Many of us do use them, many times each day, and find it an incredibly useful resource. It's just too bad it's so slow, and even worse when they're completely down like now, so we donate what we can.
The Russian mafia is a major producer of child pornography. Their quest for wealth shows even less scruples than the RIAA. I'd sooner get a SCO license than fund those guys. There are plenty of other legal and easy-to-use alternatives for music (many of them free, too), so you do not have to choose between the RIAA and the mob.
certain technology using code is patented - so if Microsoft steals that technology from your word processor (say, if you've got some brand new way of parsing files, to take a fairly lame example), they're forbidding you to sue them unless you want to lose your compatibility.
No, you are reading it wrong. If Microsoft "steals" your patented parsing technology, and you whip up a patent covering Microsoft's XML schemas and sue them over those schemas, THEN Microsoft cancels your schema license. If you sue them for something else, then the schema license isn't affected at all. Go and read what you quoted again, I am sure you'll agree:)
For the record, many recent open source licenses from both IBM and SUN has this exact same term ("use our tech, except if you sue us over them using patents"). GNU is considering this kind of protection too, in the next version of the GPL.
Or, put this way, the moment OpenOffice or StarOffice implements these schemas, Microsoft can plunder their source code, and the only way OO or Sun can fight it is to lose the compatibility that would make them competitive.
I thought you said you could read legalese. It says, in the text you quoted yourself, that Microsoft can cancel your license to the schemas if you sue Microsoft for patent infringement in relation to their use of their own schemas. Source code is generally not protected by patents, but by copyright. So your take on this is faulty at best.
No, the reference implementation of dijjer is in Java. Btw, Sanity, it's a cool piece of software with great potential. I kind of figured it uses some NIO or other Sun-only (so far) APIs, but I'm glad to hear that it doesn't.
It would seem to me that if you have a way to communicate with absolute anonymity on the net, you should use that technology and only that technology to plan your coup d'etat. If what you are suggesting is that developing anonymizing technology is useless because you can be tracked when using other technologies, I have to say that's a bit of a silly argument.
With Tor, you don't transfer files; you transfer packets. This is analogous to running a TCP/IP router on the internet, you just relay traffic for others. What Tor adds to this is that you have no way to find out what packets you relay contain or where they are ultimately headed. If you are really a civil libertarian, you won't care. If you still care, maybe you should look for another label for yourself:)
The problem with this logic is that it works very poorly for political activists in totalitarian regimes, or anyone with sufficiently unpopular opinions. These people have the right to communicate, and people have the right to hear what they have to say.
Could it be that it increases anonymity of a connection but also potentially decreases the privacy instead?
Why do you think so? It does increase anonymity, but why would it decrease privacy in the same process? You are as private as you wish; if you send your name anonymously, you break the whole point, of course. If you allow harmful Javascript to snoop your real IP and send that over Tor, you are of course busted; but Tor users should browse with Privoxy to filter out all that.
Couple this with payload analysis (HTTP packets having obvious information about destination at least) and you have a powerful tracking mechanism
That's the whole beauty of onion routing. If you're A and you tunnel through B -> C -> D to reach D, B only knows it should deliver the package to C, and that it came from A. It does not know whether A is the originating node, and it does not know whether C is the final destination. Unless you have a global, colluding attacker controlling a very large amount of the nodes, there is no way to track routes. You cannot analyze the payload of a package, since it's encrypted in layers and layers. When receiving a package, you peel off a layer to get at the routing information you need, but that's all you get.
What about it? GNUNet is an anonymous file sharing application, while Tor is a generic anonymizing networking layer. It can run file sharing apps, but it wasn't even primarily designed for it -- it was designed for safely and anonymously exchanging messages. The American navy started what became the roots of Tor, and it was designed for their needs.
It isn't so much the review process which makes patents harder to get. Don't forget that applying for a patent costs large amounts of money, and that's even before you've paid the lawyer who wrote the application for you. Copyrights, on the other hand, are free (you get them as soon as you've created anything substantial whether you like it or not). In short, it's not a level playing field.
I'm sorry, but Norway is a member of the EEA, meaning we have to implement all the bad EU laws with no say and nothing for it. So when the EU introduces software patents, Norway will have to as well (to harmonize, don't you know). So we are concerned, but powerless.
I've been looking for an independent "grassroots" news service for a while, and I tried to follow Indymedia. I found it not only to be extremely messy (what sites should I go to?), but also extremely leftist, often opinionated to the point of not being "news" at all, and too often (for my taste) covering anti-globalization demonstrations (there must be other important things going on in the world).
Then I found Free Republic, and it was just as opinionated, only to the opposite extreme of the political spectrum.
I've been an avid user and sometimes contributor to Wikipedia for over a year, and I'm thrilled to see them launch Wikinews. Perhaps I have finally found what I was looking for?
"I've seen exeem, nice bit torrent client, seems to inpliment submiting torrents, I don't have a serial, so I can't try it out, anyone wanna share one? After all, this is p2p after all!"... I think we can conclude that not only will it be unfree software, it will also only exist for Windows.
Obligatory Futurama quote
on
Preview of KDE 3.4
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't say that one has to like KDE, but "I don't like the icons" is not a very godd reason...
Calculon: An Oscar, you say? That would get me out of this festering rat's nest called "television" once and for all. Let me see the script. [Zoidberg hands it to him and he speed-reads it.] No, no I don't like the font.
Slashdot Mirror
The following filters in my Adblock setup kicked in to make the article ad-free:
.gif?
http://ad.
http://*.i.com.com (I know, quite specific)
I have indeed donated, out of my poor student budget.
Dude, you have some pretty sick fantasies.
Many of us do use them, many times each day, and find it an incredibly useful resource. It's just too bad it's so slow, and even worse when they're completely down like now, so we donate what we can.
Running Wikimedia is insanely costly. Did you donate to them? (I thought not)
The Russian mafia is a major producer of child pornography. Their quest for wealth shows even less scruples than the RIAA. I'd sooner get a SCO license than fund those guys. There are plenty of other legal and easy-to-use alternatives for music (many of them free, too), so you do not have to choose between the RIAA and the mob.
You mean like http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/?
certain technology using code is patented - so if Microsoft steals that technology from your word processor (say, if you've got some brand new way of parsing files, to take a fairly lame example), they're forbidding you to sue them unless you want to lose your compatibility.
:)
No, you are reading it wrong. If Microsoft "steals" your patented parsing technology, and you whip up a patent covering Microsoft's XML schemas and sue them over those schemas, THEN Microsoft cancels your schema license. If you sue them for something else, then the schema license isn't affected at all. Go and read what you quoted again, I am sure you'll agree
For the record, many recent open source licenses from both IBM and SUN has this exact same term ("use our tech, except if you sue us over them using patents"). GNU is considering this kind of protection too, in the next version of the GPL.
Or, put this way, the moment OpenOffice or StarOffice implements these schemas, Microsoft can plunder their source code, and the only way OO or Sun can fight it is to lose the compatibility that would make them competitive.
I thought you said you could read legalese. It says, in the text you quoted yourself, that Microsoft can cancel your license to the schemas if you sue Microsoft for patent infringement in relation to their use of their own schemas. Source code is generally not protected by patents, but by copyright. So your take on this is faulty at best.
I had expected arrests to start after reading this, but that was only some days ago. Evans must be pleased.
I like the variant term Richard Stallman likes to promote: Digital Restrictions Management.
That is why few purchase CDs anymore.
How can you say that in comment to a Slashdot story titled "US CD Sales Increase in 2004"?
No, the reference implementation of dijjer is in Java. Btw, Sanity, it's a cool piece of software with great potential. I kind of figured it uses some NIO or other Sun-only (so far) APIs, but I'm glad to hear that it doesn't.
Tor is written in C.
It would seem to me that if you have a way to communicate with absolute anonymity on the net, you should use that technology and only that technology to plan your coup d'etat. If what you are suggesting is that developing anonymizing technology is useless because you can be tracked when using other technologies, I have to say that's a bit of a silly argument.
With Tor, you don't transfer files; you transfer packets. This is analogous to running a TCP/IP router on the internet, you just relay traffic for others. What Tor adds to this is that you have no way to find out what packets you relay contain or where they are ultimately headed. If you are really a civil libertarian, you won't care. If you still care, maybe you should look for another label for yourself :)
The problem with this logic is that it works very poorly for political activists in totalitarian regimes, or anyone with sufficiently unpopular opinions. These people have the right to communicate, and people have the right to hear what they have to say.
Why do you think so? It does increase anonymity, but why would it decrease privacy in the same process? You are as private as you wish; if you send your name anonymously, you break the whole point, of course. If you allow harmful Javascript to snoop your real IP and send that over Tor, you are of course busted; but Tor users should browse with Privoxy to filter out all that.
That's the whole beauty of onion routing. If you're A and you tunnel through B -> C -> D to reach D, B only knows it should deliver the package to C, and that it came from A. It does not know whether A is the originating node, and it does not know whether C is the final destination. Unless you have a global, colluding attacker controlling a very large amount of the nodes, there is no way to track routes. You cannot analyze the payload of a package, since it's encrypted in layers and layers. When receiving a package, you peel off a layer to get at the routing information you need, but that's all you get.
What about it? GNUNet is an anonymous file sharing application, while Tor is a generic anonymizing networking layer. It can run file sharing apps, but it wasn't even primarily designed for it -- it was designed for safely and anonymously exchanging messages. The American navy started what became the roots of Tor, and it was designed for their needs.
It isn't so much the review process which makes patents harder to get. Don't forget that applying for a patent costs large amounts of money, and that's even before you've paid the lawyer who wrote the application for you. Copyrights, on the other hand, are free (you get them as soon as you've created anything substantial whether you like it or not). In short, it's not a level playing field.
I will have to move to Norway or something...
I'm sorry, but Norway is a member of the EEA, meaning we have to implement all the bad EU laws with no say and nothing for it. So when the EU introduces software patents, Norway will have to as well (to harmonize, don't you know). So we are concerned, but powerless.
Oh well. Who needs innovation, anyway.
I've been looking for an independent "grassroots" news service for a while, and I tried to follow Indymedia. I found it not only to be extremely messy (what sites should I go to?), but also extremely leftist, often opinionated to the point of not being "news" at all, and too often (for my taste) covering anti-globalization demonstrations (there must be other important things going on in the world).
Then I found Free Republic, and it was just as opinionated, only to the opposite extreme of the political spectrum.
I've been an avid user and sometimes contributor to Wikipedia for over a year, and I'm thrilled to see them launch Wikinews. Perhaps I have finally found what I was looking for?
Based on a comment on the slyck forum:
... I think we can conclude that not only will it be unfree software, it will also only exist for Windows.
"I've seen exeem, nice bit torrent client, seems to inpliment submiting torrents, I don't have a serial, so I can't try it out, anyone wanna share one? After all, this is p2p after all!"
I don't say that one has to like KDE, but "I don't like the icons" is not a very godd reason...
Calculon: An Oscar, you say? That would get me out of this festering rat's nest called "television" once and for all. Let me see the script. [Zoidberg hands it to him and he speed-reads it.] No, no I don't like the font.
He's posting on all the slashdots.