Yeah, right... watching Buffy, then skipping over to PBS while the ads are showing is going to be illegal soon, right? Your new CBDTPA TV set is going to force you to watch shows ALL THE WAY THROUGH.
Seriously, these kinds of cross-industry mergers are often appallingly inefficient for the first few years while all of the organizational kinks get worked out.
Then, when you start to see the synergies, they really take off, often out-competing all of the players from the industries the hybrid company was formed from.
In two years, when you see tightly branded Time Warner content (i.e. Bugs Bunny!) "Available Only On AOL!", with AOL billing you per-view on your ISP bill on your DCMA/CBDTPA-enabled home Entertainment Appliance, don't say you didn't have the chance to buy stock now:-)
Political problems, political solutions: we need to take political action to combat this stuff.
Privacy needs to be made a right, and we need to push back against being stripped of our rights at political levels: no amount of encryption in the world can stop you going to jail for using it.
Firstly, all standards must be open and unencumbered.
Secondly, XML is the right way to do this for political not technical reasons. But still use XML.
Thirdly, and very importantly, all information held in the system is (C) the user, licensed under strict contract to the Information Repository to use. This is a protection against somebody buying the system if it becomes successful and changing the terms of service.
Fourthly, information has to be protected in three important ways:
Every piece of information about you has to be accessable without linking it to any other piece of information about you (i.e. no Unique ID) - more on the technical aspects of this later.
Every site/organization which wants access to your information must agree not to use it in conjunction with other public information to compile a profile of you.
You must be able to revoke any and all information at any point.
Fifth, no unusual public key cryptography should be used in the system. SSH/SSL yes, PGP/GPG no - this is to protect from the government's ire. Symmetric key ciphers for protecting your own information (i.e. passwords) seem OK to me.
Sixth, two different sites/organizations, both accessing the same data about you, should not be able to tell from that request that they are accessing information about the same person: i.e. if A asks for your DOB, and B asks for it, they should not both be accessing UID234234.DOB. One scheme for this is that "permissions" are given to different organizations, of the form:
This protects your identity and prevents cross-correlation of different databases.
Seventh, the standard should work like email: standard infrastructure can provide a server, anybody can operate one, and you have control of your use of these systems. No single operator.
Eighth, and most importantly, none of this is worth shit without a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. Without that, any scheme can be forced over time into revealing more about users than they wish to reveal, either by legal, economic, social or political means.
Strong cryptography is nothing without strong laws, and strong laws are something without any cryptography at all. Support GeekPAC! (the Geek Political Action Committee
Looks like the players previously too cowed to come out into the open and talk about M$ tactics are now talking: in detail and in court.
At this point, though, given how much Windows XP sucks, the FBI security warning about it, the slow rate of adoption in the corporate setting.... does it really matter what the guy from Red Hat says?
Some folks are producing a feature film this way!
on
Open Source... Television?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Seriously! The entire thing is being done in POV-RAY, with both models and renderings available online!
PDAs are not spontanious enough for children in a multi-lingual environment. Too long to type your messages in, never mind translation issues.
However, I think that digital cameras, the - cheap ones mind you - could be ideal, particularly if you give the older children video cameras in addition (say 1/10 of the group gets video cameras, or you have a "camera crew" per two dozen participants).
You want to say "HI" to Wong Meng in Taipei? Turn the cam around, smile, take a picture of yourself and send it. Much easier than text entry, translation etc.
Have base station PCs, use the cameras as webcams some of the time, and still cams the rest of the time, and have the kids take them home at the end of the gig: and *continue*to*publish*pictures* as time passes - kinda like the penpal idea.
Think of it as "children's eye window on the world" - longditudinal images from the conference participants over time, plus it's going to put less load on your translation services.
And a picture is worth a thousand words.
If you do still want to build custom hardware, think like a "Compact Flash" format wireless transponder to basically squirt pictures to base-station PCs as they're taken, so the kids don't have to mess with file upload/download: point, click, put images online.
Hell, you might even end up with a commercial product at the end of it:-) to fund future efforts!
I'd like to see texts which addressed specific topic areas (say, database programming) in a language-independant way. You could have a couple of languages in the book, and then allow users to contribute examples in the same structure as the book (i.e. same examples) on the web.
You could also host discussion boards structured the same way as the book so people can ask for help and submit updates as they appear.
Why? Not just because you might miss a class, but also for reference after the event.
Why MP3 rather than video?
Simple: cost. You could take a tiny slice of the tech budget and wire every auditorium and classroom for sound, and serving the files is no big deal (96KBMP for voice sounds like a CD).
The problem which this leaves is blackboards / whiteboards. I'd suggest two possible solutions, in keeping with this low-tech approach.
1> Webcams which take a picture of the board every five or ten seconds.
(Pros: cool, cons: more complex, sync. with audio a problem).
2> One of those funky systems which record where your pen is on the whiteboard and produce gifs from that data.
Either solution is expensive, relative to sound, however, so mebbe the right thing to do is just to skip it.
Even if a DRM licence costs $50K, hell, even if it's $100K, companies or groups of artists can buy a key and then syndicate the service: you send in your work and an affadavit that it's yours, they charge you some cash to sign it, and off it goes into the content pool.
Don't knock it: widespread deployment of cryptographic systems may require government mandate.
Firstly, will you accept payment in anonymous digital cash like Digigold?
Second, what will you do about massively copyright-infringing sites, for example, if somebody were to move Lyrics.CH (as it was) to your servers, how do you think you would you handle the resulting pressures?
But not all speech is protected. Most of us would have serious moral qualms about helping in a kidnapping/murder, or in passing notes between a hitman and his client. Yet that's part of the payload that Freenet will carry, by allowing anonymous communications between hitman and client, or kidnapper and victim's family.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but this is true of the internet in general: you can anonymize mail any number of ways, some of them are secure, and any machine carrying public trafic is involved. Freenet is a change in scale, but not in kind as far as criminal or otherwise prejudiced communications go.
It's possible that the moral good in providing a safe haven for whistleblowers and oppressed peoples will outweight the blood from murder victims. This is the type of moral dilemma that keeps people up at night. Pretending that this type of crime won't occur doesn't help answer this question, and in fact it casts doubt on all anonymous schemes because it makes the proponents come across as shallow eggheads who don't fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.
The question is not whether this sort of crime will occur: it will. Criminals have for years been making use of the mode technologies of the day, and the internet is no different. Remember Sneakers? The Mafia's encrypted Information Systems Cray? It's just fiction, but the point is that Organized Crime has always adapted.
Is freenet really going to be so much more of a problem? We'll see, but I'm betting that it won't. The people who really have something to hide have been doing it sucessfully since the Cypherpunk remailer was launched, and so far I haven't heard of any kidnappings being brokered across that.
(Why do I feel the urge to quote Oppenheimer quoting Shiva after the first nuclear detonation?)
Firstly, it was Krsna, not Shiva.
Secondly, get a grip: freenet and it's successors are not the equivalent of a neuclear weapon for anybody except perhaps a few copyright holders - many may be significantly better off once we get those damn record companies and their publisher stooges off their backs. They may not think so now, but when we see hundreds of thousands of dollars of micropayments for music going straight into the pockets of the artists, rather than into the maw of corporate copyrighted america, we'll see which way the wind blows, eh?
I'm amazed at the amount of hostility that Freenet is drawing from the Slashdot community. It's like it's hit some sort of a totally raw nerve and really separated the men from the boys (and the women from the girls, I suppose).
Get with it, people. Freenet is where the internet has been headed from the start. The technical issues (moderation, crypto) will be sorted out in time, and then we'll get to see what the future looks like because we'll have participated in it's creation.
If you can't handle it, pick up a shovel and cut your DSL line: this technological development has always been latent since the beginning of public key cryptography, and now it's here.
Will it be possible to build a web-like text retreival system on top of freenet, or an HTTP/FreeNet gateway? How wil freenet hyperlinks be implemented?
The obvious solution to the whole Napster problem is micropayments.
Suppose that your Napster engine has a built-in micropayments client. Not a "You must pay or we won't let you use this music" - no, that just invites piracy and totally screws things up. No, just something where a PGP-signed payment URL is encoded with the document.
Then your client displays a button which says "pay this artist" and you click it, select the amount, and the money is transferred.
As for the how, you would need either a digital currency, e-gold or a balance held on-line by the company, probably funded with a credit card interface.
Slashdot Mirror
May be a different country, but the economics and usability issues are very similar indeed:
Wired talks about it, and there's a lot more info over on Google.
Yo! Moderators! This is NOT flamebait. It may be controversial, but why is /. covering this as if it mattered?.
Remod!
WTF? It's all over, folks - it's not that the dot sold out, it's just that the old folks have won. Open source, ruled by Apple and IBM.
Why is this news? Answer: it isn't. What it is is lame. The buzz has worn off, and it's back to business as usual.
Yeah, right... watching Buffy, then skipping over to PBS while the ads are showing is going to be illegal soon, right? Your new CBDTPA TV set is going to force you to watch shows ALL THE WAY THROUGH.
Jesus, give me a break! (no pun intended)
I think they will make out like banditos!
:-)
Seriously, these kinds of cross-industry mergers are often appallingly inefficient for the first few years while all of the organizational kinks get worked out.
Then, when you start to see the synergies, they really take off, often out-competing all of the players from the industries the hybrid company was formed from.
In two years, when you see tightly branded Time Warner content (i.e. Bugs Bunny!) "Available Only On AOL!", with AOL billing you per-view on your ISP bill on your DCMA/CBDTPA-enabled home Entertainment Appliance, don't say you didn't have the chance to buy stock now
vkg
Political problems, political solutions: we need to take political action to combat this stuff.
Privacy needs to be made a right, and we need to push back against being stripped of our rights at political levels: no amount of encryption in the world can stop you going to jail for using it.
Support GeekPAC - the beginnings of our voice in Washington.
Secondly, XML is the right way to do this for political not technical reasons. But still use XML.
Thirdly, and very importantly, all information held in the system is (C) the user, licensed under strict contract to the Information Repository to use. This is a protection against somebody buying the system if it becomes successful and changing the terms of service.
Fourthly, information has to be protected in three important ways:
Fifth, no unusual public key cryptography should be used in the system. SSH/SSL yes, PGP/GPG no - this is to protect from the government's ire. Symmetric key ciphers for protecting your own information (i.e. passwords) seem OK to me.
Sixth, two different sites/organizations, both accessing the same data about you, should not be able to tell from that request that they are accessing information about the same person: i.e. if A asks for your DOB, and B asks for it, they should not both be accessing UID234234.DOB. One scheme for this is that "permissions" are given to different organizations, of the form:
HASH (organization_pass_word + your_pass_word + your_unique_ID + index_of_data_you_wish_to_reveal + data_store_added_noise)
This protects your identity and prevents cross-correlation of different databases.
Seventh, the standard should work like email: standard infrastructure can provide a server, anybody can operate one, and you have control of your use of these systems. No single operator.
Eighth, and most importantly, none of this is worth shit without a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. Without that, any scheme can be forced over time into revealing more about users than they wish to reveal, either by legal, economic, social or political means.
Strong cryptography is nothing without strong laws, and strong laws are something without any cryptography at all. Support GeekPAC! (the Geek Political Action Committee
vkg.
Remember the Clipper Chip? Encryption export restrictions? The DCMA? The SSSCA?
The drive to regulate the internet and new technology in general, to force it back into the old way of doing things, isn't going away.
Even if we beat this one, there will always be another. Don't get complacent.
Interference with the processor...?
I mean, wouldn't that just suck? Somebody walks in to the room with a new Pentium and your network dies????!!!!!
Hrm. Well, if it was a cryptography product, you'd trust it, RIGHT?
But seriously, although there are some interesting things in SE Linux, I do suspect that the trust model it embodies is actually significantly broken.
Even if the code is perfectly kosher.
That would be roughly 200,000 nights of "Intimate Services"... and we're not talking about skanks, neither - not at those prices.
I think the Cryptic Seduction approach is looking pretty good, huh?
Here's the link to their write up, commenting on Bruce Schneier's take No Big Deal .
Anyway, we all know they've been reading our sekrit kees by telepathy for years now, right?
Looks like the players previously too cowed to come out into the open and talk about M$ tactics are now talking: in detail and in court.
At this point, though, given how much Windows XP sucks, the FBI security warning about it, the slow rate of adoption in the corporate setting.... does it really matter what the guy from Red Hat says?
Seriously! The entire thing is being done in POV-RAY, with both models and renderings available online!
The Internet Movie Project has all the rest of the details.
Hey, just because WIRED got taken, doesn't mean it's real.
Boring boring boring.
--
What I want to see is a system like this that would let us zap politicians on TV.
PDAs are not spontanious enough for children in a multi-lingual environment. Too long to type your messages in, never mind translation issues.
:-) to fund future efforts!
However, I think that digital cameras, the - cheap ones mind you - could be ideal, particularly if you give the older children video cameras in addition (say 1/10 of the group gets video cameras, or you have a "camera crew" per two dozen participants).
You want to say "HI" to Wong Meng in Taipei? Turn the cam around, smile, take a picture of yourself and send it. Much easier than text entry, translation etc.
Have base station PCs, use the cameras as webcams some of the time, and still cams the rest of the time, and have the kids take them home at the end of the gig: and *continue*to*publish*pictures* as time passes - kinda like the penpal idea.
Think of it as "children's eye window on the world" - longditudinal images from the conference participants over time, plus it's going to put less load on your translation services.
And a picture is worth a thousand words.
If you do still want to build custom hardware, think like a "Compact Flash" format wireless transponder to basically squirt pictures to base-station PCs as they're taken, so the kids don't have to mess with file upload/download: point, click, put images online.
Hell, you might even end up with a commercial product at the end of it
I'd like to see texts which addressed specific topic areas (say, database programming) in a language-independant way. You could have a couple of languages in the book, and then allow users to contribute examples in the same structure as the book (i.e. same examples) on the web.
You could also host discussion boards structured the same way as the book so people can ask for help and submit updates as they appear.
Why? Not just because you might miss a class, but also for reference after the event.
Why MP3 rather than video?
Simple: cost. You could take a tiny slice of the tech budget and wire every auditorium and classroom for sound, and serving the files is no big deal (96KBMP for voice sounds like a CD).
The problem which this leaves is blackboards / whiteboards. I'd suggest two possible solutions, in keeping with this low-tech approach.
1> Webcams which take a picture of the board every five or ten seconds.
(Pros: cool, cons: more complex, sync. with audio a problem).
2> One of those funky systems which record where your pen is on the whiteboard and produce gifs from that data.
Either solution is expensive, relative to sound, however, so mebbe the right thing to do is just to skip it.
Ok, where's your evidence for this?
Even if a DRM licence costs $50K, hell, even if it's $100K, companies or groups of artists can buy a key and then syndicate the service: you send in your work and an affadavit that it's yours, they charge you some cash to sign it, and off it goes into the content pool.
Don't knock it: widespread deployment of cryptographic systems may require government mandate.
Vinay
Mebbe these DRM systems will actually help.
No, really, think about it.
If you're a small artist, and DRM actually works, you can put a couple of your songs up on Napster-clones with the copy bits set to "Copy Forever".
Then put the rest of the album up with "Pay me for a licence".
People who want to distribute for free can, as can people who want to police. What's the problem with this?
I think it may just be building a technical infrastructure for trust.
Vinay
PS: and no, I don't like the mandating of DRM - but I think it itself may be savable.
Second, what will you do about massively copyright-infringing sites, for example, if somebody were to move Lyrics.CH (as it was) to your servers, how do you think you would you handle the resulting pressures?
Vinay Kumar Gupta
Well, sorry to break it to you, but this is true of the internet in general: you can anonymize mail any number of ways, some of them are secure, and any machine carrying public trafic is involved. Freenet is a change in scale, but not in kind as far as criminal or otherwise prejudiced communications go.
It's possible that the moral good in providing a safe haven for whistleblowers and oppressed peoples will outweight the blood from murder victims. This is the type of moral dilemma that keeps people up at night. Pretending that this type of crime won't occur doesn't help answer this question, and in fact it casts doubt on all anonymous schemes because it makes the proponents come across as shallow eggheads who don't fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.
The question is not whether this sort of crime will occur: it will. Criminals have for years been making use of the mode technologies of the day, and the internet is no different. Remember Sneakers? The Mafia's encrypted Information Systems Cray? It's just fiction, but the point is that Organized Crime has always adapted.
Is freenet really going to be so much more of a problem? We'll see, but I'm betting that it won't. The people who really have something to hide have been doing it sucessfully since the Cypherpunk remailer was launched, and so far I haven't heard of any kidnappings being brokered across that.
(Why do I feel the urge to quote Oppenheimer quoting Shiva after the first nuclear detonation?)
Firstly, it was Krsna, not Shiva.
Secondly, get a grip: freenet and it's successors are not the equivalent of a neuclear weapon for anybody except perhaps a few copyright holders - many may be significantly better off once we get those damn record companies and their publisher stooges off their backs. They may not think so now, but when we see hundreds of thousands of dollars of micropayments for music going straight into the pockets of the artists, rather than into the maw of corporate copyrighted america, we'll see which way the wind blows, eh?
Vinay
Get with it, people. Freenet is where the internet has been headed from the start. The technical issues (moderation, crypto) will be sorted out in time, and then we'll get to see what the future looks like because we'll have participated in it's creation.
If you can't handle it, pick up a shovel and cut your DSL line: this technological development has always been latent since the beginning of public key cryptography, and now it's here.
Vinay
Will it be possible to build a web-like text retreival system on top of freenet, or an HTTP/FreeNet gateway? How wil freenet hyperlinks be implemented?
Suppose that your Napster engine has a built-in micropayments client. Not a "You must pay or we won't let you use this music" - no, that just invites piracy and totally screws things up. No, just something where a PGP-signed payment URL is encoded with the document.
Then your client displays a button which says "pay this artist" and you click it, select the amount, and the money is transferred.
As for the how, you would need either a digital currency, e-gold or a balance held on-line by the company, probably funded with a credit card interface.
Why not?