Speaking from the other side of the fence--- when I taught a C++ course two summers ago (at Stanford), I didn't care what people used for developing and debugging their code, but I did require that it compile under g++ and run under Solaris. This environment was available to everyone signed up for the course, and simplified the amount of work I and my TA had to do to test everyone's assignment. It also made it easier to provide code to the students for use in their assignments.
The Winter section of the same course offered more variety of platforms (Visual C++, CodeWarrior on Macintosh, and g++ on Solaris), but they had more manpower--- and more experience with the other platforms.
I didn't have any obvious problems with somebody not testing their code under g++
2.5-3 hits per month?! I think that's a big underestimate. My usage (in terms of searches done, not even page views) is more like 10-30 per month.
If Sergy Brin says "If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today," I'm willing to believe he's actually done the numbers...
It's worse than that. (full disclosure: I write for ThemeStream occasionally, and actually got a check from them, but have earned less than $50.) Authors who write interesting, informative articles get paid little, because they are buried among piles of crap, and there are so few outside visitors. Authors who complain about Themestream get hundreds of views because--- surprise, surprise--- everyone visiting the site is interested in ThemeStream. I won't even get into "dime clubs". Suffice it to say that ThemeStream could immensly benefit from some editors, or at least an Avogato-style trust metric.
On the positive side, I had fun writing the articles I did, and did manage to earn some book-buying money.
Who will they sue after all the people trying to develop person-to-person file sharing are out of business? Will HTTP servers become illegal? Will Gnutella and any other software that could be used for copying be restricted under the DCMA? Will they sue the Internet backbone providers for allowing copyrighted content to flow through their routers?
Well, that might be a bit extreme even for Hollywood. But the MPAA and RIAA's position seems to be that any software which allows arbitrary person-to-person file transfer is illegal. Or is it just indexing that makes such illegal?
It shouldn't need to be said, I find this attitude completely unacceptable. HTTP clients are not illegal merely because I can find illegal content on somebody else's HTTP server using a search engine. Napster and Scout are more streamlined, efficient, and convenient versions of the same thing; I simply don't see any fundamental or legal difference.
I think MPAA et al are making a big mistake. Rather than trying to eliminate file-sharing services, they should invest in building their own--- one with features they like. Instead, they may end up in a world where the services currently provided by Scour or Napster are done in a distributed fashion (or in an appropriate jurisdiction) and they have no influence.
I'm fully aware that hosts are capable of operating in "dual stack" (IPv4 and IPv6 mode), and I apologize if I gave the impression this was not possible. However, doing so means that they must have both v4 and v6 addresses. All the additional addresses v6 promises you don't matter if you still have to talk v4 to get to the rest of the world.
IPv6 deployment will hardly be "just there". Even if all your devices are IPv6-capable, this is a far cry from enabling it, configuring everything correctly (like ensuring DNS gives out v6 addresses), and getting v6 service from your ISP.
I don't see v6 happening on the large scale any time soon, either. The ugly truth is that if you upgrade your network to IPv6, you still need to speak IPv4 with the rest of the world. So, your snazzy-new network's hosts have to go through a protocol translator (a NAT box that does v6->v4 conversion) to access anybody (read: most of the world) that hasn't upgraded to IPv6 as well.
Compare this with using IPv4-to-IPv4 NAT. NAT is more widely deployed and understood, and probably easier to put in place than converting your entire network or setting up lots of v6-over-v4 tunnelling. Sure, you don't have globally visible addresses for each of your hosts. But new services have to be designed taking NAT into account anyway.
Until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make speaking IPv6 useful, there's no incentive to upgrade networks and hosts. The claims of increased security and QoS over v4 are, in my opinion, vastly exaggerated--- just because v6 has a "flow identifier" field doesn't mean anybody's decided something useful to do with it.
Did the article have any actual news? Nothing I saw there was new--- Sprint has been part of the 6bone for a while, and testing out IPv6 on the VBNS is nothing new, right? It seems we're still waiting for sufficient demand for IPv6 service before anybody bothers offering it...
Most people are expected to get address blocks from their ISP (and the ISPs from their next-tier providers). Globally routable addresses are (as now) available from the IP registries: ARIN, RIPE, APNIC. You can go to their web pages and see what the policies are for getting IPv6 address range allocations: they're pretty stringent.
No, you will not have to give up your IPv4 address unless your ISP stops offering v4 service. As far as backward compatibility, I disagree with the impression that the other commenters to your question have given. IPv6-only hosts must still use v4 addresses to talk to v4 hosts, even if the network infrastructure supports both. This must be accomplished via a protocol translator (something like a NAT gateway) with all the issues that entails. Merely assigning a range of v6 addresses to "cover" legacy v4 addresses is not the end of the problem.
No... Google still does keyword search, so the Microsoft page needs to actually include those words to show up "normally". The inclusion must have been deliberate.
But a one-time error in interpreting the blueprint probably won't carry over into the next generation. One misbehaving nanobot isn't a big problem if it can't create other misbehaving bots.
Specific Design Guidelines
1.Any self-replicating device which has sufficient onboard information to describe its own manufacture should encrypt it such that any replication error will randomize its blueprint.
2.Encrypted MNT device instruction sets should be utilized to discourage irresponsible proliferation and piracy.
3.Mutation (autonomous and otherwise) outside of sealed laboratory conditions, should be discouraged.
4.Replication systems should generate audit trails.
5.MNT device designs should incorporate provisions for built-in safety mechanisms, such as: 1) absolute dependence on a single artificial fuel source or artificial "vitamins" that don't exist in any natural environment; 2) making devices that are dependent on broadcast transmissions for replication or in some cases operation; 3) routing control signal paths throughout a device, so that subassemblies do not function independently; 4) programming termination dates into devices, and 5) other innovations in laboratory or device safety technology developed specifically to address the potential dangers of MNT.
6. MNT developers should adopt systematic security measures to avoid unplanned distribution of their designs and technical capabilities.
Most of these look like reasonable ideas, but what the heck is an "Encrypted instruction set"? They should be clear whether they're talking about code signing (i.e., any program must be signed with a private key kept by the original designer) or mere obfuscation.
I particularly like #1--- it'll be an interesting research problem to come up with a "genetic code" specifically designed to make evolution hard. I imagine the hope here is to ensure a sort of "fail-stop" property for the devices, similar to catching programs that have gone bad through the virtual memory system.
Unfortunately, a lot of the Web Easter Eggs they mention look out-of-date. (Like the Google search for "more evil than Satan himself"... it no longer points you at Microsoft.)
I find it interesting that even ISPs don't, in general, "own" their IP address ranges. For example, APNIC explicitly states in its Policies for Allocation and Assignment that IP addresses should be considered "leased", not owned. I dunno if anybody has succesfully "taken back" IP address ranges, though.
Good comments. I was at the symposium, and one of the fears Mr. Joy has is that genetically engineered viruses or bacteria can easily be used as weapons of mass destruction. He pointed out that human-designed microbes have none of the "limitations" of evolved ones.
This betrays a error common in thinking about evolution: confusing the actual state of affairs (i.e., humanity hasn't been wiped out by a supervirus) with the way things must be. It's true that viruses and bacteria which don't kill their hosts too quickly do better in the long run, but no virus can consciously make that decision. Just because wiping out the human race doesn't make evolutionary sense for a virus does not imply that it can't and won't happen. (The general case of how viruses behave doesn't give us any comfort for how a specific virus will act.)
This is why we must develop nano- and bio-technology: as human population grows, so does the population of parasites on the human population, and the possibilities for those parasites to mutate into lethal forms. Especially given increases in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we need new ways of augmenting the human immunes system.
Bill Joy dismissed out of hand the possibility of building defenses against genetic and nanotechnological weapons. But the fact that nature has already given us such defenses implies that it can be done. And to counter very real, existing threats to the human species, we should do it. I'll trust any open, technological defense against "Knowledge of Mass Destruction" much more than a political one.
(No, Joy didn't say explicitly what sort of controls he thought would be sufficient. But that's the truly hard part of the question! He stated that the only viable option was "relinquishment". And the language he used was, I thought, strongly in the camp of "we shouldn't develop these ideas".)
They claim that automatically finding redundant identical files provides 80 to 90 percent disk savings. This seems like a very high number to me--- in what sort of environment is 90 percent of your disk space duplicated elsewhere? I find it hard to believe that most disk storage (on a server) is per-user configuration files that don't change.
I seem to recall reading a paper on doing something similar in a Unix system (to remove all the dot-files that were copied to user directories and never changed), but I can't find a reference at the moment. I also believe there's been work on copy-on-write file systems in Unix as well.
I happened on the exhibit at SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) pretty much by accident. It was an absolutely beautiful collection, and the book does a great job of bringing that home. Some of the pictures of the Earth are deeply moving, especially in contrast with the stark view of the moon.
Michael Light, the author/artist (?), explains that he was able to obtain access to the original negatives and digitize them, while most sources use third-or-fourth generation copies. I hope NASA makes more of its original data open for digital conversion and preservation, before it becomes damaged. (Although, to be fair, most of its current data is already digital--- all the more reason to make it publicly available.)
You (and Joseph Farah) are being needlessly paranoid. There is nothing in the Executive Order that establishes any new laws, organizations (other than the "working group") or powers. It's certainly true that the members of the working group, being high-level officials, may be able to implement new policies under already-granted executive power. But Mr. Farah's alarmism should be treated as the pure speculation that it is.
The working group is supposed to investigate three things:
1. Are existing federal laws sufficient to address crimes that use the Internet? 2. Are new technologies, government powers, or organizations needed to combat Internet crime? 3. Can new technologies help "educate and empower" citizens to protect themselves?
Now, we might not like the answers the working group comes up with to those questions. (Things like the V-chip, government access to private keys, etc.) But that's not a reason to disparage the attempt at studying the issues. In fact, this can be an opportunity to argue that current government powers are sufficient--- or at least that further regulation will not be effective.
There's no need to panic just because the government is considering what changes, policies, or technologies might help law enforcement. We might (however unlikely) agree with the answers they come up with!
Without government intervention, the free market MUST provide consumers with the best possible products.
Absolutely not. Do you believe Microsoft provides the best possible products? If not, what government intervention has caused this--- intellectual property protections?
Go read "The Rise of Worse is Better." Good products do not necessarily survive in the marketplace, for very good reasons. If you ever have the chance, ask Andy Rappaport about "The Great Value Illusion" or read his article on "The Computerless Computer Company." Technical superiority does not ensure marketability.
The free market may be the most moral choice for an economic system, but don't ever mistake it for optimal. The rest of your post is well taken, though.
(b) uses a very strong hashing algorithm like MD5 on the saved log files
As long as the hash itself is protected. To be secure, the hash should be printed to hardcopy (or at least widely distributed) as soon as it is created, rather than being kept on the same system, where it can be replaced along with the file.
Also, all-or-nothing distribution seems like a bad idea, and partial distribution seems even worse. Lots of movies lose money, but getting $0 in receipts is a lot worse than getting $10 million less than the movie cost you.
Partial distribution "cheats" those who contributed to the first half, if the rest of the movie is never shown. I'd consider seeing just the first quarter of a movie to be worth a heck of a lot less than 1/4th of a whole "ticket". The value I receive for my "contribution" is almost entirely dependent on what other people have spent, so it's very hard to make a good economic decision on my part. At least with all-or-nothing I can get my money back.
On the other hand, just giving up and cutting your losses by releasing the entire movie after a certain amount of time defeats the entire system.
It was Yet Another Research Operating System that didn't go anywhere. Very OO design, meant to be "distributed". All system interfaces were written in a specialized interface definition language.
Sun's pages on it seem to have disappeared, although they still turn up in search engines and links from other sites.
BTW--- I think "royalty-free" in this context meant just from Sun's perspective, in that it was written from scratch internally. Shouldn't be taken as a suggestion that it was free software.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking from the other side of the fence--- when I taught a C++ course two summers ago (at Stanford), I didn't care what people used for developing and debugging their code, but I did require that it compile under g++ and run under Solaris. This environment was available to everyone signed up for the course, and simplified the amount of work I and my TA had to do to test everyone's assignment. It also made it easier to provide code to the students for use in their assignments.
The Winter section of the same course offered more variety of platforms (Visual C++, CodeWarrior on Macintosh, and g++ on Solaris), but they had more manpower--- and more experience with the other platforms.
I didn't have any obvious problems with somebody not testing their code under g++
2.5-3 hits per month?! I think that's a big underestimate. My usage (in terms of searches done, not even page views) is more like 10-30 per month.
If Sergy Brin says "If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today," I'm willing to believe he's actually done the numbers...
It's worse than that. (full disclosure: I write for ThemeStream occasionally, and actually got a check from them, but have earned less than $50.) Authors who write interesting, informative articles get paid little, because they are buried among piles of crap, and there are so few outside visitors. Authors who complain about Themestream get hundreds of views because--- surprise, surprise--- everyone visiting the site is interested in ThemeStream. I won't even get into "dime clubs". Suffice it to say that ThemeStream could immensly benefit from some editors, or at least an Avogato-style trust metric.
On the positive side, I had fun writing the articles I did, and did manage to earn some book-buying money.
Who will they sue after all the people trying to develop person-to-person file sharing are out of business? Will HTTP servers become illegal? Will Gnutella and any other software that could be used for copying be restricted under the DCMA? Will they sue the Internet backbone providers for allowing copyrighted content to flow through their routers?
Well, that might be a bit extreme even for Hollywood. But the MPAA and RIAA's position seems to be that any software which allows arbitrary person-to-person file transfer is illegal. Or is it just indexing that makes such illegal?
It shouldn't need to be said, I find this attitude completely unacceptable. HTTP clients are not illegal merely because I can find illegal content on somebody else's HTTP server using a search engine. Napster and Scout are more streamlined, efficient, and convenient versions of the same thing; I simply don't see any fundamental or legal difference.
I think MPAA et al are making a big mistake. Rather than trying to eliminate file-sharing services, they should invest in building their own--- one with features they like. Instead, they may end up in a world where the services currently provided by Scour or Napster are done in a distributed fashion (or in an appropriate jurisdiction) and they have no influence.
I'm fully aware that hosts are capable of operating in "dual stack" (IPv4 and IPv6 mode), and I apologize if I gave the impression this was not possible. However, doing so means that they must have both v4 and v6 addresses. All the additional addresses v6 promises you don't matter if you still have to talk v4 to get to the rest of the world.
IPv6 deployment will hardly be "just there". Even if all your devices are IPv6-capable, this is a far cry from enabling it, configuring everything correctly (like ensuring DNS gives out v6 addresses), and getting v6 service from your ISP.
I don't see v6 happening on the large scale any time soon, either. The ugly truth is that if you upgrade your network to IPv6, you still need to speak IPv4 with the rest of the world. So, your snazzy-new network's hosts have to go through a protocol translator (a NAT box that does v6->v4 conversion) to access anybody (read: most of the world) that hasn't upgraded to IPv6 as well.
Compare this with using IPv4-to-IPv4 NAT. NAT is more widely deployed and understood, and probably easier to put in place than converting your entire network or setting up lots of v6-over-v4 tunnelling. Sure, you don't have globally visible addresses for each of your hosts. But new services have to be designed taking NAT into account anyway.
Until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make speaking IPv6 useful, there's no incentive to upgrade networks and hosts. The claims of increased security and QoS over v4 are, in my opinion, vastly exaggerated--- just because v6 has a "flow identifier" field doesn't mean anybody's decided something useful to do with it.
See "I'll stick with IPv4 for now, thank you" from Network Fusion for a "testimonial" from a network administrator who's just as happy not upgrading his network...
Did the article have any actual news? Nothing I saw there was new--- Sprint has been part of the 6bone for a while, and testing out IPv6 on the VBNS is nothing new, right? It seems we're still waiting for sufficient demand for IPv6 service before anybody bothers offering it...
Most people are expected to get address blocks from their ISP (and the ISPs from their next-tier providers). Globally routable addresses are (as now) available from the IP registries: ARIN, RIPE, APNIC. You can go to their web pages and see what the policies are for getting IPv6 address range allocations: they're pretty stringent.
No, you will not have to give up your IPv4 address unless your ISP stops offering v4 service. As far as backward compatibility, I disagree with the impression that the other commenters to your question have given. IPv6-only hosts must still use v4 addresses to talk to v4 hosts, even if the network infrastructure supports both. This must be accomplished via a protocol translator (something like a NAT gateway) with all the issues that entails. Merely assigning a range of v6 addresses to "cover" legacy v4 addresses is not the end of the problem.
No... Google still does keyword search, so the Microsoft page needs to actually include those words to show up "normally". The inclusion must have been deliberate.
But a one-time error in interpreting the blueprint probably won't carry over into the next generation. One misbehaving nanobot isn't a big problem if it can't create other misbehaving bots.
Most of these look like reasonable ideas, but what the heck is an "Encrypted instruction set"? They should be clear whether they're talking about code signing (i.e., any program must be signed with a private key kept by the original designer) or mere obfuscation.
I particularly like #1--- it'll be an interesting research problem to come up with a "genetic code" specifically designed to make evolution hard. I imagine the hope here is to ensure a sort of "fail-stop" property for the devices, similar to catching programs that have gone bad through the virtual memory system.
Perhaps the adventure game and psychoanalyst that come with Emacs could be called open-source Easter eggs. :)
Unfortunately, a lot of the Web Easter Eggs they mention look out-of-date. (Like the Google search for "more evil than Satan himself"... it no longer points you at Microsoft.)
I find it interesting that even ISPs don't, in general, "own" their IP address ranges. For example, APNIC explicitly states in its Policies for Allocation and Assignment that IP addresses should be considered "leased", not owned. I dunno if anybody has succesfully "taken back" IP address ranges, though.
Good comments. I was at the symposium, and one of the fears Mr. Joy has is that genetically engineered viruses or bacteria can easily be used as weapons of mass destruction. He pointed out that human-designed microbes have none of the "limitations" of evolved ones.
This betrays a error common in thinking about evolution: confusing the actual state of affairs (i.e., humanity hasn't been wiped out by a supervirus) with the way things must be. It's true that viruses and bacteria which don't kill their hosts too quickly do better in the long run, but no virus can consciously make that decision. Just because wiping out the human race doesn't make evolutionary sense for a virus does not imply that it can't and won't happen. (The general case of how viruses behave doesn't give us any comfort for how a specific virus will act.)
This is why we must develop nano- and bio-technology: as human population grows, so does the population of parasites on the human population, and the possibilities for those parasites to mutate into lethal forms. Especially given increases in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we need new ways of augmenting the human immunes system.
Bill Joy dismissed out of hand the possibility of building defenses against genetic and nanotechnological weapons. But the fact that nature has already given us such defenses implies that it can be done. And to counter very real, existing threats to the human species, we should do it. I'll trust any open, technological defense against "Knowledge of Mass Destruction" much more than a political one.
(No, Joy didn't say explicitly what sort of controls he thought would be sufficient. But that's the truly hard part of the question! He stated that the only viable option was "relinquishment". And the language he used was, I thought, strongly in the camp of "we shouldn't develop these ideas".)
I seem to recall reading a paper on doing something similar in a Unix system (to remove all the dot-files that were copied to user directories and never changed), but I can't find a reference at the moment. I also believe there's been work on copy-on-write file systems in Unix as well.
Michael Light, the author/artist (?), explains that he was able to obtain access to the original negatives and digitize them, while most sources use third-or-fourth generation copies. I hope NASA makes more of its original data open for digital conversion and preservation, before it becomes damaged. (Although, to be fair, most of its current data is already digital--- all the more reason to make it publicly available.)
Who cares about logos? I want some nano LEGOS!
You (and Joseph Farah) are being needlessly paranoid. There is nothing in the Executive Order that establishes any new laws, organizations (other than the "working group") or powers. It's certainly true that the members of the working group, being high-level officials, may be able to implement new policies under already-granted executive power. But Mr. Farah's alarmism should be treated as the pure speculation that it is.
1. Are existing federal laws sufficient to address crimes that use the Internet?
2. Are new technologies, government powers, or organizations needed to combat Internet crime?
3. Can new technologies help "educate and empower" citizens to protect themselves?
Now, we might not like the answers the working group comes up with to those questions. (Things like the V-chip, government access to private keys, etc.) But that's not a reason to disparage the attempt at studying the issues. In fact, this can be an opportunity to argue that current government powers are sufficient--- or at least that further regulation will not be effective.
There's no need to panic just because the government is considering what changes, policies, or technologies might help law enforcement. We might (however unlikely) agree with the answers they come up with!
Absolutely not. Do you believe Microsoft provides the best possible products? If not, what government intervention has caused this--- intellectual property protections?
Go read "The Rise of Worse is Better." Good products do not necessarily survive in the marketplace, for very good reasons. If you ever have the chance, ask Andy Rappaport about "The Great Value Illusion" or read his article on "The Computerless Computer Company." Technical superiority does not ensure marketability.
The free market may be the most moral choice for an economic system, but don't ever mistake it for optimal. The rest of your post is well taken, though.
As long as the hash itself is protected. To be secure, the hash should be printed to hardcopy (or at least widely distributed) as soon as it is created, rather than being kept on the same system, where it can be replaced along with the file.
Good points...
Also, all-or-nothing distribution seems like a bad idea, and partial distribution seems even worse. Lots of movies lose money, but getting $0 in receipts is a lot worse than getting $10 million
less than the movie cost you.
Partial distribution "cheats" those who contributed to the first half, if the rest of the movie is never shown. I'd consider seeing just the first quarter of a movie to be worth a heck of a lot less than 1/4th of a whole "ticket". The value I receive for my "contribution" is almost entirely dependent on what other people have spent, so it's very hard to make a good economic decision on my part. At least with all-or-nothing I can get my money back.
On the other hand, just giving up and cutting your losses by releasing the entire movie after a certain amount of time defeats the entire system.
It was Yet Another Research Operating System that didn't go anywhere. Very OO design, meant to be "distributed". All system interfaces were written in a specialized interface definition language.
:)
Sun's pages on it seem to have disappeared, although they still turn up in search engines and links from other sites.
BTW--- I think "royalty-free" in this context meant just from Sun's perspective, in that it was written from scratch internally. Shouldn't be taken as a suggestion that it was free software.