Today in Washington environmentalists, human rights advocates, anarchists, and in general various people who are concerned with elitist corporate rule are protesting. They are protesting against the IMF and the World Bank; orginizations which are corporatist tools for the transfer of power from localized individuals to the global corporate elite.
While protest against these organizations and others (such as the WTO) is important, there is another factor in this equation that many people (present company of/. excluded) are not aware. This factor is the strictly controlled digital world, with severe limitations on the power of the individual, which large corporations are preparing for us.
We must make aware, to the general populace, that this corporate complex is setting itself up to control the future digital world. This general awareness is vital to prevent the passing of laws which clearly stomp individual rights. How do you think we can best create such awareness?
Ken Thompson made this very clear during his 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM, in which he revealed a shocking, and subtle, software subversion technique that's still illustrative seventeen years later.
Yeah, still illustrative but yet to be actually implemented in the wild in 17 years! Why then, if this is seemingly so simple and explicit instructions on how to do it are easily available, has it not been yet exploited? Because most people don't just download their compilers from anywhere. Try sending a binary only version to the maintainers of egcs and tell them that some bugs have been fixed and they should distribute this compiler as the latest version. It won't be accepted. And if the maintainers of egcs are corrupt enough to implement this themselves then we should all be scared because I think Stallman trojaned gcc 0.8.1 and it has been propagating ever since.
On a global level, nanotechnology raises some serious issues. On the one hand there are enormous benefits that the technology may produce i.e. possibly final cures to the aging and diseases that have plagued us for our entire history. On the other hand are the dangers, hard to visualize at this point, but all stemming from the radical power of this new tool, i.e. home-made attempts at genocide. I wonder if the heralded "Age of Nanotechnology" will be nothing more than a finely engineered disaster. But who knows.
Require Microsoft to publish complete documentation of all interfaces between software components, all communications protocols, and all file formats. This would block one of Microsoft's favorite tactics: secret and incompatible interfaces.
Require Microsoft to use its patents for defense only, in the field of software. (If they happen to own patents that apply to other fields, those other fields could be included in this requirement, or they could be exempt.) This would block the other tactic Microsoft mentioned in the Halloween documents: using patents to block development of free software.
Require Microsoft not to certify any hardware as working with Microsoft software, unless the hardware's complete specifications have been published, so that any programmer can implement software to support the same hardware.
If this comes to your school and you don't like it then try this: report as many people as you can, make up fake people and report them, remember you have complete anonymity. Report several thousand people from your school, if lots of people do this their system can't possibly keep working.
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Can anyone say EMP. Of course the system will be hardened against such vulnerablilties.
Love's delegated administration model has the Linux systems running in a customer's own offices and administered remotely by the service provider.
The day I let Caldera remotely run my machine will be a sad one indeed. Can you please change my window manager, sir?
Today in Washington environmentalists, human rights advocates, anarchists, and in general various people who are concerned with elitist corporate rule are protesting. They are protesting against the IMF and the World Bank; orginizations which are corporatist tools for the transfer of power from localized individuals to the global corporate elite.
While protest against these organizations and others (such as the WTO) is important, there is another factor in this equation that many people (present company of
We must make aware, to the general populace, that this corporate complex is setting itself up to control the future digital world. This general awareness is vital to prevent the passing of laws which clearly stomp individual rights. How do you think we can best create such awareness?
Ken Thompson made this very clear during his 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM, in which he revealed a shocking, and subtle, software subversion technique that's still illustrative seventeen years later.
Yeah, still illustrative but yet to be actually implemented in the wild in 17 years! Why then, if this is seemingly so simple and explicit instructions on how to do it are easily available, has it not been yet exploited? Because most people don't just download their compilers from anywhere. Try sending a binary only version to the maintainers of egcs and tell them that some bugs have been fixed and they should distribute this compiler as the latest version. It won't be accepted. And if the maintainers of egcs are corrupt enough to implement this themselves then we should all be scared because I think Stallman trojaned gcc 0.8.1 and it has been propagating ever since.
There is no strong guarantee that source code and binaries of an application have any real relationship.
There is if you roll your own, you fool.
On a global level, nanotechnology raises some serious issues. On the one hand there are enormous benefits that the technology may produce i.e. possibly final cures to the aging and diseases that have plagued us for our entire history. On the other hand are the dangers, hard to visualize at this point, but all stemming from the radical power of this new tool, i.e. home-made attempts at genocide. I wonder if the heralded "Age of Nanotechnology" will be nothing more than a finely engineered disaster. But who knows.
Require Microsoft to publish complete documentation of all interfaces between software components, all communications protocols, and all file formats. This would block one of Microsoft's favorite tactics: secret and incompatible interfaces.
Require Microsoft to use its patents for defense only, in the field of software. (If they happen to own patents that apply to other fields, those other fields could be included in this requirement, or they could be exempt.) This would block the other tactic Microsoft mentioned in the Halloween documents: using patents to block development of free software.
Require Microsoft not to certify any hardware as working with Microsoft software, unless the hardware's complete specifications have been published, so that any programmer can implement software to support the same hardware.
If this comes to your school and you don't like it then try this: report as many people as you can, make up fake people and report them, remember you have complete anonymity. Report several thousand people from your school, if lots of people do this their system can't possibly keep working.
I want to smash some Starbucks, that should get the point across.
I've already tried to network my 386 and my Macintosh SE into one supercluster but the project flopped.
Now I can start distributing a postscript version of my manifesto, not just the 20Mb mp3 of me reading it.
The trees don't want to "eat" pollution anymore than we do.
NASA is controlled by an ancient secret society who ritualistically sacrifice their spacecraft to appease their Akkadian gods.