can commit copyright infringement. If you asked me for directions on the street, and I told you how to get to the bank, and then you robbed it, that doesn't make me a robber, for example. Of course, there's still the question of intent.
As far as intent goes, I would much rather have more specific laws rather than depend on the arbitrary interpretation of vague laws by the judiciary. You pointed out some very good examples of laws that were too broad - expelling children from school for any drugs, for example. In these cases, we don't need to make exceptions to the laws on the basis of intent, we just need more specific laws so that exceptions are unnecessary. This is again the same point I was making before - it is wrong to interpret a law to make more things illegal than are explicitly stated in the law. If there is a specific law forbidding something, then breaking the law is illegal regardless of intent. Contrariwise, if there is no law, then you haven't done anything that was illegal by definition, even if you did it with bad intentions.
Dear Senator or Representative (personalized for each recipient):
I'm writing you as a consequence of a web page (http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate/) set up by Microsoft corporation to encourage innovation in the software industry. This is a laudable goal, although I'm surprised to see it supported by Microsoft. Microsoft is not widely regarded as an innovative force in the software industry. Rather than designing, implementing, and releasing innovative products at a competitive price, Microsoft has instead chosen to consolidate its position in the industry by threatening, colluding against, and sometimes outright buying its competitors while providing substandard products in terms of security, usability, and compatibility with accepted technical standards. By doing so, they have captured 90% of the market for desktop computer software in this country, and 25-33% of the market for server software.
If a car company acted in this manner, or perhaps the telephone company, you can bet that they would be under investigation by Federal and state anti-trust regulators. And as it turns out, Microsoft _is_ under investigation as well by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Although it appears that Microsoft set up their "Freedom to Innovate" site in order to marshal grass-roots support for their position in the DOJ's case against them, I am using the site to send you the opposite message: please ensure freedom to innovate in the software industry for _all companies_ by supporting the DOJ case against Microsoft. Only when the software industry is free from fear of reprisals by Microsoft can true innovation occur.
Innovation is already starting to happen - for example, many computer makers such as IBM, Dell, and Compaq have begun to offer Linux as an option on their machines as their customers have demanded. Do you think that they would have been allowed to do this by Microsoft if the trial were not occurring? In the past Microsoft has threatened computer makers with being blacklisted from selling Microsoft windows on their machines if they also sold products from Microsoft's competition, such as Netscape. Please encourage this recent trickle of innovation to become the torrent that our nation needs - support the DOJ in their efforts to get a just verdict and reasonable remedies for the harm Microsoft has done the software industry.
Thank you for your time,
etc., etc.
Is promoting copyright abuse by others illegal, though? Is it as illegal as the original copyright abuse was? I'll agree that it sounds like the guy knew what he was doing: pointing people to mp3s which were illegally available on the web. Whether or not he had a guilty mind, however, shouldn't affect the law.
The law should either specifically state that assisting others in breaking copyright law is illegal, or else it isn't. If it is illegal, then that sign at my local library that points to the Copier Room needs to come down too. In some cases, promoting a crime is illegal - for example, inciting a riot. But those cases are normally spelled out in the law which involves the original crime. What does the Berne Convention have to say about encouraging copyright violation? That is probably the relevant law in this case.
It seems like the music industry is going about this backwards anyway - there are likely many more sites that link to mp3 sites than sites that actually provide the mp3s themselves. If they were really interested in stopping the problem, they would go after sites which provide the mp3s in the first place, and the problem of people linking to mp3s would be solved. It appears that they're trying to annoy people with a marginal connection to the copyright violation rather than solving the copyright problem at its root.
That's what I was wondering about. The article mentions illegally using AOL to "post" the virus. If they are using "post" in the Usenet sense, then his culpability is much less than if he "post"ed it by mailing it to someone (the old-fashioned meaning of post). Of course, breaking into AOL (if that's what happened) is illegal in and of itself.
Another question is: if this guy only mailed (assuming that it was initially an email and not a news posting) Melissa to one other person, and this other person's computer then started off the chain reaction of email, is the original author liable for all of the damage worldwide, or just the damage to the one machine he sent an email to? You could argue that after that original email, it is downstream recipients of those messages which are in turn attacking other machines. I'm not saying this is a good argument necessarily, but it is an argument.
For example, say a dishonest building contractor uses cheap cement in a building. Then some kids come up and throw rocks at the side of the building. The rocks damage the facade of the building, but then (because the construction was so bad in the first place) the slight damage they've caused to the outside of the building cascades into a complete structural collapse. In this (admittedly far-fetched) case, are those kids responsible for destroying a building? Many people would also assign some blame to the poor construction of the building in the first place.
Likewise, I think it would be fair to assign some blame to those who wrote and deployed such a rickety and insecure email system. There's professional negligence at the root of Melissa at least as much as there is evil intent on the part of the macro virus writer.
This still requires a warrant. As other posters have pointed out, "fishing expeditions" are just as illegal with this law as they were before the law. So no one can legally install a hardware sniffer on your machine without the same sort of warrant necessary to wiretap your phone, for example. This isn't really a big change.
What the authorities are trying to prevent is the sort of situation that occurred with Kevin Mitnick. (I'm not an authority on Mr. Mitnick; I'm sure someone here will correct me if I get the facts a little wrong.) My understanding is that he had encrypted files on his machines which could have been used as evidence against him. However, he refused to surrender the password/keys necessary to get at the files (I can't argue with that, from a 5th Amendment point of view). This new law allows the government to install a hardware monitor on your machine hopefully before you encrypt all of your data. After that, even though you think you are encrypting all of your files, that may no longer be the case. Or perhaps your files are encrypted, but the password and/or keys are stored by the monitoring device, so that there's no wasted time getting information out of the suspect in order to decrypt their files.
Either way, no more messy 5th Amendment issues to cause headaches for law enforcement.
Is the author unhappy that these info appliances don't save everything to the desktop? The last time I saved a file on a windows machine, I put it in a directory with all the other files for that particular project. A hierarchical directory structure is a Good Thing, it isn't just a crazy techie Linux thing, and I think the author is creating a bit of a straw man in this case.
Possibly more important than mutation is genetic crossover, where organisms swap parts of their genome. I've been reading "Artificial Life" by Steven Levy recently, and some of the researchers in his book were able to get the same evolutionary improvements in their creatures with mostly crossover and only a little mutation. In some cases they had mutation turned off all the way and evolution still ground right along. I recommend the book to anyone who's interested in the subject - it makes a great introduction to the topic and covers a lot of ground.
But not a real green dress - that's cruel.
I didn't think of that possibility. However, if you use sufficient redundancy, then not all of the people processing that block will be running a hacked client. As long as there is one legitimate client which records a positive result back at d.net, then you can demonstrate that anybody else who said that block was a negative is running a broken (hacked) client. It would be necessary to send the redundant blocks to different clients simultaneously in order to make sure that any hacked clients are discovered before the user of the hacked client has an opportunity to cash in on their ill-gotten gains.
You could also seed the work units with positives and check to see which clients record those as negative results, and then ban those clients before they cause you to miss a real positive result. Seeding the work units like this means you have to be able to generate more than one positive result, which would be doable in SETI because a number of different results could be the pattern we're looking for. In other words, there are many possible positive results. Seeded positives might be impossible to use in key cracking because there should only be one key to the puzzle and if we already knew the key, we wouldn't need a contest to find it. The only solution that I can see for d.net would be for the client to not return a positive/negative result but just return the processed block for final interpretation as positive or negative back at the d.net server. Unfortunately this moves back into the "security through obscurity" model.
Well, if they've got so many more volunteers than are strictly necessary, why not hand out blocks multiple times and check that all the clients give the same results? If you detect any differences, run that block on a trusted machine at SETI@Home HQ and ban the clients that returned the bogus blocks.
Granted, you aren't going to be able to detect hacked clients returning unchecked blocks very easily this way, because you won't have too many positive blocks to compare the results with. But you could seed the raw data with some known positive blocks to catch clients that are returning incorrect (unchecked) negative results. And if a hacked client is sophisticated enough to return a positive result for a positive block and a negative result for all other blocks, isn't that the same behavior as an unmodified client?
Yes, this extra redundancy would slow the project down, but it sounds like there is more than enough computing power available. If SETI@Home explained that redundant processing was necessary to ensure valid results, I'm sure most users wouldn't have a problem with it. If you're interested in SETI@Home in the first place, you already know that good science and/or good data analysis isn't done overnight and requires a lot of procedural safeguards to get the right results.
It's great that the Libertarian party has principles, and I'll admit that most Libertarians I talk to seem to have a good grasp on those principles. But however wonderful those principles are, you can't assume that the U.S. was founded with your principles in mind but has since strayed from them. The U.S. Constitution indicates that the principles of government include ensuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare (that's welfare the concept, not welfare the government program). The U.S. has never really followed Libertarian principles in the past; perhaps the American Confederation which briefly preceded the U.S. was closer to these ideals, but the U.S. has always had other concerns beyond simply national defense and domestic justice.
I can't argue with many of the specific complaints that you brought up (many of them are indeed bad things), but none of those problems are unsolvable without a Libertarian government, they just require that our current government change its laws. A Libertarian government wouldn't be immune to passing bad laws either.
That does NOT mean the government has a right to: Dictate what we can and cannot eat and drink (FDA)
I do disagree with this one. The FDA couldn't care less if you enjoy a snack of leaded paint chips in a light motor oil. However, they do care if a company sells this treat labeled as "crunchy watercress salad in a light viniagrette". This is in the interest of protecting individuals from large corporations, which falls under ensuring domestic tranquility.
Can anyone comment on how secure these anonymizers are legally? For example, anon.penet.fi was an anonymizer used by a lot of people until their records were subpoenad to track down a subscriber for a case. It seems to me that the only way an anonymizer could really be protected is if it maintained no logs at all and kept no information regarding their users. Then their servers could be seized but no useful information would be gained as far as their user base. Are there any anonymizers available now which work this way?
Save the Queen!
Which one's the Queen?
I am!
No you're not!
Freedom! Horrible horrible freedom!
Actually, it's not what you think - my comment started at 2, as will this one I expect. If you have enough highly-ranked posts you can increase your default score from 1 to 2. This was a lot easier a month or two ago when there was more moderation == more chances to be marked up. I'm not sure how long it takes for the lack of positive moderation to shift your default score back to 1. I haven't had any posts moderated up in a while but I still end up defaulting at 2. Since this post is completely off-topic, I expect my default will change soon :)
That being said, I preferred /. a few months ago with more moderation, rather than less. More moderation increased the delta between good posts and bad posts, so that it was pretty clear when the comment quality was falling off rapidly. Now with less moderation, good posts usually get marked up and poor posts sometimes get marked down, but not often enough. Result: you have to dive deeper into the 1 and 0 level posts to make sure you see all the good comments.
Universal published their content on the web with no access restrictions. If people go to that content and download it, I don't see a problem as long as the referring site didn't misrepresent the actual source of the content. A previous article on /. discussed displaying someone else's site in your frame with your advertisements. This wouldn't be OK, because in a way that misrepresents the source of the content. But if the Movie-List says "Go get movie trailers from Universal", then no one is deceived and I don't see how Universal can complain. Apparently in this case Movie-List didn't list the source of the content, so their case isn't as strong. But if the source is attributed, I don't see a problem.
As another poster mentioned, there's no reason that Universal can't set up a technical solution - generate random URLs for each visitor, only serve the content to browsers referred from one of their sites, etc. But if they make content freely available on the 'net with no access restrictions, I don't see how they can complain if people download it. What if I just typed in a random URL and happened to hit one of their trailers without going through their site?
This happens a lot. I have a Linux Today slashbox set up at the top of my /. page, and I always wonder why the /. folks don't do the same to get the news at the same time. Maybe it's journalistic courtesy - if somebody else gets the scoop, you let them have it for a while before publishing your own article?
I'd certainly like to see some of the details filled in on this plan, as the NYT was fairly vague about it. This is probably because the plan isn't close to final yet. What sort of "patterns of patterns" are being monitored here? Other than detecting quantity-based attacks such as smurfs and mailbombs, I don't see what this monitoring can accomplish. Most attackers of other systems will look more or less like authorized users in terms of the quantity of bandwidth they use in their attacks. Only by inspecting the actual contents of their packets could you find out what their actions are, and there are way too many packets flying around for that. Also, how is this monitoring system planning to differentiate between authorized users doing potentially dangerous things (rebooting a server, etc) and unauthorized users doing the same thing?
Implementation issues aside, this doesn't necessarily decrease the security or privacy of Internet use. With the proper tools anyone could monitor Internet packets right now, whether or not there is a sophisticated government effort to do so. Plaintext email and other unencrypted data will be no less secure under the FBI's plan, and packets to and from your host to the rest of the 'net will just be logged in one more place than they were before. The loss of privacy and security is not as severe as you would think; mostly because there wasn't a whole lot of privacy and security on the 'net to begin with. There's an understanding that you don't monitor traffic that isn't yours, but there's no guarantee that everyone who can see your traffic is high-minded enough to abide by that understanding.
This is not to say that I support the government's monitoring plan - I don't think it will work, for reasons listed above. And of course I object to my traffic being preemptively monitored by a government party without a warrant or a court order. But I'm not sure even in the worst case there would be as much loss of privacy as there would be loss of the illusion of privacy. If this leads to more pervasive use of strong cryptography, wonderful.
A few points as you enlighten yon Mac user...
A new PC can probably boot from a CD, depending on its BIOS. Not all PC's can, however; booting from a CD-ROM drive isn't always supported in older machines' BIOS. With those older machines, just running Linux or a *BSD won't help you boot from a CD if your BIOS won't allow it.
What this article means: the original SAFE bill was a big step forward in allowing exports of U.S. crypto. This new version of the bill contains amendments made by the House Armed Services Committee. This particular version of SAFE doesn't include many of the pro-encryption points made in the first version. The House Rules Committee gets to decide which version of the bill goes to vote before the full House - the original, the crippled Armed Services Committee version, or some other version.
What this article doesn't mean: the entire House have totally reversed themselves on what they will support and are now strongly anti-crypto. The President will assume full control of crypto exports and this control can't be challenged in court. These things should not be read out of this article.
My opinion: It may be the case that SAFE will be watered down somewhat when it reaches the floor of the full House. Depending on the political realities of getting legislation through the House, some amount of compromise is probably unavoidable. The original SAFE bill was a big step forward though, and I don't think that momentum can be totally erased or even slowed for long. There are too many legitimate uses for encryption, and U.S. companies are only going to lose more money in the international market if they can't compete with strong crypto. The government may not want to encourage individual use of cryptography (and may even want to discourage it, depending on your level of paranoia) but there will be enough money in the business uses of encryption that export controls will have to be relaxed.
Disclaimer: I work for a large nameless company which would be very happy to export strong crypto. No more mainaining two product lines!
As I said, the President can fire investigators now that the independent counsel law has been allowed to expire by Congress. But before it expired (which was within the last couple of months, IIRC), the President could not have fired Ken Starr. I wasn't aware that Nixon had fired investigators, but I imagine that his actions led directly to the independent counsel act in the first place. Now that it has expired, we'll probably wish we still had it someday.
It's true that the President can fire some of the people who could have him removed from office, (namely those in the Executive branch which you mentioned) but he can't fire all of the people who could remove him - for example, Congress. I'm sorry if I read your original post incorrectly; I understood it to mean that the President could fire any and all threats to his remaining in office, which is not correct.
It's true that there was an impeachment this year - I was incorrect to call it a near-impeachment.
That I can agree with that - for example, Pres. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus (show cause for imprisonment) during the Civil War. He probably suspended other rights as well, that's just the first one I thought of. I won't argue with that interpretation; I just don't think it's correct to say that the President can suspend the entire Constitution. No one can unilaterally do that.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the U.S. debt to the U.N., or just the U.S. debt in general. I don't know about the back debt to the U.N. I did hear on the news the other day that the U.S. annual contribution to the U.N. was supposed to be around 300 million dollars. The source who was being interviewed mentioned that this was less than 1% of the U.S. budget. To be fair, the interviewee was a member of a pro-U.N. organization.