Face it, the only right you'll have is the right to not buy a product. And face it, soon those products will be necessary to exercise other things that in the past was referred to as "rights", such as free speech, voting rights, the right to engage in your community, and the right to enjoy advances in arts in science. There will be products that violate your rights to engage in some or more of these, but necessary to engage in another. For example, if you choose to have voting rights, you buy a product to have voting rights, but when you buy that product, you loose your right to read books. That's my dystopia.
If we just sit and watch, it'll be like that in 30 years. I'm not going to just sit and see it happen. I hope, neither will you.
Yep, that's a good point. BTW, it is exactly what happens in Norway for students. In local elections, students didn't untill recently have the right to vote where they wanted, they could only vote where their parents lived. Since there are only four universities in Norway, there are quite few students living nearby their parents while they study, and consquently, they do not have voting rights where they live. Which means that effectively, most students do not have voting rights in local elections.
That was untill recently: They just changed the law, so that you can vote where you live, but if you do, you waive the right to have travel scholarships. Before, you could get a few bucks to travel home and visit your parents once a year. But if you vote, you loose that money. And with the costs of travel, that is very significant. But of course, some people may afford to travel on their own budget, but at the same time, they decided that students will no longer get discounts on state-sponsored trains. Wow.
The issue is of course that politicians are scared shitless of the possibility that students get voting rights. About 1/5 of Oslo's population are students, but only 1/30 are voters. So, if students got voting rights, they would actually have to listen to students, and that is obviously quite scary.
Hm, I think you're missing the point here. Yeah, you don't need to meet to exchange keys, I don't need to meet for someone to send me a encrypted message. But how do I know if that person is who he claims to be? It is not about encryption, it is about signatures.
Really, I don't have anything to hide, so I'm not that concerned about encryption, beyond that I appreciate that I have the possibility of encrypting something if I need some time in the future. What is important to me is that I can trust the person in the other end to be who he claims to be.
So, you've got to ask yourself:
What's an authenticated channel?
Would you sign my key if I called you on the phone telling you my name, but you've never heard my voice before, you had no way at all to tell if I was the one I claimed to be?
A programmer friend of mine told me that ten years ago, the police wanted traffic control boxes that would image and read license plates, submit it to a central database, and if people drove too fast between the boxes, it would be discovered, and they would be fined.
Very effective of course, since all you do with the current boxes around here is that you look out for them and slow down just in front and speed up afterwards.
The problem is that you can obviously use this to control the movements of a lot of people, so the availability of these data are rather frightening.
Well, my friend was ask if his company could develop this system.
They said "yes, it is possible, but we find it highly unethical so we're not going to do it".
Well, we all know this isn't hard, and while it has been brought up several times since then, it has not yet been implemented, at least not here.
That's an example where a code of ethics at least delayed a morally dubious system from being implemented at least ten years.
Also, recall that it may have been ethical considerations within a group of German scientists that prevented Germany from acquiring The Bomb in WWII. That's speculation, but it is possible.
I was just wondering if there are any peruvians here. I'm going to Peru this summer to do some climbing, and I figured I'd like to take the opportunity when travelling such great distances to meet people and exchange PGP signatures?
So, any peruvians who would like to meet me while I'm there?
I'll probably be in Lima on the 4th of july, Arequiba a couple of days later. Then a day or two in Cuzco before going into the wild. I'll be back in Lima most probably on the 8th of august to fly home.
Cool down. I know Paul Steinhardt, I invited him to speak at the Norwegian Conference for Physics Students some years ago. He is a really brilliant scientist and it is a real pleasure to hear him talk about his stuff.
All theories in cosmology starts with speculation. However, this is nothing like they cooked up over night. They've been working on this for a very long time.
Then, there is this challenge of getting good tests. This is very, very hard in cosmology, but I can tell you, it is not an issue these guys simply ignore. But you don't put everything in one article.
It doesn't run on my platform. It's not accessible (yeah, they tried to do something about it, I know). It's controlled by a single company. Which is even a BSA member. I want an universal, accessible web. That's all I need.
For the first time in history, scarcity is about to vanish. There is no scarcity in copies of many works of art. It is now possible for the first time in history for everybody to share works of art, for enjoyment and advancement of humanity at just about no cost at all.
How can this be bad? It is something that mankind should have been striving for, yet, it just happened. It is still the best thing that has happened to mankind in a very long time.
Yet, the entertainment industry is trying to destroy that monumental achievement. Why? Because they have yet to come up with a business model that takes this into account. We, mankind, has yet to understand how creators can be awarded securely, so that they can make a living from providing the works that we enjoy so much.
We should be the first to acknowledge that this is not an easy problem to solve. After all, getting the funds to keep/. running has proven to be non-trivial.
However, in this situation, the proposed legislation threatens to destroy all that we have built up.
It must not happen. It would be a great step backwards for mankind.
What must happen now, is that all the great minds of this planet must come together and think, and experiment, to solve one of the most fundamental problems of our time: How do you reward people in a post-scarcity society?
Finally, to all those who say that "Congress should not pass laws", well, perhaps it is a solution for the US, but let me offer a perspective from my norwegian viewpoint: Politics is about the people influencing the society they live in, making priorities, and changing things that doesn't work. Politics is about the balances that the market can't provide. Politics is providing copyright laws in the first place, if you really want to be consistent about the "hands off" attitude, you should reject copyright alltogether. However, through politics, you should be able to create the laws that are good for society. Copyrights is meant to balance the rights of creators and people, for the benefit of everyone.
When the entertainment industry is creating DRM tech, they are clearly violating their part of the deal. Clearly, what should happen then is that DRM should be banned. Using politics.
High on my list is Axis Communication. They have a nice chip with lots of neat stuff that runs Linux, and they also got this chip in printservers, bluetooth access points, etc. I think those are they guys who wrote most of the Bluetooth code in Linux.
I really want a BT access point, I was just hoping the prize would come down a bit to make it viable for home use. I really don't need the range either.
And suitcase nukes, despite how allegedly easy they are to deploy, have NEVER been detonated in a population center or upon a military target to my knowledge. Perhaps this isn't as easy as you think?
Being a physicist, I can't think of any difficulties...
Assuming it is difficult is very dangerous. Do you really want to take that chance?
However, I think the easiest of all would be to get the nuke on a ship and set it off when the ship is in harbor. Probably, it would be safest to assume that if somebody wants to nuke a US city, there is very little you can do to prevent it. Nothing.
Subscriptions for slashdot? No. It'll never work for me.
On the other hand, ads are dead. What good are ads anyway? They only make pages load slower, waste bandwidth, and most importantly, they make the products I would buy anyway more expensive. So rather than pay another 1 buck (of whatever currency) for a product, I'd rather pay that 1 buck directly. If you would let me do it.
I think we are going to see some nasty situations soon. Obviously, banner ads are going to fail miserably soon. Ad-filtering software is being implemented in browsers, people are starting to really hate them. Joe Sixpack too. As a response, I think we might see more attempts to force you to look at them.
Content providers gotta eat too. They need the money. We ads failing, we are going to see more and more closed models, and the big content industry will lobby bad laws through that may go a long way in making sure it will be very difficult for independent journalism to get exposure. I don't know how exactly this is going to be, but then, I really couldn't imagine how bad DMCA was going to be. Given the track record I would say, be very afraid.
So, I think that to save free speech, we, the free software and open source communities have to start developing stuff to facilitate a move away from free as in beer. We must abandon free beer to get free speech.
This is how I would pay for Slashdot:
When I surfed on Slashdot, the browser recorded what I did, and along with it, payment information, inserted not only by/. editors, but also those who made comments. This payment information would include what/. editors would think a story should cost. Say once a week, I would review the stuff I had surfed, and authorize payments. Some money would go to/. for their editorial efforts, for hardware, etc. Some money would even go to posters of comments I would find insightful.
There would have to be short path between me, making payments, and receivers of payments, so banks would have to get involved, and they would have to rethink many things, and realize it doesn't cost that much to perform simple database queries.
In fact, this would not only apply to Slashdot, I would like to pay pretty much every newspaper and journal I read online this way. Also, I'd like to be paid for the content I provide myself this way.
It should be big.
It requires involvement from many parties, and we really should have standards. Unfortunately, W3C's E-commerce activity died a horrible death. A good start would be implementation in browsers, and we can do that. After all, if we make something that works, and we're actually making money this way, they ought to come running. Making money by having a shortest possible path between end-users and content providers should be attractive to everyone.
Well, Norway isn't among the poorest countries on earth, though research and education is not getting it's share of the wealth. Yet, there is a project going on to get Linux into schools, supported by some good computer firms as well as governmental grants. They're still testing.
A friend of mine got Woody installed on all the computers where he is currently working, he is the only teacher aged under 50, but the other teachers love it, and they will probably make a complete switch to Linux (the Debian Woody-based distro the School Linux project is producing) in a short while.
There has allready been a few schools in Norway that has made the transition, for example Høle. They're still struggling with some governmental standards requiring M$ products, though.
Since everybody's posting their ideas for future phones, here's what I want:
I want my computer to be a single point of access to phones. I want it to automatically choose the cheapest method for me, whether it is a local call over standard phones, VoIP, or something else.
There has to be some hardware involved, for instance, I guess I need a card that is capable of making a call over the classical phone lines. Could a modem be used for this?
Then I could have a single front-end in my house, for example, I'øø have a Bluetooth access point, connected to the computer. Then I have a Bluetooth headset lying around. If I put it on, there is voise recognition, so that I can say "call ma", and if the cheapest call to ma happens to be a local telephone call, the computer will use the telephone card to make that call. If it happens to be VoIP, it makes a VoIP call, if I have to call on her cell phone, it dials that number.
This "while-we're-waiting-for-VoIP" card that I have in mind, anybody know if that's easy to make?
Ahem. I get a fair amount of those yes. But guess where most of my spam comes from? And that are scams, all of them. If the nigerian scam letters had said something like "laundry our money, or we'll disconnect you from the Internet", you would have a point.
Like another poster said, it is not all that well. There is at least plenty of room for FUD killing W3C recommendations. Basically, it was the work done on SVG, XML-Signature, P3P, etc that prompted the RAND discussion. So there are some recommendations where a few freeloaders want RAND licensing. In the case of SVG, IBM has a patent that may be remotely related to SVG. Kodak has a patent too, but they are so deeply into Batik it is hard to imagine them destroying all that to enforce their patent. Then there is Quark. I think I read the claims of this patent once, but I couldn't find a link. But I think it looks like they patented textbook exercises.
I don't know if it is a problem in this case, as Kodak has a big interest in the Batik toolkit, and the relevant claims of the Quark patent has to be invalid. At least to me, it seems like they patented textbook examples. So I wouldn't hold off on SVG. It is still a whole lot better than Flash.
XML-Signature is on the other hand a standard I'd like to use that is a whole lot more problematic.
Hm, no, I can't agree. The Internet should be universal. There should be room for everybody. At least that's why I don't like companies that tries to make it theirs.
It was a pretty confusing point, I agree. But I don't think it is about W3C technologies being patented. I think it is about some of the bigger companies forming something called WS-I, shoving W3C out of the way so that they can make standards and set licensing policy on their own terms. Then, what WS-I does is going to be patented and RANDed...
Hm, when I first read about WS-I some time ago, my first thought was "is this an attempt by some big companies to fork the web"?
I certainly think it looks like it.
Well, I guess it pretty much had to happen. These companies are a bunch of shameless freeloaders who are trying to turn a big profit from the open infrastructure of the Internet. And when they don't get their way with patent licensing, because W3C realizes that RAND licensing is not going to move technology forward, it is not surprising that they abuse their power to do a fork.
We've got to be on the alert on this. I think the best we can do is to make sure that we make good and extensive implementations if W3C standards, also for commerce applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I haven't used it yet, but I plan to. I just looked at the Kiwi file system. Looks nice.
If we just sit and watch, it'll be like that in 30 years. I'm not going to just sit and see it happen. I hope, neither will you.
That was untill recently: They just changed the law, so that you can vote where you live, but if you do, you waive the right to have travel scholarships. Before, you could get a few bucks to travel home and visit your parents once a year. But if you vote, you loose that money. And with the costs of travel, that is very significant. But of course, some people may afford to travel on their own budget, but at the same time, they decided that students will no longer get discounts on state-sponsored trains. Wow.
The issue is of course that politicians are scared shitless of the possibility that students get voting rights. About 1/5 of Oslo's population are students, but only 1/30 are voters. So, if students got voting rights, they would actually have to listen to students, and that is obviously quite scary.
Really, I don't have anything to hide, so I'm not that concerned about encryption, beyond that I appreciate that I have the possibility of encrypting something if I need some time in the future. What is important to me is that I can trust the person in the other end to be who he claims to be.
So, you've got to ask yourself: What's an authenticated channel?
Would you sign my key if I called you on the phone telling you my name, but you've never heard my voice before, you had no way at all to tell if I was the one I claimed to be?
Very effective of course, since all you do with the current boxes around here is that you look out for them and slow down just in front and speed up afterwards.
The problem is that you can obviously use this to control the movements of a lot of people, so the availability of these data are rather frightening.
Well, my friend was ask if his company could develop this system.
They said "yes, it is possible, but we find it highly unethical so we're not going to do it".
Well, we all know this isn't hard, and while it has been brought up several times since then, it has not yet been implemented, at least not here.
That's an example where a code of ethics at least delayed a morally dubious system from being implemented at least ten years.
Also, recall that it may have been ethical considerations within a group of German scientists that prevented Germany from acquiring The Bomb in WWII. That's speculation, but it is possible.
So, any peruvians who would like to meet me while I'm there?
I'll probably be in Lima on the 4th of july, Arequiba a couple of days later. Then a day or two in Cuzco before going into the wild. I'll be back in Lima most probably on the 8th of august to fly home.
All theories in cosmology starts with speculation. However, this is nothing like they cooked up over night. They've been working on this for a very long time.
Then, there is this challenge of getting good tests. This is very, very hard in cosmology, but I can tell you, it is not an issue these guys simply ignore. But you don't put everything in one article.
But then, hatred is not the word.
For the first time in history, scarcity is about to vanish. There is no scarcity in copies of many works of art. It is now possible for the first time in history for everybody to share works of art, for enjoyment and advancement of humanity at just about no cost at all.
How can this be bad? It is something that mankind should have been striving for, yet, it just happened. It is still the best thing that has happened to mankind in a very long time.
Yet, the entertainment industry is trying to destroy that monumental achievement. Why? Because they have yet to come up with a business model that takes this into account. We, mankind, has yet to understand how creators can be awarded securely, so that they can make a living from providing the works that we enjoy so much.
We should be the first to acknowledge that this is not an easy problem to solve. After all, getting the funds to keep /. running has proven to be non-trivial.
However, in this situation, the proposed legislation threatens to destroy all that we have built up.
It must not happen. It would be a great step backwards for mankind.
What must happen now, is that all the great minds of this planet must come together and think, and experiment, to solve one of the most fundamental problems of our time: How do you reward people in a post-scarcity society?
Finally, to all those who say that "Congress should not pass laws", well, perhaps it is a solution for the US, but let me offer a perspective from my norwegian viewpoint: Politics is about the people influencing the society they live in, making priorities, and changing things that doesn't work. Politics is about the balances that the market can't provide. Politics is providing copyright laws in the first place, if you really want to be consistent about the "hands off" attitude, you should reject copyright alltogether. However, through politics, you should be able to create the laws that are good for society. Copyrights is meant to balance the rights of creators and people, for the benefit of everyone. When the entertainment industry is creating DRM tech, they are clearly violating their part of the deal. Clearly, what should happen then is that DRM should be banned. Using politics.
Yeah, I think your points are valid, especially the last one! In fact, that is the only true defence for the future. I think it can be done. :-)
Hehe. Well, the whois isn't kept that up-to-date by all registrars, you know. It can take several months, unless you're on Opensrs...
I really want a BT access point, I was just hoping the prize would come down a bit to make it viable for home use. I really don't need the range either.
Being a physicist, I can't think of any difficulties...
Assuming it is difficult is very dangerous. Do you really want to take that chance?
However, I think the easiest of all would be to get the nuke on a ship and set it off when the ship is in harbor. Probably, it would be safest to assume that if somebody wants to nuke a US city, there is very little you can do to prevent it. Nothing.
On the other hand, ads are dead. What good are ads anyway? They only make pages load slower, waste bandwidth, and most importantly, they make the products I would buy anyway more expensive. So rather than pay another 1 buck (of whatever currency) for a product, I'd rather pay that 1 buck directly. If you would let me do it.
I think we are going to see some nasty situations soon. Obviously, banner ads are going to fail miserably soon. Ad-filtering software is being implemented in browsers, people are starting to really hate them. Joe Sixpack too. As a response, I think we might see more attempts to force you to look at them.
Content providers gotta eat too. They need the money. We ads failing, we are going to see more and more closed models, and the big content industry will lobby bad laws through that may go a long way in making sure it will be very difficult for independent journalism to get exposure. I don't know how exactly this is going to be, but then, I really couldn't imagine how bad DMCA was going to be. Given the track record I would say, be very afraid.
So, I think that to save free speech, we, the free software and open source communities have to start developing stuff to facilitate a move away from free as in beer. We must abandon free beer to get free speech.
This is how I would pay for Slashdot:
When I surfed on Slashdot, the browser recorded what I did, and along with it, payment information, inserted not only by /. editors, but also those who made comments. This payment information would include what /. editors would think a story should cost. Say once a week, I would review the stuff I had surfed, and authorize payments. Some money would go to /. for their editorial efforts, for hardware, etc. Some money would even go to posters of comments I would find insightful.
There would have to be short path between me, making payments, and receivers of payments, so banks would have to get involved, and they would have to rethink many things, and realize it doesn't cost that much to perform simple database queries.
In fact, this would not only apply to Slashdot, I would like to pay pretty much every newspaper and journal I read online this way. Also, I'd like to be paid for the content I provide myself this way. It should be big.
It requires involvement from many parties, and we really should have standards. Unfortunately, W3C's E-commerce activity died a horrible death. A good start would be implementation in browsers, and we can do that. After all, if we make something that works, and we're actually making money this way, they ought to come running. Making money by having a shortest possible path between end-users and content providers should be attractive to everyone.
A friend of mine got Woody installed on all the computers where he is currently working, he is the only teacher aged under 50, but the other teachers love it, and they will probably make a complete switch to Linux (the Debian Woody-based distro the School Linux project is producing) in a short while.
There has allready been a few schools in Norway that has made the transition, for example Høle. They're still struggling with some governmental standards requiring M$ products, though.
I want my computer to be a single point of access to phones. I want it to automatically choose the cheapest method for me, whether it is a local call over standard phones, VoIP, or something else.
There has to be some hardware involved, for instance, I guess I need a card that is capable of making a call over the classical phone lines. Could a modem be used for this?
Then I could have a single front-end in my house, for example, I'øø have a Bluetooth access point, connected to the computer. Then I have a Bluetooth headset lying around. If I put it on, there is voise recognition, so that I can say "call ma", and if the cheapest call to ma happens to be a local telephone call, the computer will use the telephone card to make that call. If it happens to be VoIP, it makes a VoIP call, if I have to call on her cell phone, it dials that number.
This "while-we're-waiting-for-VoIP" card that I have in mind, anybody know if that's easy to make?
Obviously, you need laws too, like we have in Europe.
Ahem. I get a fair amount of those yes. But guess where most of my spam comes from? And that are scams, all of them. If the nigerian scam letters had said something like "laundry our money, or we'll disconnect you from the Internet", you would have a point.
Anyway, I would choose SVG over flash any day.
XML-Signature is on the other hand a standard I'd like to use that is a whole lot more problematic.
I'm using Emacs on KDE3 right now. If we sit down together and talk, I'm sure we can get an understanding without bloodshed. :-)
Hm, no, I can't agree. The Internet should be universal. There should be room for everybody. At least that's why I don't like companies that tries to make it theirs.
You know, that's a very good comment. You'll be OK, eventually!
It was a pretty confusing point, I agree. But I don't think it is about W3C technologies being patented. I think it is about some of the bigger companies forming something called WS-I, shoving W3C out of the way so that they can make standards and set licensing policy on their own terms. Then, what WS-I does is going to be patented and RANDed...
I certainly think it looks like it.
Well, I guess it pretty much had to happen. These companies are a bunch of shameless freeloaders who are trying to turn a big profit from the open infrastructure of the Internet. And when they don't get their way with patent licensing, because W3C realizes that RAND licensing is not going to move technology forward, it is not surprising that they abuse their power to do a fork.
We've got to be on the alert on this. I think the best we can do is to make sure that we make good and extensive implementations if W3C standards, also for commerce applications.