I've combed through the 108 comments so far that have been modded 2 or above, and not a single one of them shows any awareness of what the article actually talks about. Has anybody actually read the article? Oh, wait, this is slashdot...
The article helpfully explains that the main issue being raised by the EFF is privacy. Um, it's not exactly subtle...the article has a big image of a poster with a man's face, with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU."
What the EFF is objecting to is the idea of using electronic monitoring to measure the number of miles driven. The article (remember that article thingie? it's got that little underlining thingie, with the text in a different color, so you can click on it, and it's, like, a hyperlink, so you can go and read it?) lays out some objections to this, such as the tendency the government has demonstrated since 9/11 to go nuts with intrusive monitoring of its citizens. The concern is that the government will then be able to tell where every citizen drives. That's pretty darn scary, if you think about it.
The ImageMagick package includes a command called identify, which can read the EXIF data in the JPEG file. You can use it like this:
identify -verbose creek.jpg | grep Quality
In my example, it gave " Quality: 94".
This will not work on very old cameras (from ca. 2002 or earlier?), because they don't have EXIF data. This is different info than you'd get by just comparing file sizes. The JPEG quality setting is not the only factor that can influence file size. File size can depend on resolution, JPEG quality, and other manipulations such as blurring or sharpening, adjusting brightness levels, etc.
Simple answer: no
statistically, I think rsync has very few binary files to deal with, at least the way I'm using it.
also, their technique may make the diff data smaller, but it also makes the diffing/patching process a LOT slower, something many rsync users don't want because on a LAN you don't care much about bandwidth usage.
Well, your use of rsync is not necessarily typical. I use unison for file synchronization, and unison uses rsync; I have quite a few binary files that I sync. You're right that it would be a tradeoff of cpu versus bandwidth, but actually that's the whole point of rsync.
On the other hand, I can think of at least some other reasons that this algorithm would be less appropriate for rsync than for google's intended use. (1) Google knows that their file is an executable, and knows that it's an x86 executable. Rsync would have to detect this using the kind of heuristic algorithms used by the unix "file" utility. (2) It's kind of ugly to imagine building all this x86-specific stuff into a generic program like rsync, which people may be using on ARM machines, or which people may use in the future on architectures that haven't been invented yet. (3) Google is doing one-to-many file distribution (pushing out a single patch to millions of users), so that means that the tradeoff of cpu versus bandwidth is an excellent one for them. With rsync, the typical use is one-to-one (syncing machine A with machine B), so the tradeoff isn't as awesomely spectacular.
BTW, a completely different application of this that Google may be interested in is for Google Native Client, which runs x86 code sandboxed in a browser. Suppose google has 10^8 users using a particular web app that runs x86 code in their browser via Native Client. As long as the program doesn't change, most of the users are probably just getting it from cache, so it loads fast and doesn't cost google any bandwidth. Then on a certain day, google updates the software. Potentially this causes a bottleneck where 10^8 users are all trying to download the same code (could be especially bad on a corporate network with lots of people simultaneously downloading the same stuff on a Monday morning). If Courgette is incorporated in the browser, then potentially it could be smart enough to realize that it already has version x cached, and what it's trying to download is version x+1, and work out the patch without having to download the whole thing again.
TFA doesn't explain what Gates actually did with the rights: whether he went ahead and put the videos in the public domain, or is just making them free-as-in-beer on microscoft.com, or... what? Can someone who has silverlight check the beginning and end of the video, and see whether it says anything about licensing, copyright, etc.?
For anyone already committed to OpenSolaris, there are some obvious things to do: (1) Celebrate the fact that it's open-source, which limits how badly you can be screwed. (2) Write a plan to start transitioning to Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. (3) Help to organize a community operating outside of Oracle that will coordinate on maintaining the OS with security patches for the rest of its lifetime.
For anyone else, now would be a good time to think about stealing features. I know a lot of people really like DTrace. Well, it's already been ported to FreeBSD, and the Linux port seems to be nearing completion.
It would be much easier to build a device that will only blow up if X number of Americans are in its kill range.
They say it only works if the passport is at least half an inch open, and within a range of 6 inches. I don't think there's any significant probability of getting two or more Americans, with their passports at least half an inch open, simultaneously positioned so that all their passports are within 6 inches of the same detector.
You just need to buy an RFID shield for your passport and you can put your mind at ease. Unless, of course, you want to worry about how they don't work.
Thanks for the interesting links!
As others have noted, your analysis isn't quite correct. For those who don't want to watch the whole video in your second link, here's a summary of what it says. It demonstrates a security vulnerability. The vulnerability does not involve theft of data, because there's encryption built into the passport. What it demonstrates is that if you leave your passport open by half an inch, the built-in shielding doesn't work as well, with the result that from a range of 6 inches, it's possible to detect the fact that the passport is there, and that it's a US passport rather than some other country's. (Actually they didn't really demonstrate selectivity by nationality, but they claim it's possible.) They say this exposes US tourists in foreign countries to a risk of violence targeted specifically against Americans. They demonstrate the risk by hanging a dummy from a clothesline, with a passport attached to the dummy, open half an inch. They pull it along the clothesline past an explosive device with a detector, which explodes when the passport comes within 6 inches of the detector. They also demonstrate an improved shielding system they devised, which prevents detection even when the passport is open half an inch.
Your first link is a company that sells Faraday-cage wallets for $20.
So my analysis would be as follows:
I'm sure the Faraday-cage wallets work fine, because they're based on solid physical principles. However, $20 is kind of a lot of money to pay for what is essentially 10 cents worth of aluminum foil.
In the case of a US passport, the Faraday-cage wallet isn't necessary. You're better off just getting a binder clip to hold your passport shut, so that it won't accidentally open by half an inch while it's on your person.
The binder clip should be cheap and 100% effective protection against the farfetched threat in the video. But the threat in the video is farfetched, because there are much easier ways of finding American tourists. Like they speak English. And they dress like Americans. And they carry cameras. And some of them follow tour guides who explain, loudly, in English, the local sightseeing attractions.
There are other things you might be carrying around that could have RFID, e.g., credit cards, cafeteria debit cards, or employee ID cards. A Faraday cage of some type might be a useful thing to protect these, but I'd need a lot more analysis to know whether the effort was worth it. How do I know which items in my wallet do have RFID built in? Are they encrypted? What are the possible exploits for each item?
The downloading it seems was done by circumventing anti copying technology and ignoring terms of use the lawyers say were on every page of the website.
The museum can state any terms of use it likes, but that doesn't create a legally binding contract with someone who visits their web site. According to US law, the situation was that they put some non-copyrighted images on their site, and Dcoetzee downloaded them, as allowed under US law. Heck, I could copy the text of Huckleberry Finn off of Project Gutenberg, post it on my own web site, and put up terms of service saying that anyone who reads it has automatically agreed to allow me to have sex with his teenage daughters. Doesn't mean I have a legally enforceable contract.
Also, this person went to a lot of trouble to do something that is not especially beneficial to that many people. How many wiki users can make use of hi res photos of paintings?
Why is the number of people who benefit relevant?
Under United Kingdom law a separate copyright exists for photos of paintings, it is distinct from any copyright that may or may not exist on the painting that has been photographed. The copyright holder has not been dead for centuries. It is the photographer, or whoever owns the copyright of the photo, it is not the painter.
Yep, I understand that. The photographer owns a copyright under UK law, not US law. Ridiculous law, and I'm glad I'm not subject to it, just as I'm glad I'm not subject to the laws of Uganda and Outer Mongolia.
It seems a fair conclusion that Dcoetzee was/is spoiling for a fight. (He/she was attempting to legislate UK law from a keyboard in the US?(joke))
Nope, he was just obeying the laws of the country where he lived, rather than the absurd and unjust laws of a foreign country.
Why should an experience that almost no one would be allowed to have be protected?
I think you have it backwards. The artists have mostly been dead for hundreds of years. This isn't a question of a government going out of its way to bestow a special privilege on the public, at the expense of the artists. The default is that after you're dead for a few centuries, you don't have a copyright anymore.
Dcoetzee circumvented an anti copying measure, and uploaded high res pictures (of a quality that very few people will ever need) from the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery and is hiding behind American laws.
Why "hiding?" He's a US citizen on US soil. US law is the law that applies to him. If I say that the rulers of China are a bunch of scumbags, and ought to pull out of Tibet, would you say that I was "hiding behind American laws" because I didn't risk being thrown in jail for something that's a crime in China?
May I ask why Americans get so upset about flag buring?
I'm an American. Most Americans don't get upset about flag burning. It tends to be a hot-button issue with a certain subset of right-wingers, and right-wing politicians tend to use it to score points.
Guarantees of free speech and freedom of expression are useless unless they effectively protect the expression of unpopular points of view. Flag-burning is fairly unpopular in the U.S. The good news is that our constitutional protection of freedom of speech is strong enough that it really does protect flag-burning. That's why right-wingers keep talking about a constitutional amendment to prohibit it -- because without a constitutional amendment, they can't prohibit it.
I'm not trying to be a holier-than-thou, breast-beating American, but honestly, our protection of free speech really is a lot better than what most European countries have. For example, suing someone for libel or slander is relatively difficult here; our law, unlike UK law, says that truth is an absolute defense. We also don't have laws against politically extreme speech that way the UK and Germany do. We have hate crime laws, but all they do is increase the penalty for violent acts like murder that would have been crimes anyway, regardless of motivation.
We notice you have an image of Isaac Newton on your website www.lightandmatter.com/ , which is of a portrait in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 2881).
As we do not appear to have licensed a copy of this portrait for use on your website, we wondered whether you would let us know the source from which you obtained the reproduction.
Although there may no longer be copyright in original portraits from this period, there is copyright in recently taken photographs, or scans such as those that appear on our website.Unauthorised reproduction of such photographs or scans may be an infringement of copyright law.
I look forward to hearing from you regarding this matter.
Yours sincerely,
Bernard Horrocks Copyright Officer National Portrait GallerySt Martin's PlaceLondon WC2H OHE
I'm in the U.S., and the server is in the U.S. IIRC, I sent them back an email with a link to this article on Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., explaining that their copyright wasn't legally valid in the U.S. Never heard from them again.
The letter quoted in TFA does sound a lot more aggressive than what I received. Possibly they're more interested in pursuing this case since the number of images is large, and WP has a high public profile. It would be interesting to hear from someone with some legal expertise on whether there would be any practical effect on WP or Dcoetzee if they just ignored the threat and allowed a default judgment to be entered against Dcoetzee in the UK. If Dcoetzee or Jimmy Wales take a vacation in Scotland, do jackbooted thugs meet them at the airport terminal and take them away to Euro-Copyright Prison, where they'll have to spend a 20-year sentence wearing black turtlenecks and listening to French pop music?
And when you say Perl supports random access of Unicode strings, are you sure it's not just giving you random access to an array of Unicode code points --- which is also wrong? Remember that a single Unicode glyph can be made up of an arbitrary number of code points.
Interesting point. Some documentation: man perlunicode, man perluniintro, Unicode::Normalize. I spent some time studying these, and concluded that I didn't understand enough to answer your question:-)
His argument is simple: (1) math cannot be patented (2) all algorithms are math (3) all software is one or more algorithms and so follows that software cannot be patentable.
While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't good logic. Since software is a combination of algorithms, the combination of those algorithms may be non-obvious and novel.
I want SW-patents to go the way of the dodo as much as the next/.'er, but the above struck me as aking to A) atoms cannot be patented, B) all machines are made of one or more atoms, ergo machines cannot be patented.
I regretfully agree with the parent post. One problem with Knuth's reasoning is that it's so broad that it would seem to say that algorithms and numbers shouldn't be copyrightable either. Here's an example that clearly should be copyrightable if it Shakespeare wrote it today:
printf("To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?");
Knuth also says it would be terrible to allow a patent on a number like 1009, and that part of his argument is also so broad that it would apply to copyright as well. But if I take the "To be, or not to be..." string above and encode it into some big integer, it's clearly something that should be copyrightable.
Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
I would definitely agree that MacOS 9 was a bad OS. It was by far the worst computer operating system I ever used -- much worse than earlier versions like MacOS 6 or 7, much worse than MacOS X, and much worse than Linux or FreeBSD.
The problem is that installing, say, Linux on an old mac is not something that a lot of people (e.g., my made-up Mexican elementary school teacher) are comfortable doing. It's true that installing Ubuntu on a vanilla x86 desktop machine is getting pretty darn easy -- but I don't think that applies so much to an old mac. I'm also not really sure what WM would be practical to use on an old mac. I certainly don't think you'd want to try Gnome or KDE. Maybe xfce? I'm not sure if there's any non-empty intersection between the set of WMs that will have acceptable performance on an old mac and the set of WMs that are easy enough for my fictional Mexican school teacher to figure out if he/she's used to MacOS 9.
Not everybody can afford to throw away old computers and buy new hardware. If you're a teacher at an elementary school in Mexico, and all you have in your classroom is an old mac, then this could be very important to you. It turns that mac from something that can't surf the web (or can't do so securely) to something that can.
You can't do random access on strings. No, not even if you turn it into UCS-2. Or UCS-4. Yes, Java is lying to you.
It's been interesting reading different people's replies to my post. One thing I've noticed is that each of us is talking about the language he's most familiar with. I was writing about a situation I encountered with perl. You're talking about java. Other people are talking about C.
Your comment applies to java but not to perl. In perl, you really can do random access on strings. All the internal details of the implementation are hidden, but it really does Just Work, under certain conditions. The main condition is that when you first create the string, e.g., by reading from a file, perl has to know what the encoding is. If you don't tell perl what the encoding is, it can misinterpret the encoding. For instance, if you try to read latin-1, but it's acually a unicode encoding such as utf-8, you're going to get errors or garbled data. I think this is a point that a lot of people replying to my post didn't understand. Note that latin-1 is not a type of unicode -- it's a completely different character encoding than unicode.
Nice article -- thanks for providing the link!
I liked this: "There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text.
If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly."
This is not a hard problem to solve in the case of email and web pages, which can have encoding given in headers. (If you validate your page using the w3c validator, it will warn you if you didn't supply an encoding.) It's also not an insanely hard problem for strings in memory; the encoding can be either set by your encoding convention or handled behind the scenes by your language (as in perl).
What really sucks is files. For instance, I wrote this extremely simple terminal-based personal calendar program in perl, and it's actually attracted a decent number of users. It's internationalized in 11 languages. Well, one day a user sends me an email complaining that the program is giving him mysterious error messages. He sends me his calendar file, which is a plain text file with some Swedish in it. I run the program on my machine with his calendar file, and it works fine. I can't reproduce the bug. We go through a few rounds of confused communication before I finally realize that he must have had the file encoded in Latin-1 on his end, whereas my program is documented as requiring utf-8. So now my program has to include the following cruft:
sub file_is_valid_utf8 { my $f = shift; open(F,"<:raw",$f) or return 0; local $/; my $x=<F>; close F; return is_valid_utf8($x); }
# What's passed to this routine has to be a stream of bytes, not a utf8 string in which the characters are complete utf8 characters. # That's why you typically want to call file_is_valid_utf8 rather than calling this directly. sub is_valid_utf8 { my $x = shift; return utf8::decode(my $dummy = $x); }
Yech. It requires reading the file twice, and it's not even 100% reliable.
This is the kind of situation where the Unix philosophy, based on plain text files and little programs that read and write them, really runs into a problem. With hindsight, it would have been really, really helpful if Unix filesystems could have included just a smidgen more metadata, enough to specify the character encoding.
This comes on the same day that an agreement was announced that lowers royalty payments for internet radio stations. The original plan called for royalties of 0.19 cents per streamed song. The new plan sets royalties for large stations at 25% of revenue or.14 cents/song (whichever is greater). Small stations will pay $25,000/yr or 12-14% of revenue (whichever is greater). It sounds like it's still going to be impossible for individuals to set up stations as a hobby, which I guess it was practical to do at one point, but I'm guessing that a lot of college radio stations might find it cheaper to pay the $25k/yr than to maintain an FM broadcast station.
However, ad blockers break the data collection for most analytics system. So it is likely that Firefox is being underreported, just because the of the popularity of ABP, NoScript, various cookie blockers, and so on.
Huh? The easiest way to collect browser stats is to configure apache so it records the user agent string in the usage log. The user agent string is completely unaffected by ad blockers, etc.
If someone is doing something more complicated than that, using a technique that depends on javascript, cookies, etc., then presumably it's not because they're trying to measure browser popularity, it's because they're trying to measure something else. And if that's the case, they'd be idiots to publish the fancy, less reliable stats on browser popularity without checking them against the more reliable stats based on user agent strings.
While open source books are nice...I use them to supplement the text books I issue, it isn't something that will likely replace texts. Why would I write a text book and release it for free? It is bad enough that adjunct professors get paid crap, but if I write a text book I should release that for free? I think not.
You're talking about two different things here: (a) your conjecture that nobody will write free books that are good enough to replace non-free ones, and (b) your feeling that you wouldn't write a book for free. B is your choice. A, on the other hand, is false. See my sig for a catalog of hundreds of free books, many of which are very high quality textbooks.
How many colleges are using your book as their primary text? My guess is that you are doing it as a hobby, haven't ever been paid for it and if any students are using your text they are probably your own because you run a course and set the textbook to your own.
Fictionwise's current meltdown where they apparently can't even report and pay royalties on time or properly is a big deal given their size in the eBook market and number of publishers involved.
More info? Links?
I don't yet have the 10 professionally published short stories that Fictionwise wants you to have before they'll deal with you, so this is basically moot for me, but I'd still like to hear the gory details. The other thing that scares me off is that they want exclusive electronic distribution rights.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
You're free to make that choice. But:
(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)
(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so I'm ready to switch to Gargoyle (a downstream version of openwrt with an easier web interface) or Tomato. Any opinions?
I've combed through the 108 comments so far that have been modded 2 or above, and not a single one of them shows any awareness of what the article actually talks about. Has anybody actually read the article? Oh, wait, this is slashdot...
The article helpfully explains that the main issue being raised by the EFF is privacy. Um, it's not exactly subtle...the article has a big image of a poster with a man's face, with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU."
What the EFF is objecting to is the idea of using electronic monitoring to measure the number of miles driven. The article (remember that article thingie? it's got that little underlining thingie, with the text in a different color, so you can click on it, and it's, like, a hyperlink, so you can go and read it?) lays out some objections to this, such as the tendency the government has demonstrated since 9/11 to go nuts with intrusive monitoring of its citizens. The concern is that the government will then be able to tell where every citizen drives. That's pretty darn scary, if you think about it.
The ImageMagick package includes a command called identify, which can read the EXIF data in the JPEG file. You can use it like this:
identify -verbose creek.jpg | grep Quality
In my example, it gave " Quality: 94".
This will not work on very old cameras (from ca. 2002 or earlier?), because they don't have EXIF data. This is different info than you'd get by just comparing file sizes. The JPEG quality setting is not the only factor that can influence file size. File size can depend on resolution, JPEG quality, and other manipulations such as blurring or sharpening, adjusting brightness levels, etc.
Well, your use of rsync is not necessarily typical. I use unison for file synchronization, and unison uses rsync; I have quite a few binary files that I sync. You're right that it would be a tradeoff of cpu versus bandwidth, but actually that's the whole point of rsync.
On the other hand, I can think of at least some other reasons that this algorithm would be less appropriate for rsync than for google's intended use. (1) Google knows that their file is an executable, and knows that it's an x86 executable. Rsync would have to detect this using the kind of heuristic algorithms used by the unix "file" utility. (2) It's kind of ugly to imagine building all this x86-specific stuff into a generic program like rsync, which people may be using on ARM machines, or which people may use in the future on architectures that haven't been invented yet. (3) Google is doing one-to-many file distribution (pushing out a single patch to millions of users), so that means that the tradeoff of cpu versus bandwidth is an excellent one for them. With rsync, the typical use is one-to-one (syncing machine A with machine B), so the tradeoff isn't as awesomely spectacular.
BTW, a completely different application of this that Google may be interested in is for Google Native Client, which runs x86 code sandboxed in a browser. Suppose google has 10^8 users using a particular web app that runs x86 code in their browser via Native Client. As long as the program doesn't change, most of the users are probably just getting it from cache, so it loads fast and doesn't cost google any bandwidth. Then on a certain day, google updates the software. Potentially this causes a bottleneck where 10^8 users are all trying to download the same code (could be especially bad on a corporate network with lots of people simultaneously downloading the same stuff on a Monday morning). If Courgette is incorporated in the browser, then potentially it could be smart enough to realize that it already has version x cached, and what it's trying to download is version x+1, and work out the patch without having to download the whole thing again.
TFA doesn't explain what Gates actually did with the rights: whether he went ahead and put the videos in the public domain, or is just making them free-as-in-beer on microscoft.com, or ... what? Can someone who has silverlight check the beginning and end of the video, and see whether it says anything about licensing, copyright, etc.?
For anyone already committed to OpenSolaris, there are some obvious things to do: (1) Celebrate the fact that it's open-source, which limits how badly you can be screwed. (2) Write a plan to start transitioning to Linux or FreeBSD or whatever. (3) Help to organize a community operating outside of Oracle that will coordinate on maintaining the OS with security patches for the rest of its lifetime.
For anyone else, now would be a good time to think about stealing features. I know a lot of people really like DTrace. Well, it's already been ported to FreeBSD, and the Linux port seems to be nearing completion.
They say it only works if the passport is at least half an inch open, and within a range of 6 inches. I don't think there's any significant probability of getting two or more Americans, with their passports at least half an inch open, simultaneously positioned so that all their passports are within 6 inches of the same detector.
Thanks for the interesting links!
As others have noted, your analysis isn't quite correct. For those who don't want to watch the whole video in your second link, here's a summary of what it says. It demonstrates a security vulnerability. The vulnerability does not involve theft of data, because there's encryption built into the passport. What it demonstrates is that if you leave your passport open by half an inch, the built-in shielding doesn't work as well, with the result that from a range of 6 inches, it's possible to detect the fact that the passport is there, and that it's a US passport rather than some other country's. (Actually they didn't really demonstrate selectivity by nationality, but they claim it's possible.) They say this exposes US tourists in foreign countries to a risk of violence targeted specifically against Americans. They demonstrate the risk by hanging a dummy from a clothesline, with a passport attached to the dummy, open half an inch. They pull it along the clothesline past an explosive device with a detector, which explodes when the passport comes within 6 inches of the detector. They also demonstrate an improved shielding system they devised, which prevents detection even when the passport is open half an inch.
Your first link is a company that sells Faraday-cage wallets for $20.
So my analysis would be as follows:
The museum can state any terms of use it likes, but that doesn't create a legally binding contract with someone who visits their web site. According to US law, the situation was that they put some non-copyrighted images on their site, and Dcoetzee downloaded them, as allowed under US law. Heck, I could copy the text of Huckleberry Finn off of Project Gutenberg, post it on my own web site, and put up terms of service saying that anyone who reads it has automatically agreed to allow me to have sex with his teenage daughters. Doesn't mean I have a legally enforceable contract.
Why is the number of people who benefit relevant?
Yep, I understand that. The photographer owns a copyright under UK law, not US law. Ridiculous law, and I'm glad I'm not subject to it, just as I'm glad I'm not subject to the laws of Uganda and Outer Mongolia.
Nope, he was just obeying the laws of the country where he lived, rather than the absurd and unjust laws of a foreign country.
I think you have it backwards. The artists have mostly been dead for hundreds of years. This isn't a question of a government going out of its way to bestow a special privilege on the public, at the expense of the artists. The default is that after you're dead for a few centuries, you don't have a copyright anymore.
Why "hiding?" He's a US citizen on US soil. US law is the law that applies to him. If I say that the rulers of China are a bunch of scumbags, and ought to pull out of Tibet, would you say that I was "hiding behind American laws" because I didn't risk being thrown in jail for something that's a crime in China?
I'm an American. Most Americans don't get upset about flag burning. It tends to be a hot-button issue with a certain subset of right-wingers, and right-wing politicians tend to use it to score points.
Guarantees of free speech and freedom of expression are useless unless they effectively protect the expression of unpopular points of view. Flag-burning is fairly unpopular in the U.S. The good news is that our constitutional protection of freedom of speech is strong enough that it really does protect flag-burning. That's why right-wingers keep talking about a constitutional amendment to prohibit it -- because without a constitutional amendment, they can't prohibit it.
I'm not trying to be a holier-than-thou, breast-beating American, but honestly, our protection of free speech really is a lot better than what most European countries have. For example, suing someone for libel or slander is relatively difficult here; our law, unlike UK law, says that truth is an absolute defense. We also don't have laws against politically extreme speech that way the UK and Germany do. We have hate crime laws, but all they do is increase the penalty for violent acts like murder that would have been crimes anyway, regardless of motivation.
I got one of these letters in 2004:
I'm in the U.S., and the server is in the U.S. IIRC, I sent them back an email with a link to this article on Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., explaining that their copyright wasn't legally valid in the U.S. Never heard from them again.
The letter quoted in TFA does sound a lot more aggressive than what I received. Possibly they're more interested in pursuing this case since the number of images is large, and WP has a high public profile. It would be interesting to hear from someone with some legal expertise on whether there would be any practical effect on WP or Dcoetzee if they just ignored the threat and allowed a default judgment to be entered against Dcoetzee in the UK. If Dcoetzee or Jimmy Wales take a vacation in Scotland, do jackbooted thugs meet them at the airport terminal and take them away to Euro-Copyright Prison, where they'll have to spend a 20-year sentence wearing black turtlenecks and listening to French pop music?
Interesting point. Some documentation: man perlunicode, man perluniintro, Unicode::Normalize. I spent some time studying these, and concluded that I didn't understand enough to answer your question :-)
I regretfully agree with the parent post. One problem with Knuth's reasoning is that it's so broad that it would seem to say that algorithms and numbers shouldn't be copyrightable either. Here's an example that clearly should be copyrightable if it Shakespeare wrote it today:
printf("To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?");
Knuth also says it would be terrible to allow a patent on a number like 1009, and that part of his argument is also so broad that it would apply to copyright as well. But if I take the "To be, or not to be..." string above and encode it into some big integer, it's clearly something that should be copyrightable.
I would definitely agree that MacOS 9 was a bad OS. It was by far the worst computer operating system I ever used -- much worse than earlier versions like MacOS 6 or 7, much worse than MacOS X, and much worse than Linux or FreeBSD.
The problem is that installing, say, Linux on an old mac is not something that a lot of people (e.g., my made-up Mexican elementary school teacher) are comfortable doing. It's true that installing Ubuntu on a vanilla x86 desktop machine is getting pretty darn easy -- but I don't think that applies so much to an old mac. I'm also not really sure what WM would be practical to use on an old mac. I certainly don't think you'd want to try Gnome or KDE. Maybe xfce? I'm not sure if there's any non-empty intersection between the set of WMs that will have acceptable performance on an old mac and the set of WMs that are easy enough for my fictional Mexican school teacher to figure out if he/she's used to MacOS 9.
Not everybody can afford to throw away old computers and buy new hardware. If you're a teacher at an elementary school in Mexico, and all you have in your classroom is an old mac, then this could be very important to you. It turns that mac from something that can't surf the web (or can't do so securely) to something that can.
No, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I run linux.
It's been interesting reading different people's replies to my post. One thing I've noticed is that each of us is talking about the language he's most familiar with. I was writing about a situation I encountered with perl. You're talking about java. Other people are talking about C.
Your comment applies to java but not to perl. In perl, you really can do random access on strings. All the internal details of the implementation are hidden, but it really does Just Work, under certain conditions. The main condition is that when you first create the string, e.g., by reading from a file, perl has to know what the encoding is. If you don't tell perl what the encoding is, it can misinterpret the encoding. For instance, if you try to read latin-1, but it's acually a unicode encoding such as utf-8, you're going to get errors or garbled data. I think this is a point that a lot of people replying to my post didn't understand. Note that latin-1 is not a type of unicode -- it's a completely different character encoding than unicode.
Nice article -- thanks for providing the link! I liked this: "There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text. If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly."
This is not a hard problem to solve in the case of email and web pages, which can have encoding given in headers. (If you validate your page using the w3c validator, it will warn you if you didn't supply an encoding.) It's also not an insanely hard problem for strings in memory; the encoding can be either set by your encoding convention or handled behind the scenes by your language (as in perl).
What really sucks is files. For instance, I wrote this extremely simple terminal-based personal calendar program in perl, and it's actually attracted a decent number of users. It's internationalized in 11 languages. Well, one day a user sends me an email complaining that the program is giving him mysterious error messages. He sends me his calendar file, which is a plain text file with some Swedish in it. I run the program on my machine with his calendar file, and it works fine. I can't reproduce the bug. We go through a few rounds of confused communication before I finally realize that he must have had the file encoded in Latin-1 on his end, whereas my program is documented as requiring utf-8. So now my program has to include the following cruft:
Yech. It requires reading the file twice, and it's not even 100% reliable.
This is the kind of situation where the Unix philosophy, based on plain text files and little programs that read and write them, really runs into a problem. With hindsight, it would have been really, really helpful if Unix filesystems could have included just a smidgen more metadata, enough to specify the character encoding.
Huh? They are getting something in return. The copyright holders are selling them the privilege of redistributing the music for profit.
This comes on the same day that an agreement was announced that lowers royalty payments for internet radio stations. The original plan called for royalties of 0.19 cents per streamed song. The new plan sets royalties for large stations at 25% of revenue or .14 cents/song (whichever is greater). Small stations will pay $25,000/yr or 12-14% of revenue (whichever is greater). It sounds like it's still going to be impossible for individuals to set up stations as a hobby, which I guess it was practical to do at one point, but I'm guessing that a lot of college radio stations might find it cheaper to pay the $25k/yr than to maintain an FM broadcast station.
Huh? The easiest way to collect browser stats is to configure apache so it records the user agent string in the usage log. The user agent string is completely unaffected by ad blockers, etc.
If someone is doing something more complicated than that, using a technique that depends on javascript, cookies, etc., then presumably it's not because they're trying to measure browser popularity, it's because they're trying to measure something else. And if that's the case, they'd be idiots to publish the fancy, less reliable stats on browser popularity without checking them against the more reliable stats based on user agent strings.
You're talking about two different things here: (a) your conjecture that nobody will write free books that are good enough to replace non-free ones, and (b) your feeling that you wouldn't write a book for free. B is your choice. A, on the other hand, is false. See my sig for a catalog of hundreds of free books, many of which are very high quality textbooks.
57. Here is the list.
More info? Links?
I don't yet have the 10 professionally published short stories that Fictionwise wants you to have before they'll deal with you, so this is basically moot for me, but I'd still like to hear the gory details. The other thing that scares me off is that they want exclusive electronic distribution rights.
You're free to make that choice. But:
(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)
(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.