We have been thinking about this problem for some time. Our solution is a mechanism called "subspaces", where users can effectively vouch for the authenticity of data, even though that data might be anonymously inserted into the network. Even those vouching for data can remain anonymous, they will be motivated to stay honest to maintain the reputation of their anonymous identity. You can learn more about subspaces here.
I am looking forward to the well-written rebuttal to this paper. While I am an Open Source developer myself, Open Source isn't my "cause" per-se and it is probably best left to someone whose cause it is.
RMS probably isn't the best person to write the rebuttal since the paper is written largely from a business perspective, RMS's arguments may be somewhat orthogonal to the main thrust of this paper. Also, the fact that the paper attacks RMS directly (suggesting that he is not widely respected within the Free Software/Open Source community - which IMHO is bullsh1t) would make it awkward for him to respond without sounding too defensive. ESR might be a better bet - even though I have always seen him as a-little too preoccupied with self-aggrandizement. I would say that Bruce Schneier would be the best person to rebut this given his level of respect in the security community.
There is a big difference between lining your own pockets at the expense of the shareholders whose company you are running into the ground, and trying to figure out what the average age of your newspaper's readership is.
$1024 for a conference pass - that is absolutely rediculous given than many of the people who make Open Source happen don't have the backing of a company that could cover this cost.
Even the 65% off that students get leaves the student with a hefty price-tag, I know that during my student days every pound (went to uni in the UK) was valuable and there was no way I could justify spending over $300 to get into a conference just for the privilige of speaking to others who have also had to fork out (I find the people I meet at conferences are often much more interesting than those speaking at them).
This will give American companies an economic advantage. The Kyoto restrictions, if implimented, would bring any industrialized nation's economy to it's knees. Does anyone have any CLUE as to how expensive it will be to reduce all emissions 8%?
Germany has already reduced emmissions by 19% - is its economy on it's knees because of it?
His remarks regarding the Japanese come in the category of "they're fucking us over" paranoia.
I think it is pretty amusing that Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc, a Japanese company, is a member of the MPAA these days. It makes the MPAAs jingoistic arguments seem rather ironic. I wonder what they think of his comments....
It is depressing that even as many other western countries make an effort to reduce the damage they are doing to the environment, the US is - if anything - moving in the opposite direction (of course, what do you expect when the leader of the country has such strong ties to the oil industry).
The core problem with this is that it acts as a serious disincentive to other countries "why should we bend over backwards to save our environment when the US continues to pollute it?".
The US government claims that they want to stamp out terrorism, but that is like complaining about crime in your neighborhood while buying drugs from your local dealer - if you do business with dirty people, expect the mud to splash back every now and then. The only real way to do this is to stop interfering in the middle-east, and that means finding an alternative to oil (and no, the answer is not to start digging up Alaska, that would, at best, delay the inevitable).
He's also incredibly humble, if you haven't noticed.
Hey, you are the one who started with the accusations that I am some sort of newbie, unworthy of debating with your holiness, yet even by your own admission (your journal) you are a poor programmer. I simply pointed out the stupidity of taking an elitist attitude with someone who, for all you know, could be a well respected software developer in the open source community.
Your opinion itself speaks volumes about what you know and understand. You're the clueless suit touring the factory, wondering why the steam pipes aren't chromed.
Don't be a dick, you have no idea what I know and understand, but if you did, you would be feeling rather stupid right now. I have been a qualified software engineer for years, on slashdot for a lot longer than you (judging by your user number), so please don't pull that patronising crap on me.
Ever wondered why books of names (the kind that expecting parents buy) are so popular? To put it into computing jargon: we like to give our children 'meaningful identifiers'.
So it is with computers, not least because system administrators in charge of large sites would have a hard time remembering all the individual IP addresses.
The problem is not where DNS is being used as some form of UID, but where DNS is being used as a tool to allow people to locate information relevant to a particular concept, such as "www.dictionary.com" etc. That was never DNSs intended purpose. It is the fact that DNS is being used well beyond its initial intended purpose that makes it a kludge.
It is a testament to the inventors that they came up with such an expandable, distributed, hierarchial system.
Perhaps your head has been buried in the sand, but haven't you been paying attention to the problems created by the Internet's centralized architecture (do a search for ICANN here on slashdot for some good pointers).
Then people like you arrived, with much bleeting and moo'ing, shepherded here by marketdroids and buzzwordologists. And things keep getting worse. Why? Because you came here, never bothering to learn the rules, and then wondering, bitching about, and crying why things don't work.
Christ, you are such an idiot. I feel pretty comfortable in saying that I know a lot more about the Internet (including DNS), and how it works than you do. I have written articles for publications like IEEE Internet Computing on communication protocols, lectured at a number of universities (most of which I doubt you could get into as a janitor, let alone a lecturer), and pretty-much done all of the things that would allow me to be as arrogant as you try to be, that you haven't.
If there is a demand for something that we already have at this time, for free and with no effort? In other words, you would like it if I paid for something I already get now for free...
DNS isn't free, it costs money to register a domain name, and it costs money to maintain the DNS infrastructure (which you indrectly pay for once a month to your ISP). Now Google is free, they don't ask for money, they simply ask for you to pay a-little attention to unobtrusive advertising.
Cyber-squatting is simple. Outlaw domain parking, domain transfers, false advertising (which is what registering www.books.com and pointing it at a porn site is), and enforce trademarks.
Oh, and that all magically happens for free? You are suggesting a very expensive band-aid for a completely broken system, and it is the Internet's users that will pay for it, directly or indirectly.
Dumbass. On a fresh install of the browser of your choice (or lack thereof), you can't get everywhere you want to go only by clicking links. If the url field is hidden or disabled, which you advocate, you'll be reduced to clicking a toolbar button or a pre-loaded bookmark. I'm sure one such will be a searh engine... but with M$ can you count on its integrity?
Even if that were the situation now, it need not be the situation in the future, and certainly doesn't justify the expense and inefficency of the DNS system.
I-S-P bad. No like us have nice web names. Must use bad homepage **DAMN*... It can't be done.
Er, and exactly how does the DNS system help to solve this problem? With DNS you get the domain that you can afford (if someone else doesn't get there first), and only if your ISP wants you to. With Google, they try to allow those who want to find your website, to find it, irrespective of your ISPs preference.
But stop ranting yourself about how the current ones are ugly, when you have no clue why they are even like they are.
It is pretty clear that I probably know a-lot more about the current Internet's architecture than you do, you certainly don't know enough about me to claim that I have "no clue" - and if you did know anything about me, you would be feeling pretty stupid right now.
DNS isn't broken, and it isn't ugly. As a protocol, it is highly distributable, robust, and solves the IP-human readable name problem as well as anything that has ever been published.
It is broken and it is ugly, and Google is an excellent example of how it could be done while avoiding all of the problems I have pointed out with DNS.
This is one of the things that "RealNames" was trying to fix/exploit. Of course it has since gone out of business.
The main problem with developing a replacement for the DNS function/service, is getting everyone to agree on how the service will be provided and operate.
Not really, for example, Google is a great replacement for DNS, not functionally equivalent, but basically does the same thing but much more effectively.
Oh, and we should instead rely on a search engine scheme, where a company may never get the users that are searching for it, because of a million idiots (Sadly, they turn out to be non-idiots more often than idiots. My apologies) ranting about XYZ Inc. ?
If there is a demand for a service which locates the authorative websites of corporations, then capitalism will provide. This is a lame argument specific to the way Google happens to work.
First off, it's laziness on the part of morons like yourself, that lust after AOL keywords and are pissed that the internet doesn't bend itself to fit your warped little design philosophies.
Actually, it is insulting wannabe-elitist morons like you that are ruining Slashdot - but that is a different argument. If you think my design philosophy is flawed, why don't you explain why rather than wasting my time with Ad Hominem (look it up) attacks.
Secondly, not everything is the web. Not even close. DNS and domain names aren't about identifying your lousy porn site, they are about identifying a particular host. Done well though (which isn't the case), it's pretty decent at getting you within a few clicks of where you want to be.
What about the cyber-sqatting, cost, and creation of private monopolies? DNS is an ugly ugly solution to the problem of finding IP addresses.
Thirdly, how the fuck do you expect to ever type in the first URL, google.com or whatnot, if it's hidden from you on your brand new Dell? I can see the horror that would be inevitable in such a scheme. microsoft-search.com as a nice little button on the toolbar, that never ever brings up a link to click on for google or yahoo, no matter how you phrase the keywords.
Market forces will create a demand for comprehensive search-engines which aren't biased, in fact, they already have.
Finally, the problem is the fact that the vast majority of ISP's view their customers as users of content that they provide, rather than participants in the first, and largest, p2p network ever devised. At best, you'll recieve a lousy homepage with no ftp, cgibin, or any other goodies, and a lousy url like http://www.smalltown-isp.net/users/~dumbfart/.
What the hell are you ranting about? This has nothing todo with whether your ISP supports cgi.
Sen. Hollings wants to know why there isn't enough compelling content to drive demand for broadband?
Are you just ranting mindlessly or did you actually have a point?
Amazing how many comments betray the fact that people haven't read the article.
At the moment these unicode domain names will not be displayed correctly by web-browsers, rather you will see a bunch of cunfusing control codes, so this threat isn't really a problem yet.
Of course, the underlying problem is that DNS is an ugly kludge which has long-outgrown itself. The administrative cost of constructing a massive global namespace is vast, and we can all see the opportunities for cyber-squatting it creates, to the detriment of the public interest.
These days I am more likely to go to Google and type in a few words, rather than try to guess the URL. The task of finding the website you are interested in should be left to the specialists (like Google and other search engines), we shouldn't try to maintain an ugly, broken, monopolistic, and expensive "first come first serve" architecture like DNS.
There is no good reason why a web user should ever need to see a URL (except perhaps momentum), any more than they need to see the HTML which makes up a document.
I read that, and smelled something fishy. That was almost certainly some marketing moron's idea to mention, since I really doubt the company spent years to develop a hugely expensive three dimensional display in order to SCREEN LUGGAGE.
I despise any company that twists the truth to take advantage of people's fears.
Pretty much everyone is doing it, it is the latest sales tactic for all sorts of things - most of which are completely unrelated to security. Suddenly a CRM package is being described as a way to "profile and track terrorists", a word processor becomes a "terrorist profile authoring device" etc etc.
One of the amazing things about the US is how quickly good-taste goes out the window when it gets in the way of a sale.
Trade secret law has always been more relaxed on the west coast, that is probably the reason why silicon valley grew in California as opposed to on the east coast.
So, by that logic, if it isn't "brought to your attention" then it isn't something you want.
The point is that massive amounts of marketing isn't the only way to bring things to people's attention. If something is desirable, then people will learn about it (through forums like Slashdot).
If you are justifying the record company's existance on the basis that we wouldn't be able to find the music they like unless the record industry was marketing it, then projects like Linux, or bands like the Grateful Dead would never have been brought to people's attention.
"Attention", as everybody on the Internet knows, costs money.
Only if what you are promoting wouldn't have attracted attention in the first place. For example, how much money did it cost to generate the attention surrounding projects like Linux or Gnome in the early days? Obviously the answer is $0.00, those projects received attention because people were interested, not because they were hammered with adverts on television.
The record industry spends large amounts of money on promotion because it is expensive to get people to buy stuff that they otherwise wouldn't want.
I'll tell you who and what piracy hurts : the developer and the developer's spirit.
Hey, it hurts my spirit when i try to chat up a girl in a bar (very hard work - annoys wife too), but does that mean that these girls should be forced to sleep with me?
...would anyone want to use this in preference to Mozilla? Mozilla is rock-solid stable now (at least in my experience). As for user interface, it is just as easy to use as any other web browser I have seen (both installation and usage). Best of all, we know that there are no hidden agendas, the software is written in the best interests of the users (would Netscape include functionality which might block AOL's advertising for-example? I doubt it).
All of this is completely aside from the fact that Mozilla is Open Source, which of course would motivate people to use it even if it was actually inferior to IE and Netscape.
It sounds obvious, but who gets hurt if someone obtains a piece of software without paying, when they wouldn't have paid for it anyway? The answer is simple and obvious - nobody does. The software company hasn't "lost" anything, they are no-poorer than they would have been if that person didn't have the software. In fact, given that their software now has a new user, who may in-the-future have the ability to pay for it, it could be viewed as a useful marketing tool.
This reality is so simple that people easily forget it. Information cannot simply be treated as property, any more than fire can.
Pittsburgh is creating the network to show off its technological savvy and attract new businesses to move there, Gdovic said.
Amazing, they can actually set up a Wifi network which anyone can access - most people do that by mistake...
Just disconnected from earthlink - took 2 minutes
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
I went onto their website, and went to "LiveChat". I remembered my username, but not my password - they got by with the last 4 digits of my credit card number, and 2 minutes later it was done.
Slashdot Mirror
We have been thinking about this problem for some time. Our solution is a mechanism called "subspaces", where users can effectively vouch for the authenticity of data, even though that data might be anonymously inserted into the network. Even those vouching for data can remain anonymous, they will be motivated to stay honest to maintain the reputation of their anonymous identity. You can learn more about subspaces here.
RMS probably isn't the best person to write the rebuttal since the paper is written largely from a business perspective, RMS's arguments may be somewhat orthogonal to the main thrust of this paper. Also, the fact that the paper attacks RMS directly (suggesting that he is not widely respected within the Free Software/Open Source community - which IMHO is bullsh1t) would make it awkward for him to respond without sounding too defensive. ESR might be a better bet - even though I have always seen him as a-little too preoccupied with self-aggrandizement. I would say that Bruce Schneier would be the best person to rebut this given his level of respect in the security community.
There is a big difference between lining your own pockets at the expense of the shareholders whose company you are running into the ground, and trying to figure out what the average age of your newspaper's readership is.
Even the 65% off that students get leaves the student with a hefty price-tag, I know that during my student days every pound (went to uni in the UK) was valuable and there was no way I could justify spending over $300 to get into a conference just for the privilige of speaking to others who have also had to fork out (I find the people I meet at conferences are often much more interesting than those speaking at them).
The core problem with this is that it acts as a serious disincentive to other countries "why should we bend over backwards to save our environment when the US continues to pollute it?".
The US government claims that they want to stamp out terrorism, but that is like complaining about crime in your neighborhood while buying drugs from your local dealer - if you do business with dirty people, expect the mud to splash back every now and then. The only real way to do this is to stop interfering in the middle-east, and that means finding an alternative to oil (and no, the answer is not to start digging up Alaska, that would, at best, delay the inevitable).
At the moment these unicode domain names will not be displayed correctly by web-browsers, rather you will see a bunch of cunfusing control codes, so this threat isn't really a problem yet.
Of course, the underlying problem is that DNS is an ugly kludge which has long-outgrown itself. The administrative cost of constructing a massive global namespace is vast, and we can all see the opportunities for cyber-squatting it creates, to the detriment of the public interest.
These days I am more likely to go to Google and type in a few words, rather than try to guess the URL. The task of finding the website you are interested in should be left to the specialists (like Google and other search engines), we shouldn't try to maintain an ugly, broken, monopolistic, and expensive "first come first serve" architecture like DNS.
There is no good reason why a web user should ever need to see a URL (except perhaps momentum), any more than they need to see the HTML which makes up a document.
I despise any company that twists the truth to take advantage of people's fears. Pretty much everyone is doing it, it is the latest sales tactic for all sorts of things - most of which are completely unrelated to security. Suddenly a CRM package is being described as a way to "profile and track terrorists", a word processor becomes a "terrorist profile authoring device" etc etc.
One of the amazing things about the US is how quickly good-taste goes out the window when it gets in the way of a sale.
Trade secret law has always been more relaxed on the west coast, that is probably the reason why silicon valley grew in California as opposed to on the east coast.
If you are justifying the record company's existance on the basis that we wouldn't be able to find the music they like unless the record industry was marketing it, then projects like Linux, or bands like the Grateful Dead would never have been brought to people's attention.
The record industry spends large amounts of money on promotion because it is expensive to get people to buy stuff that they otherwise wouldn't want.
All of this is completely aside from the fact that Mozilla is Open Source, which of course would motivate people to use it even if it was actually inferior to IE and Netscape.
This reality is so simple that people easily forget it. Information cannot simply be treated as property, any more than fire can.
I went onto their website, and went to "LiveChat". I remembered my username, but not my password - they got by with the last 4 digits of my credit card number, and 2 minutes later it was done.