Actually, source shrouding was most commonly used to sell POSIX-compliant Unix programs back in the 80s. There were many flavors of Unix, all with different object file formats, but (with a liberal dose of conditional compilation) you could write programs that would compile and run on all of them. Rather than maintaining a library of binaries for every version of every flavor of Unix, you could just ship shrouded source with a makefile.
The parent is modded as "Funny", but this is a real strategy, called "source shrouding". Doing a thorough job of it is nontrivial, because it requires a full language parser to morph everything correctly. But the result can be e.g. program source with no comments, no unneeded whitespace (including newlines), and all identifiers replaced with x00001, x00002, etc. It's not a guarantee against someone managing to modify it, but it sure raises the barrier.
That said, the other posters on this thread are quite correct in saying that the "right" approach is to craft a contract that specifies how your code may be used.
Bad thing is, there is a 20% chance it could strike the moon sometime next year.
Why is this a bad thing? It's not like there's any lunar ecology to disturb, or lunar inhabitants to threaten. And if it hits Luna, that's one less piece of dangerous unguided space debris for future space travellers to keep track of.
It's absolutely certain that people will produce circumvention hardware. But hardware is enormously harder to reproduce than software, generally requiring both extensive equipment and labor to do it in bulk. So distributors big enough to make a difference with noncompliant hardware (which, if it does circumvent a DRM scheme, is a priori illegal under the DMCA) will also be big enough make attractive legal targets. It's analogous to shutting down pseudo-P2P music sharing by going after the indexing-referral servers rather than the music traders themselves.
The real problem isn't availability of open hardware; anyone will (presumably) remain able to cobble together chips and wires and create a piece of computing equipment.
The problem will arise when you try to use your homebrew machine on the internet. There are two scenarios here.
The more likely scenario is that the big content suppliers and middlemen will pressure PC manufacturers into supplying only "DRM enabled" hardware to consumers; support for such hardware will be built into the Windows kernel and DMCA-protected against interference. What's more, a Palladium (or succeeding) web security system will interact with the trusted end-user hardware to enable net content access. In this scenario, users of noncompliant hardware will still be able to use their machines locally, and to access non-Palladium net content, but will be excluded from using the most popular OS and apps.
The less likely but still frighteningly probable scenario would involve the government (whichever government you happen to live under) passing a "net homeland security act" which would make it illegal to attach non-certified hardware to the internet. Needless to say, the certification process would be onerous and expensive for hobbyists, and would mandate compliance with DRM standards.
The latter may sound far-fetched, but consider that we already require cars to be certified as safe (and relatively non-polluting, in some states) before they're allowed to use public roads. The analogy is fairly direct.
Error 575: Clue not found
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Spam stopper based on copyright, SMTP ignorance. Yeah, right.
Yep. One would think Randal Schwartz's similar experience at Intel would have left all of us a lot more cautious about how we report vs. demonstrate security weaknesses.
While this situation sucks, it still doesn't approach the evil of government censorship. If Walmart drives your magazine out of business, you can still put your ideas out in other ways. If the government decides your ideas are illegal, then you have no recourse.
That being said, it sounds like this particular example looks (or is being made to look) more like self- than imposed censorship. I would say this move by China is similar to the coerced self-regulation of movies and comics in the US. The threat of legally codified censorship was used to pressure those industries into the standardized rating system and the "comics code" respectively. This is a gray area between purely capitalist "censorship" like the Walmart case and "say that and I will shoot you" style direct legal censorship.
If anything, I'd count this as a step up for Chinese government. They tend to go directly to the jackboots-and-guns stage rather than finessing issues like this, so using "voluntary" compliance here may be a good sign that things are beginning to loosen up over there.
Magellan - USA Venus Orbiter - 3,545 kg - (May 4, 1989 - 1994) Galileo - USA & Europe Jupiter Orbiter/Atmospheric Probe - 2,222 kg - (October 18, 1989) Hubble Space Telescope - USA & Europe Telescope - (April 25, 1990) Ulysses - USA & Europe Solar Flyby - 370 kg - (October 6, 1990) Mars Observer - USA Mars Orbiter - (September 25, 1992) Clementine - USA Lunar Orbiter - (January 25, 1994) SOHO - Europe/USA Solar Probe - (December 12, 1995) NEAR - USA Asteroid Orbiter - 805 Kg - (February 17, 1996) Mars Global Surveyor - USA Mars Orbiter - (November 7, 1996) Mars Pathfinder - USA Lander & Surface Rover - 264 kg (lander), 10.5 kg (rover) - (December 4, 1996 - September 27, 1997) Cassini/Huygens - USA & Europe Saturn Orbiter/Titan Probe - (1997) Lunar Prospector - 295 kg - USA Lunar Orbiter - (January 6, 1998) Deep Space 1 (DS1) - USA Asteroid and Comet Flyby - (24 October 1998) Mars Climate Orbiter - USA Mars Orbiter - (11 December 1998) Mars Polar Lander - USA Mars Lander - (3 January 1999) Deep Space 2 (DS2) - USA Mars Penetrators - (3 January 1999) Stardust - USA Comet Sample Return - (7 February 1999) IMAGE - USA Space Weather Satellite - (25 March 2000) 2001 Mars Odyssey - USA Mars Orbiter - (7 April 2001) Genesis - USA Solar Wind Sample Return - 30 July 2001 CONTOUR - USA Fly-by of three Comet Nuclei - 4 July 2002
I'd like us to do even more, but I'd hardly characterize the above as "crap".
The problem is that if you let the public-at-large vote directly on NASA funding, most would gladly cut their funding to zero and spend it on their own pet local projects instead. Most Americans simply don't care about space exploration.
NASA could stage a poll to solicit opinions on worthwhile goals, and use the results to attempt to lobby Congress for more funding, but in the end the pork-barrel projects like ISS would win out. I find it quite remarkable that so much good science (the Mars program, Cassini, Galileo, CONTOUR, the Solar observatories, Hubble upgrades, Stardust, and so on and on) gets done in this environment.
So this guy gets headlines (and/. coverage) for determining that RF doesn't get through sheets of conductive material very well? You know, I think there's a bit of prior art on this. I used to work in a TEMPEST-rated lab; I watched a guard's walkie-talkie cut off in mid sentence as he walked in, and that was with the door still swinging shut behind him.
Similarly, sheets or mesh screens of conductive material are routinely used to block unwanted RF interference generated by devices like computers and televisions which would otherwise create a great deal of "leakage".
So I ask again: What's new here? Why is this guy getting attention? I think any electrical engineer could figure out how to wrap a Faraday cage around a theater; the question is whether theater owners want to do it.
Atari 800 ROM BASIC "Jumping Bug"
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Way back when at the dawn of time, Atari shipped a truly fine set of 8-bit home computers (400, 600XL, 800, 800XL, etc). They featured a pretty decent ROM implementation of BASIC. Soon after the initial shipment, a bug was discovered in the BASIC ROM's code-edit subsystem; if any text line having a positive integer multiple of 256 characters was inserted, the system would lock up.
Quite quickly, the problem was discovered -- a block move instruction was testing for "less than" rather than "less than or equal to" in its carry emulation. But, this being ROM, there was no way to patch the bug short of shipping new chips. Atari acknowledged the bug and promised it would be fixed in ROM BASIC B.
Since the bug was so obvious, well understood, and easily fixed, a very junior programmer was assigned the task of fixing it. He found the offending 'lt' compare and changed it to 'le'. Then his eyes wandered to the neighboring routine, the block delete support function, which was doing similar block-move logic. There, he saw a 'gt' (greater than') compare. "Aha!", we can be sure he thought to himself. "I'll fix that one, too, and win praise from my boss for being proactive!" So he changed it to 'ge', submitted the code, and moved on.
Needless to say, the second compare was supposed to be 'gt', not 'ge'. Unfortunately, nobody caught this in code review or testing. Days after ROM BASIC B shipped, it was discovered that now, if you deleted a positive integer multiple of 256 characters, the system locked up.
This became known as the Atari "Jumping Bug". ROM BASIC C finally corrected it, ending fears that instead it would lock the computer on 256*n inserts and deletes.
See the link in my sig line. Basically, I moderated a story in a way that the Powers That Be disagreed with.
Yep, that's it. No flaming, no abuse, just up-modded a post that Taco and the gang didn't like, and I lost all modding (and metamodding) privs.
It's their site, of course, and they can run it how they like. But this wasn't my understanding of how the/. community is supposed to work.
This whole question is addressed by David Brin in his The Transparent Society. His thesis is that personal privacy is doomed no matter what we do, so our only rational option is to insist that the loss be bidirectional; that is, that we have the right to watch the watchers and to share in the means and results of surveillance. Such "open source" surveillance would allow a large pool of ad-hoc monitors to detect and report abuses.
Or so Brin's theory goes. The problem is that the privacy asymmetry parallels a power asymmetry. They can and do watch us because they have all the power. We don't get to watch them because we don't. All of this is dressed up in the rhetoric of national security to help stifle protest, but those are the plain facts.
I used to consider charges that the US was becoming a police state to be alarmist, perhaps absurd. Now I see the things happening which have always been missing before, and I know our time has come. The next few years (at the very least) are going to suck mightily.
Yes, they do. Deaths occur due to lack of prompt emergency medical intervention, and in many such cases availability of a phone (cell or otherwise) would have allowed faster EMS response. Given that we're all always four minutes away from death by anoxia, the difference between an immediate and a slightly delayed EMS response can be literally a matter of life and death.
Before phones, EMS response to time-critical injuries and illnesses was more or less impossible. As phones became more pervasive, a victim's chance of surviving thanks to prompt intervention rose. Cell phones have continued this trend.
So yes, a jammed cell phone might well cost someone his or her life. The fact that the victim would also have died in 1970 is irrelevant.
It's fair for them to ask for licensing arrangements on any terms they care to name for use of their property, and to enlist government assistance in enforcing their property rights. Whether they are behaving in their own best interest is beside the point; they are free to manage their property as they will.
A streaming-media outlet using no RIAA-owned material would not be subject to this law, needless to say.
I love streaming radio stations. I listen to KPIG at work; it's a tiny station near where I grew up, but now hundreds of miles away. I get a great nostalgia rush listening to them again. (They also play kick-ass music.) I'd be really disappointed if they were forced off the net.
However, the RIAA owns the music, and they can do whatever they want with it. That's how capitalism works. The only legal recourse we have is to go elsewhere for music. Listen to bands outside the RIAA stranglehold. Support the webcasters who locate these bands and stream their music. If you're a musician, avoid RIAA-controlled distribution channels and go really indie.
It will hurt losing the stuff we already like that's locked up by the RIAA. But shit happens. Move on and make things better for the future.
Of course, the most accepted model for the "hot Jupiters" has them forming in the outer system and migrating inward, disrupting the orbits of any intervening planets. So even though a planet could orbit between them in theory, odds are that any such that existed were tossed into less earthlike orbits (or ejected from the system entirely) as the hot-Jupiter-to-be spiralled inward.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, source shrouding was most commonly used to sell POSIX-compliant Unix programs back in the 80s. There were many flavors of Unix, all with different object file formats, but (with a liberal dose of conditional compilation) you could write programs that would compile and run on all of them. Rather than maintaining a library of binaries for every version of every flavor of Unix, you could just ship shrouded source with a makefile.
The parent is modded as "Funny", but this is a real strategy, called "source shrouding". Doing a thorough job of it is nontrivial, because it requires a full language parser to morph everything correctly. But the result can be e.g. program source with no comments, no unneeded whitespace (including newlines), and all identifiers replaced with x00001, x00002, etc. It's not a guarantee against someone managing to modify it, but it sure raises the barrier.
That said, the other posters on this thread are quite correct in saying that the "right" approach is to craft a contract that specifies how your code may be used.
Imagine if it were infested with nmake!
Is that like, say, a subscription to People?
Why is this a bad thing? It's not like there's any lunar ecology to disturb, or lunar inhabitants to threaten. And if it hits Luna, that's one less piece of dangerous unguided space debris for future space travellers to keep track of.
Or, as per managementese:
"Houston, we have an opportunity!"
It's absolutely certain that people will produce circumvention hardware. But hardware is enormously harder to reproduce than software, generally requiring both extensive equipment and labor to do it in bulk. So distributors big enough to make a difference with noncompliant hardware (which, if it does circumvent a DRM scheme, is a priori illegal under the DMCA) will also be big enough make attractive legal targets. It's analogous to shutting down pseudo-P2P music sharing by going after the indexing-referral servers rather than the music traders themselves.
The real problem isn't availability of open hardware; anyone will (presumably) remain able to cobble together chips and wires and create a piece of computing equipment.
The problem will arise when you try to use your homebrew machine on the internet. There are two scenarios here.
The more likely scenario is that the big content suppliers and middlemen will pressure PC manufacturers into supplying only "DRM enabled" hardware to consumers; support for such hardware will be built into the Windows kernel and DMCA-protected against interference. What's more, a Palladium (or succeeding) web security system will interact with the trusted end-user hardware to enable net content access. In this scenario, users of noncompliant hardware will still be able to use their machines locally, and to access non-Palladium net content, but will be excluded from using the most popular OS and apps.
The less likely but still frighteningly probable scenario would involve the government (whichever government you happen to live under) passing a "net homeland security act" which would make it illegal to attach non-certified hardware to the internet. Needless to say, the certification process would be onerous and expensive for hobbyists, and would mandate compliance with DRM standards.
The latter may sound far-fetched, but consider that we already require cars to be certified as safe (and relatively non-polluting, in some states) before they're allowed to use public roads. The analogy is fairly direct.
Spam stopper based on
copyright, SMTP
ignorance. Yeah, right.
Yep. One would think Randal Schwartz's similar experience at Intel would have left all of us a lot more cautious about how we report vs. demonstrate security weaknesses.
I presume that the remainder of the post fell victim to self-censorship.
While this situation sucks, it still doesn't approach the evil of government censorship. If Walmart drives your magazine out of business, you can still put your ideas out in other ways. If the government decides your ideas are illegal, then you have no recourse.
That being said, it sounds like this particular example looks (or is being made to look) more like self- than imposed censorship. I would say this move by China is similar to the coerced self-regulation of movies and comics in the US. The threat of legally codified censorship was used to pressure those industries into the standardized rating system and the "comics code" respectively. This is a gray area between purely capitalist "censorship" like the Walmart case and "say that and I will shoot you" style direct legal censorship.
If anything, I'd count this as a step up for Chinese government. They tend to go directly to the jackboots-and-guns stage rather than finessing issues like this, so using "voluntary" compliance here may be a good sign that things are beginning to loosen up over there.
And somewhere, John Ashcroft is moaning with envy...
I liked the proposal to bill it to the State Department, given the stated goal of encouraging international cooperation.
Galileo - USA & Europe Jupiter Orbiter/Atmospheric Probe - 2,222 kg - (October 18, 1989)
Hubble Space Telescope - USA & Europe Telescope - (April 25, 1990)
Ulysses - USA & Europe Solar Flyby - 370 kg - (October 6, 1990)
Mars Observer - USA Mars Orbiter - (September 25, 1992)
Clementine - USA Lunar Orbiter - (January 25, 1994)
SOHO - Europe/USA Solar Probe - (December 12, 1995)
NEAR - USA Asteroid Orbiter - 805 Kg - (February 17, 1996)
Mars Global Surveyor - USA Mars Orbiter - (November 7, 1996)
Mars Pathfinder - USA Lander & Surface Rover - 264 kg (lander), 10.5 kg (rover) - (December 4, 1996 - September 27, 1997)
Cassini/Huygens - USA & Europe Saturn Orbiter/Titan Probe - (1997)
Lunar Prospector - 295 kg - USA Lunar Orbiter - (January 6, 1998)
Deep Space 1 (DS1) - USA Asteroid and Comet Flyby - (24 October 1998)
Mars Climate Orbiter - USA Mars Orbiter - (11 December 1998)
Mars Polar Lander - USA Mars Lander - (3 January 1999)
Deep Space 2 (DS2) - USA Mars Penetrators - (3 January 1999)
Stardust - USA Comet Sample Return - (7 February 1999)
IMAGE - USA Space Weather Satellite - (25 March 2000)
2001 Mars Odyssey - USA Mars Orbiter - (7 April 2001)
Genesis - USA Solar Wind Sample Return - 30 July 2001
CONTOUR - USA Fly-by of three Comet Nuclei - 4 July 2002
I'd like us to do even more, but I'd hardly characterize the above as "crap".
The problem is that if you let the public-at-large vote directly on NASA funding, most would gladly cut their funding to zero and spend it on their own pet local projects instead. Most Americans simply don't care about space exploration.
NASA could stage a poll to solicit opinions on worthwhile goals, and use the results to attempt to lobby Congress for more funding, but in the end the pork-barrel projects like ISS would win out. I find it quite remarkable that so much good science (the Mars program, Cassini, Galileo, CONTOUR, the Solar observatories, Hubble upgrades, Stardust, and so on and on) gets done in this environment.
Similarly, sheets or mesh screens of conductive material are routinely used to block unwanted RF interference generated by devices like computers and televisions which would otherwise create a great deal of "leakage".
So I ask again: What's new here? Why is this guy getting attention? I think any electrical engineer could figure out how to wrap a Faraday cage around a theater; the question is whether theater owners want to do it.
Quite quickly, the problem was discovered -- a block move instruction was testing for "less than" rather than "less than or equal to" in its carry emulation. But, this being ROM, there was no way to patch the bug short of shipping new chips. Atari acknowledged the bug and promised it would be fixed in ROM BASIC B.
Since the bug was so obvious, well understood, and easily fixed, a very junior programmer was assigned the task of fixing it. He found the offending 'lt' compare and changed it to 'le'. Then his eyes wandered to the neighboring routine, the block delete support function, which was doing similar block-move logic. There, he saw a 'gt' (greater than') compare. "Aha!", we can be sure he thought to himself. "I'll fix that one, too, and win praise from my boss for being proactive!" So he changed it to 'ge', submitted the code, and moved on.
Needless to say, the second compare was supposed to be 'gt', not 'ge'. Unfortunately, nobody caught this in code review or testing. Days after ROM BASIC B shipped, it was discovered that now, if you deleted a positive integer multiple of 256 characters, the system locked up.
This became known as the Atari "Jumping Bug". ROM BASIC C finally corrected it, ending fears that instead it would lock the computer on 256*n inserts and deletes.
See the link in my sig line. Basically, I moderated a story in a way that the Powers That Be disagreed with. Yep, that's it. No flaming, no abuse, just up-modded a post that Taco and the gang didn't like, and I lost all modding (and metamodding) privs. It's their site, of course, and they can run it how they like. But this wasn't my understanding of how the /. community is supposed to work.
Or so Brin's theory goes. The problem is that the privacy asymmetry parallels a power asymmetry. They can and do watch us because they have all the power. We don't get to watch them because we don't. All of this is dressed up in the rhetoric of national security to help stifle protest, but those are the plain facts.
I used to consider charges that the US was becoming a police state to be alarmist, perhaps absurd. Now I see the things happening which have always been missing before, and I know our time has come. The next few years (at the very least) are going to suck mightily.
Before phones, EMS response to time-critical injuries and illnesses was more or less impossible. As phones became more pervasive, a victim's chance of surviving thanks to prompt intervention rose. Cell phones have continued this trend.
So yes, a jammed cell phone might well cost someone his or her life. The fact that the victim would also have died in 1970 is irrelevant.
A streaming-media outlet using no RIAA-owned material would not be subject to this law, needless to say.
However, the RIAA owns the music, and they can do whatever they want with it. That's how capitalism works. The only legal recourse we have is to go elsewhere for music. Listen to bands outside the RIAA stranglehold. Support the webcasters who locate these bands and stream their music. If you're a musician, avoid RIAA-controlled distribution channels and go really indie.
It will hurt losing the stuff we already like that's locked up by the RIAA. But shit happens. Move on and make things better for the future.
Of course, the most accepted model for the "hot Jupiters" has them forming in the outer system and migrating inward, disrupting the orbits of any intervening planets. So even though a planet could orbit between them in theory, odds are that any such that existed were tossed into less earthlike orbits (or ejected from the system entirely) as the hot-Jupiter-to-be spiralled inward.