I never understood why distributed.net always waste their time trying to solve these abstract mathematical problems that really aren't anything more than "my distributed penis is bigger than your non-distributed penis" competitions. We all know roughly how much computing power it takes to crack a key, or do this Golumb ruler thing, it is only a question of whether we have or haven't done it yet (and the world isn't really any better-off if we have). Nothing is proved by achieving it, we already know exactly how difficult and statistically how long it will take. On the other hand, genetic programming is an ideal application to be tackled in a distributed fashion, and could be used to evolve some really interesting stuff (like evolving sorting algorithms - or even creatures which learn to walk!). These guys have the right idea, but what is really needed is for someone like distributed.net to get in on the act.
If you are interested in genetic programming take a look here for more info.
I have often thought about creating a system like CVS but which would operate over the web and be designed to allow a group of people to edit English text. This sounds like an ideal application for such a system. If anyone would like to find out more about my ideas (they are quite well developed although I haven't coded anything) please email me".
It sounds like you failed to have any significant effect. Didn't you put across the multitude of effective arguments against filtering software? It doesn't sound like it. I know that it is different when you are there on the front line, but I find myself asking whether you really represented the anti-censorship side of the debate as effectively as you could have. It doesn't sound like it from your description.
Actually the most valuable asset slashdot has right now is the domain SlashDot.org. This is what people type into their web-browsers to get here, and if someone else got their hands on this domain, and combined it with the slashdot source code, they could probably exorcise a subtle change in management without half the readership even noticing!
I think there is a valid concern that a public company's only true loyalty, when push comes to shove, is to its shareholders and therefore its profit. If a magazine which frequently discussed and reviewed different, say, operating systems, was purchased by the manufacturers of one of those operating systems, would almost certainly lose much credibility in the eyes of its readership. This situation is somewhat different since VA Systems does have an excellent reputation and is widely trusted by the SlashDot readership, but the problem is that VA can only continue to be trusted under its current management, and in a public company, management can change overnight.
So what can SlashDot do in this situation to maintain long-term credibility, short of a mass-resignation of the SlashDot editorial staff? Well, if any form of undue influence was going to manifest itself it would undoubtedly be in the form of article selection, currently a closed process. If this process was opened up to the SlashDot readership, possibly through something similar to the current moderation system, then the editors of SlashDot could correctly point out that they couldn't exert undue influence even if they wanted to! Editors could still submit additional stories (like Katz), so if it seemed that almost every editor-posted story was pro-VA then this would be painfully obvious (as opposed to a subtle censoring of anti-VA articles which would be much more difficult to detect).
At the moment this is something of a toy debate, but things change and I think that it is almost inevitable that Rob and co. will probably have to do something like this in the future if they don't want to risk their integrity and readership.
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A technological answer to a problem born of techno
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I have been working on a project called Freenet for over a year now. The aim is to produce a piece of software to address issues of personal liberty on the Internet. It is now being developed by a small but dedicated team in an Open Source fashion, and we are getting close to the first release of our software (which will initially be written in Java but with potential for implementation in other languages). Check out the link above if interested.
Companies like UBL, IUMA, Farm Club and
MP3.com prove that there are many creative ways to promote new artists online without infringing on the rights of artists and copyright owners.
And who said this? Cary Sherman, Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, RIAA! See this press release if you don't believe me!
"Companies like UBL, IUMA, Farm Club and
MP3.com prove that there are many creative ways to promote new artists online without infringing on the rights of artists and copyright owners"
And who said this? Cary Sherman, Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, RIAA! See this press release if you don't believe me!
Companies like UBL, IUMA, Farm Club and MP3.com prove that there are many creative ways to promote new artists online without infringing on the rights of artists and copyright owners. And who said this? Cary Sherman, Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, RIAA! See On this press release if you don't believe me!
From my brief look at Server 51, SourceForge is lightyears ahead in terms of functionality - I don't think there is much question as to which will be folded into which!
Well, in the original version of the test (which I have read), if memory serves, the judge was supposed to decide whether the subject was male or female (interesting choice of test given Turing's homosexuality), but without the knowledge that the subject might be a computer pretending to be male or female. So the judge would be paying pretty close attention to what the subject was saying, much more so than if the bot was let loose on IRC.
Not really, the trick would be to ensure that the responses given by the bot are non-specific. I wrote a bot like this a while back, when it spotted something like a place name it would respond with "I am in Edinburgh, Scotland - I really like it here". If it spotted the word "edinburgh" in the sentence it might say "I love it here in Edinburgh". That way, even if the person was not asking a question about location, the response can stand-alone, at worst it would constitute an abrupt change of subject, not uncommon on IRC.
Wrong. The Turing Test implies that the person talking to the testee (computer or human) knows that they might be a computer and tries to catch them out. On IRC people probably won't even consider the possibility that they are talking to a bot unless itr says something really silly.
About 5 years ago I wrote a very simple bot which matched regular-expressions and gave appropriate but generic responses. I realized after some time on IRC that conversations, particular those between males and "females", follow a pretty standard pattern. After 2 hours of hacking, I let my bot loose on the net. While some people spotted instantly that something was wrong, others spent literally hours talking to this simple program. Inspired by this, I did consider creating a trigger based system (a trigger being a regexp to match, and an output sentence) which used a genetic algorithm to assess the success of each trigger and to make the best ones "breed". There was also a simple "flag" mechanism to act as a memory. While I acknowledge that such a program could never pass the Turing test, the important thing to remember is that this IRC challenge is not a Turing test as (I suspect) most of the "judges" will be unaware that they are talking to a piece of software and are therefore more likely to give the system the benefit of the doubt when it says something really stupid. If any slashdotters are planning on entering this, email me, I will be happy to pass on my thoughts and knowledge.
There is nothing whatsoever in the GPL which prevents use of Freenet's code in a commercial system, in fact, it is encouraged. What is prevented is incorporating the code into a commercial system and then distributing it as a closed-source piece of software, which I don't think is in Freenet's interests. If a company wishes to implement a closed-source Freenet client, the protocol specs will be freely available and they will be free to do so, but I don't like the idea that anyone will profit from my hard work by restricting its distribution (which is what placing it under a non-open source license would entail).
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It is our hope that once the Java version of the Freenet Server is released that others will implement servers in other languages. Provided that a server complies to the (rather flexible!) Freenet Protocol. The protocol is documented on the homepage, although is still in a state of flux - and will be until the first release of the Java server.
Freenet's philosophy is to allow people to basically run their nodes according to how they see fit. Provided they conform to the Freenet message format, and follow the protocol's reccomendations as to how different message types should be handled, it is irrelevant what language they are written in.
Additionally, to demonstrate Freenet's cross-platform nature, we have already created a Perl client (which allows a user to Interact with the Freenet network).
So, to conclude, while all of our development effort is currently going into the Java version of the server, we intend to make it easy for others to implement the server in other languages (although this would be premature at this stage as there may be minor modifications to the protocol before the first release).
Well, we have made sure that Freenet is compatible with Kaffe and other similar Open Source Java efforts, and we will always ensure that it remains compatible with Open Source Java implementations. Freenet is not language specific, a server can be implemented in any language, but we decided to create a reference implementation in Java because it is cross-platform, because it is not a speed-critical application, and because Java has great support for TCP/IP networking. Others have already implemented clients in languages such as Perl, and there has been talk of a C++ server, but at present all efforts are dedicated to getting the Java implementation off the ground.
Doh! For some reason W3M insists on removing hyperlinks when you preview a comment - the Freenet project homepage is at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/.
Those of you concerned by this article might like to take a look at a project I, and a dedicated band of Java coders, have been working on for almost a year now, which is nearing its first release. It is called Freenet , and aims to make the kind of censorship Katz talks about almost impossible (if not totally impossible). We will be releasing in the next few weeks (under the GPL), when we hope to make quite a bit of noise (Katz has expressed an interest in providing some coverage), but if you would like a sneak-preview, take a look at our project's homepage .
What if the law fails us and the DVD people win the day? It is certainly a possibility we should consider. I have been considering this possibility for over a year now, and the result is a piece of software called The Freenet Server. It is currently nearing completion, and will be released under the GPL. I won't go into more detail here, visit the website for more information.
I don't think it is fair to say that the whole contest was bland and menial. Many of the projects entered over the years have really been on the cutting edge of whatever field they were investigating. As an example, one year's winner developed a new way to use chaos theory and magnetism to determine whether metal had been stressed, very useful in aircraft repair. For my part, I entered a project on Neural Nets, in 1993 which was a few years before they entered the public conciousness, and they year after I developed a new mathematical technique to map clouds of gas based on a similar principal (I discovered later) to that used to find Pluto. Of course, in any contest like this you will get the publicity hounds. I remember a few (some guys one year copied a design for a device which rendered ultrasonic sound audiable out of a physics text book, and then dressed up in Batman costumes claiming it was a "Bat Detector"!).
There are often some really cool projects at this competition, I myself entered one which was a C toolkit for implementing Neural Networks, and another which was basically a completely new mathematical technique (see my homepage for more info).
Many of the projects at this competition make use of "non-mainstream" operating systems. I have seen several using FreeBSD, and many use Linux. Personally I did everything on my Atari Falcon which was in vogue at the time.
The thing is that these guys didn't really do that well, it is quite easy to get "Special Awards", which seems to be what they have won. I myself got several. What counts is the prizes awarded by the judges, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. I myself won 2 Firsts and 1 Third having entered 4 times. If these guys had won the entire competition, then that might have been news.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are interested in genetic programming take a look here for more info.
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So what can SlashDot do in this situation to maintain long-term credibility, short of a mass-resignation of the SlashDot editorial staff? Well, if any form of undue influence was going to manifest itself it would undoubtedly be in the form of article selection, currently a closed process. If this process was opened up to the SlashDot readership, possibly through something similar to the current moderation system, then the editors of SlashDot could correctly point out that they couldn't exert undue influence even if they wanted to! Editors could still submit additional stories (like Katz), so if it seemed that almost every editor-posted story was pro-VA then this would be painfully obvious (as opposed to a subtle censoring of anti-VA articles which would be much more difficult to detect).
At the moment this is something of a toy debate, but things change and I think that it is almost inevitable that Rob and co. will probably have to do something like this in the future if they don't want to risk their integrity and readership.
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Inspired by this, I did consider creating a trigger based system (a trigger being a regexp to match, and an output sentence) which used a genetic algorithm to assess the success of each trigger and to make the best ones "breed". There was also a simple "flag" mechanism to act as a memory. While I acknowledge that such a program could never pass the Turing test, the important thing to remember is that this IRC challenge is not a Turing test as (I suspect) most of the "judges" will be unaware that they are talking to a piece of software and are therefore more likely to give the system the benefit of the doubt when it says something really stupid.
If any slashdotters are planning on entering this, email me, I will be happy to pass on my thoughts and knowledge.
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Freenet's philosophy is to allow people to basically run their nodes according to how they see fit. Provided they conform to the Freenet message format, and follow the protocol's reccomendations as to how different message types should be handled, it is irrelevant what language they are written in.
Additionally, to demonstrate Freenet's cross-platform nature, we have already created a Perl client (which allows a user to Interact with the Freenet network).
So, to conclude, while all of our development effort is currently going into the Java version of the server, we intend to make it easy for others to implement the server in other languages (although this would be premature at this stage as there may be minor modifications to the protocol before the first release).
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Of course, in any contest like this you will get the publicity hounds. I remember a few (some guys one year copied a design for a device which rendered ultrasonic sound audiable out of a physics text book, and then dressed up in Batman costumes claiming it was a "Bat Detector"!).
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Many of the projects at this competition make use of "non-mainstream" operating systems. I have seen several using FreeBSD, and many use Linux. Personally I did everything on my Atari Falcon which was in vogue at the time.
The thing is that these guys didn't really do that well, it is quite easy to get "Special Awards", which seems to be what they have won. I myself got several. What counts is the prizes awarded by the judges, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. I myself won 2 Firsts and 1 Third having entered 4 times. If these guys had won the entire competition, then that might have been news.
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