sound effects stolen from LINUX? What the hell are you on, and where can I get some?;)
If they stole it from anywhere, I'd say the Amiga. Actually, the BBC micro had a really cool sound system even before that. It showed how well you could enhance games with a good tune even though you had very little graphics and sound hardware at all...
Actually, it only _almost_ works - you can't really use any sort of cryptographic scheme to guarantee protection of music unless you have sealed hardware, as hundreds of other people are pointing out in this thread.
I do have enough maths to follow the patent, but I'd need to learn more about group theory to actually prove it or implement it. Basically, it works on a broadly similar principle to PGP-style encryption, but using polynomials instead of numbers. It has some very nice properties for speedy implementation (the patent claims O(N^2) to encrypt, compared to RSA O(N^3)). I think Slashdot's description of "rotating keys" is a bit inaccurate.
I don't quite get how the randomness is removed in the decryption, but it is removed without knowing what the random data actually is. All you need to decrypt is the private key - which is constant.
Therefore, the only randomness is needed in the encryptor. And, if you're encrypting professionally, you take it from a real random source.
The problem is a systemic one rather than an algorithmic one: in order to decrypt, you need the private key. Therefore there must be a private key in your decoding device. All you have to do is dig it out (which is what happened in DeCSS) and you can decrypt the stuff. (Even better, you can figure out the encryption key and make your own protected recordings...)
For those of you who think that the RIP Bill represents some NEW incursion into your rights, think again. It is already the case that, with a warrant, your communications can be monitored without your knowledge. It is common practice to bug members of opposition political parties (Sinn Fein).
If you want to be scared, look at the Prevention of Terrorism act. (Not on line, AFAICT), or indeed any of the Northern Ireland Acts. The current PTA strectches the definition of terrorism to include "the threat of damage to property" (targetted at environmental protestors). "Terrorist" groups can be declared "proscribed organisations"; effectively, you can be arrested and held without charge if you are "suspected" of being a terrorist.
Let's not forget the Criminal Justice and Public Order Acts, various parts of which have attempted to make raves, gypsies, the miner's strikes, and environmental protests by occupation ["Aggravated Tresspass"] criminal offences.
Currently they're going after asylum seekers, who are currently being rounded up and held in what are concentration camps in all but name.
Finally, don't forget the War On Drugs, although it's not nearly as bad as in the US due to the lack of guns.
Liberal Democracy? Sorry, we prefer Thatecherism which lives on in the persona of Jack Straw. Oh well, at least I don't live in NI.
Fascinating stuff; it does have the potential to be faster, but processors must be designed in different ways to exploit the varying speed of different operations. Then there's waiting for the RAM...
Earth (games.eesite.com/earth) and utopia (games.eesite.com/utopia) are like planetarion, but without all the annoying properties and a much better social structure.
I started on planetarion, but because the rules ENCOURAGE powerful players to trash small players it's just no fun. Utopia is far better balanced.
Bell Labs UNIX was originally simply a vehicle for running the roff formatter on. And that's nowhere near as nice as latex. Secretaries can and _did_ use early primitive text formatters to do useful work on. So what's happened in the meantime?
Software that's "so easy to use you don't need to train people", used by people who simply don't know how to use it through no fault of their own.
You _are_ part of the investing class
on
Natural Capitalism
·
· Score: 1
Do you have any money? I presume you do, to pay for internet access.
Do you keep all of it yourself, and none of it in the bank?
Have you ever bought any product or service? (Hint: yes)
Then you are part of the capitalist economy. The money you have in the bank is an investment.
You can't pretend that there is a single hard black line between the Upper Class and the Lower class, and that everyone falls on one side of that line or the other. Now that WOULD be "logically defective".
What do you think the goals of class war are? Extermination? Slavery? Theft? What? Don't you think that "they" could do it much more easily with power than economics?
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now. I'm not convinced. They did have a go at allowing clones, but abandoned it when they found that it was just not helping market share at all. http://www.applemuseum.sea star.net/sections/history.html
Fortunately, they can't rip people off as the amateurs among us are still giving it away:)
Linux is _already_ succeeding in the market here, and has done for a while. ISPs recognise its superiority; students get hold of it and find it's cool. We've got quite a lot of developers (e.g. Alan Cox, Ian Jackson come to mind).
And we don't have quite as many blood-suckers as the US, either;)
What if... All the people who create content for the web just deleted their work?
Well, that would be terrible. The logical solution to this is, whenever you find something cool, take a copy & pass it around, so more people can experience it...
you can help by participating in the struggle against the ever growing copyright infringement that exists on today?s Web.
... oh. So the good stuff should be subject to the whim and convenience of its creators. Or their lawyers. Great.
Why work 80 hour weeks when you're not getting paid more for it, when it's taking up your life, when it's draining your ability to do anything else or interact with other people? Is it really "for the company", or is it just blind misdirected greed?
Ok, so the web gets bought out, usenet descends into screaming anarchy, irc is full of weenies. We despair.
The "plebs" aren't going to go away, as they own the internet now. (Scary, isn't it?) So what do the technically and socially intelligent do? Adapt.
Create some artificial barriers to entry. Create virtual communities. Enforce social contracts (e.g. the Debian one, but the GPL is also a form of social contract) to create the societies we want. Let the commercial outfits fund and support us - they pay for our bandwidth and space so we see their ads, but we don't buy their products.
Freenet is an interesting example: not many people are freenet nodes at the moment, and not many people are putting stuff in it, because it's not finished.
Let's have some more unfinished, uncomfortable, hard to use, elitist and exclusive user communities.. that's always going to be where the clueful will outnumber the clueless!
"running for local/state/federal office"? You mean, if I get elected to the senate, then government will represent me? Or will I just be part of the government, saying "fuck the people, I want power"? Well, that depends on whether you wear your tinfoil hat to stop the mind control lasers... Come on, people in government can be good. If you were to be elected, you wouldn't have to fuck the people if you didn't want to. You don't need to get involved. You need to tell the government to go fuck itself. I don't want anyone to have that kind of power over me. With corporations, I can opt out. And if you tell the government to fuck itself, it'll quite happily turn round and fuck you. We can't opt out of government because the government is us. This means that if you want to do things, you have to work with the rest of us. Convince other people that your point of view is better and that they should support you. Then everyone benefits. The key point of government is that you are given no options. No, the key point of government is to provide things the market can't -- social goods such as roads, law enforcement and social security.
Let me tell you a story that happened to a friend of mine. She was involved in college politics, and was worried that college were reading her email.
So she came to me for help. I informed her of her rights under the Data Protection Act - the right to copies of any data any organisation had on her - and she asked college for the lot.
A month later, college delivered a HUGE box of documents. They listed everything college knew, all her academic record (including confidential bits), interview reports, etc. Then some college council minutes in which her activities had been discussed.
The moral of the story? DPA law is _good_ for individuals, _bad_ for companies. And you don't need a lawyer, just write a letter.
Another thought is the fact that with linux clusters becoming more common it doesn't take as long to break the encryption. With a very powerfull cluster the encryption becomes a minor anoyance, to the average hacker its a bit harder.
It takes (and will continue to take) years to break long keys by brute force. They will simply be unbreakable to just about everyone.
Re:But the thing to remember here is....
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
But the thing to remember here is that the government knew that there were people who were memorizing those books for the day when the government finally collapsed and that knowledge would be needed again.
The governement in the book is the government the people wanted, but at least those in power knew it was wrong, and took steps to protect mankind (Not the citizens, per se, but the future generations) from the idiocies of the present.
No they didn't -- they took steps to hunt such people down (don't you remember the final chase?!) and drive them from the cities. They didn't want people to remember.
An excellent book, and I love its impassioned writing style. Better, even, than Gibson.
It's possible to create such a VPN reasonably easily with Linux systems running PPP over SSH; the routing is fiddly and there may be scaling problems, but it would likely work as well as Fidonet did.
What you'd have to set up carefully before starting is the social rules of such a system, making it explicitly clear what you did and did not want. Do you want absolute anonymity or non-repudiation? (They are good for different things...) You might want _several_ such anonymous networks, for different types of data (IRC, email, news, piracy of large binaries, games, web-like services &c.)
These proposals would actually be good for napster, because its users would be accountable for their actions. If Metallica come to them and say "You're infringing", they can just say "No, it's Tom, Dick and Harry over there. You can't sue us!"
Can you imagine Metallica trying to sue 300,000 fans individually? It simply wouldn't happen. The infringing users would be banned, in accordance with the law, and everyone would be happy.
(What's that? You don't like the law, and you want to be free to break it anonymously?) Why on earth should a for-profit company help you with that? If you're breaking the law to make a point, and you're not prepared to be held accountable for breaking the law, you'd better find some people who agree with you to help you.
Democratise the liability. "Open source" the responsibility --- you're free to pass on copyrighted works so long as you pass the risk of being sued on too.
(But I can't live without anonymity! Coke will buy my data profile and I'll be flooded with their ads!) That's what the Data Protection Act is for. (But I don't have one! I'm a Merkin and have no rights online!) Well, I can't help you there, mate...
Actually, I thought the more interesting thing was:
Second auxiliary question for special credit: you think the revolutionary software development technique you have just invented makes it possible to produce provably bug- free products such as P. You need $20 million dollars to productize it. Your university will be glad to pay for a postdoc for six months if you teach an extra course. The government funding agencies, after taking a year to review your application, tell you to get lost as your proposal has no commercial value. (Public funding is very much "goal-oriented" these days.) But you have found a group of investors that values your idea. Of course they expect to make a huge windfall from their investment, so they'll laugh if you suggest free software.
Ok, blow by blow:
How come solving one of the great software engineering problems is of "no commercial value"?
How come, in the next clause, it's worth a huge windfall?
If it's a scientific technique (and, speaking as a Comp. sci. student, I'd say it was), why doesn't he do what scientists have always done, and publish?
If it's really a way of making bug-free software, he'll go down in history.
First, attacking the author is not a valid way to attack an argument. The arguments in the article should be considered independently of the author. (An ad hominem logical fallacy, if you want the details.)
Yes. I think it's worth rereading Meyer's article with all the ad hominem attacks on RMS, ESR, and unspecified John Doe free software authors removed. It then says, roughly:
These nasty free software people are depriving me of my ability to profit! It shouldn't be allowed!
Which is a classic piece of protectionist twaddle.
At Cambridge, at least, when you matriculate you sign on to the Statutes and ordinances as amended; which includes following any rules they make as and when they make them.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that you couldn't get a license from the CCA to build a DVD player which had a firewire output? Or am I confused?
sound effects stolen from LINUX? What the hell are you on, and where can I get some? ;)
...
If they stole it from anywhere, I'd say the Amiga. Actually, the BBC micro had a really cool sound system even before that. It showed how well you could enhance games with a good tune even though you had very little graphics and sound hardware at all
Actually, it only _almost_ works - you can't really use any sort of cryptographic scheme to guarantee protection of music unless you have sealed hardware, as hundreds of other people are pointing out in this thread.
...)
I do have enough maths to follow the patent, but I'd need to learn more about group theory to actually prove it or implement it. Basically, it works on a broadly similar principle to PGP-style encryption, but using polynomials instead of numbers. It has some very nice properties for speedy implementation (the patent claims O(N^2) to encrypt, compared to RSA O(N^3)). I think Slashdot's description of "rotating keys" is a bit inaccurate.
I don't quite get how the randomness is removed in the decryption, but it is removed without knowing what the random data actually is. All you need to decrypt is the private key - which is constant.
Therefore, the only randomness is needed in the encryptor. And, if you're encrypting professionally, you take it from a real random source.
The problem is a systemic one rather than an algorithmic one: in order to decrypt, you need the private key. Therefore there must be a private key in your decoding device. All you have to do is dig it out (which is what happened in DeCSS) and you can decrypt the stuff. (Even better, you can figure out the encryption key and make your own protected recordings
For those of you who think that the RIP Bill represents some NEW incursion into your rights, think again. It is already the case that, with a warrant, your communications can be monitored without your knowledge. It is common practice to bug members of opposition political parties (Sinn Fein).
If you want to be scared, look at the Prevention of Terrorism act. (Not on line, AFAICT), or indeed any of the Northern Ireland Acts. The current PTA strectches the definition of terrorism to include "the threat of damage to property" (targetted at environmental protestors). "Terrorist" groups can be declared "proscribed organisations"; effectively, you can be arrested and held without charge if you are "suspected" of being a terrorist.
Let's not forget the Criminal Justice and Public Order Acts, various parts of which have attempted to make raves, gypsies, the miner's strikes, and environmental protests by occupation ["Aggravated Tresspass"] criminal offences.
Currently they're going after asylum seekers, who are currently being rounded up and held in what are concentration camps in all but name.
Finally, don't forget the War On Drugs, although it's not nearly as bad as in the US due to the lack of guns.
Liberal Democracy? Sorry, we prefer Thatecherism which lives on in the persona of Jack Straw. Oh well, at least I don't live in NI.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/Rainbow/projects/ selftimed.html
...
Fascinating stuff; it does have the potential to be faster, but processors must be designed in different ways to exploit the varying speed of different operations. Then there's waiting for the RAM
Ha. The economist provides the most reasoned, considered, researched and varied news I've ever read. I also like their dry sense of humour :)
Earth (games.eesite.com/earth) and utopia (games.eesite.com/utopia) are like planetarion, but without all the annoying properties and a much better social structure.
I started on planetarion, but because the rules ENCOURAGE powerful players to trash small players it's just no fun. Utopia is far better balanced.
Bell Labs UNIX was originally simply a vehicle for running the roff formatter on. And that's nowhere near as nice as latex. Secretaries can and _did_ use early primitive text formatters to do useful work on. So what's happened in the meantime?
Software that's "so easy to use you don't need to train people", used by people who simply don't know how to use it through no fault of their own.
Do you have any money? I presume you do, to pay for internet access.
Do you keep all of it yourself, and none of it in the bank?
Have you ever bought any product or service? (Hint: yes)
Then you are part of the capitalist economy. The money you have in the bank is an investment.
You can't pretend that there is a single hard black line between the Upper Class and the Lower class, and that everyone falls on one side of that line or the other. Now that WOULD be "logically defective".
What do you think the goals of class war are? Extermination? Slavery? Theft? What? Don't you think that "they" could do it much more easily with power than economics?
Apple too has been hurt by this. If they'd opened up the Apple to clones around '89, they would own the desktop by now. I'm not convinced. They did have a go at allowing clones, but abandoned it when they found that it was just not helping market share at all. http://www.applemuseum.sea star.net/sections/history.html
Fortunately, they can't rip people off as the amateurs among us are still giving it away :)
;)
Linux is _already_ succeeding in the market here, and has done for a while. ISPs recognise its superiority; students get hold of it and find it's cool. We've got quite a lot of developers (e.g. Alan Cox, Ian Jackson come to mind).
And we don't have quite as many blood-suckers as the US, either
What if... All the people who create content for the web just deleted their work?
Well, that would be terrible. The logical solution to this is, whenever you find something cool, take a copy & pass it around, so more people can experience it...
you can help by participating in the struggle against the ever growing copyright infringement that exists on today?s Web.
... oh. So the good stuff should be subject to the whim and convenience of its creators. Or their lawyers. Great.
Why work 80 hour weeks when you're not getting paid more for it, when it's taking up your life, when it's draining your ability to do anything else or interact with other people? Is it really "for the company", or is it just blind misdirected greed?
Ok, so the web gets bought out, usenet descends into screaming anarchy, irc is full of weenies. We despair.
.. that's always going to be where the clueful will outnumber the clueless!
The "plebs" aren't going to go away, as they own the internet now. (Scary, isn't it?) So what do the technically and socially intelligent do? Adapt.
Create some artificial barriers to entry. Create virtual communities. Enforce social contracts (e.g. the Debian one, but the GPL is also a form of social contract) to create the societies we want. Let the commercial outfits fund and support us - they pay for our bandwidth and space so we see their ads, but we don't buy their products.
Freenet is an interesting example: not many people are freenet nodes at the moment, and not many people are putting stuff in it, because it's not finished.
Let's have some more unfinished, uncomfortable, hard to use, elitist and exclusive user communities
"running for local/state/federal office"? You mean, if I get elected to the senate, then government will represent me? Or will I just be part of the government, saying "fuck the people, I want power"? Well, that depends on whether you wear your tinfoil hat to stop the mind control lasers ... Come on, people in government can be good. If you were to be elected, you wouldn't have to fuck the people if you didn't want to. You don't need to get involved. You need to tell the government to go fuck itself. I don't want anyone to have that kind of power over me. With corporations, I can opt out. And if you tell the government to fuck itself, it'll quite happily turn round and fuck you. We can't opt out of government because the government is us. This means that if you want to do things, you have to work with the rest of us. Convince other people that your point of view is better and that they should support you. Then everyone benefits. The key point of government is that you are given no options. No, the key point of government is to provide things the market can't -- social goods such as roads, law enforcement and social security.
Let me tell you a story that happened to a friend of mine. She was involved in college politics, and was worried that college were reading her email.
So she came to me for help. I informed her of her rights under the Data Protection Act - the right to copies of any data any organisation had on her - and she asked college for the lot.
A month later, college delivered a HUGE box of documents. They listed everything college knew, all her academic record (including confidential bits), interview reports, etc. Then some college council minutes in which her activities had been discussed.
The moral of the story? DPA law is _good_ for individuals, _bad_ for companies. And you don't need a lawyer, just write a letter.
Another thought is the fact that with linux clusters becoming more common it doesn't take as long to break the encryption. With a very powerfull cluster the encryption becomes a minor anoyance, to the average hacker its a bit harder.
It takes (and will continue to take) years to break long keys by brute force. They will simply be unbreakable to just about everyone.
The governement in the book is the government the people wanted, but at least those in power knew it was wrong, and took steps to protect mankind (Not the citizens, per se, but the future generations) from the idiocies of the present.
No they didn't -- they took steps to hunt such people down (don't you remember the final chase?!) and drive them from the cities. They didn't want people to remember.
An excellent book, and I love its impassioned writing style. Better, even, than Gibson.
I see a lot of First Amendment waffle here, but I don't see anyone commenting on the particular traditional social position in France ...
France has something the US could learn from: a social conscience.
It's possible to create such a VPN reasonably easily with Linux systems running PPP over SSH; the routing is fiddly and there may be scaling problems, but it would likely work as well as Fidonet did.
...) You might want _several_ such anonymous networks, for different types of data (IRC, email, news, piracy of large binaries, games, web-like services &c.)
What you'd have to set up carefully before starting is the social rules of such a system, making it explicitly clear what you did and did not want. Do you want absolute anonymity or non-repudiation? (They are good for different things
Can you imagine Metallica trying to sue 300,000 fans individually? It simply wouldn't happen. The infringing users would be banned, in accordance with the law, and everyone would be happy.
(What's that? You don't like the law, and you want to be free to break it anonymously?) Why on earth should a for-profit company help you with that? If you're breaking the law to make a point, and you're not prepared to be held accountable for breaking the law, you'd better find some people who agree with you to help you.
Democratise the liability. "Open source" the responsibility --- you're free to pass on copyrighted works so long as you pass the risk of being sued on too.
(But I can't live without anonymity! Coke will buy my data profile and I'll be flooded with their ads!) That's what the Data Protection Act is for. (But I don't have one! I'm a Merkin and have no rights online!) Well, I can't help you there, mate ...
Second auxiliary question for special credit: you think the revolutionary software development technique you have just invented makes it possible to produce provably bug- free products such as P. You need $20 million dollars to productize it. Your university will be glad to pay for a postdoc for six months if you teach an extra course. The government funding agencies, after taking a year to review your application, tell you to get lost as your proposal has no commercial value. (Public funding is very much "goal-oriented" these days.) But you have found a group of investors that values your idea. Of course they expect to make a huge windfall from their investment, so they'll laugh if you suggest free software.
Ok, blow by blow:
How come solving one of the great software engineering problems is of "no commercial value"?
How come, in the next clause, it's worth a huge windfall?
If it's a scientific technique (and, speaking as a Comp. sci. student, I'd say it was), why doesn't he do what scientists have always done, and publish?
If it's really a way of making bug-free software, he'll go down in history.
And if he publishes, everyone benefits.
Yes. I think it's worth rereading Meyer's article with all the ad hominem attacks on RMS, ESR, and unspecified John Doe free software authors removed. It then says, roughly:
These nasty free software people are depriving me of my ability to profit! It shouldn't be allowed!
Which is a classic piece of protectionist twaddle.
At Cambridge, at least, when you matriculate you sign on to the Statutes and ordinances as amended ; which includes following any rules they make as and when they make them.
Are you related to a certain Michael R Henson, by any chance?