Re:HAM radio enthusiasts have been doing it for ye
on
Open Networking
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· Score: 1
but 20Mbps still seems very optimistic with any kind of hardware
This very morning I visited a company called NERA who make equipment for doing precisely what we are discussing (internet over radio links). Their top of the range point-to-point systems will do 155 Mb/s.
This sort of thing is not cheap and certainly not affordable for home use, but I was not suggesting that people could easily implement even 20 Mb/s links. I was just pointing out that available RF bandwidth is not the limiting factor.
Re:HAM radio enthusiasts have been doing it for ye
on
Open Networking
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· Score: 2
A typical 2.4Ghz network can handle over 1.2Mbps. Far beyond anything HAM bands can support.
What a load of rubbish. HAM radio has a band at 2.4 GHZ with enough bandwidth for at least 20 Mbps (not to mention 3300-3500 MHz, 5650-5925 MHz etc etc), it even says in the article that these guys got their antennas from amateur radio suppliers. I agree that most amateur packet radio happens at painfully slow baud rates, but there are people doing much higher speed backbones.
The point which I was trying to make is that a wireless LAN consists of two very different technologies. The computer bit (protocols, error checking, addressing etc) and the RF bit (modems (not the same problem as telephone modems), amplifiers, IP3 performance, antennas, propagation etc). The RF bit is every bit as complex as the computer bit. Being an expert in computers does not make you an expert in RF engineering. It is a seperate subject which takes just as long to study at University. HAM radio has spent very many years learning lessons about widely distributed radio LANs, it would be realy stupid to ignore that knowledge when its available free for the asking.
I do research into future aircraft radio equipment and I often meet people who design wonderous inter-aircraft digital comms systems in the fond belief that the RF bit will be easy to add on at the end. They put it all together and prove once again that old adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Then they go white when I tell them how much its going to cost to fix it.
HAM radio enthusiasts have been doing it for years
on
Open Networking
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· Score: 4
HAM radio enthusiasts have been playing with long range wireless LAN for about 15 years or so. Its called packet radio and its what all the Amateur Radio stuff in your kernel source is for.
It seems to me that rather than trying to take wireless LAN technology which is realy designed for short range in-building networking and fixing it to big external antennas (which is basically what these guys are going), it might be a better plan to take technology from the HAM community and adapt it to these unlicenced bands.
The article is vague, but I very much doubt that these wireless LAN radios have the strong signal handling required to operate well when connected to a large external antenna.
Summary: An interesting idea, but one that needs as much imput from radio expert as it does from computer experts. RF engineering is not as simple as it sounds once you start dealing with a lot of signal over a large area.
Both articles say that it is proposed to log telephone calls, not record them.
A list of what numbers people called and for how long is much shorter than a recording of the calls. Likewise, a list of web sites visited takes up rather less space than the web pages themselves.
Although it is disappointing to see people like Adobe not supporting Linux, its not the end of the world and there are some positive points as well.
They may well change their mind when Linux achieves world domination.
We already have several quite acceptable word processors available.
The fewer closed source word processors there are out there, the more people will feel inclined to help develop the open source word processors such as KWord, StarOffice and Abiword, which will then work on all Linux platforms and not just i386.
Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year.
I have heard this problem mentioned numerous times in the media, but no-one ever seems to explain why it is that farmers are forced to buy new seed. Surely, if they don't like that deal they could simply stick with their current crop strain? Obviously, they may get a lower yield and thus lower profits with the old crop, but they can grow their own free seed each year. This seems to be a simple "will this extra cost give more more profit" question such as most small businesses (such as farms) make every day.
Or, is it the case that the big multi-nationals are bribing governements in the third world into making non-GM crops illegal? I would certainls not be surprised if this was the case!
Some of my colleagues here at the British MOD have a GPS simulator which they use for various navigation research tasks. Basically you connect your GPS receiver antenna input to this box of tricks, then type a lat/lon, date and time into the simulator and voila!
So, the bottom line is that anything that relies on GPS data can be faked. Obviously these simulators are expensive, but I presume that the GPS receiver manufacturers all have them, so there most be quite a few in the world.
I very much value the importance of anonymouse voting and I have never told anyone how I have or intend to vote.
Some have suggested that the current paper system is not entirely anonymouse, but the point is that it is transparent. Maybe someone could figure out some way of deducing which ballot paper came from which voter, but here in the UK, counts occure in big halls with representatives from all the competing parties, press and council officials milling about. Doing any large scale ballot paper cross-referencing in this environment without anyone noticing would be seriously difficult.
I am not going to use any sort of electronic voting until the entire system (including source code) is open to full scruteny to ensure than anonymity is maintained.
There is no problem with making wideband antennas. Bandwidths of 10:1 can easily be achieved using various forms of spiral antennas and there are designs which will do more than 20:1 (e.g. 1 to 20 GHz). They do tend to have a low gain, but most of the applications being discussed don't need high antenna gains and there are ways of making higher gain versions if required.
Spiral antennas of this nature are often used in things like radar warning receivers for military aircraft where one needs to listen to a wide range of possible threat radar bands. A modern figher aircraft could easily have 10 spiral antennas on it. Next time you are at an airshow, see if you can spot them (hint: they are usualy under small dome shaped radomes about 5cm across).
I run my Linux on an Alpha, and can't decide whether I should applaud or boo developments of this sort.
I start with the assumption that Borland aren't going to develop their products for any platform other than i386 and in due course ia64, and even if they do produce an Alpha port that will still leave people like the ARM and m68k folk out in the cold. At the end of the day, it boils down to whether the source that comes out of products like this can be compiled with gcc, or whether it is going to need to link with some i386 only libraries.
My first area of forboding is that this will just give companies another excuse for not porting their products to the Alpha "Well, we'd like to port to your platform, but until Borland support it we are stuck". Still, very few software houses are likely to move outside the Intel/AMD monopoly anyway, so I think that issue is probably fairly neutral.
My big problem is the use of products like these to develop open-source apps. Obviously, an application which cannot be compiled unless you have a commercial compiler is not a lot of use to anyone. But suppose that Borland allow people to download the libraries and compiler for free, but you have to pay for the development environment. We would end up with quite a lot of open source projects being written against i386 binary only libraries, and those with other platforms would lose out.
On the other hand, is this product simply makes it easier for authors to build projects which compile using gcc against open source libraries such as Qt (rather like a souped up KDevelop) then I am all for it.
Regretably, I haven't been able to gather enough details from the press-release etc to answer these issues, but I may have missed something. Can anyone else shed any light and tell me whether I should be happy or glum?
Does anyone have any idea when/if Mandrake are going to start distributing their Alpha port as a full product?
I asked one of the guys on Mandrake's stand at the UK Linux Expo last week about this and I think that he said the Alpha port would be fully released with 7.2. Unfortunately, a combination of his poor English and my almost non-existant French coupled with the blaring music on the Mandrake stand, meant that I wasn't sure that he had understood the question.
BTW, the current beta version of Mandrake for Alpha basically installed and works fine on my LX164, but there were a few problems with KDE (e.g. that tedious old KMail bug) which meant that I had to replace some of the RPMS with ones from RedHat 6.2.
So TurboLinux won't say how many employees they laid off. Presumably the US government knows how many employees they have in the USA at any given time, otherwise they couldn't administer the tax system. Could one access this information via the much vaunted freedom of information legislation? Sorry if that is a stupid question, but here in the UK, one often has to put up with Americans boasting of how marvelous freedom of information legislation is.
Here in DERA we have known for many years that GPS is VERY easy to jam. This is not very surprising realy. Any jammer is likely to be much closer to the receiver than the satellites are, plus, since the satellites run off solar power there is a serious limit to their own transmit power. It is no secret at all that an aircraft transmitting only a few watts can disable all GPS receivers (including the military ones) for many miles. There was an article about this in Aviation Week & Space Technology several years ago. The problem is not how to make a jammer, but how to get it close to the enemy and keep it there. This leads to numerous wacky schemes involving unmanned aircraft, parachutes, balloons etc.
The only anti-jam feature on most current GPS systems is the spread spectrum modulation. This is a complex topic in communications engineering and I realy don't have room to explain it in detail. However, the nub is that the signal is mixed with a high speed pseudo-random bit stream. This greatly increases its bandwidth (which BTW in this case does not provide any inherent signal to noise advantage) and causes the energy/Hz to drop below the thermal noise level. The receiver generates an identicle bit stream synchronised with the one on the satellite, but offset by the delay between satellite and receiver (this synchronisations is what's going on whilst your receiver is acquiring). When the second bit stream is combined with the signal from the satellite the energy is "de-spread" and basically gets piled back up into a narrow spike again. The inportant point is that any other signal will not correlate with the bit stream in the receiver. A wide band jammer stays wide-band and a narrow band jammer gets spread. In either case the recovered spike now sticks up above the jammer power. Generating a signal spread in the same way as that from the satellite doesn't help unless you can arrange for it to arrive at the receiver in exact synchronism, and to do this you need to know the exact distance between your jammer and the receiver. BTW, this pallaver is not just done for jam resistance, the synchronised bit stream is a critical part of the navigation solution. If anyone knows of an explanation of the above with diagrams, I suspect that many readers who are not RF engineers would find it useful.
Unfortunately, the above scheme only gives you a spreading gain of about 100. I.E. if your jammer is 100 times louder than the satellite then you still win. Since the satellites are a long was away, this is very easy to achieve.
One solution being actively persued by me and my colleagues in DERA's airborne antennas group and presumably the military research labs of other nations is the use of adaptive antennas. I won't even begin to try and explain how these work, but the bottom line is that by using several antennas combined via some clever electronics one can form nulls in the combined antenna pattern which point at the jammers. This makes the job of the jammer significantly more difficult, but not impossible.
BTW, there is nothing secret in the above. One of our industrial partners exhibited a prototype adaptive GPS antenna at the Farnborough Air Show at least 4 and possibly 6 years ago. Also, as might be expected, most current work in adaptive antennas is aimed at using them to defeat multi-path problems in mobile communications.
Drivers may become available that wouldn't otherwise be available. (Even a closed-source driver is better than nothing.)
If you have any platform other than i386 then 99% of the time closed-source is exactly the same as nothing.
DMCA doesn't mean you can't crack copyprotection
on
'Battling Censorware'
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· Score: 1
...it just means that you must ensure that you don't get caught!!
The thing I can't understand is why the CPHack guys revealed their identities in the first place.
Perhaps they thought that by being outside the USA they were safe from US law (a common sense view which increasingly seems to be wrong).
We need a news group (alt.linux.binaries.something) where folks with "controversial" code can annonymously post their offerings and the rest of us know where to look.
Didn't I read that there was a slight chance that the cphack source could turn out to be illegal and therefore could not be placed under GPL. Since the object of this exercise is to produce a completely legally watertight case a better scheme might be:
- Someone who understands crypto coding (unfortunately that's not me) reads the cphack essay but specifically not the source.
- The then use the knowledge gained to write a completely new cphack which (as suggested by DG) just displays the block list (and which is obviously called something else).
Now for the clever bit:-)
- We choose a country where we believe that the laws are most in our favour and justice is reasonably inexpensive (suggestions?). We then locate a volunteer in that country who (a) believes in the cause and (b) is preferably a minor.
- Said volunteer then claims to have written the code, does all GPL related legal hoop jumping and release it to an expectant world.
- Then we sit back and see what those bastards at Mattel do about it.
Obviously, this needs a bit of covert organising in order to work properly (e.g. maximum use of telephone conversations and floppy discs in jiffy bags rather than possibly traceable email).
Perhaps the above is a council of perfection, but if we could achieve at least the first half we would be getting somewhere.
Yes, I have done something positive to help the cause rather than just sitting and complaining. I paid my money to join EFF. Have you?
Stanley Kubrick (the director of A Clockwork Orange) withdrew the film in the UK soon after it's initial release. With his recent death his estate have now reversed that decision and the film is (or soon will be) released in the UK with an 18 certificate. It was not therefore 'banned' in the manner implied by Spud Zeppelin. Many have speculated about Mr Kubricks motives, but I don't think that anyone realy knows the reason for his decision.
See http://uk.imdb.com/SB?19991207#5 for more details.
UK drivers don't ignore the motorway speed limit because it is irrelevant, they ignore it because it is not enforced. In those places where it is enforced (usually with speed cameras) the percentage driving at less than 70 mph is considerably greater. If the laws on shoplifting were not enforced in the same way then only about 5% - 10% of people would go to the checkout and pay!
Similarly, if these insane new copyright protection laws were not being enforced then we wouldn't be having all this fuss. The entire point is that the film studios have enough money to pay for these laws to be both created and enforced. With those resources you do not require any concensus.
If (for some insane reason) the studios needed people in the UK to drive slower then they could soon pay for a lot more speed cameras and the staff to organise the prosecutions. How? Well, the government likes to farm out as much as possible to private contractors. The studios create a subsidiary (UK driving safety Ltd?) and persuades ministers to give them the job. Then they just run the business at a MASSIVE loss. Yes, the government has even more money than the studios, but they don't like to increase public spending and drivers are voters.
Finally, a couple of points of fact: 1. On many Southern motorways there is so much traffic during rush hours that it is tough to exceed 30 mph! 2. I am both incredibly frugal and green so I save fuel by rarely exceeding 60 mph. I think that puts me in the 5%.
An excellent summary of the situation and the most important point is the one about DeCSS working on Windows. I think that this one fact is in serious danger of sinking our case. Yes, I know about the problems with reading UDF filesystems, but that is far too technical an argument for the judge, let alone the press, to understand.
We need LiViD to produce a simple DVD player with a graphical interface which is open source and written specifically for Linux. It doesn't initially need any more than a play and a stop button and most importantly does not rely on or have the option to produce any unencrypted video files on the disc. This would be exactly what CSS was hacked for. A program to play DVDs on Linux which even the judge can understand how to use. We then remove DeCSS from all of the mirror sites and replace it with the new player. I think that our case would then be much stronger.
In response to other points raised by cmuncey; getting VA to buy the right to produce a DVD player is not going to solve the problem. VA are an i386 only shop (at least last time I checked). At present, Linux runs on 9 (count them in linux/arch) platforms. Would VA provide player software for all of them (or at least all the ones to which the hardware can be connected)? An open source player runs on all platforms. If an i386 binary only player appears we are going to need some non-i386 machines available to demonstrate in court that the problem still exists.
Finally, I endorse the call to join EFF. I joined last week, and let me tell you that the feeling of having done something more productive than just whining on/. is worth every penny.
So what sort of binary are these "Binary" filters going to be written in then? It wouldn't be i386 binary would it by any chance??? How is that going to run on my Alpha then?
It is very easy to campaign against the Microsoft monopoly whilst supporting the i386 one!!
Let's face some facts. The movie industry are not creating all this fuss to put the genie back into the bottle. They know, just as we do, that this is impossible. BUT, they hope that if they can bankrupt and few people and better still get one or two thrown into jail then when they finally release DVD2 (plus other schemes which rely on encryption to protect interlectual property such as purchasing music to download) everyone will be too scared to try and crack it and they will be able to stitch the consumer up however they like.
Now, we are not going to be able to fight this sort of thing through the courts (although that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try in the current cases) because:
a) The movie industry can afford lots of very good lawyers.
b) If the laws are not adequate they have enough money to pay polititions to change them.
Plus, we are not going to be able to get enough public support to get the few non-corrupt polititions to help because:
a) Very few people are going to be able to understand the issues (try explaining this case to your mother and see how you get on!).
b) The general media are unlikely to report the cases accurately.
c) There are an awful lot of "important" issues (economy, violent crime, environment) which the vast majority of the public care about far more than they are ever going to care about these (to them) obscure technical issues.
So, as in a military campaign we have to see what can be done about moving the fight to areas where we can play to our strengths. What is that area? Well obviously it is the INTERNET.
Most goverments would dearly like to remove child porn from the internet, yet huge quantities still slosh around every day. How is this achieved? Simple, the images are anonymously posted at regular intervals to usenet newsgroups. Do we have a newsgroup where such postings regularly occur? Perhaps we had better start one and make sure that everyone knows where it is.
The other solution has been suggested by others so I shall not labour the point. We need a server in a "free" country (e.g. China, Cayman Islands etc) through which software authors can establish an anonymous internet presence. Unfortunately, I doubt that I am living in a "free" country (UK) and my software skills are not up to the job, so I can only propose and support the idea, but at the end of the day, this is what we are going to HAVE to do.
Slashdot Mirror
This very morning I visited a company called NERA who make equipment for doing precisely what we are discussing (internet over radio links). Their top of the range point-to-point systems will do 155 Mb/s.
This sort of thing is not cheap and certainly not affordable for home use, but I was not suggesting that people could easily implement even 20 Mb/s links. I was just pointing out that available RF bandwidth is not the limiting factor.
What a load of rubbish. HAM radio has a band at 2.4 GHZ with enough bandwidth for at least 20 Mbps (not to mention 3300-3500 MHz, 5650-5925 MHz etc etc), it even says in the article that these guys got their antennas from amateur radio suppliers. I agree that most amateur packet radio happens at painfully slow baud rates, but there are people doing much higher speed backbones.
The point which I was trying to make is that a wireless LAN consists of two very different technologies. The computer bit (protocols, error checking, addressing etc) and the RF bit (modems (not the same problem as telephone modems), amplifiers, IP3 performance, antennas, propagation etc). The RF bit is every bit as complex as the computer bit. Being an expert in computers does not make you an expert in RF engineering. It is a seperate subject which takes just as long to study at University. HAM radio has spent very many years learning lessons about widely distributed radio LANs, it would be realy stupid to ignore that knowledge when its available free for the asking.
I do research into future aircraft radio equipment and I often meet people who design wonderous inter-aircraft digital comms systems in the fond belief that the RF bit will be easy to add on at the end. They put it all together and prove once again that old adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Then they go white when I tell them how much its going to cost to fix it.
It seems to me that rather than trying to take wireless LAN technology which is realy designed for short range in-building networking and fixing it to big external antennas (which is basically what these guys are going), it might be a better plan to take technology from the HAM community and adapt it to these unlicenced bands.
The article is vague, but I very much doubt that these wireless LAN radios have the strong signal handling required to operate well when connected to a large external antenna.
Summary: An interesting idea, but one that needs as much imput from radio expert as it does from computer experts. RF engineering is not as simple as it sounds once you start dealing with a lot of signal over a large area.
G1DGL
A list of what numbers people called and for how long is much shorter than a recording of the calls. Likewise, a list of web sites visited takes up rather less space than the web pages themselves.
They may well change their mind when Linux achieves world domination.
We already have several quite acceptable word processors available.
The fewer closed source word processors there are out there, the more people will feel inclined to help develop the open source word processors such as KWord, StarOffice and Abiword, which will then work on all Linux platforms and not just i386.
I have heard this problem mentioned numerous times in the media, but no-one ever seems to explain why it is that farmers are forced to buy new seed. Surely, if they don't like that deal they could simply stick with their current crop strain? Obviously, they may get a lower yield and thus lower profits with the old crop, but they can grow their own free seed each year. This seems to be a simple "will this extra cost give more more profit" question such as most small businesses (such as farms) make every day.
Or, is it the case that the big multi-nationals are bribing governements in the third world into making non-GM crops illegal? I would certainls not be surprised if this was the case!
So, the bottom line is that anything that relies on GPS data can be faked. Obviously these simulators are expensive, but I presume that the GPS receiver manufacturers all have them, so there most be quite a few in the world.
Surely most people in the USA will think, If it does kill me I don't care because I can just sue the cell phone company for millions! :-)
Some have suggested that the current paper system is not entirely anonymouse, but the point is that it is transparent. Maybe someone could figure out some way of deducing which ballot paper came from which voter, but here in the UK, counts occure in big halls with representatives from all the competing parties, press and council officials milling about. Doing any large scale ballot paper cross-referencing in this environment without anyone noticing would be seriously difficult.
I am not going to use any sort of electronic voting until the entire system (including source code) is open to full scruteny to ensure than anonymity is maintained.
Spiral antennas of this nature are often used in things like radar warning receivers for military aircraft where one needs to listen to a wide range of possible threat radar bands. A modern figher aircraft could easily have 10 spiral antennas on it. Next time you are at an airshow, see if you can spot them (hint: they are usualy under small dome shaped radomes about 5cm across).
I start with the assumption that Borland aren't going to develop their products for any platform other than i386 and in due course ia64, and even if they do produce an Alpha port that will still leave people like the ARM and m68k folk out in the cold. At the end of the day, it boils down to whether the source that comes out of products like this can be compiled with gcc, or whether it is going to need to link with some i386 only libraries.
My first area of forboding is that this will just give companies another excuse for not porting their products to the Alpha "Well, we'd like to port to your platform, but until Borland support it we are stuck". Still, very few software houses are likely to move outside the Intel/AMD monopoly anyway, so I think that issue is probably fairly neutral.
My big problem is the use of products like these to develop open-source apps. Obviously, an application which cannot be compiled unless you have a commercial compiler is not a lot of use to anyone. But suppose that Borland allow people to download the libraries and compiler for free, but you have to pay for the development environment. We would end up with quite a lot of open source projects being written against i386 binary only libraries, and those with other platforms would lose out.
On the other hand, is this product simply makes it easier for authors to build projects which compile using gcc against open source libraries such as Qt (rather like a souped up KDevelop) then I am all for it.
Regretably, I haven't been able to gather enough details from the press-release etc to answer these issues, but I may have missed something. Can anyone else shed any light and tell me whether I should be happy or glum?
I suspect that there may be some countries where my current degree of smugness would be illegal :-).
Does anyone have any idea when/if Mandrake are going to start distributing their Alpha port as a full product?
I asked one of the guys on Mandrake's stand at the UK Linux Expo last week about this and I think that he said the Alpha port would be fully released with 7.2. Unfortunately, a combination of his poor English and my almost non-existant French coupled with the blaring music on the Mandrake stand, meant that I wasn't sure that he had understood the question.
BTW, the current beta version of Mandrake for Alpha basically installed and works fine on my LX164, but there were a few problems with KDE (e.g. that tedious old KMail bug) which meant that I had to replace some of the RPMS with ones from RedHat 6.2.
So TurboLinux won't say how many employees they laid off. Presumably the US government knows how many employees they have in the USA at any given time, otherwise they couldn't administer the tax system. Could one access this information via the much vaunted freedom of information legislation? Sorry if that is a stupid question, but here in the UK, one often has to put up with Americans boasting of how marvelous freedom of information legislation is.
The only anti-jam feature on most current GPS systems is the spread spectrum modulation. This is a complex topic in communications engineering and I realy don't have room to explain it in detail. However, the nub is that the signal is mixed with a high speed pseudo-random bit stream. This greatly increases its bandwidth (which BTW in this case does not provide any inherent signal to noise advantage) and causes the energy/Hz to drop below the thermal noise level. The receiver generates an identicle bit stream synchronised with the one on the satellite, but offset by the delay between satellite and receiver (this synchronisations is what's going on whilst your receiver is acquiring). When the second bit stream is combined with the signal from the satellite the energy is "de-spread" and basically gets piled back up into a narrow spike again. The inportant point is that any other signal will not correlate with the bit stream in the receiver. A wide band jammer stays wide-band and a narrow band jammer gets spread. In either case the recovered spike now sticks up above the jammer power. Generating a signal spread in the same way as that from the satellite doesn't help unless you can arrange for it to arrive at the receiver in exact synchronism, and to do this you need to know the exact distance between your jammer and the receiver. BTW, this pallaver is not just done for jam resistance, the synchronised bit stream is a critical part of the navigation solution. If anyone knows of an explanation of the above with diagrams, I suspect that many readers who are not RF engineers would find it useful.
Unfortunately, the above scheme only gives you a spreading gain of about 100. I.E. if your jammer is 100 times louder than the satellite then you still win. Since the satellites are a long was away, this is very easy to achieve.
One solution being actively persued by me and my colleagues in DERA's airborne antennas group and presumably the military research labs of other nations is the use of adaptive antennas. I won't even begin to try and explain how these work, but the bottom line is that by using several antennas combined via some clever electronics one can form nulls in the combined antenna pattern which point at the jammers. This makes the job of the jammer significantly more difficult, but not impossible.
BTW, there is nothing secret in the above. One of our industrial partners exhibited a prototype adaptive GPS antenna at the Farnborough Air Show at least 4 and possibly 6 years ago. Also, as might be expected, most current work in adaptive antennas is aimed at using them to defeat multi-path problems in mobile communications.
If you have any platform other than i386 then 99% of the time closed-source is exactly the same as nothing.
The thing I can't understand is why the CPHack guys revealed their identities in the first place.
Perhaps they thought that by being outside the USA they were safe from US law (a common sense view which increasingly seems to be wrong).
We need a news group (alt.linux.binaries.something) where folks with "controversial" code can annonymously post their offerings and the rest of us know where to look.
- Someone who understands crypto coding (unfortunately that's not me) reads the cphack essay but specifically not the source.
- The then use the knowledge gained to write a completely new cphack which (as suggested by DG) just displays the block list (and which is obviously called something else).
Now for the clever bit :-)
- We choose a country where we believe that the laws are most in our favour and justice is reasonably inexpensive (suggestions?). We then locate a volunteer in that country who (a) believes in the cause and (b) is preferably a minor.
- Said volunteer then claims to have written the code, does all GPL related legal hoop jumping and release it to an expectant world.
- Then we sit back and see what those bastards at Mattel do about it.
Obviously, this needs a bit of covert organising in order to work properly (e.g. maximum use of telephone conversations and floppy discs in jiffy bags rather than possibly traceable email).
Perhaps the above is a council of perfection, but if we could achieve at least the first half we would be getting somewhere.
Yes, I have done something positive to help the cause rather than just sitting and complaining. I paid my money to join EFF. Have you?
Stanley Kubrick (the director of A Clockwork Orange) withdrew the film in the UK soon after it's initial release. With his recent death his estate have now reversed that decision and the film is (or soon will be) released in the UK with an 18 certificate. It was not therefore 'banned' in the manner implied by Spud Zeppelin. Many have speculated about Mr Kubricks motives, but I don't think that anyone realy knows the reason for his decision.
See http://uk.imdb.com/SB?19991207#5 for more details.
Similarly, if these insane new copyright protection laws were not being enforced then we wouldn't be having all this fuss. The entire point is that the film studios have enough money to pay for these laws to be both created and enforced. With those resources you do not require any concensus.
If (for some insane reason) the studios needed people in the UK to drive slower then they could soon pay for a lot more speed cameras and the staff to organise the prosecutions. How? Well, the government likes to farm out as much as possible to private contractors. The studios create a subsidiary (UK driving safety Ltd?) and persuades ministers to give them the job. Then they just run the business at a MASSIVE loss. Yes, the government has even more money than the studios, but they don't like to increase public spending and drivers are voters.
Finally, a couple of points of fact:
1. On many Southern motorways there is so much traffic during rush hours that it is tough to exceed 30 mph!
2. I am both incredibly frugal and green so I save fuel by rarely exceeding 60 mph. I think that puts me in the 5%.
We need LiViD to produce a simple DVD player with a graphical interface which is open source and written specifically for Linux. It doesn't initially need any more than a play and a stop button and most importantly does not rely on or have the option to produce any unencrypted video files on the disc. This would be exactly what CSS was hacked for. A program to play DVDs on Linux which even the judge can understand how to use. We then remove DeCSS from all of the mirror sites and replace it with the new player. I think that our case would then be much stronger.
In response to other points raised by cmuncey; getting VA to buy the right to produce a DVD player is not going to solve the problem. VA are an i386 only shop (at least last time I checked). At present, Linux runs on 9 (count them in linux/arch) platforms. Would VA provide player software for all of them (or at least all the ones to which the hardware can be connected)? An open source player runs on all platforms. If an i386 binary only player appears we are going to need some non-i386 machines available to demonstrate in court that the problem still exists.
Finally, I endorse the call to join EFF. I joined last week, and let me tell you that the feeling of having done something more productive than just whining on /. is worth every penny.
Simple question for those in Norway.
If/when Jon's case comes to court, will it be heard before a Jury?
So what sort of binary are these "Binary" filters going to be written in then? It wouldn't be i386 binary would it by any chance??? How is that going to run on my Alpha then?
It is very easy to campaign against the Microsoft monopoly whilst supporting the i386 one!!
Let's face some facts. The movie industry are not creating all this fuss to put the genie back into the bottle. They know, just as we do, that this is impossible. BUT, they hope that if they can bankrupt and few people and better still get one or two thrown into jail then when they finally release DVD2 (plus other schemes which rely on encryption to protect interlectual property such as purchasing music to download) everyone will be too scared to try and crack it and they will be able to stitch the consumer up however they like.
Now, we are not going to be able to fight this sort of thing through the courts (although that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try in the current cases) because:
a) The movie industry can afford lots of very good lawyers.
b) If the laws are not adequate they have enough money to pay polititions to change them.
Plus, we are not going to be able to get enough public support to get the few non-corrupt polititions to help because:
a) Very few people are going to be able to understand the issues (try explaining this case to your mother and see how you get on!).
b) The general media are unlikely to report the cases accurately.
c) There are an awful lot of "important" issues (economy, violent crime, environment) which the vast majority of the public care about far more than they are ever going to care about these (to them) obscure technical issues.
So, as in a military campaign we have to see what can be done about moving the fight to areas where we can play to our strengths. What is that area? Well obviously it is the INTERNET.
Most goverments would dearly like to remove child porn from the internet, yet huge quantities still slosh around every day. How is this achieved? Simple, the images are anonymously posted at regular intervals to usenet newsgroups. Do we have a newsgroup where such postings regularly occur? Perhaps we had better start one and make sure that everyone knows where it is.
The other solution has been suggested by others so I shall not labour the point. We need a server in a "free" country (e.g. China, Cayman Islands etc) through which software authors can establish an anonymous internet presence. Unfortunately, I doubt that I am living in a "free" country (UK) and my software skills are not up to the job, so I can only propose and support the idea, but at the end of the day, this is what we are going to HAVE to do.
That doesn't quite answer the question. Being criminaly liable is NOT the same as being old enough to be a party to a legally binding contract.
So, at what age can someone in Norway sign a legally binding contract?