Actually, the analogy I was using would be more like, "I won't manufacture dell computers because somebody might use it to make kiddie porn". The ethical delimma you face is the notion that you are indirectly facillitating the possibility of somebody else to use something for illict purposes . You don't know for a fact that somebody will use your computer for this, but by setting up freenet, you make it possible.
Well, if you are concerned about the legality of it as opposed to the ethics of it, then the fact that it is on your machine without your knowledge or consent should protect you (IANAL of course). As for the ethics of it, would you hold yourself responsible if you manufacture cameras and somebody uses them to take child porn pictures?
Like many other Linux applications, this product is probably good enough. Is quark better? Almost certainly, and you'll pay $1000 premium for that improvment. Is Office better than OpenOffice. Yes. But most people don't need everything that makes Office better. Is Photoshop better than Gimp? Yes.
If your livelihood is dependent on it, then it may very well be worth $1000. But if you are just doing some amateur work or you have a small home business needing some DTP, then this is good enough. Programs like this change the game because it allows people to dabble in whole new areas without having to shell out a premium price.
You've got a programming team of say 100 developers. You decide to outsource. You take 90 of those jobs and send them overseas. 10 of them you transition to do integration and analysis. So, what do those 90 people do?
Sure we can try to move up the food chain, but the nature of this is that there are inherently less jobs the further you move up the chain.
I think one thing that people struggle with is understanding what is actually legal to do with the media they purchase. I'm not talking about ethics, but the actual letter of the law about what I am allowed to do. So to simplify, what's legal or illegal about the following cases:
1) Copying a CD to tape to listen to in my car 2) Ripping a CD to listen to on my computer at work 3) Loaning a CD to a friend 4) Ripping a copy of a CD and giving those files to a friend 5) Ripping a copy of a CD and putting those files on Kazaa 6) Selling copies of the CD
Related to this, how does the volume of these activities influence them? Is it legal to make one copy of a CD for one friend? What if it's for 100 friends? or 500 friends? We can talk endlessly about the spirit of the law and the ethics of it, but the letter of the law is critically important here.
The thing that this article seemed to ignore was the business reality of things. Internet Explorer will survive because Microsoft has huge coffers and will make it so in the interests of controlling API's. Mozilla will continue to survive because it's open source and the *nixes will always need browsers. Safari will continue to survive because Apple will make it so.
Opera is doomed on the desktop. Very few people are willing to pay money for a browser. The other projects survive because they can be given to users for zero cost. Opera may continue to be a niche player in the future, but ultimately it can't grow because it's not something people will pay for.
Actually I'd suggest the complete opposite, that desktop PC's are becoming pointless, not consoles. You go out and buy a console for $200-400 and you get a machine that can play a ton of games, might have some PVR capabilities, and graphics that, when new are pretty damn good.
Now, go get a PC to play games on. It'll cost you about $1000, then in two years you'll have to spend another $200-300 in upgrades to let you keep playing new games. Then another 2 years later you have to start over and spend another $1000. On the other hand, the PS2 has been around for, what, 3 years now, and it still has new games made for it today that aren't obviously suffering from the older hardware.
Furthermore, when you buy that game for the console, it works. That's it. Buy one for your PC, then you have to download Direct X 37.5.12 and the latest video drivers and sound drivers. But it turns out there's an odd bug that comes up because of the video card and sound card you have interacting with eachother in a funny way. Thus, whenever you start the game now, your shower turns on.
Desktop gaming will continue to be popular amongst the more hard core people who are willing to invest in top quality hardware. Otherwise, it is cheaper and substantially easier to just get one of these console game systems and be done with it.
Let's start by saying the console is real, not vaporware. I've seen a working prototype in action. Inside the spacy-looking case it's just a PC running Windows XP that has no CD or floppy drive, and uses a proprietary encryption scheme for data stored on its hard drive.
Proprietary encryptions scheme? Name me one proprietary encryption scheme that has held up to reverse engineering efforts. This will get cracked, probably quickly, and then you'll have another big DMCA fiasco over it as people try to install Linux on the box for fun.
First of all SCO has to proove that copyrights were actually infringed. Then after they proove that, which won't be easy, they will have to proove that their release of the code under the GPL was an accident. Neither one of these is easy to proove, and proving both would be an amazing feat.
We won't have a decision in a year. Think about how long the Microsoft case dragged out. IBM is going make sure to drag this out and make it as expensive for SCO as possible. By the time any decisions will have been rendered by a judge, it will likely be irrelevant.
Can you show me the math for this? You have to realize that there's no way we can be made completely invulnerable to attack. Therefore we have to draw the line somewhere at which point the costs are too high to justify given the relative risk. Where that point is, I do not know, but it does exist, and blindly wasting money isn't going to help things.
You figure out how many resources it would take to accomplish a given act, then figure out the availability of those resources to the enemy. Then you just make sure that the cost to them is higher than they'd be willing to invest and that the cost to prevent it is less than the cost to accept the risk. If a given vulnerability can be exploited to great effect by modestly trained, poorly equipped, angry people, then you probably need to fix it.
With Gorman's work, he is highlighting choke points in the infrastructure. Would the rational response to this situation not be to diversify off those choke points? We should identify key weaknesses with this kind of research then solve them. We should not simply hide the information.
Basically the approach that I think works best here is one similar to what we see when dealing with Internet security. Take the risky information and keep it under wraps temporarily while work is done to fix the problems. Then once the majority of the problems are fixed, release the information.
If they burn the information like is suggested in the article, then it just means the weaknesses are left there until somebody with the resources and motivation decides to recreate this persons's efforts. Security through obscurity only goes so far, and if a PHD student with no special access can build up a system like this, it's reasonable to assume that national enemies could do so as well. Heck, for all we know, they already have. They certainly aren't going to publicize that fact.
Of coruse the problem here is that, unlike in software, fixing these choke points is likely terribly expensive. It's hard to justify the investment to fix them when the threat to them can't be clearly measured.
I played Tribes 2, and the thing that PS manages, which Tribes failed at, is encouraging strong team play. I got frustrated playing Tribes 2 because I was never able to find a group that actually used coordinated tactics. In PS, because of the XP system, it encourages you to work in groups and to specialize (because you can't do anything and everything due to cert limitations).
I've been playing Planetside since release and it's definitely more fun that the MMORPG type games. Those games basically consist of clicking the mouse to gain exp doing some repetitive task, and socializing. With PS, being an FPS, you actually do stuff, and then occasionally you socialize.
A couple things to really like about it:
* MASSIVE battles - Literally hundreds of people all fighting in one place.
* Little stratification - Unlike in a MMORPG, where the noobs can't hang with the hardcore addict elite, anybody can play a part. If you can't shoot straight, be an engineer, a medic, or a hacker. Better yet, be a galaxy pilot and ferry people around to the battles, you will be loved by all.
If you want to try it, just one word of warning. If you decide to play as the Vanu Sovereignty, expect some frustration. They are the most complex to play, and they have some key weaknesses that make it very difficult for them to win when faced with equal opposition. If that doesn't sound like your bad, play the New Congolmerate or Terran Republic.
The thing that always kills IIS, is the integration it has with Windows. This isn't a defect in IIS, or Windows, per se, but rather a defect that arises because of how they integrate with eachother. A script executes on IIS in a way that's not inately a bug, but then when it interacts with Windows, Exchange, etc, suddenly it becomes one.
Apache is just a webserver, and that's all. PHP, JSP, etc, are all separate applications treated separately. The integration does make things more efficient, yes, but also more prone to problems.
They didn't do that because if they did that, then they'd find bugs in their bug finder, so they'd have to run the bug finder on the bug finder to find bugs there, but then they'd have to run the bug finder on the bug finder on the...
This doesn't indicate that the commercial equivalents are better. You've got the DEVELOPMENT branch of Apache, which is derrived from the 2.0.x code which is a complete rework from the original 1.X branch of code. So it's a rather new code base and it's showing similar defect rates to a code base that has been around for a while. I'd say this prooves that open source is better.
Agreed. It's funny that MMORPGs have managed to accentuate the really boring parts of paper role playing games and minimize the fun creative parts. It's so mechanized and repetitive. I tried to get into them, being a long time RPG player, but it's so dullll.
Basically there are two things you do in an MMORPG:
1) do tedious repetitive tasks to gain exp 2) socialize
The problem is that unless the group you hang out with gains the experience at roughly the same rate, then your social group breaks down. Furthermore, why do i need to pay $15/month just for socializing. Isn't that AIM is for?:)
One other thought occurs to me on this. Could the sales of MMO games cut into the sales of the other one-time purchase games. That is, if I'm paying $15/month for a game I feel compelled to play, and I not paying $50/month on games for my PS/2, etc?
This may seem ludicrous, but I predict that SOE will suffer harshly from it's overwhelming interest in the MMO* games. The notion of getting people to pay for a game on a monthly basis seems good but there's a huge problem with it: market saturation. If I'm paying up to $15/month to play a game I'm only going to play that one game. I'm not going to accumulate multiple subscriptions because I only have time for one game.
Eventually Sony is going to dump huge money into some MMO game and it's going to be a disaster. They'll blow huge amounts of money on some great idea and then nobody will show up to play. The only way they can achieve revenue growth in MMO games is by getting subscribers they don't already have and by jacking up fees.
Furthermore, with everybody rushing to make new MMO games, there's going to be increasin competition for these subscribers. So you'll see the subscription base fragment, thus making it even harder to make a buck because you'll have effectively less subscribers per game. So you either have to scale back the games or raise the prices.
How precisely is this stupid of them? Seems to me that it's the first thing they've done that was vaguely intelligent. Instead of trying to shut down P2P, which is perfectly legitimate, they are now trying to prosecute people that are actually violating their copyrights. Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
I'm not a fan of the RIAA and it's nice to see them finally getting their head on straight about this. It's going to be tedious and expensive, but it's the only legitimate legal means for them to deal with this. In reality they are better served by the existence of P2P because people still end up buying albums and concert tickets, but regardless, the law is the law. Maybe after these lawsuits go through and their sales are still flagging they'll figure out that it wasn't P2P that was hurting them, it was the quality of their product.
The major problem with recommendations is that you have little basis to judge the quality of them. It's a common problem that a former employer will give an employee an excellent review in an effort to get rid of an underperforming employee. It's also common to do the opposite, giving a negative review to keep a top notch employee. Is the recommendation being given by a friend who's distorting the truth to help out?
A firm, ordinarily doesn't have access to information about what the person is actually doing. They almost certainly can't see real code or examples of the person's interaction with others. The interview can help with this to some extent, but it's easier to fake an interview than to fake actual skill.
Also, the participation in open source work implies a strong personal interest in what they are doing. These are the types of people who are more likely understand the technology and will put in the extra effort needed to get projects done because they actually enjoy it.
This is why people have parents. If you need to do a research paper on a filtered topic, then your parent can go to the library with you and tell the librarian it's okay for you to have free reign. At that point, if you get access to pr0n, it's your parents fault not the librarians.
I didn't realize that CIPA provided a means for adults to unlock the filters. That being the case I don't have that much of a problem with it anymore. This law seems to give authority to the parents until the child becomes an adult and that's very reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the analogy I was using would be more like, "I won't manufacture dell computers because somebody might use it to make kiddie porn". The ethical delimma you face is the notion that you are indirectly facillitating the possibility of somebody else to use something for illict purposes . You don't know for a fact that somebody will use your computer for this, but by setting up freenet, you make it possible.
Well, if you are concerned about the legality of it as opposed to the ethics of it, then the fact that it is on your machine without your knowledge or consent should protect you (IANAL of course). As for the ethics of it, would you hold yourself responsible if you manufacture cameras and somebody uses them to take child porn pictures?
Like many other Linux applications, this product is probably good enough. Is quark better? Almost certainly, and you'll pay $1000 premium for that improvment. Is Office better than OpenOffice. Yes. But most people don't need everything that makes Office better. Is Photoshop better than Gimp? Yes.
If your livelihood is dependent on it, then it may very well be worth $1000. But if you are just doing some amateur work or you have a small home business needing some DTP, then this is good enough. Programs like this change the game because it allows people to dabble in whole new areas without having to shell out a premium price.
You've got a programming team of say 100 developers. You decide to outsource. You take 90 of those jobs and send them overseas. 10 of them you transition to do integration and analysis. So, what do those 90 people do?
Sure we can try to move up the food chain, but the nature of this is that there are inherently less jobs the further you move up the chain.
I think one thing that people struggle with is understanding what is actually legal to do with the media they purchase. I'm not talking about ethics, but the actual letter of the law about what I am allowed to do. So to simplify, what's legal or illegal about the following cases:
1) Copying a CD to tape to listen to in my car
2) Ripping a CD to listen to on my computer at work
3) Loaning a CD to a friend
4) Ripping a copy of a CD and giving those files to a friend
5) Ripping a copy of a CD and putting those files on Kazaa
6) Selling copies of the CD
Related to this, how does the volume of these activities influence them? Is it legal to make one copy of a CD for one friend? What if it's for 100 friends? or 500 friends? We can talk endlessly about the spirit of the law and the ethics of it, but the letter of the law is critically important here.
The thing that this article seemed to ignore was the business reality of things. Internet Explorer will survive because Microsoft has huge coffers and will make it so in the interests of controlling API's. Mozilla will continue to survive because it's open source and the *nixes will always need browsers. Safari will continue to survive because Apple will make it so.
Opera is doomed on the desktop. Very few people are willing to pay money for a browser. The other projects survive because they can be given to users for zero cost. Opera may continue to be a niche player in the future, but ultimately it can't grow because it's not something people will pay for.
Name me one company that's not about the money.
Actually I'd suggest the complete opposite, that desktop PC's are becoming pointless, not consoles. You go out and buy a console for $200-400 and you get a machine that can play a ton of games, might have some PVR capabilities, and graphics that, when new are pretty damn good.
Now, go get a PC to play games on. It'll cost you about $1000, then in two years you'll have to spend another $200-300 in upgrades to let you keep playing new games. Then another 2 years later you have to start over and spend another $1000. On the other hand, the PS2 has been around for, what, 3 years now, and it still has new games made for it today that aren't obviously suffering from the older hardware.
Furthermore, when you buy that game for the console, it works. That's it. Buy one for your PC, then you have to download Direct X 37.5.12 and the latest video drivers and sound drivers. But it turns out there's an odd bug that comes up because of the video card and sound card you have interacting with eachother in a funny way. Thus, whenever you start the game now, your shower turns on.
Desktop gaming will continue to be popular amongst the more hard core people who are willing to invest in top quality hardware. Otherwise, it is cheaper and substantially easier to just get one of these console game systems and be done with it.
Let's start by saying the console is real, not vaporware. I've seen a working prototype in action. Inside the spacy-looking case it's just a PC running Windows XP that has no CD or floppy drive, and uses a proprietary encryption scheme for data stored on its hard drive.
Proprietary encryptions scheme? Name me one proprietary encryption scheme that has held up to reverse engineering efforts. This will get cracked, probably quickly, and then you'll have another big DMCA fiasco over it as people try to install Linux on the box for fun.
First of all SCO has to proove that copyrights were actually infringed. Then after they proove that, which won't be easy, they will have to proove that their release of the code under the GPL was an accident. Neither one of these is easy to proove, and proving both would be an amazing feat.
We won't have a decision in a year. Think about how long the Microsoft case dragged out. IBM is going make sure to drag this out and make it as expensive for SCO as possible. By the time any decisions will have been rendered by a judge, it will likely be irrelevant.
Can you show me the math for this? You have to realize that there's no way we can be made completely invulnerable to attack. Therefore we have to draw the line somewhere at which point the costs are too high to justify given the relative risk. Where that point is, I do not know, but it does exist, and blindly wasting money isn't going to help things.
You figure out how many resources it would take to accomplish a given act, then figure out the availability of those resources to the enemy. Then you just make sure that the cost to them is higher than they'd be willing to invest and that the cost to prevent it is less than the cost to accept the risk. If a given vulnerability can be exploited to great effect by modestly trained, poorly equipped, angry people, then you probably need to fix it.
With Gorman's work, he is highlighting choke points in the infrastructure. Would the rational response to this situation not be to diversify off those choke points? We should identify key weaknesses with this kind of research then solve them. We should not simply hide the information.
Basically the approach that I think works best here is one similar to what we see when dealing with Internet security. Take the risky information and keep it under wraps temporarily while work is done to fix the problems. Then once the majority of the problems are fixed, release the information.
If they burn the information like is suggested in the article, then it just means the weaknesses are left there until somebody with the resources and motivation decides to recreate this persons's efforts. Security through obscurity only goes so far, and if a PHD student with no special access can build up a system like this, it's reasonable to assume that national enemies could do so as well. Heck, for all we know, they already have. They certainly aren't going to publicize that fact.
Of coruse the problem here is that, unlike in software, fixing these choke points is likely terribly expensive. It's hard to justify the investment to fix them when the threat to them can't be clearly measured.
I played Tribes 2, and the thing that PS manages, which Tribes failed at, is encouraging strong team play. I got frustrated playing Tribes 2 because I was never able to find a group that actually used coordinated tactics. In PS, because of the XP system, it encourages you to work in groups and to specialize (because you can't do anything and everything due to cert limitations).
That's why I pay a monthly fee.
I've been playing Planetside since release and it's definitely more fun that the MMORPG type games. Those games basically consist of clicking the mouse to gain exp doing some repetitive task, and socializing. With PS, being an FPS, you actually do stuff, and then occasionally you socialize.
A couple things to really like about it:
* MASSIVE battles - Literally hundreds of people all fighting in one place.
* Little stratification - Unlike in a MMORPG, where the noobs can't hang with the hardcore addict elite, anybody can play a part. If you can't shoot straight, be an engineer, a medic, or a hacker. Better yet, be a galaxy pilot and ferry people around to the battles, you will be loved by all.
If you want to try it, just one word of warning. If you decide to play as the Vanu Sovereignty, expect some frustration. They are the most complex to play, and they have some key weaknesses that make it very difficult for them to win when faced with equal opposition. If that doesn't sound like your bad, play the New Congolmerate or Terran Republic.
The thing that always kills IIS, is the integration it has with Windows. This isn't a defect in IIS, or Windows, per se, but rather a defect that arises because of how they integrate with eachother. A script executes on IIS in a way that's not inately a bug, but then when it interacts with Windows, Exchange, etc, suddenly it becomes one.
Apache is just a webserver, and that's all. PHP, JSP, etc, are all separate applications treated separately. The integration does make things more efficient, yes, but also more prone to problems.
They didn't do that because if they did that, then they'd find bugs in their bug finder, so they'd have to run the bug finder on the bug finder to find bugs there, but then they'd have to run the bug finder on the bug finder on the...
This doesn't indicate that the commercial equivalents are better. You've got the DEVELOPMENT branch of Apache, which is derrived from the 2.0.x code which is a complete rework from the original 1.X branch of code. So it's a rather new code base and it's showing similar defect rates to a code base that has been around for a while. I'd say this prooves that open source is better.
My pants are not tailored to hold a full size notebook in the pocket. Other than that, great plan!
Agreed. It's funny that MMORPGs have managed to accentuate the really boring parts of paper role playing games and minimize the fun creative parts. It's so mechanized and repetitive. I tried to get into them, being a long time RPG player, but it's so dullll.
:)
Basically there are two things you do in an MMORPG:
1) do tedious repetitive tasks to gain exp
2) socialize
The problem is that unless the group you hang out with gains the experience at roughly the same rate, then your social group breaks down. Furthermore, why do i need to pay $15/month just for socializing. Isn't that AIM is for?
One other thought occurs to me on this. Could the sales of MMO games cut into the sales of the other one-time purchase games. That is, if I'm paying $15/month for a game I feel compelled to play, and I not paying $50/month on games for my PS/2, etc?
This may seem ludicrous, but I predict that SOE will suffer harshly from it's overwhelming interest in the MMO* games. The notion of getting people to pay for a game on a monthly basis seems good but there's a huge problem with it: market saturation. If I'm paying up to $15/month to play a game I'm only going to play that one game. I'm not going to accumulate multiple subscriptions because I only have time for one game.
Eventually Sony is going to dump huge money into some MMO game and it's going to be a disaster. They'll blow huge amounts of money on some great idea and then nobody will show up to play. The only way they can achieve revenue growth in MMO games is by getting subscribers they don't already have and by jacking up fees.
Furthermore, with everybody rushing to make new MMO games, there's going to be increasin competition for these subscribers. So you'll see the subscription base fragment, thus making it even harder to make a buck because you'll have effectively less subscribers per game. So you either have to scale back the games or raise the prices.
How precisely is this stupid of them? Seems to me that it's the first thing they've done that was vaguely intelligent. Instead of trying to shut down P2P, which is perfectly legitimate, they are now trying to prosecute people that are actually violating their copyrights. Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
I'm not a fan of the RIAA and it's nice to see them finally getting their head on straight about this. It's going to be tedious and expensive, but it's the only legitimate legal means for them to deal with this. In reality they are better served by the existence of P2P because people still end up buying albums and concert tickets, but regardless, the law is the law. Maybe after these lawsuits go through and their sales are still flagging they'll figure out that it wasn't P2P that was hurting them, it was the quality of their product.
Hire... sorry :)
The major problem with recommendations is that you have little basis to judge the quality of them. It's a common problem that a former employer will give an employee an excellent review in an effort to get rid of an underperforming employee. It's also common to do the opposite, giving a negative review to keep a top notch employee. Is the recommendation being given by a friend who's distorting the truth to help out?
A firm, ordinarily doesn't have access to information about what the person is actually doing. They almost certainly can't see real code or examples of the person's interaction with others. The interview can help with this to some extent, but it's easier to fake an interview than to fake actual skill.
Also, the participation in open source work implies a strong personal interest in what they are doing. These are the types of people who are more likely understand the technology and will put in the extra effort needed to get projects done because they actually enjoy it.
This is why people have parents. If you need to do a research paper on a filtered topic, then your parent can go to the library with you and tell the librarian it's okay for you to have free reign. At that point, if you get access to pr0n, it's your parents fault not the librarians.
I didn't realize that CIPA provided a means for adults to unlock the filters. That being the case I don't have that much of a problem with it anymore. This law seems to give authority to the parents until the child becomes an adult and that's very reasonable.