The problem with trying to regulate Microsoft out of being a monopoly as opposed to the slice and dice method is twofold: 1) Writing regulations that Microsoft can't weasel out of 2) Writing regulations that won't get overturned by a higher court Let's take the notion of forcing them to release a $30 bundled with nothing version and a $99 deluxe version. I think it is safe to say that Microsoft will do everything in its power to cripple and make useless that $30 O/S. They'll make a point of not bundling useful things like TCP/IP stacks, etc. So, how do you keep them from doing that? Can you regulate a minimum fitness for the operating system? How do you measure that? How do you insure the measure keeps pace with the technology? Good theory but a big pain to implement properly. This is Microsoft we are dealing with and they will do everything in their power to find every little loop hole. Whatever they can't find a loop hole through they'll appeal endlessly to keep it in court and out of enforcement until it all becomes a moot point in the long run. I say dice them up. It's the only way that will work in the long run.
One thing to keep in mind here is that although Code may be considered expression, this still doesn't define which forms of expression are protected by the first amendment. Basically this goes back to the old "shouting fire in a crowded theater" bit. Sure you can say a lot, but you can't say anything you want to.
Code is expression, but that doesn't mean all code is protected by the first amendment. It is likely that more destructive and anti-social forms of code will be declared illegal regardless of their status as a form of expression.
One of the fundamental aspects of open source development is the survival of the fittest way that good code is promoted and bad code is axed. If suddenly there is real competition between a dozen MS's then that's great because we will end up with a better system faster. They'll all have to compete with eachother and Linux on price, performance, stability, etc.
Something else to keep in mind is that Linux will never die. It might shift back to being an alternative OS instead of a mainstram one, but that won't kill it. If people want to make it work, they will.
Why wouldn't they? Their goal was to crack the encryption so that they could reveal the list of sites that CyberPatrol has. They did this, and within the next few days it was distributed all over the Internet. Now, they have settled, they don't have to pay more legal bills, and two thing have happened:
1) There has been no legal precedent set that makes this sort of thing illegal 2) CyberPatrol's reverse engineering instructions and the list of sites circulate through the net feely.
As we have all seen before, the Internet routes around such things. Let's assume that German officials set up tomorrow two mechanisms to stop MP3's. The first is a Cyberpatrol like filter that conducts wholesale blocks of sites. The second is a protocol filter which scans connections for the characteristics of MP3 files and blocks them (yes, the router would die trying to do such a thing, but just bare with me I'm trying to make a point).
Okay, so how do we route around this:
1) Encoding the MP3's into other formats to eliminate the possibility of having a filter figure out whether the traffic is an MP3 or something else. I mean heck, you could just ZIP the damn things and accomplish this:)
2) Smaller ISP's in Germany can establish peering agreements with other countries. Granted this is a risk to the them and so probably wouldn't happen.
3) People who want to trade in illegal MP3's already move around like mad, so this isn't really a big change for them.
What's screwed up about this is that ultimately the people they want to fight (those evil mean hackers) are the people most capable of elluding their efforts. The people who get screwed are the common person, the small record label trying to make a place for themselves, etc.
Someday I envision that there will be pratcially two Internets. One, heavily regulated and strictly controlled. The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws.
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Ways to Establish Location (and get around them)
on
Geographic Screening
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· Score: 2
I can think of a few ways to identify a user's location, but every single one of them can be easily hacked around by somebody who knows how. SYSYTEM 1: IP Address Map using ARIN When you connect to the server, your physical location is established by doing a lookup of your originating IP address against ARIN. ARIN indicates what IP blocks have been registered to what locations. So, they can check the country of the owner of your IP adress and identify you. This system is unreliable because ARIN's records are not completely useful in this regard. For example, a french company may register IP's for a server in the U.S. The other thing is that routing through a proxy server would quickly eliminate the usefulness of this approach. SYSTEM 2: Verified Identities They could provide their service only to those people who proove their residency. This of course would be stupid because nobody will go through the hassle to get registered. Also, this really isn't patentable so I'm guessing they aren't going this route. Basically any other approach would involve hacks to the way TCP/IP works, which means it probably wouldn't work. God help us if they do get it to work...
"Well, we can't force consumers to read privacy statements, but in all our consumer outreach programs, we tell people: Even if you've visited this site before -- because things change -- the first thing to do is go to the privacy statement and review it to make sure there have been no changes. And we encourage licensees to put any changes up at the front. This is easier said than done -- none of us like to read pages and pages of text."
Are they kidding? Who on God's green earth would re-read the privacy policy of a web site every time they visit it??? If they really cared about TrustE having some enforcement authority, they require that users re-authorize every time privacy changes.
Copyright is essentially a compromise that was reached between the government and intellectual property owners. It grants them a monopoly over the information they manufacture but with conditions such as fair use and eventual expiration of that copyright. The existence of this arrangement is dependent on the fact that copyright holders cannot adequately protect their works from copying. Or would that be COULD not?
Picture this. The DVD Conortium releases the new DVD standard that will support high definition formats. As a part of this standard, they include a very strong encryption scheme that is unbreakable (or just close enough for government work:). Then they proceed to release these new DVD's only to sealed box systems where users cannot get at the underlying system (Tradition DVD Players, set top boxes, game consoles, "internet applicances", etc). Oh, and add to this that they just flat stop making CD's and only release new music on the audio equivalent of this "enhanced" DVD technology.
Now, not only could you not play this on your Linux box, but you couldn't even get a drive for it. The technology seems to be evolving in such a way that eventually enthusiasts and businesses will be the one's with PC's, and consumers will just use sealed internet appliances. So why risk the inability to enforce copyright by releasing it to PC's being a small percentage of the overall market. Nope, you have to get a sealed system with no upgrades or ability to hack the O/S and you throw it out when you don't like it and get a new one for free with your cable subscription. They'll subsidize the cost of these devices, and then make it all back in the end by upping the cost of the media you buy.
No more MP3 trading. No more ripping. No more DeCSS. Oh yeah, and since the government's copyright protections are either superfluous on appliances, or unenforcable on PC's, guess what? No more copyrights. Why bother? And thus, no more fair use and no more expiration of copyright. Nope nope, the media corps dictate their terms to you, and you just cope because there's nobody else who can provide the same service.
Now, you might think that congress can save us. Yet, this would take a fundamental reconstructing of their understanding of copyright law. Besides which, who's financing their campaigns? Yup, AOL Time Warner Turner etc, incorporated and their ilk. Furthermore, they'll play it smart and provide ways for people to get a pseudo-fair use out of the technology. They'll provide academic discounts for libraries and schools. They'll have to pay for this of course, but the prices will be very reasonable.
They will be an information monopoly. Media for the corporations, by the corporations. Packaged and delievered to you at the maximum price they can extort from you.
I hate paying taxes as much as the next person, but my reason for hating paying taxes is not the tax itself, but my impression that I'm not getting much bang for the buck. There are countries that have similar or lower tax rates to the United States but yet most of them provide GOOD public education, free college tuition and free health care. Frankly though, I think that if we are going to take issue with the notion of taxes, then we should try to work against taxes (or better yet governement reform), in a way that helps all people. The problem I see right now is that the poor, who don't have computers or Internet connections, not only miss out on the educational benefits of the Internet, but get doubly screwed because they have to go to brick and mortar stores and pay sales tax. A person with more money can avoid this very easily. My only hesitation in permitting states to charge sales tax to purchases made on-line is that the web of taxes will make life inordinately complicated for businesses. Furthermore, I'd be that these taxes would only apply to on-line purchases, not catalog purchases which are essentially the same thing and have gone untaxed for years. It will be interesting to see what happens to the whole consumer e-commerce thing when: 1) You have to pay sales tax 2) You have to pay shipping 3) You have to pay the same price on-line as you do at a brick and mortar store
Sure, the data grows exponentially, but as you just pointed out, so does the storage media. At one point, holding on to all of the e-mail I ever received would have been a ludicrous concept. But now using CD-R or even just a big mirrored hard drive, I can keep a limitless archive. I think the bigger concern is not the limitations of the physical media's capacity to store everything, it is the ability to view that stuff a few years down the line. E-mail is all ascii text so it isn't too difficult to deal with, but as the data becomes more robust and complex, then the issues of obsolesence become more pronounced.
Think about that for a moment. Let's say they had some grand political motive here. So, they decide they want to announce to the world that they did it. Here's the magic question for you:
How do they claim responsibility in a way that people will know it is them without revealing enough information to land them in Jail?
If you deface a website, you can at least leave your message behind. With a DOS, you don't get that opportunity so there is no direct association between the attack and the related political message.
All of the targets have been the big names in commerical internet sites. CNN was probably targeted over other news sites because it is part of the AOLTimeWarnerTurner cabal. So, it would seem that this attack was launched by either people with issues against commercial sites, or it was part of a government conspiracy. I lean towards the latter, but then look at my e-mail address and it will become self explanatory:)
Let's say that five years down the line, Linux is just getting way too commercial. All our worst fears have come true. RedHat, who has been bought by IBM, has pretty much crushed Microsoft, and begun to dominate both the server and desktop environments.
The hacker community who liked being outsiders will get fed up with the commercialized Linux and they will start their own distributions. Actually, they even go beyond having alternative distributions and start writing alternative Kernels that eventually become incompatible with Linux. Because it is all GNU, it is all good.
Another five years down the line, this alternative Linux now has all sorts of strange and possibly useful features that Linux doesn't have (the need to be stable will slow its evolution). All of these hackers are suddenly out there looking for jobs that will pay the bills and guess what, they are experts on this alternative Linux. So, some of them go to work for RedHat, others start their own distributions, Linux evolves, they evolve, and the cycle begins again.
Oh, and as for those AOL folks, they'll all be using Playstation 3's. If you can get web and e-mail with it, why on god's earth would you want to put up with the complexity of a PC? They'll watch their DVD's on their HDTV's (without regional encoding because that's going away). Of course they'll be running linux on their Playstation's but they'll never realize it nor care and that's exactly the way it should be.
For those of you who want to set up ipchains to block everything vaguely associated with doubleclick, I went over to ARIN and looked up what IP blocks have been assigned to them. This should block everything. On a couple I went a bit overboard and blocked an entire 0-255 subnet when they only had a small chunk. But i figure, better safe than sorry:). Here ya go:
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.206.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 199.95.208.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 63.160.54.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.211.225.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.10.202.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 216.94.59.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.228.78.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.228.86.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 209.167.73.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.229.75.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 208.203.243.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 204.178.112.160/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 204.253.104.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 216.230.65.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 63.77.79.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 128.11.60.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 128.11.92.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 199.95.210.0/24 -j REJECT ipchains -A output -d 199.95.206.0/24 -j REJECT
Double Click does not actually provide any content. All they are is an ad banner company. You've probably run across countless sites that use double click's banners, but you never noticed.
The tracking works regardless of IP address because the information is stored as a cookie. The cookie remains consistent on your browser even if you change IP addresses.
See, here's the thing, nobody is going to go out and buy new CD players, but they will go out and buy DVD players! I'm sure that all of the DVD players deal with the new copy protection scheme just fine when they play CD's. So now they move you to drives where they are controlling who can play what when and how often. Oh and of course you can't play DVD's on Linux but that's okay because most people run Windows. Why would you want to use Linux anyhow? I mean it is so complex and hard to use, why would you want to play DVD's there? The only reason you could possibly want to do that is so that you could make illegal copies! We can't have any of that now, can we? You want to make a copy for your own personal use? Oh, well yes, that's legal, but who really does that? Nobody in their right mind would need to back up their music! Just go out and buy another copy like a good consumer!
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.
Let us assume that the amount of information available in the world continues to expand exponentially. So what?
Eventually the amount of information in the world will reach a critical mass where there is so much noise in it all that people will just ignore the vast majority of it. I would suggest that this is already the case in fact.
Think about it, in the vast space that is the Internet, how much of it do you use on a routine basis? How much of it is actually useful to you in some fashion? Yet it keeps growing, so it just means that you're ignoring more of it which really puts very little strain on you.
Now, you might think that eventually we come to a problem where, because of all the noise, we have trouble finding things. This is not a problem either. Think about it, how do you find information now? You go to sites that have traditionally provided you with relavent search results or you talk to friends and ask them. You use filters to limit that vast amount of information into a more managable form.
Now, as for the media, those who produce information (to define it very loosely), they are in fact limited in how much they can grow. There's only so much information that people can actually consume. Increasingly we see competition for people's attention between TV, Internet, Radio, Books, etc. Only so much of your day can be reasonably spent on gathering information so the market for these services is limited. So, they must compete with eachother to provide, not just MORE content, but more USEFUL content.
As the media have tried to expand the number of hours that the average persons spends consuming media, people have show greater interest in getting "off-line". This is a strong indication that the fundamental limits of time people are willing to commit to media consumption are being reached now.
It isn't dependent on the bottom line of any company. Welcome to the elegance of the GPL. If any of the Linux organizations start taking a direction that you don't want, you have the power to ignore them and go your own way.
Actually, what I suspect is going to happen with Linux is a sort of fragmentation. Most of the big players right now are interested in developing Linux to be more valuable to businesses. This means that development will likely slow down and focus on stability rather than innovation. Those people out there who came into their own as "linux hackers" will wear the hat of "linux developer" now, trying to look more reputable and trying to get some compensation for their years of hard work.
As the main Linux distributions become more mainstream and corporatized, a new underground version of Linux will begin to evolve. As the old Linux bloats and slow under the weight of legacy compatibility, this new hacker off shoot will come into its own, just like the current Linux has. And so on and so on...
Or maybe all the hackers will just start playing with Hurd:).
There are scame artists and scheisters in just about every business in the world. Now, as Linux becomes more main stream, we are going to see our fair share of them popping up. I mean if anybody can download a distribution and start selling it, why wouldn't somebody try what LinuxOne appears to be trying.
In the end what this will do is further reinforce the value of brand within the Linux community. Red Hat, SUSE, VA Linux, Debian, etc, etc. These will be names that will be tied to reputations about products that have a certain level of quality. A few people will get burned by these scam artists, and it will just strengthen the position of those who deliver a real and valuable product or service.
I'd be curious to see an interview with some folks at LinuxOne on Slashdot. I'd be interested to hear them attempt to defend themselves.
Jupiter Research says it found that 45 per cent of online music fans are more likely to have increased their music purchases than online fans who don't use Napster
This may be a technicality here, but what does the research say about the 55 percent you didn't mention here. If 55 percent of online music fans are less likely to increase or more likely to decrease music purchases then this stat is deceptive.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt Katz, but if you're going to say "don't believe everything you read", you might want to make sure you back your arguments more thoroughly.
Why are issues being raised about who will legally defend GPL'd software? The reason is that big money making corporations have finally realized the value of open source software. Those companies who try to breach the GPL will have two things combatting them:
1) Other corporations using the GPL software will sue them in order to level the playing field. For example, if Red Hat tried to do something that violated the GPL of linux, VA Linux, SUSE, Debian, IBM, Compaq and a few others would show up at their doorstep with a big pack of lawyers. It is corporate interest that threatens the GPL and it is the same interest that will protect it.
2) Evil Bad Corporation (unrelated to Microsoft), decides that it wants to take a piece of GPL'd software and put a bunch of modifications on it, then sell it under a closed or heavily modified OS license. Now, the question is, WHY ON GOD's GREEN EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THIS??? If you did this, and your product was successful you've just set yourself up for a nasty fall. If you get sued, and somebody can afford the attorneys, you will lose, and with it will go your lock on the source code. Your empire will crumble quickly.
One other thing to consider is that not only would the breaching of the license be a civil legal issue, it might also be considered criminal because of breach of copyright. I'm not sure about that one but it seems at least vaguely plausible.
How are successful IPO's "getting off on the wrong foot"? The success of these IPO's is indication of popular interest and belief in the possible potential of the open source movement. If anything this is validating what a lot of these people have been strugling for.
There's nothing wrong with making money folks. What will be the interesting thing to see is what these people do with their new found wealth. Give them a chance to do something with it before we judge its inherent morality.
Ultimately, I do not believe our technology is capable of wiping out all life on earth. We are easily capable of wiping ourselves out, but the earth and the rest of life on it is much more resilient.
If you believe that there is a creator, it is a logical assumption that this creator was the one who gave us all minds. Why is it wrong for us to use our minds? Where does it say in any religious text, "Thouh shalt not create life in a laboratory!"
Personally I don't think this is a matter of religious morality. We should use those same minds that can create life in a lab to ask ourselves, "is this a good idea?", or, "So what are we going to do with this life in a petrie dish anyhow?"
The problem is that we have this belief that creating technology without contemplating its implications for our society is okay. The mere act of inventing something implies it eventual usage, and so we must decide whether it is worth going down that road. Frankly I don't think God cares if we create life or invent nuclear weapons. I think we should however!
Slashdot Mirror
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Code is expression, but that doesn't mean all code is protected by the first amendment. It is likely that more destructive and anti-social forms of code will be declared illegal regardless of their status as a form of expression.
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Something else to keep in mind is that Linux will never die. It might shift back to being an alternative OS instead of a mainstram one, but that won't kill it. If people want to make it work, they will.
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1) There has been no legal precedent set that makes this sort of thing illegal
2) CyberPatrol's reverse engineering instructions and the list of sites circulate through the net feely.
Seems like a win-win scenario to me!
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Okay, so how do we route around this:
1) Encoding the MP3's into other formats to eliminate the possibility of having a filter figure out whether the traffic is an MP3 or something else. I mean heck, you could just ZIP the damn things and accomplish this
2) Smaller ISP's in Germany can establish peering agreements with other countries. Granted this is a risk to the them and so probably wouldn't happen.
3) People who want to trade in illegal MP3's already move around like mad, so this isn't really a big change for them.
What's screwed up about this is that ultimately the people they want to fight (those evil mean hackers) are the people most capable of elluding their efforts. The people who get screwed are the common person, the small record label trying to make a place for themselves, etc.
Someday I envision that there will be pratcially two Internets. One, heavily regulated and strictly controlled. The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws.
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"Well, we can't force consumers to read privacy statements, but in all our consumer outreach programs, we tell people: Even if you've visited this site before -- because things change -- the first thing to do is go to the privacy statement and review it to make sure there have been no changes. And we encourage licensees to put any changes up at the front. This is easier said than done -- none of us like to read pages and pages of text."
Are they kidding? Who on God's green earth would re-read the privacy policy of a web site every time they visit it??? If they really cared about TrustE having some enforcement authority, they require that users re-authorize every time privacy changes.
*sigh*
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Picture this. The DVD Conortium releases the new DVD standard that will support high definition formats. As a part of this standard, they include a very strong encryption scheme that is unbreakable (or just close enough for government work
Now, not only could you not play this on your Linux box, but you couldn't even get a drive for it. The technology seems to be evolving in such a way that eventually enthusiasts and businesses will be the one's with PC's, and consumers will just use sealed internet appliances. So why risk the inability to enforce copyright by releasing it to PC's being a small percentage of the overall market. Nope, you have to get a sealed system with no upgrades or ability to hack the O/S and you throw it out when you don't like it and get a new one for free with your cable subscription. They'll subsidize the cost of these devices, and then make it all back in the end by upping the cost of the media you buy.
No more MP3 trading. No more ripping. No more DeCSS. Oh yeah, and since the government's copyright protections are either superfluous on appliances, or unenforcable on PC's, guess what? No more copyrights. Why bother? And thus, no more fair use and no more expiration of copyright. Nope nope, the media corps dictate their terms to you, and you just cope because there's nobody else who can provide the same service.
Now, you might think that congress can save us. Yet, this would take a fundamental reconstructing of their understanding of copyright law. Besides which, who's financing their campaigns? Yup, AOL Time Warner Turner etc, incorporated and their ilk. Furthermore, they'll play it smart and provide ways for people to get a pseudo-fair use out of the technology. They'll provide academic discounts for libraries and schools. They'll have to pay for this of course, but the prices will be very reasonable.
They will be an information monopoly. Media for the corporations, by the corporations. Packaged and delievered to you at the maximum price they can extort from you.
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How do they claim responsibility in a way that people will know it is them without revealing enough information to land them in Jail?
If you deface a website, you can at least leave your message behind. With a DOS, you don't get that opportunity so there is no direct association between the attack and the related political message.
All of the targets have been the big names in commerical internet sites. CNN was probably targeted over other news sites because it is part of the AOLTimeWarnerTurner cabal. So, it would seem that this attack was launched by either people with issues against commercial sites, or it was part of a government conspiracy. I lean towards the latter, but then look at my e-mail address and it will become self explanatory
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The hacker community who liked being outsiders will get fed up with the commercialized Linux and they will start their own distributions. Actually, they even go beyond having alternative distributions and start writing alternative Kernels that eventually become incompatible with Linux. Because it is all GNU, it is all good.
Another five years down the line, this alternative Linux now has all sorts of strange and possibly useful features that Linux doesn't have (the need to be stable will slow its evolution). All of these hackers are suddenly out there looking for jobs that will pay the bills and guess what, they are experts on this alternative Linux. So, some of them go to work for RedHat, others start their own distributions, Linux evolves, they evolve, and the cycle begins again.
Oh, and as for those AOL folks, they'll all be using Playstation 3's. If you can get web and e-mail with it, why on god's earth would you want to put up with the complexity of a PC? They'll watch their DVD's on their HDTV's (without regional encoding because that's going away). Of course they'll be running linux on their Playstation's but they'll never realize it nor care and that's exactly the way it should be.
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ipchains -A output -d 199.95.206.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.208.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 63.160.54.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.211.225.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.10.202.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 216.94.59.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.228.78.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.228.86.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 209.167.73.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.229.75.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 208.203.243.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 204.178.112.160/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 204.253.104.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 216.230.65.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 63.77.79.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 128.11.60.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 128.11.92.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.210.0/24 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.206.0/24 -j REJECT
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The tracking works regardless of IP address because the information is stored as a cookie. The cookie remains consistent on your browser even if you change IP addresses.
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(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.---
(b) "CSS" means the Contents Scramble System used to encrypt, scramble or otherwise protect the contents of certain DVDs from being copied.
All that needs to be proven is that DVD's can be copied without DeCSS and the entire basis of the injunction can be thrown out. The Judge clearly believes that DeCSS is meant to make it easy to copy DVD's which is definitively not the case.
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Eventually the amount of information in the world will reach a critical mass where there is so much noise in it all that people will just ignore the vast majority of it. I would suggest that this is already the case in fact.
Think about it, in the vast space that is the Internet, how much of it do you use on a routine basis? How much of it is actually useful to you in some fashion? Yet it keeps growing, so it just means that you're ignoring more of it which really puts very little strain on you.
Now, you might think that eventually we come to a problem where, because of all the noise, we have trouble finding things. This is not a problem either. Think about it, how do you find information now? You go to sites that have traditionally provided you with relavent search results or you talk to friends and ask them. You use filters to limit that vast amount of information into a more managable form.
Now, as for the media, those who produce information (to define it very loosely), they are in fact limited in how much they can grow. There's only so much information that people can actually consume. Increasingly we see competition for people's attention between TV, Internet, Radio, Books, etc. Only so much of your day can be reasonably spent on gathering information so the market for these services is limited. So, they must compete with eachother to provide, not just MORE content, but more USEFUL content.
As the media have tried to expand the number of hours that the average persons spends consuming media, people have show greater interest in getting "off-line". This is a strong indication that the fundamental limits of time people are willing to commit to media consumption are being reached now.
---
Actually, what I suspect is going to happen with Linux is a sort of fragmentation. Most of the big players right now are interested in developing Linux to be more valuable to businesses. This means that development will likely slow down and focus on stability rather than innovation. Those people out there who came into their own as "linux hackers" will wear the hat of "linux developer" now, trying to look more reputable and trying to get some compensation for their years of hard work.
As the main Linux distributions become more mainstream and corporatized, a new underground version of Linux will begin to evolve. As the old Linux bloats and slow under the weight of legacy compatibility, this new hacker off shoot will come into its own, just like the current Linux has. And so on and so on...
Or maybe all the hackers will just start playing with Hurd
---Steve
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In the end what this will do is further reinforce the value of brand within the Linux community. Red Hat, SUSE, VA Linux, Debian, etc, etc. These will be names that will be tied to reputations about products that have a certain level of quality. A few people will get burned by these scam artists, and it will just strengthen the position of those who deliver a real and valuable product or service.
I'd be curious to see an interview with some folks at LinuxOne on Slashdot. I'd be interested to hear them attempt to defend themselves.
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- Jupiter Research says it found that 45 per cent of online music fans are more likely to have increased their music purchases than online fans who don't use Napster
This may be a technicality here, but what does the research say about the 55 percent you didn't mention here. If 55 percent of online music fans are less likely to increase or more likely to decrease music purchases then this stat is deceptive.I'll give you the benefit of the doubt Katz, but if you're going to say "don't believe everything you read", you might want to make sure you back your arguments more thoroughly.
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1) Other corporations using the GPL software will sue them in order to level the playing field. For example, if Red Hat tried to do something that violated the GPL of linux, VA Linux, SUSE, Debian, IBM, Compaq and a few others would show up at their doorstep with a big pack of lawyers. It is corporate interest that threatens the GPL and it is the same interest that will protect it.
2) Evil Bad Corporation (unrelated to Microsoft), decides that it wants to take a piece of GPL'd software and put a bunch of modifications on it, then sell it under a closed or heavily modified OS license. Now, the question is, WHY ON GOD's GREEN EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THIS??? If you did this, and your product was successful you've just set yourself up for a nasty fall. If you get sued, and somebody can afford the attorneys, you will lose, and with it will go your lock on the source code. Your empire will crumble quickly.
One other thing to consider is that not only would the breaching of the license be a civil legal issue, it might also be considered criminal because of breach of copyright. I'm not sure about that one but it seems at least vaguely plausible.
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There's nothing wrong with making money folks. What will be the interesting thing to see is what these people do with their new found wealth. Give them a chance to do something with it before we judge its inherent morality.
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Personally I don't think this is a matter of religious morality. We should use those same minds that can create life in a lab to ask ourselves, "is this a good idea?", or, "So what are we going to do with this life in a petrie dish anyhow?"
The problem is that we have this belief that creating technology without contemplating its implications for our society is okay. The mere act of inventing something implies it eventual usage, and so we must decide whether it is worth going down that road. Frankly I don't think God cares if we create life or invent nuclear weapons. I think we should however!
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