I think O'Reilly may be running the danger of being hypocritical. I have here a book on C algorithms ("Mastering Algorithms with C", ISBN 1-56592-453-3) put out by O'Reilly. At the opening of the book are the words: "Copyright (C) 1999 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved". If I were to take, say, the chapter on double-linked lists and use the code as a template for my own program, wouldn't I be in violation of copyright law? I mean, code is copyrightable and, infact, the GNU GPL depends on it.
If you distributed copies of the actual code or a modified version thereof, yes, that might (depending on the license) technically be a violation of copyright. If you use the ideas presented in the book without copying the code, that isn't. Ideas can't be copyrighted; only specific expressions of those ideas (e.g. strings of words, pictures, chunks of source code, pieces of music) can be.
The source code on this disk can be freely used, adapted, and redistributed in source or binary form, so long as an acknowledgment appears in derived source files. The citation should list that the code comes from the book "Mastering Algorithms with C" by Kyle Loudon, published by O'Reilly & Associates. This code is under copyright and cannot be included in any other book, publication, or educational product without permission from O'Reilly & Associates. No warranty is attached; we cannot take responsibility for errors or fitness for use.
This is not a free-software or open-source license, because of the clause restricting users from using the code in "any other book, publication, or educational product" without special permission. Free software, according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the Open Source Definition, requires "no discrimination against fields of endeavor". Discounting that provision, however, it does permit you to use, modify, and redistribute the code "in source or binary form, so long as an acknowledgment appears in derived source files."
... which it isn't; it's copyright infringement. Theft, or larceny, or whatever your local laws call it involves the appropriating and removing of a piece of property.
He characterizes current technology as "offering comfort to hackers, spies, pirates and pedophiles."
... which it does. It also offers comfort to security-conscious users and sysadmins who can combat "hackers", privacy- and encryption-aware users who can combat "spies", musicians and software developers who can end-run around "pirates", and sexual-abuse victims who need the same kind of anonymity to speak out that "pedophiles" want.
He says that if intellectual property is not respected, the Internet will "suffer the fate of the buffalo", and "wither and die like the Hantavirus".
The Internet was around a long time before the current commercial-"content" jackasses came by and plastered their ads all over it. The best parts of the Net have always been, and will always be, cooperative.
He claims to know about technology that can "trace every Internet download and tag every file."
... it's called the "telescreen".
He defines anonymity as meaning "being able to get away with stealing, or hacking..."
... or speaking controversially, or whistle-blowing, or reporting on the security holes perpetrated by lawsuit-happy software companies, or discussing highly sensitive personal issues like sexual abuse, or gender-bending on a MUD, or making jokes about your boss on USENET...
Allowing anonymity on the internet "would undermine the very basis of our civilized society".
The widespread copyright infringement of Napster users "is suspiciously like the Old World principle called slavery." [The musicians being the "slaves", I guess.]
... and war is peace, and ignorance is strength, right?
The current dangerous anarchy of the internet, like the equally unjust Soviet Union, "will crack, crumble and collapse."
The Soviet Union collapsed? The KGB is still running it, last I checked. Where do you think that Puta... er, I mean, Putin guy came from?
He declares war on the Internet, for its own good, and compares it to World War II. If only the forces of Copyright can bring "enough men and women, weaponry and money" to bear against the Internet, as the Allies did against Nazi Germany, then the world will be once again made safe.
And if the Aryan people bring "enough men and women, weaponry and money" to bear against the blood-corruption of the Jews, Slavs, gays, and other Untermenschen, the world will once again be made safe for psychotic Austrians with little mustaches.
(For the record: I don't support MP3-bootlegging or other bootlegging. I find that die-hard "software pirates" are some of the least creative and forward-thinking people I know; they're so interested in getting the popular goods that they never stop to think if there's something better than that bootleg copy of W2K out there. However, I believe the risk to freedom posed by regulation and policing of this bootlegging is far, far greater than that posed by the bootlegging itself. Consider the War on Drugs -- yes, there are a lot of street drugs out there that can fuck you up, but in the end the cops and the prisons and the illegality have done more social harm than all the pot, coke, and junk in the world ever could.)
When Doubleclick violates my personal privacy, they do not merely hide from me information that would allow me to make more informed consumption decisions (as in your Coors example). They do violence to me by taking something of value from me -- my personal information -- without my consent, or even my knowledge.
Oh, I suppose they cracked into your computer and downloaded that "personal information" about you. No? Oh, you mean you transmitted that "personal information" to them? Well, I'm afraid I can't see that as violence; they're just storing information that you sent them. If it's so "personal", don't bloody transmit it, okay?
What, you mean that sending that information was in your broken browser's broken defaults? Fix it, or take it up with your vendor for shipping you a trojan -- er, I mean, "integrated undocumented feature". Help out your fellow human beings by setting up a Junkbuster proxy and letting them use it, or by teaching them to set one up themselves. In no case is it a misdeed on the part of a server operator to store information which you transmit to that server. Such a position is completely untenable -- would you forbid the keeping of access logs next? -- and that you would call for police to arrest or shoot people for storing such information is truly frightening.
I usually don't have a beef with informed libertarianism, but knee-jerk libertarianism is another matter. If you really believe this, then tell us -- under what circumstances would government action be called for? Rape?
It ain't knee-jerk; it's just more radical than you're comfortable with. Yes, I do really think that calling for government "intervention" against peaceful people is calling for violence. Mumble mumble jack-booted thugs mumble Waco mumble Ruby Ridge mumble COINTELPRO HUAC MK-Ultra mumble ECHELON mumble mumble.
And yes, violence is a quite justified response to attempted rape or to other acts of violence. It is not a justified response to the ordinary collection of ordinary information which you transmitted to the collector's Web server.
The same points apply to privacy on the Net. No security measure is 100% secure -- if you filter out cookies, for example, watch as Microsoft rolls out some new tracking mechanism in IE7 that does an end-run around your proxy.
Then you have a problem with Microsoft, not with Doubleclick. To continue your metaphor, why are you buying a car from a car dealer who requires that you let people you consider to be thieves use it one day out of every week? Why do you pay for such an arrangement?
That you don't know better is no excuse. Yes, Doubleclick could tell you more about the information they collect -- but they don't have to. The Coors beer company would prefer you not to know that there are better beers in the world than theirs -- and yet they are not defrauding you by failing to tell you this.
Point being, yes, you can and should defend your personal privacy on the Net. But this does not obviate the potential improvement we could see if privacy was protected by law as well as by individual action. Not to mention that the vast majority of people aren't technically proficient enough to install and configure Junkbuster, or edit their HOSTS file -- are you saying that their privacy is somehow less sacrosanct than yours?
Not at all. Did you read the part of my post where I recommended to sysadmins that they set up and configure Junkbuster as an option for their users? Collective action does not imply government action; people can cooperate to advance their mutual self-interest without bringing the evils of government into play.
Doubleclick's vision of the Web is not my vision of the Web -- nor is it Microsoft's, Junkbuster's, Sun's, RMS's, or AOL's. Each of these parties may be tempted to try to bring the forces of government into the marketplace on its side. But do you recall Aesop's fable of the horse and the man? The horse is harried by a wolf, and permits a man to ride him in order that together they may hunt down and kill the wolf. Once the wolf is dead, though, the horse asks the man to get off his back -- but the man has no intention of doing so, and digs in with the spurs, laughing.
That's what government does when you invite it into your industry. Look at radio. Big radio stations went to government to sort out the problems of contesting for frequencies -- and ended up with the censorious FCC on their backs, telling them what words they may use on the air. We only recently managed to rid ourselves of the Communications Decency Act -- do you want to give government's evil another shot at the Net, this time under cover of "privacy protection"?
Government isn't about cooperation. Government is about violence. Every government action, no matter how benevolent, is based on violence: if you try to choose not to go along with it, you get shot or put in jail. Can radio stations now go to the FCC and say "Yes, thank you for helping us resolve our bandwidth disputes, but we really don't want any of this censorship stuff, thank you"? They could try, but they'd get laughed at, just like Aesop's horse. If they went ahead and started saying "fuck" on the air when they felt like it, they would have their stations invaded by policemen and forcibly taken off the air. Any deejay or engineer who resisted would be shot and killed.
Of course there are things individuals can do to enhance their own privacy. But there is also room for reasonable regulation in this space. We have laws settling lots of other disputes that used to get settled by individuals duelling in the streets, and we're generally better off for having them, I think.
Nobody here is duelling in the streets. There is contention, yes: there is a debate on over what the future of the Web should look like; that debate is being played out in software, data, and protocols. Yet there is no violence going on. Nobody is forced to fund Doubleclick or to use a browser s/he doesn't want. You, OTOH, seek to introduce violence to the situation. Let us suppose that your proposals are put into effect -- Doubleclick's current behavior becomes against the law. If Doubleclick & co. continue to do what they have been doing, policemen with guns will show up at their offices and arrest them. If the Doubleclick people say to the policemen "Please do go away; we are peacefully conducting business," and refuse to go along, they will be shot and killed quite dead.
I for one believe that escalating violence is a highly non-optimal way to resolve a peaceful contention. It's certainly not something I want to deal with in the industry in which I work. So I find that private, cooperative solutions to contentions are much, much more desirable than government-based ones. This works in the case of spam (as I argue here) and it can work in the case of unwanted advertisements on the Web as well. So rather than spending your time calling for policemen to come and shoot people with whom you disagree, I entreat you to do something productive instead -- maybe go out and help some newbies use a Junkbuster proxy.
Why complain about Doubleclick? Their actions need not have any effect whatsoever on you. You have every right to protect yourself. Are you using the Junkbuster Proxy yet? Do you have a comprehensive blockfile?
Are you a sysadmin? Have you considered setting up a Junkbuster proxy alongside your Squid caching proxy and recommending it to your users? You can save a lot of bandwidth by letting your users opt out of banner ads. Most of them don't like 'em any more than you do.
(If you use Debian on your server systems, Junkbuster is available in both slink (the current stable release) and potato (the current beta release) as the package "junkbuster".
If you use a Macintosh for your home system, as I do, I recommend to you the iCab Web browser, which almost exactly duplicates the image-filtering abilities of Junkbuster -- right there in your browser configuration.)
Advertisers do not have any right to your bandwidth or your private information. However, you need not rely on the FTC or any other branch of government to protect you, your children, or your institution's resources. And if you're only willing to stand up for your rights if government will help you -- then what rights do you really have?
The system must not accept foolishly easy passwords; it must enforce mixed-case with special characters.
... thereby causing the majority of newbies to keep their passwords written on Post-It Notes on their monitors, or else on index cards in their desk drawers. Especially if said newbies are secretaries, librarians, or Deans.
He managed to piss everyone in the list off by saying that (essentially) the problem with the internet was poorly written software such as BIND and Sendmail (actually he is pissed because he was RBLed) to the point where Paul Vixie actually joined the list just to post a couple of messages in response.
Ummm.....If there are viable private solutions to this scourge, then why haven't we seen them already?
There are viable private solutions to spam. See the Mail Abuse Prevention System. Using MAPS's lists to filter your incoming mail will significantly reduce the amount of spam you receive. No, it will not eliminate all spam -- but neither does any "solution" to a social problem entirely eliminate that problem. (Certainly law is not a perfect solution to problems -- otherwise, why do we still have murder, theft, and copyright violation?)
(One of the great things about MAPS is that the more participants, the better it gets. If you use MAPS to filter your mail, then report spam you receive back to MAPS appropriately, you will be helping to improve the service -- thus reducing your future spam intake and everyone else's.)
I am not sure if a private solution would work in this situation because of the "free speech" arguements and also of the multi-juristdictional nature of the problem.
It's funny you should mention those -- because those are, in fact, two problems with law-based solutions which do not affect private solutions.
"Freedom of speech", as protected by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution (among others), is more accurately described as the freedom to use your own resources, including your voice and your property, to speak your mind. It does not justify your use of other people's property to speak your mind. That, however, is what spammers do -- they use my mail server, without my permission, to spam me, my users, and others. In the civilized world we call that "theft of services" -- just as if I owned a printing press and you crept in by night and used my press to print up your leaflets.
The legal trouble, then, lies in defining "permission". Some would argue (and have argued) that by connecting a mail server to the Internet you are implicitly granting everyone permission to use it as much as they want, for whatever purpose they want -- including spamming. The opposite extreme is to hold that only explicitly solicited mail is granted permission -- which would rule out a lot of perfectly legitimate mail. Both of these are IMHO ridiculous extremes. A legal attempt to stop spam, however, must deal with these issues in defining spam. Veer to far towards the first position, and you violate property rights; veer too far towards the second, and you violate freedom of speech. A private attempt to stop spam can define permission extensionally -- i.e. by example. This is exactly what cooperative, voluntary systems like MAPS's lists do. The lists are made up of addresses associated with actual pieces of spam received and reported by participants.
You also mention the "multi-jurisdictional nature of the problem". This, too, is a problem solely for legal attempts to stop spam, and not private ones. Private cooperation among ISPs and among users may easily ignore governmental borders -- indeed, it already does. MAPS participants come from all corners of the globe.
For all those anti-government folks, I am surprised to see that a creation of a civilian anti-spam force is so distrubing to you.
What's so "anti-government" about bounty-hunters and more laws? That's about as "anti-government" as any other case of stool-pigeonry.
As a Libertarian, I object to government meddling in private affairs. I also object to crime (i.e. the violation of people's rights), and I consider spamming to be criminal, regardless of whether or not government thinks it is. Spamming is a violation of the property rights of those spammed, and of the owners of mail servers that relay and store the spam. I support people taking private action to protect themselves from crime, insofar as they feel the need to do so, and can do so without violating others' rights in the process -- and that is exactly what MAPS and similar systems do.
If you are emotionally dependent on government to protect your rights -- in other words, if you are unwilling to protect them yourself -- what rights do you really have?
I suggest that there be added to the per-user preferences an option specifying whether you want Slashdot (or other people) to feel free to use your posts (with attribution) in books or other works.
Seeing as the journos seem to see the need to state a definition for "hacker" most every time they use it ("This Web-site vandalism is just another of the recent works of 'hackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers"), it's clear that they believe that the word "hacker" is not yet clearly-enough defined in the common parlance to stand on its own.
One does not, after all, state a definition for common words like "golfer", "policeman", or "beer"; that one states a definition indicates that one believes the word to need defining. ("The driver had been drinking 'beer', an alcoholic beverage made from fermented barley spiced with hops.")
Therefore, to say that they rely on the common parlance for the meaning of "hacker" is disingenuous. They might as well say "This Web vandalism is just another of the recent works of so-called 'crackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers." Doing this would serve the cause of education -- improving, rather than damaging, the common parlance -- and further would avoid pissing off hackers.
No, because GPL tries to take away your right to a warranty. There is a give and take, so GPL is in fact a contract, and not just a license or a purely right granting document.
Um, no.
The implicit "right" to warranty isn't out of nowhere; it's part of the default-contract provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) -- you know, that thing that's getting modified as states adopt UCITA. These provisions apply to commercial transactions unless they are overridden by other terms agreed upon by the parties to the transaction. Every commercial transaction, after all, is a contract.
Now, I don't know about you -- maybe you buy packaged distributions -- but I don't engage in commercial transactions in order to get my hands on GPLed software; I download it from Debian. Therefore, there is no commercial transaction going on; hence UCC does not apply; hence there is no implied warranty. The GPL no-warranty language is largely for show or for clarification, like a lot of the language in EULAs.
Even if you do get your GPLed software in a commercially-packaged GNU/Linux distribution, you are not entering contract with the individual authors of the software, but with the distributor. (You aren't buying Apache from the Apache Software Foundation; you're buying it from Red Hat.) Hence, if there is any implied warranty under UCC, it is between you and the distributor. And the distributor can disclaim that warranty by specifying other terms to the contract -- which the Washington case under discussion holds that it can do via a shrink-wrap agreement.
So, in other words, if Apache explodes, you may be able to claim warranty from Red Hat (if you bought it from them), but you can't claim warranty from Apache. Further, you can't even claim warranty from Red Hat in the state of Washington if they have a warranty-disclaiming EULA-style "agreement".
GNU GPL is not a shrink-wrap license, true. However, it is not the same sort of "license" as Microsoft shrink-wrap licenses.
Microsoft's "End User License Agreement" assumes that before you agree to it, you have no right to use the software. The EULA, therefore, is phrased as a "license" to use the software. GPL, on the other hand, assumes that you already do have the right to use the software; what you lack, due to copyright law, is the right to redistribute it. The GPL, therefore, is phrased as a license to distribute the software, under certain conditions.
You'll note that you don't have to click on the GPL in order to be bound by its terms when you redistribute GPLed software. Why? Because the GPL is not a contract. The GPL is solely a license. In fact, the GPL clearly states that you do not have to "agree to" it; if you don't want to obey its terms, that's fine -- but if you do disobey its terms when distributing GPLed software, that distribution is a violation of copyright. You may obey the GPL's provisions when redistributing GPLed software, in which case you are within your rights, or you may violate its provisions when distributing GPLed software, in which case you are breaking the law.
(Note, if you will, the difference between agreeing to something and agreeing with something. The latter is an expression of opinion; the former is a declaration that one consents to be bound by a set of terms. Note also the difference between agreeing to something and obeying it. You don't need to agree to the laws against copyright violation in order to be penalized for not obeying them.)
In contrast with GPL and related licensens, proprietary EULAs aren't licenses at all; they're waivers masquerading as contracts. In exchange for the dubious "right to use" the software, they state that you must agree to waive certain rights you would otherwise have. By clicking on the little "I Agree" button, you thereby (supposedly) waive those rights in exchange for the "right to use".
But there is no "right to use" -- or rather, the right to use is inherent in legitimately-granted access to the software.
Consider: If I operate a college computer lab, I grant access to the computers in that lab to any number of students who have not clicked on any "license agreement". What grants these students the "right to use" any proprietary software that may have been (legitimately) installed on that computer? If one has to agree to an EULA to have that right, then those students, not bound by any EULA, are just as illicit as any warez d00d.
My interpretation is that what grants the students the right to use the software is the fact that they came by it legitimately -- that the software was legally installed on the computers (i.e. it was not "pirated") and that they had the right to use those computers.
Similarly, if you legitimately come by a piece of proprietary software -- say, by purchasing a CD containing it in a store, or downloading it from the manufacturer's Web site -- then you already do have the right to use it. You don't have to agree to anything. Go ahead and unzip Microsoft's Kerberos documentation with WinZip, Stuffit Expander, or unzip(1), instead of running the self-extracting archive and seeing the bogus "trade secret" EULA. You already have the right to use it within if you downloaded it legally. (You don't, however, have the right to redistribute it without a license to do so. That's copyright law.)
===
A Parable on Licensing:
Imagine, if you will, that I own a bagel shop and you purchase from me one bagel. You leave my shop; I follow you to the park, where you plan to eat the bagel. Before you take a bite, however, I exclaim: "By biting into that bagel, thus making use of the intellectual property of its recipe, you agree to waive your right to sue me if it contains radioactive waste, cyanide, or dead roaches! I do not grant you permission to eat that bagel unless you agree to these terms!"
Assuming that you do not immediately become disgusted and toss the bagel in my face or the trash can, does your biting into the bagel create an agreement between you and me? Of course not. Did you need my permission to eat the bagel? Of course not. You already had the right to eat the bagel, as you came by the bagel legitimately -- by buying it from me, its creator.
(Little hint, though: You shouldn't buy bagels made by people who want you to waive your right to sue if they contain radioactive waste.)
Actually, if you copy music and don't buy a legal copy, you are in fact stealing. From whom, now, this is the issue.
Please name one jurisdiction, anywhere in the world, in which copyright violation is covered under theft laws. AFAIK, there are none; copyright violation is covered under copyright violation laws. Hence, for any non-Clintonian definition of the word "is", copyright violation "is not" theft. It "is" illegal, just as theft is. However, the two aren't the same thing, and it is foolery to say they are.
people who want to describe themselves as Libertarian like to talk a good game, but when the rubber meets the road they tend to retreat to comfortable conservative positions.
Not this Libertarian. I actually agree with what I wrote above, surprise surprise.
"We believe that adults have the right to private choice in consensual sexual activity.
"We oppose any government attempt to dictate, prohibit, control, or encourage any private lifestyle, living arrangement or contractual relationship.
"We support repeal of existing laws and policies which are intended to condemn, affirm, encourage, or deny sexual lifestyles or any set of attitudes about such lifestyles."
To me this means that rather than supporting "gay marriage", we should oppose "straight marriage". Marriage is a religious issue, not a civil one, and for government to grant special favors to straight couples is unjust to gay people, unmarried straight people, polyamorous people, and so forth.
Libertarians do not generally oppose "corporatism" -- on the contrary, they tend to support completely unrestrained free-market activity.
... which shows that you don't know what "corporatism" means. It means the entanglement of government with corporations, the use of corporations as a tool of government policy... things like corporate welfare, the creation of monopolies, the use of corporations to control workers (piss tests, anyone?)... the kind of thing that was all the rage in Fascist Italy.
Libertarians support the free market... and the free market is not served when government gives favors to corporations, nor when it manipulates them to assail the private behavior of their employees.
And by your own admission, the fact that only "some" libertarians oppose the patent system only reinforces this point: why do not all libertarians oppose it, as an outrageous intrusion into individual liberty? Why is it not a fundamental part of the Libertarian Party platform?
Probably because it hasn't been a major issue until recently? The mises.org link I gave earlier is also to a group that represents to me the most "conservative" (i.e. Republican-esque) side of the Libertarians, and I was (pleasantly) surprised to find them opposing patents.
Because the Libertarian Party is chiefly about economic liberty, with civil liberties as an afterthought, if they are addressed at all.
Well, why don't we go to the source? Let's see what we find at the Libertarian Party Web site. On the front page I find four headlines related to specific current issues: the War on Drugs, Internet censorship, the income tax, and the Census. Of these, two are clearly civil-liberties issues (the WoD and censorship), one is a privacy issue (the Census), and one is an economic issue (the income tax). So if you could privacy as a civil liberty (which I do), we have 75% civil-liberties and 25% economics.
Let's go to the news page. Here I see nine news articles, of which three pertain to privacy, two are tax issues, one is gun-rights, one pertains to the right to breastfeed an infant, one to hate-crime laws, and one to an attempt by government to regulate circuses out of existence. By Libertarian standards (under which the rights to keep and bear arms and to raise one's child are civil liberties) again we have a significant majority of civil-liberties over economics issues.
That the Libertarian Party occasionally endorses causes that are traditionally characterized as "liberal," such as a woman's right to choose or narcotics decriminalization, only emphasizes the fact that on most issues, Libertarians are closely aligned with "conservative" issues.
What about:
freedom of immigration
freedom of speech and the press
separation of church and state
equality under the law for gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities (and for everyone else too)
opposition to the draft and to militarism
opposition to corporate welfare, stadium subsidies, and other forms of corporatism
protection of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments against "law-and-order" police powers, wiretaps, unwarranted search-and-seizure, and the like
These are "conservative" positions? Do they sound like Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, or Rush Limbaugh speaking? I think not. And yet they are Libertarian positions, just as much as support for the free market is.
The left/right, liberal/conservative, single-axis political spectrum, dating back to the French Revolution, is an inaccurate model for the diversity of political views. It is more useful to describe people's political positions in terms of the set of rights or freedoms which they support, or conversely in terms of the set of restrictions on freedom which they support. One such model is the two-axis system proposed by the Advocates for Self-Government. I think even it is too simplistic, but it is a damn sight better than the usual spectrum.
Oh, is he? For a charlatan he can think very very cleanly and can express himself very well.
But of course... a charlatan is necessarily an expert at sounding correct, while in fact not being correct. You can't be a successful charlatan if you are not convincing. A charlatan who can't sound correct is not a charlatan; s/he's a kook.
Lessig seems to be saying "If all these bad things happen, and we don't do anything about them, then the Net will not be free." The problem with that is that it's a counterfactual. Yes, bad things are happening to the Net -- but people are constantly doing things about it. Who in the world would have, three or four years ago, predicted the popularity of Napster? (As I am a college sysadmin, I of course don't like Napster -- but I tolerate it and I respect it as an example of a distributed system, albeit a kludgy one.) Napster, to a greater degree Gnutella, and to an infinitely greater degree Freenet are all means people have come up with to circumvent what they see as restrictions being placed on the Net.
No, the Net is not inherently free. However, it is free enough now, and there are enough people who know how to hack it, that any attempt to enslave it would be like nailing jelly to a tree.
The principal difficulty with most notions of regulatiing spam is that it impinges upon freedom of speech. The same pen that denies broadcasting of unsolicited advertisement also shuts down the Franklin-style pamphleteer.
On the contrary. [Benjamin] Franklin paid for the production and distribution of his pamphlets... in fact, he owned his own printing press. Spammers, on the other hand, come into my house (computer) and use my printing press (mail server) to print up their ads, then leave them lying around my house for me and my tenants (users) to see.
Freedom of speech is something which exists in public forums, such as the town square. Freedom of the press is something which exists for people who own presses. Both of these are rights which protect you from the government censoring you when you're using your own resources (your voice or your press) to speak your mind. It is not "free speech" for you to come into my house without my permission and preach your doctrines; nor is it "free press" for you to use my resources to disseminate your ads. The former is trespassing and the latter is theft!
If you want to make your words known on the Net, disseminate them in a cooperative forum such as Usenet or Freenet (under the conventions and rules of that forum), or a private forum such as Slashdot (given the owner's permission), or your own personal Web page. Don't do it by stealing from other people, which is what you're doing if you spam.
"Legitimate Business Spam" is a contradiction in terms. Legitimate businesses pay their own costs; they do not foist those costs off on others. Spamming, because it forces the cost of advertisement onto the recipient and the recipient's ISP, is what in economics is called an "externality" -- a cost of doing business which is not absorbed by the party which incurs the cost, and which is thus forced on someone else without his/her consent.
Another example of an externality is pollution. By polluting, a company may be able to do business more cheaply (because it doesn't pay to clean up its emissions) but this foists off the costs upon others, in the form of damaged property, sickened people and animals, and other losses.
If I run a chemical company, I have no right to lower my production costs at the expense of giving you cancer or chloracne. Similarly, if I run an online business, I have no right to lower my costs of advertising by forcing you and your ISP to pay for the bandwidth and disk space incurred by my ads.
Insofar as a chemical company is dumping PCBs in my water, making me sick or stupid, that chemical company is not being a legitimate business; it is being a criminal business. Similarly, insofar as an online business is forcing its advertising costs on me, it is not a legitimate business.
Looks like the press got suckered in to reporting an urban legend! I hope Bill Gates puts these so-called newspapers out of business for this slanderous coverage.
Considering that for some time, Microsoft agreed that there was a backdoor -- even though they were as mistaken as anyone else -- I think he'd have precious little to stand on.
The anti-Slashdot lies need to stop. Slashdot ran the story based on many, many reports, including an admission from MS, that there was a hole. When the reports were found to be inaccurate, Slashdot posted that fact as well. There is no Slashdot conspiracy here -- there are just a lot of pseudo-radicals who think flaming makes them activists.
Zico, it is extremely disingenuous for you to call ESR's criticism of the reported backdoor "garbage and lies", when Microsoft itself was for quite a while stating that the backdoor existed as reported.
Were they spreading "garbage and lies" about their own code? Or perhaps was it a mistake?
You can't do that with closed-source software. Since you don't have the source code, you can't alter the code.
Actually, you can. That is exactly how application-infecting viruses work -- by modifying the (machine-language) code of installed binaries. They don't need the source; they use the fact that all executables of a given format have certain commonalities. A virus doesn't need access to Microsoft Word's source code in order to infect a copy of Word; it only needs to know that Word is an.EXE file, and that all.EXE files work the same way. Similarly, the writer of a Trojan horse can create a Trojaned executable from a clean one without recompiling.
Yes, it takes more work to figure out how to maliciously modify a binary than to do the same to source code -- but that figuring-out has already been done and documented, and so is already available for your friendly neighborhood saboteur.
This has already proven to be untrue in the case of Perl at least, as noted in this article in theRegister
Funny you should mention that, because the Register article says:
"Perl scripts are not the problem. Perl is not the problem. Incompetence is the problem. There are too many amateurs out there writing sloppy code. They get a brief lesson in Perl from some book and think that this makes them the Internet's gift to programming," [Bugtraq contributor Joe] Harris told The Register.
It's one thing to spread FUD, but to spread trivially refutable FUD, and link to the article that refutes it...? FWIW, ESR's point was that Perl itself (the interpreter, as distributed by Larry Wall and company) will never have deliberately-placed backdoors; not that it should be impossible to write insecure code in Perl.
Why? Because when we think, we think 'about' things (it is the irreducible mark of the mental) and nowhere in the program is anything intrinsically about anything else.
Where is the 'aboutness' located in your brain? Is there an 'aboutness center' of the brain? There is not. 'Aboutness' is not an irreducible phenomenon, merely an emergent one. As such, it can just as well emerge out of inorganic systems of sufficient and appropriate complexity. See Dennett, Consciousness Explained.
I think you'll find that the insistence on 'aboutness' reduces to the well-debunked Cartesian Dualist philosophy, which draws a definitive separation between mind and brain which has never been found to exist. Worse yet, the idea of 'irreducible' properties of 'mind' is more primitive still -- nothing more than warmed-over Thomist accident/essence duality: medieval Catholic authoritarian ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
So what does the license on the code say? I find the following in the example file to which you refer:
This is not a free-software or open-source license, because of the clause restricting users from using the code in "any other book, publication, or educational product" without special permission. Free software, according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the Open Source Definition, requires "no discrimination against fields of endeavor". Discounting that provision, however, it does permit you to use, modify, and redistribute the code "in source or binary form, so long as an acknowledgment appears in derived source files."Hypocrisy? Not here.
(For the record: I don't support MP3-bootlegging or other bootlegging. I find that die-hard "software pirates" are some of the least creative and forward-thinking people I know; they're so interested in getting the popular goods that they never stop to think if there's something better than that bootleg copy of W2K out there. However, I believe the risk to freedom posed by regulation and policing of this bootlegging is far, far greater than that posed by the bootlegging itself. Consider the War on Drugs -- yes, there are a lot of street drugs out there that can fuck you up, but in the end the cops and the prisons and the illegality have done more social harm than all the pot, coke, and junk in the world ever could.)
What, you mean that sending that information was in your broken browser's broken defaults? Fix it, or take it up with your vendor for shipping you a trojan -- er, I mean, "integrated undocumented feature". Help out your fellow human beings by setting up a Junkbuster proxy and letting them use it, or by teaching them to set one up themselves. In no case is it a misdeed on the part of a server operator to store information which you transmit to that server. Such a position is completely untenable -- would you forbid the keeping of access logs next? -- and that you would call for police to arrest or shoot people for storing such information is truly frightening.
It ain't knee-jerk; it's just more radical than you're comfortable with. Yes, I do really think that calling for government "intervention" against peaceful people is calling for violence. Mumble mumble jack-booted thugs mumble Waco mumble Ruby Ridge mumble COINTELPRO HUAC MK-Ultra mumble ECHELON mumble mumble.And yes, violence is a quite justified response to attempted rape or to other acts of violence. It is not a justified response to the ordinary collection of ordinary information which you transmitted to the collector's Web server.
That you don't know better is no excuse. Yes, Doubleclick could tell you more about the information they collect -- but they don't have to. The Coors beer company would prefer you not to know that there are better beers in the world than theirs -- and yet they are not defrauding you by failing to tell you this.
Not at all. Did you read the part of my post where I recommended to sysadmins that they set up and configure Junkbuster as an option for their users? Collective action does not imply government action; people can cooperate to advance their mutual self-interest without bringing the evils of government into play.Doubleclick's vision of the Web is not my vision of the Web -- nor is it Microsoft's, Junkbuster's, Sun's, RMS's, or AOL's. Each of these parties may be tempted to try to bring the forces of government into the marketplace on its side. But do you recall Aesop's fable of the horse and the man? The horse is harried by a wolf, and permits a man to ride him in order that together they may hunt down and kill the wolf. Once the wolf is dead, though, the horse asks the man to get off his back -- but the man has no intention of doing so, and digs in with the spurs, laughing.
That's what government does when you invite it into your industry. Look at radio. Big radio stations went to government to sort out the problems of contesting for frequencies -- and ended up with the censorious FCC on their backs, telling them what words they may use on the air. We only recently managed to rid ourselves of the Communications Decency Act -- do you want to give government's evil another shot at the Net, this time under cover of "privacy protection"?
Government isn't about cooperation. Government is about violence. Every government action, no matter how benevolent, is based on violence: if you try to choose not to go along with it, you get shot or put in jail. Can radio stations now go to the FCC and say "Yes, thank you for helping us resolve our bandwidth disputes, but we really don't want any of this censorship stuff, thank you"? They could try, but they'd get laughed at, just like Aesop's horse. If they went ahead and started saying "fuck" on the air when they felt like it, they would have their stations invaded by policemen and forcibly taken off the air. Any deejay or engineer who resisted would be shot and killed.
Nobody here is duelling in the streets. There is contention, yes: there is a debate on over what the future of the Web should look like; that debate is being played out in software, data, and protocols. Yet there is no violence going on. Nobody is forced to fund Doubleclick or to use a browser s/he doesn't want. You, OTOH, seek to introduce violence to the situation. Let us suppose that your proposals are put into effect -- Doubleclick's current behavior becomes against the law. If Doubleclick & co. continue to do what they have been doing, policemen with guns will show up at their offices and arrest them. If the Doubleclick people say to the policemen "Please do go away; we are peacefully conducting business," and refuse to go along, they will be shot and killed quite dead.I for one believe that escalating violence is a highly non-optimal way to resolve a peaceful contention. It's certainly not something I want to deal with in the industry in which I work. So I find that private, cooperative solutions to contentions are much, much more desirable than government-based ones. This works in the case of spam (as I argue here) and it can work in the case of unwanted advertisements on the Web as well. So rather than spending your time calling for policemen to come and shoot people with whom you disagree, I entreat you to do something productive instead -- maybe go out and help some newbies use a Junkbuster proxy.
Are you a sysadmin? Have you considered setting up a Junkbuster proxy alongside your Squid caching proxy and recommending it to your users? You can save a lot of bandwidth by letting your users opt out of banner ads. Most of them don't like 'em any more than you do.
(If you use Debian on your server systems, Junkbuster is available in both slink (the current stable release) and potato (the current beta release) as the package "junkbuster".
If you use a Macintosh for your home system, as I do, I recommend to you the iCab Web browser, which almost exactly duplicates the image-filtering abilities of Junkbuster -- right there in your browser configuration.)
Advertisers do not have any right to your bandwidth or your private information. However, you need not rely on the FTC or any other branch of government to protect you, your children, or your institution's resources. And if you're only willing to stand up for your rights if government will help you -- then what rights do you really have?
(Off-topic note to CmdrTaco et al.: Fix extrans mode or remove it!)
(One of the great things about MAPS is that the more participants, the better it gets. If you use MAPS to filter your mail, then report spam you receive back to MAPS appropriately, you will be helping to improve the service -- thus reducing your future spam intake and everyone else's.)
It's funny you should mention those -- because those are, in fact, two problems with law-based solutions which do not affect private solutions."Freedom of speech", as protected by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution (among others), is more accurately described as the freedom to use your own resources, including your voice and your property, to speak your mind. It does not justify your use of other people's property to speak your mind. That, however, is what spammers do -- they use my mail server, without my permission, to spam me, my users, and others. In the civilized world we call that "theft of services" -- just as if I owned a printing press and you crept in by night and used my press to print up your leaflets.
The legal trouble, then, lies in defining "permission". Some would argue (and have argued) that by connecting a mail server to the Internet you are implicitly granting everyone permission to use it as much as they want, for whatever purpose they want -- including spamming. The opposite extreme is to hold that only explicitly solicited mail is granted permission -- which would rule out a lot of perfectly legitimate mail. Both of these are IMHO ridiculous extremes. A legal attempt to stop spam, however, must deal with these issues in defining spam. Veer to far towards the first position, and you violate property rights; veer too far towards the second, and you violate freedom of speech. A private attempt to stop spam can define permission extensionally -- i.e. by example. This is exactly what cooperative, voluntary systems like MAPS's lists do. The lists are made up of addresses associated with actual pieces of spam received and reported by participants.
You also mention the "multi-jurisdictional nature of the problem". This, too, is a problem solely for legal attempts to stop spam, and not private ones. Private cooperation among ISPs and among users may easily ignore governmental borders -- indeed, it already does. MAPS participants come from all corners of the globe.
What's so "anti-government" about bounty-hunters and more laws? That's about as "anti-government" as any other case of stool-pigeonry.As a Libertarian, I object to government meddling in private affairs. I also object to crime (i.e. the violation of people's rights), and I consider spamming to be criminal, regardless of whether or not government thinks it is. Spamming is a violation of the property rights of those spammed, and of the owners of mail servers that relay and store the spam. I support people taking private action to protect themselves from crime, insofar as they feel the need to do so, and can do so without violating others' rights in the process -- and that is exactly what MAPS and similar systems do.
If you are emotionally dependent on government to protect your rights -- in other words, if you are unwilling to protect them yourself -- what rights do you really have?
I suggest that there be added to the per-user preferences an option specifying whether you want Slashdot (or other people) to feel free to use your posts (with attribution) in books or other works.
One does not, after all, state a definition for common words like "golfer", "policeman", or "beer"; that one states a definition indicates that one believes the word to need defining. ("The driver had been drinking 'beer', an alcoholic beverage made from fermented barley spiced with hops.")
Therefore, to say that they rely on the common parlance for the meaning of "hacker" is disingenuous. They might as well say "This Web vandalism is just another of the recent works of so-called 'crackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers." Doing this would serve the cause of education -- improving, rather than damaging, the common parlance -- and further would avoid pissing off hackers.
The implicit "right" to warranty isn't out of nowhere; it's part of the default-contract provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) -- you know, that thing that's getting modified as states adopt UCITA. These provisions apply to commercial transactions unless they are overridden by other terms agreed upon by the parties to the transaction. Every commercial transaction, after all, is a contract.
Now, I don't know about you -- maybe you buy packaged distributions -- but I don't engage in commercial transactions in order to get my hands on GPLed software; I download it from Debian. Therefore, there is no commercial transaction going on; hence UCC does not apply; hence there is no implied warranty. The GPL no-warranty language is largely for show or for clarification, like a lot of the language in EULAs.
Even if you do get your GPLed software in a commercially-packaged GNU/Linux distribution, you are not entering contract with the individual authors of the software, but with the distributor. (You aren't buying Apache from the Apache Software Foundation; you're buying it from Red Hat.) Hence, if there is any implied warranty under UCC, it is between you and the distributor. And the distributor can disclaim that warranty by specifying other terms to the contract -- which the Washington case under discussion holds that it can do via a shrink-wrap agreement.
So, in other words, if Apache explodes, you may be able to claim warranty from Red Hat (if you bought it from them), but you can't claim warranty from Apache. Further, you can't even claim warranty from Red Hat in the state of Washington if they have a warranty-disclaiming EULA-style "agreement".
Microsoft's "End User License Agreement" assumes that before you agree to it, you have no right to use the software. The EULA, therefore, is phrased as a "license" to use the software. GPL, on the other hand, assumes that you already do have the right to use the software; what you lack, due to copyright law, is the right to redistribute it. The GPL, therefore, is phrased as a license to distribute the software, under certain conditions.
You'll note that you don't have to click on the GPL in order to be bound by its terms when you redistribute GPLed software. Why? Because the GPL is not a contract. The GPL is solely a license. In fact, the GPL clearly states that you do not have to "agree to" it; if you don't want to obey its terms, that's fine -- but if you do disobey its terms when distributing GPLed software, that distribution is a violation of copyright. You may obey the GPL's provisions when redistributing GPLed software, in which case you are within your rights, or you may violate its provisions when distributing GPLed software, in which case you are breaking the law.
(Note, if you will, the difference between agreeing to something and agreeing with something. The latter is an expression of opinion; the former is a declaration that one consents to be bound by a set of terms. Note also the difference between agreeing to something and obeying it. You don't need to agree to the laws against copyright violation in order to be penalized for not obeying them.)
In contrast with GPL and related licensens, proprietary EULAs aren't licenses at all; they're waivers masquerading as contracts. In exchange for the dubious "right to use" the software, they state that you must agree to waive certain rights you would otherwise have. By clicking on the little "I Agree" button, you thereby (supposedly) waive those rights in exchange for the "right to use".
But there is no "right to use" -- or rather, the right to use is inherent in legitimately-granted access to the software.
Consider: If I operate a college computer lab, I grant access to the computers in that lab to any number of students who have not clicked on any "license agreement". What grants these students the "right to use" any proprietary software that may have been (legitimately) installed on that computer? If one has to agree to an EULA to have that right, then those students, not bound by any EULA, are just as illicit as any warez d00d.
My interpretation is that what grants the students the right to use the software is the fact that they came by it legitimately -- that the software was legally installed on the computers (i.e. it was not "pirated") and that they had the right to use those computers.
Similarly, if you legitimately come by a piece of proprietary software -- say, by purchasing a CD containing it in a store, or downloading it from the manufacturer's Web site -- then you already do have the right to use it. You don't have to agree to anything. Go ahead and unzip Microsoft's Kerberos documentation with WinZip, Stuffit Expander, or unzip(1), instead of running the self-extracting archive and seeing the bogus "trade secret" EULA. You already have the right to use it within if you downloaded it legally. (You don't, however, have the right to redistribute it without a license to do so. That's copyright law.)
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A Parable on Licensing:
Imagine, if you will, that I own a bagel shop and you purchase from me one bagel. You leave my shop; I follow you to the park, where you plan to eat the bagel. Before you take a bite, however, I exclaim: "By biting into that bagel, thus making use of the intellectual property of its recipe, you agree to waive your right to sue me if it contains radioactive waste, cyanide, or dead roaches! I do not grant you permission to eat that bagel unless you agree to these terms!"
Assuming that you do not immediately become disgusted and toss the bagel in my face or the trash can, does your biting into the bagel create an agreement between you and me? Of course not. Did you need my permission to eat the bagel? Of course not. You already had the right to eat the bagel, as you came by the bagel legitimately -- by buying it from me, its creator.
(Little hint, though: You shouldn't buy bagels made by people who want you to waive your right to sue if they contain radioactive waste.)
In fact, the Libertarian Party Platform has the following to say about "Sexual Rights":
To me this means that rather than supporting "gay marriage", we should oppose "straight marriage". Marriage is a religious issue, not a civil one, and for government to grant special favors to straight couples is unjust to gay people, unmarried straight people, polyamorous people, and so forth.... which shows that you don't know what "corporatism" means. It means the entanglement of government with corporations, the use of corporations as a tool of government policy
Libertarians support the free market ... and the free market is not served when government gives favors to corporations, nor when it manipulates them to assail the private behavior of their employees.
Probably because it hasn't been a major issue until recently? The mises.org link I gave earlier is also to a group that represents to me the most "conservative" (i.e. Republican-esque) side of the Libertarians, and I was (pleasantly) surprised to find them opposing patents.Well, why don't we go to the source? Let's see what we find at the Libertarian Party Web site. On the front page I find four headlines related to specific current issues: the War on Drugs, Internet censorship, the income tax, and the Census. Of these, two are clearly civil-liberties issues (the WoD and censorship), one is a privacy issue (the Census), and one is an economic issue (the income tax). So if you could privacy as a civil liberty (which I do), we have 75% civil-liberties and 25% economics.
Let's go to the news page. Here I see nine news articles, of which three pertain to privacy, two are tax issues, one is gun-rights, one pertains to the right to breastfeed an infant, one to hate-crime laws, and one to an attempt by government to regulate circuses out of existence. By Libertarian standards (under which the rights to keep and bear arms and to raise one's child are civil liberties) again we have a significant majority of civil-liberties over economics issues.
- freedom of immigration
- freedom of speech and the press
- separation of church and state
- equality under the law for gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities (and for everyone else too)
- opposition to the draft and to militarism
- opposition to corporate welfare, stadium subsidies, and other forms of corporatism
- protection of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments against "law-and-order" police powers, wiretaps, unwarranted search-and-seizure, and the like
- (for some libertarians) opposition to the patent system
These are "conservative" positions? Do they sound like Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, or Rush Limbaugh speaking? I think not. And yet they are Libertarian positions, just as much as support for the free market is.The left/right, liberal/conservative, single-axis political spectrum, dating back to the French Revolution, is an inaccurate model for the diversity of political views. It is more useful to describe people's political positions in terms of the set of rights or freedoms which they support, or conversely in terms of the set of restrictions on freedom which they support. One such model is the two-axis system proposed by the Advocates for Self-Government. I think even it is too simplistic, but it is a damn sight better than the usual spectrum.
Lessig seems to be saying "If all these bad things happen, and we don't do anything about them, then the Net will not be free." The problem with that is that it's a counterfactual. Yes, bad things are happening to the Net -- but people are constantly doing things about it. Who in the world would have, three or four years ago, predicted the popularity of Napster? (As I am a college sysadmin, I of course don't like Napster -- but I tolerate it and I respect it as an example of a distributed system, albeit a kludgy one.) Napster, to a greater degree Gnutella, and to an infinitely greater degree Freenet are all means people have come up with to circumvent what they see as restrictions being placed on the Net.
No, the Net is not inherently free. However, it is free enough now, and there are enough people who know how to hack it, that any attempt to enslave it would be like nailing jelly to a tree.
Freedom of speech is something which exists in public forums, such as the town square. Freedom of the press is something which exists for people who own presses. Both of these are rights which protect you from the government censoring you when you're using your own resources (your voice or your press) to speak your mind. It is not "free speech" for you to come into my house without my permission and preach your doctrines; nor is it "free press" for you to use my resources to disseminate your ads. The former is trespassing and the latter is theft!
If you want to make your words known on the Net, disseminate them in a cooperative forum such as Usenet or Freenet (under the conventions and rules of that forum), or a private forum such as Slashdot (given the owner's permission), or your own personal Web page. Don't do it by stealing from other people, which is what you're doing if you spam.
Another example of an externality is pollution. By polluting, a company may be able to do business more cheaply (because it doesn't pay to clean up its emissions) but this foists off the costs upon others, in the form of damaged property, sickened people and animals, and other losses.
If I run a chemical company, I have no right to lower my production costs at the expense of giving you cancer or chloracne. Similarly, if I run an online business, I have no right to lower my costs of advertising by forcing you and your ISP to pay for the bandwidth and disk space incurred by my ads.
Insofar as a chemical company is dumping PCBs in my water, making me sick or stupid, that chemical company is not being a legitimate business; it is being a criminal business. Similarly, insofar as an online business is forcing its advertising costs on me, it is not a legitimate business.
The anti-Slashdot lies need to stop. Slashdot ran the story based on many, many reports, including an admission from MS, that there was a hole. When the reports were found to be inaccurate, Slashdot posted that fact as well. There is no Slashdot conspiracy here -- there are just a lot of pseudo-radicals who think flaming makes them activists.
Were they spreading "garbage and lies" about their own code? Or perhaps was it a mistake?
Yes, it takes more work to figure out how to maliciously modify a binary than to do the same to source code -- but that figuring-out has already been done and documented, and so is already available for your friendly neighborhood saboteur.
FWIW, you can get a proper su (in Debian, at least) by installing the secure-su package.
Where is the 'aboutness' located in your brain? Is there an 'aboutness center' of the brain? There is not. 'Aboutness' is not an irreducible phenomenon, merely an emergent one. As such, it can just as well emerge out of inorganic systems of sufficient and appropriate complexity. See Dennett, Consciousness Explained.
I think you'll find that the insistence on 'aboutness' reduces to the well-debunked Cartesian Dualist philosophy, which draws a definitive separation between mind and brain which has never been found to exist. Worse yet, the idea of 'irreducible' properties of 'mind' is more primitive still -- nothing more than warmed-over Thomist accident/essence duality: medieval Catholic authoritarian ideology.