There would not be half the problems if the system was not
being abused.
I agree!
What would be so bad about birmingham.al.us and birmingham.uk
Absolutely nothing, except that - as you imply - practically everyone
in the USA thinks that.com means an American company and most folks
elsewhere think that.com means the first organisation to choose the
name.
Recently, I heard a british priest being interviewed on the radio
about something happening at his church. At the end of the interview
he said "You can find at more at www.lowerdingleychurch.COM" (or some
such). Since when has his little village church been an international
business? What's wrong with.org.uk? Give me strength!!
The are numerous examples of cities in different countries with the same names. Particularly between the
UK and USA. Two obvious examples are London and Birmingham. Who gets the birmingham.com
domain? The one in England, or the one in Alabama?
What does the word Prescott mean to folks in the USA?
In the UK it means only one thing, and that is
John Prescott the deputy prime minister
(roughly the equivalent of Dick Cheyney). By the admitidly low standard of politicians he is quite a character.
He single handedly made the last general election interesting by punching a voter who was
stupid enough to throw an egg at him (when choosing your egg target, don't choose one who used to earn spare
cash by bare knuckle boxing!).
I can't decide if the phrase "Prescott PC" would be good for sales or not. I guess it
might suggest a machine with a bit of punch!
I don't disagree with the basic point that all DRM systems can be cracked, but...
tracking down the subversives who use Linux/BSD and other "unAmerican" OSes would prove difficult
Well, maybe it would be tricky to find people who were using Linux/BSD, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find those who are developing them. Without huge amounts of cooperation across the internet, there is no way we can continue to develop these OSs. Also, once they are illegal you won't be able to connect to the internet using them.
if the governement started coming after the people, they just might have a revolution on their hands.
Get Real! If tomorrow morning the government announced that every none Microsoft/Apple OS was illegal and that folks had seven days to destroy all copies or go inside. How many people would riot? 100? 1000? How many rioted in Seatle? Did that change anything? What percentage of the population would care or even understand? 1 percent? Maybe 2? I guarantee that more than 90% wouldn't care at all, and most of them would also be easily persuaded that Linux was something to do with terrorism.
If we want to fight this we need to (a) get folks who sound respectable (e.g. university professors) to start trying to educate politicians and more importantly (b) get folks with big wallets and a vested interest (e.g. IBM) to start bribing those same politicians.
People have been hit by Windows viruses and Outlook trojan horses, they've had to put up with all the nastiness and instability which is an inherent part of Windows, they've had to deal with exorbitant upgrade pricing and heavy-fisted licensing practices... and yet they still sing the praises of Microsoft.
I never cease to be amazed by how many/. readers find this to be a revelation. We often read comments scorning global corporations over their view of consumers as "gullets" who consume crap products and excrete cash. But, for at least 90% of people this is an entirely accurate description!
The plain fact is that if MS decided to charge $300 per year for a Windows licence most consumers would happily pay and think that they were getting a great deal.
If you still find this hard to understand, just stop and think how stupid the average person is. Now, consider that half of the population is more stupid than that!
What can we do? I am sorry, but I have no idea. My own solution is to use Linux for as long as possible. If I finaly have a choice of giving up computing as a hobby or switching to fully DRM controlled Windows, I will give up computing and take up model engineering (assuming some clown hasn't decided that no-one can own a lathe because they might make a gun!).
The section of the DOJ's comments which I found most interesting is the bit on open source. Right at the top it lists things which make OSS different and having access to the source code isn't one of them!!!!
This makes a nonsense of the rest of that section since it is based on the premis that OSS companies will be able to obtain licenses for Microsoft APIs and network protocols. What are they going to do with them? Since access to that information is restricted they won't be able to release the results as open source.
At the end of the day, we might as well accept that the US government (and most US citizens) would be entirely happy with a world where Windows was the only operating system which could either run on modern computers or connect to the internet.
I understand that you have spent $1 Billion promoting Linux, and as a result you seem to be selling plenty of shiny new mainframes. If the SSSCA makes Linux illegal, what are you going to do then?
You could try to produce a closed source SSSCA complient version of Linux for your customers, but that would break the GPL. OTOH, I guess that Stallman and Co aren't rich enough to sue you so perhaps that doesn't matter. But, once open source Linux is illegal all the work on your version will have to be done by your staff at your expense. Wouldn't it be cheaper to bribe some politicians so that other folks can keep developing it at no expense to you?
We all look forward to hearing your opinion on this matter.
My Estonian fiancee used Word 97 to write a 1 page document containing English and Russian. As instructed, she emailed the document to me as an RTF file. I imported the file into the latest OpenOffice: result, gobbeldy-gook.
I then imported the same RTF into Word 97 and it looked fine. I re-saved it as.doc and loaded it back into OpenOffice and it still looked fine.
She now sends all documents as.doc.
Bottom Line: If you need to transfer Russian text from Word to OpenOffice,.doc works and.rtf doesn't. Conclusion is that.doc is so ubiquitous that coders put more effort into.doc converters than RTF ones and that Word probably produces querky RTF in the first place.
At the end of the day, a CD is just a great big heap of ones and zeros. In some fancy way, your CD player turns this into sound. Presumably, it does this via a combination of software and nifty electronics (which could be emulated in software). So, therefore, if we could extract all the ones and zeros we could write a program which emulates an audio CD player (on which these crippled discs seem to work fine). We just put an OGG encoder where the D/A converter would be and voila! If a 15 year old CD player can convert the binary data into sound, then so can we.
So, what is the problem with implementing this scheme (apart from the DMCA). Is it that there is no way of persuading a CDROM drive to output the raw data? If so, this just confirms my view that the entire problem lies in CDROM firmware. Could we re-flash this in some drives?
Somewhere in a CD player the bits we want are wizzing along a PCB track. Does anyone know the practicality of tapping into this?
Forgive me for being stupid, but precisely which of these bullets has anything at all to do with the topic under discussion (i.e. the right of the police to sieze cash and not give it back even if they don't bring any charges)?
It may well be that such legislation exists, but simply realing off a list of well known but irelevant features of the UK legal system doesn't help much.
So, are you claiming that the UK police have the same right to sieze and keep cash from people irrespective of guilt? If so (and I don't doubt that this is quite likely) could you point to the relevant statute, or some example cases?
BTW, the non-jury courts bit currently only applies in Norther Ireland.
NOW what are you going to buy your airline ticket with??
With my credit card! Precisely as I said in the last line of my 3 line post. The airline need to know who you are anyway (at least they seem to in Europe) so you don't lose any privacy by using a credit card in this case. I can't put it any simpler.
Fortunately for me, I don't live in the USA (and I now try to avoid visiting it). And yes, I do realise that if the US have such laws it won't take the UK government long to come up with something similar (or perhaps they already have?).
Sorry, didn't make myself entirely clear. I meant that although it is obviously possible to pay with cash, buying air tickets with cash doesn't increase your privacy since you have to give your name and address anyway. So you might as well have the ease of paying with credit card.
If you read the article you will see that quite a lot of the information (e.g. what restaurants you frequent) could only be discovered by credit card records.
Do what I do and use cash whenever possible.
Obviously, it wouldn't be sensible to buy your air tickets with cash, but the airline knows who you are anyway so you don't lose anything by paying by card on this occasion.
So, let me see if I have this right. The US Government's
great idea to prevent terrorism is a system to ensure that
you can't check you bomb filled bag onto a flight and then
go home?
I am continually amazed by how backward the USA is
sometimes. Here in the UK we have had this system for as long
as anyone can remember. That is why then you check-in at
Heathrow they ask all those tedious questions about if you have been
given anything to carry and if anyone could have messed with
your luggage. If you don't turn up at the gate, they literaly
search through the hold and take your bags off. This of course can
take ages!
Some years ago a terrorist made friends with
a presumably not terribly bright girl and persuaded her to
carry a bag on an El Al flight for him. Fortunately, a security
guard thought the bag looked suspiciously heavy and found
the bomb in it.
If I download and install the NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux (having checked the source carefully for back doors) am I then safe from Magic Lantern?
It seems to me that sooner or later these two government projects are going to come into conflict and it will be very interesting to see who comes out on top.
Nice, but what I realy want is a fuzzy watch.
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
On KDE there is a thing called "fuzzy clock" which tells you the time in words to an accuracy of 5 minutes (mine currently says "Ten past one").
Don't we live in interesting times. One group of companies are hard at work making better and cheaper MP3 players which they sell with "easy to use CD ripping software" whilst another group and working equally hard to make it impossible to rip CDs. Sooner or later these two groups are going to bump into each other with one almighty BANG.
I think that we can safely say that when they do collide they will stitch up some deal which results in the consumer being screwed over.
BTW, does anyone know if you can buy a portable OGG player yet? Perhaps someone could come up with a firmware patch for one of these things which would add that feature.
Does anyone know how the MP3 player manufacturers feel about this? Doesn't it make their products completely useless?
OTOH, perhaps they like the idea. After all, once all CDs are locked, folks will (in theory) have to get their music off the net in some secure format and load it onto their brand new "secure" MP3 player which they have just bought from the same people who sold them the old non-secure one only a year or so ago. And you know what? Joe Sixpack is SO stupid that he will think this perfectly reasonable!
What precisely does this AAC thing prevent me from doing? It seems I can get MP3s from either a CD or the net and load them into the phone. What else would I want to do?
Well, I did enter "Linux" as my religion, but somehow it didn't get onto the list:-(.
Presumably we can conclude from this that significantly more people entered Jedi than Linux and that a religion has to reach a certain threshold before being listed. Does anyone know what that level might be?
It is quite evident to me that Linux is a religion, since we have a diety (Linus), a holy book (kernel source), rituals (re-compiling the kernel) and wars (KDE/Gnome).
Here are my latest ideas to inconvenience Carnivor/Echelon etc. I presume that the Feds don't already think you are a terrorist. If they do then your machine has probably already been tampered with so these ideas won't help.
1 - Defeat keyword searches. The Feds can't possibly read everyone's email. Presumably they store the text and then do giant keyword/keyphrase searches using some clever code. So, send your text as a image file (PNG/TIFF/JPG etc). Simply write it on a text editor and then either do a screen grab or import it into something like Gimp. The guy at the other end can read it without needing any crypto software, but the Fed's keyword tracker will skip straight over it. Worried that they have OCR? Simple: Use cursive fonts and keep changing them; rotate the text to a funny angle; use patterned backgrounds.
2 - Load up their decrypt machines - Let's assume that they have some big hardware which tries to decrypt any binary files that they don't understand. So, give it something to chew on. Grab 50K from/dev/random and email it to a friend. Then he can send some of his entropy back again. We have lots of bright people here on/., presumably someone could come up with a little script to automate this? Perhaps it could randomly choose words from/usr/share/dict/words to put in the subject line.
It's going to take a long time for them to word a law which makes these activities illegal
Slashdot Mirror
I agree!
What would be so bad about birmingham.al.us and birmingham.uk
Absolutely nothing, except that - as you imply - practically everyone in the USA thinks that .com means an American company and most folks
elsewhere think that .com means the first organisation to choose the
name.
Recently, I heard a british priest being interviewed on the radio about something happening at his church. At the end of the interview he said "You can find at more at www.lowerdingleychurch.COM" (or some such). Since when has his little village church been an international business? What's wrong with .org.uk? Give me strength!!
The are numerous examples of cities in different countries with the same names. Particularly between the UK and USA. Two obvious examples are London and Birmingham. Who gets the birmingham.com domain? The one in England, or the one in Alabama?
Wow, that's more like it. Perhaps AMD should name their next processor after him!
In the UK it means only one thing, and that is John Prescott the deputy prime minister (roughly the equivalent of Dick Cheyney). By the admitidly low standard of politicians he is quite a character. He single handedly made the last general election interesting by punching a voter who was stupid enough to throw an egg at him (when choosing your egg target, don't choose one who used to earn spare cash by bare knuckle boxing!).
I can't decide if the phrase "Prescott PC" would be good for sales or not. I guess it might suggest a machine with a bit of punch!
I don't disagree with the basic point that all DRM systems can be cracked, but...
tracking down the subversives who use Linux/BSD and other "unAmerican" OSes would prove difficult
Well, maybe it would be tricky to find people who were using Linux/BSD, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find those who are developing them. Without huge amounts of cooperation across the internet, there is no way we can continue to develop these OSs. Also, once they are illegal you won't be able to connect to the internet using them.
if the governement started coming after the people, they just might have a revolution on their hands.
Get Real! If tomorrow morning the government announced that every none Microsoft/Apple OS was illegal and that folks had seven days to destroy all copies or go inside. How many people would riot? 100? 1000? How many rioted in Seatle? Did that change anything? What percentage of the population would care or even understand? 1 percent? Maybe 2? I guarantee that more than 90% wouldn't care at all, and most of them would also be easily persuaded that Linux was something to do with terrorism.
If we want to fight this we need to (a) get folks who sound respectable (e.g. university professors) to start trying to educate politicians and more importantly (b) get folks with big wallets and a vested interest (e.g. IBM) to start bribing those same politicians.
I never cease to be amazed by how many
The plain fact is that if MS decided to charge $300 per year for a Windows licence most consumers would happily pay and think that they were getting a great deal.
If you still find this hard to understand, just stop and think how stupid the average person is. Now, consider that half of the population is more stupid than that!
What can we do? I am sorry, but I have no idea. My own solution is to use Linux for as long as possible. If I finaly have a choice of giving up computing as a hobby or switching to fully DRM controlled Windows, I will give up computing and take up model engineering (assuming some clown hasn't decided that no-one can own a lathe because they might make a gun!).
This makes a nonsense of the rest of that section since it is based on the premis that OSS companies will be able to obtain licenses for Microsoft APIs and network protocols. What are they going to do with them? Since access to that information is restricted they won't be able to release the results as open source.
At the end of the day, we might as well accept that the US government (and most US citizens) would be entirely happy with a world where Windows was the only operating system which could either run on modern computers or connect to the internet.
I understand that you have spent $1 Billion promoting Linux, and as a result you seem to be selling plenty of shiny new mainframes. If the SSSCA makes Linux illegal, what are you going to do then?
You could try to produce a closed source SSSCA complient version of Linux for your customers, but that would break the GPL. OTOH, I guess that Stallman and Co aren't rich enough to sue you so perhaps that doesn't matter. But, once open source Linux is illegal all the work on your version will have to be done by your staff at your expense. Wouldn't it be cheaper to bribe some politicians so that other folks can keep developing it at no expense to you?
We all look forward to hearing your opinion on this matter.
I then imported the same RTF into Word 97 and it looked fine. I re-saved it as .doc and loaded it back into OpenOffice and it still looked fine.
She now sends all documents as .doc.
Bottom Line: If you need to transfer Russian text from Word to OpenOffice, .doc works and .rtf doesn't. Conclusion is that .doc is so ubiquitous that coders put more effort into .doc converters than RTF ones and that Word probably produces querky RTF in the first place.
So, what is the problem with implementing this scheme (apart from the DMCA). Is it that there is no way of persuading a CDROM drive to output the raw data? If so, this just confirms my view that the entire problem lies in CDROM firmware. Could we re-flash this in some drives?
Somewhere in a CD player the bits we want are wizzing along a PCB track. Does anyone know the practicality of tapping into this?
Just my random thoughts on the topic.
It may well be that such legislation exists, but simply realing off a list of well known but irelevant features of the UK legal system doesn't help much.
So, are you claiming that the UK police have the same right to sieze and keep cash from people irrespective of guilt? If so (and I don't doubt that this is quite likely) could you point to the relevant statute, or some example cases?
BTW, the non-jury courts bit currently only applies in Norther Ireland.
With my credit card! Precisely as I said in the last line of my 3 line post. The airline need to know who you are anyway (at least they seem to in Europe) so you don't lose any privacy by using a credit card in this case. I can't put it any simpler.
Fortunately for me, I don't live in the USA (and I now try to avoid visiting it). And yes, I do realise that if the US have such laws it won't take the UK government long to come up with something similar (or perhaps they already have?).
Sorry, didn't make myself entirely clear. I meant that although it is obviously possible to pay with cash, buying air tickets with cash doesn't increase your privacy since you have to give your name and address anyway. So you might as well have the ease of paying with credit card.
Do what I do and use cash whenever possible.
Obviously, it wouldn't be sensible to buy your air tickets with cash, but the airline knows who you are anyway so you don't lose anything by paying by card on this occasion.
What does "incentivated" mean? Is it anything like advocated?
Or perhaps publicised?
I am continually amazed by how backward the USA is sometimes. Here in the UK we have had this system for as long as anyone can remember. That is why then you check-in at Heathrow they ask all those tedious questions about if you have been given anything to carry and if anyone could have messed with your luggage. If you don't turn up at the gate, they literaly search through the hold and take your bags off. This of course can take ages!
Some years ago a terrorist made friends with a presumably not terribly bright girl and persuaded her to carry a bag on an El Al flight for him. Fortunately, a security guard thought the bag looked suspiciously heavy and found the bomb in it.
It seems to me that sooner or later these two government projects are going to come into conflict and it will be very interesting to see who comes out on top.
Does anyone know of a watch that does this?
I think that we can safely say that when they do collide they will stitch up some deal which results in the consumer being screwed over.
BTW, does anyone know if you can buy a portable OGG player yet? Perhaps someone could come up with a firmware patch for one of these things which would add that feature.
OTOH, perhaps they like the idea. After all, once all CDs are locked, folks will (in theory) have to get their music off the net in some secure format and load it onto their brand new "secure" MP3 player which they have just bought from the same people who sold them the old non-secure one only a year or so ago. And you know what? Joe Sixpack is SO stupid that he will think this perfectly reasonable!
Perhaps if he placed a deposit with some trusted third party (Mad Dog, Eric Raymond etc) people might be happier to devote the time.
What precisely does this AAC thing prevent me from doing? It seems I can get MP3s from either a CD or the net and load them into the phone. What else would I want to do?
Presumably we can conclude from this that significantly more people entered Jedi than Linux and that a religion has to reach a certain threshold before being listed. Does anyone know what that level might be?
It is quite evident to me that Linux is a religion, since we have a diety (Linus), a holy book (kernel source), rituals (re-compiling the kernel) and wars (KDE/Gnome).
1 - Defeat keyword searches. The Feds can't possibly read everyone's email. Presumably they store the text and then do giant keyword/keyphrase searches using some clever code. So, send your text as a image file (PNG/TIFF/JPG etc). Simply write it on a text editor and then either do a screen grab or import it into something like Gimp. The guy at the other end can read it without needing any crypto software, but the Fed's keyword tracker will skip straight over it. Worried that they have OCR? Simple: Use cursive fonts and keep changing them; rotate the text to a funny angle; use patterned backgrounds.
2 - Load up their decrypt machines - Let's assume that they have some big hardware which tries to decrypt any binary files that they don't understand. So, give it something to chew on. Grab 50K from /dev/random and email it to a friend. Then he can send some of his entropy back again. We have lots of bright people here on /., presumably someone could come up with a little script to automate this? Perhaps it could randomly choose words from /usr/share/dict/words to put in the subject line.
It's going to take a long time for them to word a law which makes these activities illegal