1. The ISPs will not be willing to monitor the traffic (prohibitively expensive)
If the proposal becomes law, and the content overlords push enforcement, they may have no choice. And this will raise everyone's internet access price.
2. The ISPs are not allowed by UK Law to monitor the traffic
The proposal could make an exception for this, depending on the final form it takes if it gets that far.
3. The ISPs cannot tell if the traffic is copyright infringing material anyway , it might be encrypted, it might be Public domain, it might not be copyrightable material, it might be fair use, it might be creative commons, it might be with the owners consent?
The content overloards could provide some (probably very unreliable) software that will scan for signatures of most popular content. They will argue all fair use would not be going over the internet between different access accounts (even though in reality there are valid reasons for this to happen). Anyway, I suspect they will focus on just the major copyrighted content that makes up 90% of the revenues the content overlords think they should get.
This is another unenforceable law that the police and the public will ignore...
Quite possibly so. But to the extent the content overlords push enforcement once they have the law, it could be hard for at least the ISPs to ignore. The police would not be involved unless it gets to the point that the executives of an ISP have to be jailed for ignoring it.
No, they shouldn't be. But who knows what mechanisms the proposal might end up requiring if it becomes law. What encryption will do is at least cut out one such mechanism. It will still be possible for the content overlords to run their own bogus file sharing agents to see who is at least offering, or even accepting, such downloads. Or they could spy onto insecure computers. Or they could be planting rootkits. Encryption won't stop them, but it will make things harder for them.
As for the encryption practice, it needs to start now, and it needs to be done for everything. Don't give them the ability to ass-u-me that encrypted traffic to other than known bank addresses means you have something to hide.
This is why we need to start using more encryption... for everything done over the internet. That includes making web sites that operate over HTTPS and redirect to the HTTPS URL if accessed via just the HTTP URL. The more we do that now the harder it will be for them to ass-u-me that encryption means you're hiding something. Use encryption by default "because it's more work to turn it on and off for different places".
If they see encrypted traffic, they will probably ass-u-me you have something to hide. That's why what we need to do is not just do encryption, but do encryption for everything. For example, if you have your own web site, be sure it runs encrypted over HTTPS and that the non-encrypted URL always does a redirect to the encrypted URL.
When encryption is used, the ISPs cannot directly monitor what data is coming across the network. Would they then assume that any BitTorrent connection must be something illegal? Would they have to depend on the content overlords to make claims from their own spies in the sharing?
Should the encryption be "in the stream" like HTTPS, SSL, and SSH does? Or should it be IPsec? Or both?
Or she still has that monster size paper copy machine that still needs to be paid off (they are not cheap in the versions needed to handle the large maps involved).
I agree, in this day and age, we should have such maps for no more than the cost of digital reproduction when we get them in digital form. And we should be able to. But just keep in mind why these tax assessors, and other government office officials in other circumstances like this, might be trying to collect the same money for digital data as for paper data... they are stuck with continuing to pay off the loan for that equipment.
I hope the court rules against her since we need to move forward instead of being stuck in the past. But these government offices do have (incorrectly anticipated) future costs to resolve (how to pay off a giant photo copy machine when no one wants or can even use paper anymore).
I'll let you figure out how to do this, in the role of a county tax assessor.
Before automatic reproduction equipment came along, you could not even have a copy of the map unless you paid a map maker to hand create a copy. That would be half a day effort for just one sectional map. The cost: half a day's wages. Want the entire county? Several weeks wages.
Along comes photo copy machinery. But this isn't cheap because the maps are huge. Even in 2008 this means investing a huge sum of money for the specialized (and hence, no economy of scale which means very expensive) equipment needed to make the copies.
Now you are a tax assessor. You don't have the budget to just buy the equipment. So your office has to take out a loan to buy it, to be paid back through the sale of copies. This is in no way a profit operation, as all the money collected for copies goes to pay off the loan. Now consider that along comes the internet and suddenly no one wants your paper copies anymore. But you're stuck with a big piece of equipment no one else has any use for, and a loan that still needs to be paid off.
I'm sure part of that money, especially after the loan is paid off, ends up supplementing the office operation itself. But that's actually typical for a great many government operations, where the routine servicing needs of a very small segment of the population has to be paid for by those that use it. A tax assessor general operation probably should not qualify for this since the general operation affects all property owners and potential buyers and a few lawyers with property cases ongoing. But it is not that far out of line, as $8 for a copy of a large sheet at 3 feet by 2 feet and larger is close to the real cost considering things like the special equipment and handling needed.
Normally, the copying should not be a profit operation. However, this copying is a big part of what such an office does. That requires some equipment investment. And these are not small 8.5x11 sheets that typical copying equipment can serve. I've been to one of these offices in a West Virginia county, before, and these are on the order of 3x2 feet in size for the original paper copy. To some extent, the concern may be to protect that investment in reproduction equipment that could go underutilized if the maps go online.
But the world is changing. I should be able to click on "tax map" on my GPS equipped phone and have it automatically pull up the map of where I am standing, and overlay that with a satellite/aerial photo view, with names and addresses from the phone book, etc. I should not have to make a trip down to the county tax assessor just so they can pay off an antiquated copy machine due to their inability to assess the pace of technology development.
These maps are not accurate in terms of exact positioning. The assessment information is official, but the land shape and position is merely for identification purposes, only. Ironically, however, this very technology could also help make such maps much more accurate. Integrated with standardized survey data and low level aerial photos, and the assessments can be much more accurate in terms of things like valuation.
It's the whole design of HTML/XML, that needs to have DTD files in the first place to do the processing, that is all wrong. I warned about this well over 12 years ago. At least what little code I've written to process HTML/XML has always entirely ignored the DTD.
Sheesh! These guys must be totally incompetent idiots if they can't make a copy of a hard drive within a day, and return the laptop. If they think the owner might use that data to commit a future crime, then keep the hard drive and return the rest of the laptop. If they think the owner might commit a crime even without the data, then arrest the owner. Just keeping laptops makes no sense.
Maybe this isn't an "excuse" for not encrypting, but from what I read in their documentation, which doesn't really go into enough detail to satisfy me that they are doing things as reliable and efficient as possible, I would have to reformat everything to their special volume format. And I see at least a couple issues with its design. If I knew enough about the actual encryption algorithms, I'd just implement my own encryption system. If someone who does wants to join with me, maybe we can produce something.
If it runs while loading the OS (kernel), and then runs when that OS mounts a filesystem, it must be running in two different places since in one case the I/O is done through BIOS calls and in the other case through device driver calls in a kernel. That doesn't sound like independence from the kernel to me. It sounds like it has to be compiled into the kernel (otherwise the / filesystem isn't encrypted), or at least inside initramfs (which is still compiled into the kernel).
I'm really not concerned about the install process. I'm concerned about reliability aspects, including the ability to support the way I structure my file systems. Performance would be good, too, but there is obviously a certain amount of performance hit for the encryption. For example, things like direct write should still continue to work faster, by doing the encryption of data blocks directly from the original buffer to a temporary (not copy to a temporary first), then completing the write.
You can label the now total of 4 states however you like, such as 00/01/10/11 or 0/1/2/3 or A/B/C/D or T/A/C/O. But whatever they are, Intel would need to, at some point, convert this all back to 2 bits with states 0/1 when interfacing with external binary circuits. If they don't know how to do that they are welcome to "Ask Slashdot".
You are counting the number of VALUES that could be stored, not the equivalent number of bits needed to store those values. With your logic, starting with 8 slots that store 2 states, going to 8 slots that store 4 states, we'd be going from 256 to 65536. But that's not 256 times the capacity of bit storage; it's still just a doubling of the capacity. For every slot that can store 4 states, that's just the equivalent of 2 bits. That's certainly twice as much as before, and it means this technology of memory can come in twice the capacity for about the same fabrication costs (and you know a corporation will take as much of that as profit as the market can handle). Still, it's a better thing to have if these states are reliable (there is a risk that the new states may not be as reliable under adverse conditions like voltage error, thermal stress, and radiation, as the original two states).
Both John McCain and Mitt Romney are both anti-American-tech-worker. So I will never vote for either of them. I'm not sure about Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul, yet, but I am hopeful.
The big record labels know (most of) their music is crap. That's why they don't offer free, reduced quality, 30 second samples. They know that if sampled, most people will decline to buy. They'd also decline to download. I wonder just how many downloads people make end up being deleted or simply ignored because that's when they discover it's crap. I also wonder how many people who find something they like end up buying it from a legal source (but aren't do this as much as in the past just because they now know which songs are crap and not worth buying).
I am glad to see that Cox is motivated to make a big effort to avoid being a medium for spam. But I do think they are doing this wrong. The article suggests a right to use their bandwidth any way they see fit. That is not true. They do not have the right to abuse others or other criminal actions. While I applaud an effort to stop those abuses, I think Cox is doing this wrong when it impacts non-abusive non-criminal uses of the internet. This also shows rather clearly that content-based filter is not the right way. I believe it never has been, and never will be. Blocking of the egress SMTP port is, IMHO, a good default. But it should be openable by anyone who calls in and can say the right buzzwords (like "SMTP" and "port 25"). Virtually all zombie spam is from people that don't know those words and do run "the default OS". Cox needs to fix this. What next? Filtering music downloads, a great many of which are perfectly legal?
... sold them through 3 or 4 hand picked online retailers, such as Amazon and Newegg and others. That way they could have bulk shipped them to those retailers and let the retailers handle the details like they are well experienced in doing.
The only DRM that can possibly work is the sealed black box with self destruct feature when tampered with. And even then, the black box has to be fully integrated, or use something like a stronger version of HDCP with a monitor.
This is all entirely a different concept than, for example, a top secret agency like the NSA encrypting backup data it stores offsite. That agency has no reason to give out any keys to the public because it isn't trying to make the data accessible to the public. You, and the media companies, OTOH, have contradicting goals. You want at least some of the public to see the data on a platform they basically control most of. In the case of open source software, change that to: they control virtually all of. This is all fundamentally a flawed concept right from the beginning. Whether or not your system gets cracked, or how quickly, depends on whether there is an interest. If someone wants it, they will get it.
Your best option is some sort of watermarking that identifies each customer individually, in addition to being a proof that the document originates with you. Even this can be easily cracked, but at least it doesn't require being cracked for someone who just wants to view your document to do so. So maybe the effort to crack it won't be made unless someone wants to get into the act of masssively distributing your document.
Slashdot Mirror
If the proposal becomes law, and the content overlords push enforcement, they may have no choice. And this will raise everyone's internet access price.
2. The ISPs are not allowed by UK Law to monitor the trafficThe proposal could make an exception for this, depending on the final form it takes if it gets that far.
3. The ISPs cannot tell if the traffic is copyright infringing material anyway , it might be encrypted, it might be Public domain, it might not be copyrightable material, it might be fair use, it might be creative commons, it might be with the owners consent?The content overloards could provide some (probably very unreliable) software that will scan for signatures of most popular content. They will argue all fair use would not be going over the internet between different access accounts (even though in reality there are valid reasons for this to happen). Anyway, I suspect they will focus on just the major copyrighted content that makes up 90% of the revenues the content overlords think they should get.
This is another unenforceable law that the police and the public will ignoreQuite possibly so. But to the extent the content overlords push enforcement once they have the law, it could be hard for at least the ISPs to ignore. The police would not be involved unless it gets to the point that the executives of an ISP have to be jailed for ignoring it.
No, they shouldn't be. But who knows what mechanisms the proposal might end up requiring if it becomes law. What encryption will do is at least cut out one such mechanism. It will still be possible for the content overlords to run their own bogus file sharing agents to see who is at least offering, or even accepting, such downloads. Or they could spy onto insecure computers. Or they could be planting rootkits. Encryption won't stop them, but it will make things harder for them.
As for the encryption practice, it needs to start now, and it needs to be done for everything. Don't give them the ability to ass-u-me that encrypted traffic to other than known bank addresses means you have something to hide.
This is why we need to start using more encryption ... for everything done over the internet. That includes making web sites that operate over HTTPS and redirect to the HTTPS URL if accessed via just the HTTP URL. The more we do that now the harder it will be for them to ass-u-me that encryption means you're hiding something. Use encryption by default "because it's more work to turn it on and off for different places".
If they see encrypted traffic, they will probably ass-u-me you have something to hide. That's why what we need to do is not just do encryption, but do encryption for everything. For example, if you have your own web site, be sure it runs encrypted over HTTPS and that the non-encrypted URL always does a redirect to the encrypted URL.
When encryption is used, the ISPs cannot directly monitor what data is coming across the network. Would they then assume that any BitTorrent connection must be something illegal? Would they have to depend on the content overlords to make claims from their own spies in the sharing?
Should the encryption be "in the stream" like HTTPS, SSL, and SSH does? Or should it be IPsec? Or both?
Or she still has that monster size paper copy machine that still needs to be paid off (they are not cheap in the versions needed to handle the large maps involved).
I agree, in this day and age, we should have such maps for no more than the cost of digital reproduction when we get them in digital form. And we should be able to. But just keep in mind why these tax assessors, and other government office officials in other circumstances like this, might be trying to collect the same money for digital data as for paper data ... they are stuck with continuing to pay off the loan for that equipment.
I hope the court rules against her since we need to move forward instead of being stuck in the past. But these government offices do have (incorrectly anticipated) future costs to resolve (how to pay off a giant photo copy machine when no one wants or can even use paper anymore).
I'll let you figure out how to do this, in the role of a county tax assessor.
Before automatic reproduction equipment came along, you could not even have a copy of the map unless you paid a map maker to hand create a copy. That would be half a day effort for just one sectional map. The cost: half a day's wages. Want the entire county? Several weeks wages.
Along comes photo copy machinery. But this isn't cheap because the maps are huge. Even in 2008 this means investing a huge sum of money for the specialized (and hence, no economy of scale which means very expensive) equipment needed to make the copies.
Now you are a tax assessor. You don't have the budget to just buy the equipment. So your office has to take out a loan to buy it, to be paid back through the sale of copies. This is in no way a profit operation, as all the money collected for copies goes to pay off the loan. Now consider that along comes the internet and suddenly no one wants your paper copies anymore. But you're stuck with a big piece of equipment no one else has any use for, and a loan that still needs to be paid off.
I'm sure part of that money, especially after the loan is paid off, ends up supplementing the office operation itself. But that's actually typical for a great many government operations, where the routine servicing needs of a very small segment of the population has to be paid for by those that use it. A tax assessor general operation probably should not qualify for this since the general operation affects all property owners and potential buyers and a few lawyers with property cases ongoing. But it is not that far out of line, as $8 for a copy of a large sheet at 3 feet by 2 feet and larger is close to the real cost considering things like the special equipment and handling needed.
Normally, the copying should not be a profit operation. However, this copying is a big part of what such an office does. That requires some equipment investment. And these are not small 8.5x11 sheets that typical copying equipment can serve. I've been to one of these offices in a West Virginia county, before, and these are on the order of 3x2 feet in size for the original paper copy. To some extent, the concern may be to protect that investment in reproduction equipment that could go underutilized if the maps go online.
But the world is changing. I should be able to click on "tax map" on my GPS equipped phone and have it automatically pull up the map of where I am standing, and overlay that with a satellite/aerial photo view, with names and addresses from the phone book, etc. I should not have to make a trip down to the county tax assessor just so they can pay off an antiquated copy machine due to their inability to assess the pace of technology development.
These maps are not accurate in terms of exact positioning. The assessment information is official, but the land shape and position is merely for identification purposes, only. Ironically, however, this very technology could also help make such maps much more accurate. Integrated with standardized survey data and low level aerial photos, and the assessments can be much more accurate in terms of things like valuation.
My laptop has plenty of lithium. Does that mean it is ready to belch out some firey dust cloud?
It's the whole design of HTML/XML, that needs to have DTD files in the first place to do the processing, that is all wrong. I warned about this well over 12 years ago. At least what little code I've written to process HTML/XML has always entirely ignored the DTD.
... to image copy one hard drive in a year?
Sheesh! These guys must be totally incompetent idiots if they can't make a copy of a hard drive within a day, and return the laptop. If they think the owner might use that data to commit a future crime, then keep the hard drive and return the rest of the laptop. If they think the owner might commit a crime even without the data, then arrest the owner. Just keeping laptops makes no sense.
Maybe this isn't an "excuse" for not encrypting, but from what I read in their documentation, which doesn't really go into enough detail to satisfy me that they are doing things as reliable and efficient as possible, I would have to reformat everything to their special volume format. And I see at least a couple issues with its design. If I knew enough about the actual encryption algorithms, I'd just implement my own encryption system. If someone who does wants to join with me, maybe we can produce something.
If it runs while loading the OS (kernel), and then runs when that OS mounts a filesystem, it must be running in two different places since in one case the I/O is done through BIOS calls and in the other case through device driver calls in a kernel. That doesn't sound like independence from the kernel to me. It sounds like it has to be compiled into the kernel (otherwise the / filesystem isn't encrypted), or at least inside initramfs (which is still compiled into the kernel).
I'm really not concerned about the install process. I'm concerned about reliability aspects, including the ability to support the way I structure my file systems. Performance would be good, too, but there is obviously a certain amount of performance hit for the encryption. For example, things like direct write should still continue to work faster, by doing the encryption of data blocks directly from the original buffer to a temporary (not copy to a temporary first), then completing the write.
You can label the now total of 4 states however you like, such as 00/01/10/11 or 0/1/2/3 or A/B/C/D or T/A/C/O. But whatever they are, Intel would need to, at some point, convert this all back to 2 bits with states 0/1 when interfacing with external binary circuits. If they don't know how to do that they are welcome to "Ask Slashdot".
You are counting the number of VALUES that could be stored, not the equivalent number of bits needed to store those values. With your logic, starting with 8 slots that store 2 states, going to 8 slots that store 4 states, we'd be going from 256 to 65536. But that's not 256 times the capacity of bit storage; it's still just a doubling of the capacity. For every slot that can store 4 states, that's just the equivalent of 2 bits. That's certainly twice as much as before, and it means this technology of memory can come in twice the capacity for about the same fabrication costs (and you know a corporation will take as much of that as profit as the market can handle). Still, it's a better thing to have if these states are reliable (there is a risk that the new states may not be as reliable under adverse conditions like voltage error, thermal stress, and radiation, as the original two states).
Both John McCain and Mitt Romney are both anti-American-tech-worker. So I will never vote for either of them. I'm not sure about Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul, yet, but I am hopeful.
Hillary Clinton is definitely anti-American-tech-worker, so I will never vote for her. I don't know enough about Barack Obama, yet, but I am hopeful.
The big record labels know (most of) their music is crap. That's why they don't offer free, reduced quality, 30 second samples. They know that if sampled, most people will decline to buy. They'd also decline to download. I wonder just how many downloads people make end up being deleted or simply ignored because that's when they discover it's crap. I also wonder how many people who find something they like end up buying it from a legal source (but aren't do this as much as in the past just because they now know which songs are crap and not worth buying).
The correct title of the report should have been "Netborked Nation: One Brand in America 2007".
I am glad to see that Cox is motivated to make a big effort to avoid being a medium for spam. But I do think they are doing this wrong. The article suggests a right to use their bandwidth any way they see fit. That is not true. They do not have the right to abuse others or other criminal actions. While I applaud an effort to stop those abuses, I think Cox is doing this wrong when it impacts non-abusive non-criminal uses of the internet. This also shows rather clearly that content-based filter is not the right way. I believe it never has been, and never will be. Blocking of the egress SMTP port is, IMHO, a good default. But it should be openable by anyone who calls in and can say the right buzzwords (like "SMTP" and "port 25"). Virtually all zombie spam is from people that don't know those words and do run "the default OS". Cox needs to fix this. What next? Filtering music downloads, a great many of which are perfectly legal?
When will all the traffic on the net be encrypted?
... Boston didn't do this first.
... sold them through 3 or 4 hand picked online retailers, such as Amazon and Newegg and others. That way they could have bulk shipped them to those retailers and let the retailers handle the details like they are well experienced in doing.
The only DRM that can possibly work is the sealed black box with self destruct feature when tampered with. And even then, the black box has to be fully integrated, or use something like a stronger version of HDCP with a monitor.
This is all entirely a different concept than, for example, a top secret agency like the NSA encrypting backup data it stores offsite. That agency has no reason to give out any keys to the public because it isn't trying to make the data accessible to the public. You, and the media companies, OTOH, have contradicting goals. You want at least some of the public to see the data on a platform they basically control most of. In the case of open source software, change that to: they control virtually all of. This is all fundamentally a flawed concept right from the beginning. Whether or not your system gets cracked, or how quickly, depends on whether there is an interest. If someone wants it, they will get it.
Your best option is some sort of watermarking that identifies each customer individually, in addition to being a proof that the document originates with you. Even this can be easily cracked, but at least it doesn't require being cracked for someone who just wants to view your document to do so. So maybe the effort to crack it won't be made unless someone wants to get into the act of masssively distributing your document.
You can't win. So why play the game.
... on dialup access?