Prior to the advent of public key crypto, the problem of key distribution meant that useful cryptography would be limited to the powerful who could afford the expense of secure transportation of symmetric keys, such as the military. PK crypto largely eliminated the problem of key distribution, leaving only the much easier problem of creating a public key infrastructure (PKI).
The danger is that quantum computers will make public key crypto useless, setting us back to a time when useful crypto is reserved for those that can afford symmetric key distribution systems, or quantum crypto, which - if possible - is likely to be incredibly expensive.
Now I would never suggest that we stop research in these areas, but I do think that it gives us a limited window to obtain free communication for all while we still have the tools to achieve it.
Advances in communication technology, just as it is making it more difficult to control copyrighted information, will also make privacy more and more difficult to enforce. Consider a world where there are cameras on every street (perhaps privately owned), which can track everything you do in public. This could be placed into a public database, or on to a system like Freenet.
Of course it is not all bad, since these exact same tools could be used to monitor the monitors. The police may be able to use these tools to watch us, but we will also be able to use them to watch the police.
Rather than wasting time trying to prevent application of this technology (which will ultimately be futile), we should be trying to ensure that everyone has access to it.
The point is that if the government creates a good law, then by-all-means, use it the way it was intended, but don't provide ammunition for those who would prevent such laws in the future by abusing them. How does using the Data Protection Act to force a fast-food chain to hand over CCTV footage of you achieve anything other than pissing people off?
So essentially your response to this is that the British government, unlike every other government on the planet, is completely trustworthy because Gordon Brown is a salt-of-the-earth kinda guy, and the British police are flawless?
Is this the same government which pays for a security service (MI6) which has the capability of censoring any information regarding how they spend the taxpayers money. Are these the same police who, on several occasions, framed innocent people for the purposes of providing sacraficial lambs after a number of IRA terrorist attacks in the 70s? Are these the same police who are virtually invisible on the streets of London until after a crime has been committed (which they see on their beloved CCTV)?
The article is right, the British have no experience of totalitarian government, and as a result people like you think that it could never happen in Britain. I am sure that totalitarian government was probably the last thing on the German's minds in the 1920s too. The main difference is that Hitler never came close to the surveillance capabilities that the British government now have.
Note: And before you dismiss me as a dumb yank who knows nothing, I spent 6 years living in the UK (4 in Scotland, 2 in London), and originate from Dublin, Ireland. I even went through 6 months of police training in Scotland before deciding that the police wasn't for me.
Firstly, the term "piracy" was intended with irony.
I am not that fussy about who gets karma, but I do think that plagerism is dishonest, and wanted to raise the issue. I suspect that the/. moderators would probably rather not get into the business of detecting and punishing plagerism, however moderators should take action - unfortunately they haven't in this case.
It isn't a question of claiming property rights over words, it is a simple issue of honesty. It is reasonable to assume that when you post a comment it is your own words unless you attribute it to someone else. You didn't attribute those words to their author, and thus implied that they were yours.
As for "neener neener neener", it is now clear to anyone who had read my comments (and your admission) that you are dishonest. I don't think you can claim this as a victory, in fact, you have been exposed as a plagiarist, and an immature one at that. Congratulations.
I also note with interest that you don't even have a +2 bonus, so the fact that you needed to use someone else's words to get moderated up does not really say good things about your intellectual ability now does it?
This is moderator manipulation. This is a verbatim copy of a comment I posted in response to someone who was complaining that peer to peer systems need interoperability. You may notice that this issue isn't raised in Katz's article.
This guy is the worst kind of karma whore, he doesn't even write his own comments.
This is a verbatim copy of a comment I posted a few weeks ago. It is pretty rude to copy people's stuff without attribution. I will see if I can find the comment in question and post it, but I am pretty sure it is identical.
Freenet does largely what you describe, in a logarithmically scalable manner (which differenciates it from Gnutella which isn't very scalable). Freenet caches data automatically, moving it closer to demand, and replicating popular data, where as Gnutella only shares what is already on your machine. If you are interested in learning more I suggest reading this paper.
I recently sent an email to Eazel support regarding some problems I was having with Nautilus. The response made it sound like there was something wrong, the email thanked me for my support at this "challenging time", yet I have not heard that Eazel was having any problems.
It is not my intention to start rumours, but it would be a real shame if they were having problems since Nautilus has so much potential, but is still somewhat unusable (too bloated, and too difficult to install).
I note that there is now a built-in firewall, I wonder what this will mean for P2P applications such as Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet. Will this application permit incoming connections? Will software producers need to get "authorized" by Microsoft to allow the application through the firewall? What does this mean for free software on Windows?
When will these people see that people are not going to pay for hardware which prevents them from exercising their legal right to fair use of copyrighted material. The arrogance of these companies is breath-taking, that they think they can make me pay for something which hurts my interests.
We need to ensure that enough people are well-informed about any hardware which incorporates this kind of technology, that it falls flat on its face, and whichever companies are pusing it are stung badly and punished for their arrogance.
Almost everyone I know uses the Internet, even my parents are keen to use it. If you told somebody this 6 years ago, they might not be surprised by it, but they would be surprised that we characterized that as a failure. The Internet has changed many people's lives, changed the way we buy things, and changed the way we communicate. Just because if failed to meet the expectations of sheep-like venture capitalists who poured money into some extremely dumb ideas just because they has a website, doesn't mean that it was a failure overall.
We need to get some perspective on this, the Internet has been, and will continue to be, an incredible success.
The thing that irks me, and the thing you have failed to address, is the expectation that all P2P systems should interoperate. Of course, it is good when people standardize on open protocols such as XML and XML-RPC, but using XML doesn't suddenly make your software interoperable, and sometimes it isn't possible. For example, the communication protocol used in Freenet has very specific requirements in terms of crypto, forward deniability, and security, which would mean that we anyone who wanted to talk to Freenet must speak Freenet's language.
Interoperability is a good goal in general terms, but there is nothing about P2P systems which makes them more in-need of interoperability than any other software. In many cases, TCP/IP is all the interoperability they need.
You seem to fall into the common trap of thinking that the different P2P architectures are just different approaches to doing the same thing. This isn't the case, there is actually very little in common between the various architectures as they generally have very different goals. For example, Napster and Gnutella are both designed to let people share their mp3s with other people, Freenet is designed to provide a secure forum for free speech, Seti@home is designed to combine people's spare cycles to find aliens etc. These systems are as different as chalk and cheese, just because many journalists think they fall under the P2P buzzword, doesn't mean that they have any more in common than any other software, nor that there is any more room for interoperability than there is with any other software that communicates via the Internet.
The claim that P2P would be great if only the systems would interoperate really doesn't bear much scrutiny, TCP/IP is often the full extent of what these systems have in common. This isn't a flaw, it is a simple fact.
It depends on what people are used to. If Microsoft change their licence, do you think that thousands of CIOs will risk their careers on changing their primary software platform? Of course not, meaning that people will grow used to this kind of licence and they will become widespread.
With Debian installing the latest security updates is as simple as running a single command, in fact, if you care to set up a cron job, you can have your machine do this automatically (although this could be slightly risky). I also suspect that Debian's updates are much more frequent that Microsoft's.
The Trolltech copy of the 2.3.0 source is really slow, so I have mirrored it in Freenet for those who want it. Freenet users can find it at freenet:KSK@qt-x11-2.3.0.tar.gz.
Slashdot Mirror
The danger is that quantum computers will make public key crypto useless, setting us back to a time when useful crypto is reserved for those that can afford symmetric key distribution systems, or quantum crypto, which - if possible - is likely to be incredibly expensive.
Now I would never suggest that we stop research in these areas, but I do think that it gives us a limited window to obtain free communication for all while we still have the tools to achieve it.
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Of course it is not all bad, since these exact same tools could be used to monitor the monitors. The police may be able to use these tools to watch us, but we will also be able to use them to watch the police.
Rather than wasting time trying to prevent application of this technology (which will ultimately be futile), we should be trying to ensure that everyone has access to it.
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Is this the same government which pays for a security service (MI6) which has the capability of censoring any information regarding how they spend the taxpayers money. Are these the same police who, on several occasions, framed innocent people for the purposes of providing sacraficial lambs after a number of IRA terrorist attacks in the 70s? Are these the same police who are virtually invisible on the streets of London until after a crime has been committed (which they see on their beloved CCTV)?
The article is right, the British have no experience of totalitarian government, and as a result people like you think that it could never happen in Britain. I am sure that totalitarian government was probably the last thing on the German's minds in the 1920s too. The main difference is that Hitler never came close to the surveillance capabilities that the British government now have.
Note: And before you dismiss me as a dumb yank who knows nothing, I spent 6 years living in the UK (4 in Scotland, 2 in London), and originate from Dublin, Ireland. I even went through 6 months of police training in Scotland before deciding that the police wasn't for me.
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I am not that fussy about who gets karma, but I do think that plagerism is dishonest, and wanted to raise the issue. I suspect that the /. moderators would probably rather not get into the business of detecting and punishing plagerism, however moderators should take action - unfortunately they haven't in this case.
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As for "neener neener neener", it is now clear to anyone who had read my comments (and your admission) that you are dishonest. I don't think you can claim this as a victory, in fact, you have been exposed as a plagiarist, and an immature one at that. Congratulations.
I also note with interest that you don't even have a +2 bonus, so the fact that you needed to use someone else's words to get moderated up does not really say good things about your intellectual ability now does it?
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This guy is the worst kind of karma whore, he doesn't even write his own comments.
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I recently sent an email to Eazel support regarding some problems I was having with Nautilus. The response made it sound like there was something wrong, the email thanked me for my support at this "challenging time", yet I have not heard that Eazel was having any problems.
It is not my intention to start rumours, but it would be a real shame if they were having problems since Nautilus has so much potential, but is still somewhat unusable (too bloated, and too difficult to install).
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We need to ensure that enough people are well-informed about any hardware which incorporates this kind of technology, that it falls flat on its face, and whichever companies are pusing it are stung badly and punished for their arrogance.
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We need to get some perspective on this, the Internet has been, and will continue to be, an incredible success.
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Interoperability is a good goal in general terms, but there is nothing about P2P systems which makes them more in-need of interoperability than any other software. In many cases, TCP/IP is all the interoperability they need.
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The claim that P2P would be great if only the systems would interoperate really doesn't bear much scrutiny, TCP/IP is often the full extent of what these systems have in common. This isn't a flaw, it is a simple fact.
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