Of course, we don't live in the stratosphere. And the principle component of the NOAA data is from the sea surface, which doesn't have parking lots. That component alone is consistent with the whole.
If you're unsure where you stand on the issue of global warming, you might want to look at the following two graphs. The first shows that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising. There is no real question that this is much human induced. At the same time, global temperatures are also dramatically rising. Here the extent of human influence is more debatable. It is possible that an apparent cause (rising CO2) and an apparent effect (rising temperatures) are both happening independently but, coincidentally, at the same time. And, also at the same time, there is some other, unknown force causing the entire planet to heat. It truly is possible. But I wouldn't personally bet the world on that.
I agree with you on nuclear power. But the US outputs eight times the CO2 per capita versus China. Furthermore, Chinese CO2 production is falling while US production is growing.
The worst polluters in the world are socialist governments. That's a fact.
No it isn't. The world's largest producer of CO2 is the United States, and our emissions are steadily increasing. In contrast, for example, Russia and China have both been decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from already much lower absolute and per-capita rates.
Many people have pointed out that the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP complete, and so showing P = NP could have practical implications for the business world.
What this misses is the idea of approximation algorithms, which has emerged in recent years. The idea is simple: even though finding the optimal solution to a problem is NP-hard, finding a nearly-optimal solution may be easy. For example, finding the shortest path for the salesman might be very difficult, but finding nearly the shortest path isn't.
For the traveling salesman problem in particular, there is a polynomial time approximation scheme. This means that if you want a solution that is within 10% of optimal, you can get it in polynomial time. If you want one within 1% of optimal, you can also get it in polynomial time. In fact, you can approximate the solution as well as you want in polynomial time. The catch is that the degree of the polynomial increases as you demand better approximations. So, as a practical matter, the Traveling Salesman Problem is already solved. (At least for Euclidean spaces.)
A few people here are claiming a polynomial-time solution would be irrelevant if the order of the polynomial was large (giving O(n^1000) as an example of large). For moderately large inputs (and we're really not talking that large), O(n^1000) is better than O(e^n). Taking the example of O(n^1000), n only has to be greater than 10,000 for O(n^1000) to beat O(e^n). Exponentials grow fast, people.
But 10,000^1000 is a four thousand digit number! So this is not a meaningful demonstration of the superiority of polynomial time vs. exponential time. A running time of n^1000 is impractical even for n = 2-- that gives a three hundred digit number.
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: "Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process."
...which is legalspeak for "Yeah, as long as wiretaps require court orders, so does Magic Lantern."
Baloney. If that's what he meant, he would have said, "Yes". In fact, this is doubletalk for "no". The FBI wants to do this with only a warrant (easily obtained) instead of by seeking phone-tapping permission (much harder).
Copy protection schemes are like perpetual motion machines: there is always some crank claiming to have one, despite sound arguments that no such thing can exist.
This plan was clearly produced by some savvy businessmen. They charge a modest fee, but lock you into the service FOREVER-- the longer you subscribe, the larger your collection, and the greater the penalty for terminating the service. What an incredible business model!
Of course, it relies entirely on the integrity of the copy protection scheme. OOPS!
Amazing that such "savvy businessmen" are completely taken in by the copy protection cranks. Not just once, but again and again and again and again and...
They encourage locals to grow and export poppy products (heroin & opium) to the point that Afghanistan is the #1 supplier of those drugs worldwide. Only 10% of their land is arable, and 90% of that is used for poppy production. This results in the vast majority of the gov't income.
Anyone who thinks we are going to try and conquer Afghanistan is an idiot.
On one hand, you're absolutely right. On the other hand:
Hiller: Can you name the general who is in
charge of Pakistan?
Bush: Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?
Hiller: No, it's four questions of four leaders in four hot spots.
Bush: The new Pakistani general -- just been
elected -- he's not been elected... the guy took
over office...it appears he's going to bring
stability to the country and I think that's good
news for the subcontinent.
The northern alliance seems quite willing to assume what we regard as their right to lead Afghanistan, and I don't imagine that it could be worse than the Taliban.
From the 1999 US State Department human rights report:
"Women and girls were subjected to rape, kidnaping, and forced marriage, particularly in areas outside of Taliban control."
"Masood's forces and the Northern Alliance members committed numerous, serious abuses. Masood's forces continued sporadic rocket attacks against Kabul. Anti-Taliban forces bombarded civilians indiscriminately. Various factors infringed on citizens' privacy rights. Armed units of the Northern Alliance, local commanders, and rogue individuals were responsible for political killings, abductions, kidnapings for ransom, torture, rape, arbitrary detention, and looting."
I wanted to test my antagonist further so I thought of a number of tricky
questions as we gossiped. For example, I asked him: "Do you know Armando
Acevedo?" Senor Acevedo is an obscure Mexican player, not remotely of
Grandmaster strength.
My opponent's reply came instantly, if cryptically:
"Siegen 1970". Now if you look in the tournament book of the Siegen Chess Olympiad of 1970
you will find that Bobby Fischer played a certain Armando Acevedo in a
preliminary round. He was obviously trying to tell me something.
Typing "Fischer Armando Acevedo" into Google turns up a reference to the 1970 Siegen match on the 3rd link. (The 2nd link is a consequence of Short's article.) It's in Spanish, but the exact phase "Siegen, 1970 appears explicity next to the first occurrance of "Fischer". See for yourself. The point is that one need not have access to a thirty year old tournament book, as Short suggests, to quickly generate the reply that he received. Thus this particular piece of evidence is a lot weaker than it appears.
Most government agencies stink. There's no competition, no possibility of going bankrupt. I think that makes quality control very difficult.
I believe this problem is much MORE pronounced in the national security bureaucracy. People can't be fired without contemplating the security risks. Ineffective people can be concealed, because so much is concealed. Old boys networks can flourish unchecked. The degree of public accountability is essentially nil.
I know NSA has a lot of bright people, but they must also have more deadwood than the coast of Maine.
I love the idea of a raffle to determine when the security will be broken. Proceeds to the EFF. Can I get one ticket for, um, 8 days and one for 35?
But the real problem will be distributing the crack without the author getting arrested.
Ideally, the film industry would distribute movies at a price that makes cracking not worthwhile or most people. (Like that will happen.) And with the download time, the effective price of renting the same movie twice is huge even if they charge $0 for the second rental. Oh, and no more Disney "limited time sale" scams, eh?
It kinda scares me that huge sectors of our economy are willing to bet the farm on DRM, which-- to my thinking-- is in the same class as perpetual motion machines. I realize the studios have no good options, but if some hokey DRM system (and they're all hokey) is all that's protecting their entire archives against replication... *DAMN* If publishers, studios, recording companies, etc. all do stuff like that, we're creating an economic risk of staggering proportions.
There are at least a few big problems with this article. First, no mention is made of whether these results have been accepted for publication in a refereed journal. If they haven't been, then it is just one guy spouting off. There's not even a comment taken from a scientist unconnected to the work. Is it at least a reasonable-sounding guy? Well, the article explicitly mentions that, short of funding, he started researching video games with an expectation of getting funded by games manufacturers (well-known funders of world-class psychological research?) Finally, I'm no brain expert, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that generic, childhood frontal lobe activity is sure-and-certain associated with moral development. If it were, wouldn't we be doing frontal lobe exercises each morning? The kook alarm is ringing loudly...
I'm not sure what you can mathematically prove about a real-world system like this. What havoc can I cause by dropping a pencil stub in the printer that creates the paper record of votes? What if I pull THIS plug at THAT time? (And, hmm, what if I then stick that plug into my laptop?) Or what if I adjust the vertical on the display to hide the bottom candidate from that sweet, but mentally fragile grandmother behind me in line? What happens to a touch screen if I stick a little piece of gum on it? Can I somehow damage the touch sensors without making this fact evident? Exactly how much fun can I have with a strong magnet? In short, I'm not sure that formal methods buy you much in such an informal environment.
There are other ways to hide bits in text, such as word choice and ordering, e.g. "narrow, wooden bridge" vs. "wooden, narrow bridge".
Some authors might object that this violates their creative integrity, yada, yada, but some will make compromises for the bottom line.
Maybe this points up the real problem with this fingerprinting scheme. Even if, mathematically, one could devise a scheme where fingerprints can't be removed without a prohibitively large number of texts, there will always be someone who THINKS they can do it. And, from the publisher's perspective, that's just as bad: yeah, they can prosecute the guy who did it, but the copied text is still out there.
Oh well, I don't really want this to work anyway.:-)
Yes, so you get two copies of the book. You diff them. You find several differences. Now what are you going to do? Suppose you resolve them randomly. When you see "grey" and "gray", you just pick one version at random. That should do the trick, right???
Not so, young grasshoppah!
Suppose that I, the Evil Publisher, encode 1000 random bits into each book using things like "gray/grey" or comma/no-comma. Your two copies will actually AGREE on about 500 bits, so you won't even know they're there. Now I compare the books I've sold against the pirate copy. Almost all books with agree with the pirate copy on about 500 bits +/- a few standard deviations. But TWO will agree on around 750 bits-- namely, the two you merged. With 99.9999% confidence (or around there), I now know the identity of both you AND your buddy who also purchased the second book. That should be enough for a search warrant!
(Of course, you might be more clever. But then so might the Evil Publisher. Not clear who would win, but without knowing his strategy and with years of prison time on the line, would you actually play the game?)
As far as I can tell, technically there *IS* one slim sliver hope for digital rights management on the internet.
For concreteness, suppose we're talking about an eBook. It is a given that you can't secure an eBook: someone can always run it an emulated environment and dump the text to an ASCII file. And you can't prevent it from being passed around the internet once it is broken. A system like Freenet can be made more or less unbreakable (provided automatic passing of encrypted messages remains legal and permitted by ISPs.)
The ray of hope is to make every copy of an eBook slightly different. In one book, use "grey" instead of "gray" on page 67. In another, put a comma before a short prepositional phrase on page 123. By using various combinations of these, a publisher could at least identify which copy is being passed around the net and prosecute the hell out of that person. (Copyright holders can probably get the law changed to prescribe a many-year prison sentence.)
Clearly, this is no panacea. What if someone in Cuba breaks the eBook? What if you steal the book off someone else's computer, break it, and distribute their copy? What if you buy the eBook in a way that conceals your identity? Futhermore, it might be possible to combine several versions of the text to destroy these markers. (But this doesn't look easy to me.) And even if you can identify and prosecute the original copyright violator, that's little solace to the publisher after everyone already has a free copy of Harry Potter V in hand.
But that's it: the only ray of hope I see for DRM, unless the internet itself is significantly hobbled-- which seems entirely possible.
We can have the internet or we can have digital intellectual property-- but not both. Though many of us are middle-of-the-road in our opinions, the nature of the technology makes the issue fundamentally bipolar: there is no middle ground.
If citizens are allowed to automatically send and receive encrypted messages over the internet, then there is no way to enforce digital intellectual property laws. Unless we start executing copyright infringers, the 0.0001% enforcement that might be possible against a Freenet-type system isn't going to alter behavior. Digital IP is dead.
On the other hand, if citizens are not allowed to automatically send and receive encrypted messages over the internet, then the internet is dead. Yes, you can still dump your money into corporate web sites and post your baby pictures. But many potential applications are ruled out. And, more importantly, the internet is destroyed as a free speech medium: no longer can one use it to routinely circulate documents against the wishes of the usual elites.
Digital people are typically too prone to see issues in black and white. In this case, however, the issue really is black or white: we can have the internet, or we can have digital IP. Probably a lot of us wish that the choice weren't so stark, but it is.
I hear a lot of people bashing the RIAA/MPAA (myself included), but I don't hear very much constructive criticism.
Fair enough. How about we pass some common sense legislation that fairly balances the needs of citizens against the needs copyright holder in order to ensure a continuing flowering of the arts while maintaining basic democratic princip... NNNNYAYAYAYAAAHHGGGHHH!!!! NO!! LET'S PUT ANTHRAX IN HILLARY ROSEN'S LUCKY CHARMS!!!
If servers are allowed, enforcement can be totally defeated. Suppose all my file transfers are public-key encrypted, and my only *direct* communications are with people that I know and trust in the real world. (I still can communicate with anyone via multiple hops.) Then there's never a way to show that I've done anything wrong short of confiscating my computer. But that could only be legally justified if I had already done something wrong. It's hopelessly circular. So enforcement becomes totally impossible.
It is analogous to Turing completeness. If you allow a certain amount of computational power on the internet (FreeNet-type nodes), then that's it: you've got everything. If you don't allow that much power, the internet is permanently crippled. Technical people too often think of essentially social issues in digital yes/no terms. But in this case the issue really is remarkably binary.
This is THE fight. There are only two paths ahead: an internet where you can run a Gnutella or FreeNet-type node and an internet where you can't:
If you can, then encryption and compartmentalization can defeat enforcement. Digital copyright is effectively dead, copyright holders shrivel up, and the world is a better, happier place.
If you can't, then the internet is dead: yeah, you can still read corporate-produced content and put up your own (benign, inoffensive, non-Cease-and-Desist provoking) HTML, but that's it. The internet as a medium for public to share ideas without routing them through economic-elite moderators (as with radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc.) will be over.
And the decision about whether you can run a FreeNet node is going to be made substantially by ISPs. Congress appears to be immobilized for now. So this is the crux of the fight for the soul of the internet.
I think you're right. After all, this is precisely the prescription for a really deadly real-world disease.
For example, Ebola has very high mortality, but the onset is so fast the epidemic potential is limited. On the other hand, AIDS is awful because of its long dormancy; someone can transmit it for years before they realize they have it. The real nightmare would be a highly contagious form of AIDS-- that would be pretty much end the human race. As you point out, there is no reason why one couldn't craft an analogous computer virus... and so someone probably will shortly.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, we don't live in the stratosphere. And the principle component of the NOAA data is from the sea surface, which doesn't have parking lots. That component alone is consistent with the whole.
If you're unsure where you stand on the issue of global warming, you might want to look at the following two graphs. The first shows that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising. There is no real question that this is much human induced. At the same time, global temperatures are also dramatically rising. Here the extent of human influence is more debatable. It is possible that an apparent cause (rising CO2) and an apparent effect (rising temperatures) are both happening independently but, coincidentally, at the same time. And, also at the same time, there is some other, unknown force causing the entire planet to heat. It truly is possible. But I wouldn't personally bet the world on that.
I agree with you on nuclear power. But the US outputs eight times the CO2 per capita versus China. Furthermore, Chinese CO2 production is falling while US production is growing.
The worst polluters in the world are socialist governments. That's a fact.
No it isn't. The world's largest producer of CO2 is the United States, and our emissions are steadily increasing. In contrast, for example, Russia and China have both been decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from already much lower absolute and per-capita rates.
Many people have pointed out that the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP complete, and so showing P = NP could have practical implications for the business world.
What this misses is the idea of approximation algorithms, which has emerged in recent years. The idea is simple: even though finding the optimal solution to a problem is NP-hard, finding a nearly-optimal solution may be easy. For example, finding the shortest path for the salesman might be very difficult, but finding nearly the shortest path isn't.
For the traveling salesman problem in particular, there is a polynomial time approximation scheme. This means that if you want a solution that is within 10% of optimal, you can get it in polynomial time. If you want one within 1% of optimal, you can also get it in polynomial time. In fact, you can approximate the solution as well as you want in polynomial time. The catch is that the degree of the polynomial increases as you demand better approximations. So, as a practical matter, the Traveling Salesman Problem is already solved. (At least for Euclidean spaces.)
A few people here are claiming a polynomial-time solution would be irrelevant if the order of the polynomial was large (giving O(n^1000) as an example of large). For moderately large inputs (and we're really not talking that large), O(n^1000) is better than O(e^n). Taking the example of O(n^1000), n only has to be greater than 10,000 for O(n^1000) to beat O(e^n). Exponentials grow fast, people.
But 10,000^1000 is a four thousand digit number! So this is not a meaningful demonstration of the superiority of polynomial time vs. exponential time. A running time of n^1000 is impractical even for n = 2-- that gives a three hundred digit number.
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: "Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process."
Baloney. If that's what he meant, he would have said, "Yes". In fact, this is doubletalk for "no". The FBI wants to do this with only a warrant (easily obtained) instead of by seeking phone-tapping permission (much harder).
Copy protection schemes are like perpetual motion machines: there is always some crank claiming to have one, despite sound arguments that no such thing can exist.
This plan was clearly produced by some savvy businessmen. They charge a modest fee, but lock you into the service FOREVER-- the longer you subscribe, the larger your collection, and the greater the penalty for terminating the service. What an incredible business model!
Of course, it relies entirely on the integrity of the copy protection scheme. OOPS!
Amazing that such "savvy businessmen" are completely taken in by the copy protection cranks. Not just once, but again and again and again and again and...
They encourage locals to grow and export poppy products (heroin & opium) to the point that Afghanistan is the #1 supplier of those drugs worldwide. Only 10% of their land is arable, and 90% of that is used for poppy production. This results in the vast majority of the gov't income.
Your information is dated. The Taliban have eliminated opium production.
The four-year drought might deserve a share of blame for the current famine.
Anyone who thinks we are going to try and conquer Afghanistan is an idiot.
On one hand, you're absolutely right. On the other hand:
(From an interview aired November 3, 1999.)
The northern alliance seems quite willing to assume what we regard as their right to lead Afghanistan, and I don't imagine that it could be worse than the Taliban.
From the 1999 US State Department human rights report:
"Women and girls were subjected to rape, kidnaping, and forced marriage, particularly in areas outside of Taliban control."
"Masood's forces and the Northern Alliance members committed numerous, serious abuses. Masood's forces continued sporadic rocket attacks against Kabul. Anti-Taliban forces bombarded civilians indiscriminately. Various factors infringed on citizens' privacy rights. Armed units of the Northern Alliance, local commanders, and rogue individuals were responsible for political killings, abductions, kidnapings for ransom, torture, rape, arbitrary detention, and looting."
I wanted to test my antagonist further so I thought of a number of tricky questions as we gossiped. For example, I asked him: "Do you know Armando Acevedo?" Senor Acevedo is an obscure Mexican player, not remotely of Grandmaster strength.
My opponent's reply came instantly, if cryptically: "Siegen 1970". Now if you look in the tournament book of the Siegen Chess Olympiad of 1970 you will find that Bobby Fischer played a certain Armando Acevedo in a preliminary round. He was obviously trying to tell me something.
Typing "Fischer Armando Acevedo" into Google turns up a reference to the 1970 Siegen match on the 3rd link. (The 2nd link is a consequence of Short's article.) It's in Spanish, but the exact phase "Siegen, 1970 appears explicity next to the first occurrance of "Fischer". See for yourself. The point is that one need not have access to a thirty year old tournament book, as Short suggests, to quickly generate the reply that he received. Thus this particular piece of evidence is a lot weaker than it appears.
Most government agencies stink. There's no competition, no possibility of going bankrupt. I think that makes quality control very difficult.
I believe this problem is much MORE pronounced in the national security bureaucracy. People can't be fired without contemplating the security risks. Ineffective people can be concealed, because so much is concealed. Old boys networks can flourish unchecked. The degree of public accountability is essentially nil.
I know NSA has a lot of bright people, but they must also have more deadwood than the coast of Maine.
I love the idea of a raffle to determine when the security will be broken. Proceeds to the EFF. Can I get one ticket for, um, 8 days and one for 35?
But the real problem will be distributing the crack without the author getting arrested.
Ideally, the film industry would distribute movies at a price that makes cracking not worthwhile or most people. (Like that will happen.) And with the download time, the effective price of renting the same movie twice is huge even if they charge $0 for the second rental. Oh, and no more Disney "limited time sale" scams, eh?
It kinda scares me that huge sectors of our economy are willing to bet the farm on DRM, which-- to my thinking-- is in the same class as perpetual motion machines. I realize the studios have no good options, but if some hokey DRM system (and they're all hokey) is all that's protecting their entire archives against replication... *DAMN* If publishers, studios, recording companies, etc. all do stuff like that, we're creating an economic risk of staggering proportions.
There are at least a few big problems with this article. First, no mention is made of whether these results have been accepted for publication in a refereed journal. If they haven't been, then it is just one guy spouting off. There's not even a comment taken from a scientist unconnected to the work. Is it at least a reasonable-sounding guy? Well, the article explicitly mentions that, short of funding, he started researching video games with an expectation of getting funded by games manufacturers (well-known funders of world-class psychological research?) Finally, I'm no brain expert, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that generic, childhood frontal lobe activity is sure-and-certain associated with moral development. If it were, wouldn't we be doing frontal lobe exercises each morning? The kook alarm is ringing loudly...
I'm not sure what you can mathematically prove about a real-world system like this. What havoc can I cause by dropping a pencil stub in the printer that creates the paper record of votes? What if I pull THIS plug at THAT time? (And, hmm, what if I then stick that plug into my laptop?) Or what if I adjust the vertical on the display to hide the bottom candidate from that sweet, but mentally fragile grandmother behind me in line? What happens to a touch screen if I stick a little piece of gum on it? Can I somehow damage the touch sensors without making this fact evident? Exactly how much fun can I have with a strong magnet? In short, I'm not sure that formal methods buy you much in such an informal environment.
Oops, you go to jail too. :-)
There are other ways to hide bits in text, such as word choice and ordering, e.g. "narrow, wooden bridge" vs. "wooden, narrow bridge".
Some authors might object that this violates their creative integrity, yada, yada, but some will make compromises for the bottom line.
Maybe this points up the real problem with this fingerprinting scheme. Even if, mathematically, one could devise a scheme where fingerprints can't be removed without a prohibitively large number of texts, there will always be someone who THINKS they can do it. And, from the publisher's perspective, that's just as bad: yeah, they can prosecute the guy who did it, but the copied text is still out there.
Oh well, I don't really want this to work anyway. :-)
Yes, so you get two copies of the book. You diff them. You find several differences. Now what are you going to do? Suppose you resolve them randomly. When you see "grey" and "gray", you just pick one version at random. That should do the trick, right???
Not so, young grasshoppah!
Suppose that I, the Evil Publisher, encode 1000 random bits into each book using things like "gray/grey" or comma/no-comma. Your two copies will actually AGREE on about 500 bits, so you won't even know they're there. Now I compare the books I've sold against the pirate copy. Almost all books with agree with the pirate copy on about 500 bits +/- a few standard deviations. But TWO will agree on around 750 bits-- namely, the two you merged. With 99.9999% confidence (or around there), I now know the identity of both you AND your buddy who also purchased the second book. That should be enough for a search warrant!
(Of course, you might be more clever. But then so might the Evil Publisher. Not clear who would win, but without knowing his strategy and with years of prison time on the line, would you actually play the game?)
As far as I can tell, technically there *IS* one slim sliver hope for digital rights management on the internet.
For concreteness, suppose we're talking about an eBook. It is a given that you can't secure an eBook: someone can always run it an emulated environment and dump the text to an ASCII file. And you can't prevent it from being passed around the internet once it is broken. A system like Freenet can be made more or less unbreakable (provided automatic passing of encrypted messages remains legal and permitted by ISPs.)
The ray of hope is to make every copy of an eBook slightly different. In one book, use "grey" instead of "gray" on page 67. In another, put a comma before a short prepositional phrase on page 123. By using various combinations of these, a publisher could at least identify which copy is being passed around the net and prosecute the hell out of that person. (Copyright holders can probably get the law changed to prescribe a many-year prison sentence.)
Clearly, this is no panacea. What if someone in Cuba breaks the eBook? What if you steal the book off someone else's computer, break it, and distribute their copy? What if you buy the eBook in a way that conceals your identity? Futhermore, it might be possible to combine several versions of the text to destroy these markers. (But this doesn't look easy to me.) And even if you can identify and prosecute the original copyright violator, that's little solace to the publisher after everyone already has a free copy of Harry Potter V in hand.
But that's it: the only ray of hope I see for DRM, unless the internet itself is significantly hobbled-- which seems entirely possible.
We can have the internet or we can have digital intellectual property-- but not both. Though many of us are middle-of-the-road in our opinions, the nature of the technology makes the issue fundamentally bipolar: there is no middle ground.
If citizens are allowed to automatically send and receive encrypted messages over the internet, then there is no way to enforce digital intellectual property laws. Unless we start executing copyright infringers, the 0.0001% enforcement that might be possible against a Freenet-type system isn't going to alter behavior. Digital IP is dead.
On the other hand, if citizens are not allowed to automatically send and receive encrypted messages over the internet, then the internet is dead. Yes, you can still dump your money into corporate web sites and post your baby pictures. But many potential applications are ruled out. And, more importantly, the internet is destroyed as a free speech medium: no longer can one use it to routinely circulate documents against the wishes of the usual elites.
Digital people are typically too prone to see issues in black and white. In this case, however, the issue really is black or white: we can have the internet, or we can have digital IP. Probably a lot of us wish that the choice weren't so stark, but it is.
I hear a lot of people bashing the RIAA/MPAA (myself included), but I don't hear very much constructive criticism.
Fair enough. How about we pass some common sense legislation that fairly balances the needs of citizens against the needs copyright holder in order to ensure a continuing flowering of the arts while maintaining basic democratic princip... NNNNYAYAYAYAAAHHGGGHHH!!!! NO!! LET'S PUT ANTHRAX IN HILLARY ROSEN'S LUCKY CHARMS!!!
(Sorry, man, I really tried.)
Because this is not an option at all.
If servers are allowed, enforcement can be totally defeated. Suppose all my file transfers are public-key encrypted, and my only *direct* communications are with people that I know and trust in the real world. (I still can communicate with anyone via multiple hops.) Then there's never a way to show that I've done anything wrong short of confiscating my computer. But that could only be legally justified if I had already done something wrong. It's hopelessly circular. So enforcement becomes totally impossible.
It is analogous to Turing completeness. If you allow a certain amount of computational power on the internet (FreeNet-type nodes), then that's it: you've got everything. If you don't allow that much power, the internet is permanently crippled. Technical people too often think of essentially social issues in digital yes/no terms. But in this case the issue really is remarkably binary.
This is THE fight. There are only two paths ahead: an internet where you can run a Gnutella or FreeNet-type node and an internet where you can't:
And the decision about whether you can run a FreeNet node is going to be made substantially by ISPs. Congress appears to be immobilized for now. So this is the crux of the fight for the soul of the internet.
I'm not opttimistic.
I think you're right. After all, this is precisely the prescription for a really deadly real-world disease.
For example, Ebola has very high mortality, but the onset is so fast the epidemic potential is limited. On the other hand, AIDS is awful because of its long dormancy; someone can transmit it for years before they realize they have it. The real nightmare would be a highly contagious form of AIDS-- that would be pretty much end the human race. As you point out, there is no reason why one couldn't craft an analogous computer virus... and so someone probably will shortly.
Movie: $10 for two hours. Totally passive.
Computer game: $50 for many tens of hours. Interactive. Increasingly social.
And I wonder if computer games now actually require more work to create than movies? (Diablo II vs. American Sweetharts, say?)