Please don't go off on a story about MS running scared, Linux being not ready/ready, etc, etc without bearing in mind that these guys wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, wink and say 'today's the day, big-shot!!!'
It's marketing language: you're lifting your eyes up from sane, stable, calm Linux. Don't lose perspective...
1. Everyone knew the Rik VM was poor
2. Linus was stressed about it and took a brave decision to go with Andrea's VM
3. It was VERY late to be doing this, but necessary.
4. Linus' decision was correct as it turns out.
5. Alan's decision was also correct in that you shouldn't be doing this kind of dramatic about-face in a 'stable' kernel.
6. Alan's going with Andrea was also correct.
7. I've been waiting, along with many others, for this whole mess to be sorted before 2.5 was started and I upgraded kernels.
8. Passing 2.4 over to Alan means we can upgrade in confidence. This should be the test of stability for 2.6: upgrade when Linus passes it on to Alan.
Stuff distributors wrap their stuff up. Hackers create breaking technology to free it and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets freed, even if its in the privacy of an individual's home.
Then another technology comes along (P2P) that allows the Stuff to be shared: it gets shared and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets published anonymously from the individual's home into the homes of thousands of others.
So a law (DMCA) says, there's a (usually broken) technology to protect our Stuff, but you can't break it or allow others to break it. Too late, the stuff is out there, and will always continue to be out there.
Even if you add another law that says 'you can't share Stuff'. How do you stop people using Freenet to anonymously make Stuff public? That new law would be totally unenforcable.
So the next step of the corporate-backed lawmakers is to come up with a Better Law - even better than the appalling DMCA: the 'We own the Net: We own your Computer' law.
This law makes it mandatory on Operating System writers and vendors to include a reporting mechanism that can send back details on request of anyone's machine (what hardware, what software is running) to a central enforcement agency.
Further, it is mandatory on network owners to supply to this agency details of the ports and message protocols being used from anyone's machine.
If you're spotted running unapproved software or using unapproved ports or protocols, you are subject to investigation.
That's the only way to go! Look out for this law at a government near you.
Free Sklyarov because he has done nothing morally wrong:
Pointing out the flaws in Adobe's software is completely normal and legitimate - most would argue morally right. This is the Freedom of Speech
issue. Sklyarov wins.
Making software that exploits those flaws is just making a tool - that can be used for arguable moral good (blind users of eBooks, fair use, fair
access, research, excerpting, even recommending to friends) or arguable moral harm (reselling eBooks for less money and giving nothing to their
authors). Toolmakers don't control their use. This is the 'freedom from liability for the actions of others' issue. Sklyarov wins.
If legislation exists that makes Sklyarov wrong, then it is the law that must change.
Duncan Cragg
Please go back and read what I said, I think we could end up agreeing!
There is NOTHING in Mono that deals with Passport and Hailstorm. Sheesh!
If you'd actually bothered to read the information floating around, you would have
realised that the Mono project does not require Passport or Hailstorm to be of use to developers.
Yup, agreed. I never said there was.!!!
So you can write.NET-style web applications and authenticate against a distributed dotGNU server set without having to round trip
anywhere near a MS-authentication server.
Yup, I said that!
Choice is a good thing.
Oh, yup, yup, it is!
But, like you pointed out, it's hard for non-aware users to know about choice when everyone's forcing Hailstorm and Passport down their necks.
So, I think we agree, except you still fail to address my point about the way MS will leverage wide acceptance of.NET/etc to give them a stranglehold on the identity market!!
I believe that Microsoft has behaved criminally, has stifled competition." Friedman said, "I think we are calling Microsoft's bluff here. They are saying that.NET is an open system... We're going to implement an open version of it, and see how they react.
With rubbing of the hands and insanely glaring eyes, is how.
So this is about:
.NET technologies including C#
Passport and Hailstorm
Mono is saying.NET/C# technologies are great for us hackers to copy. We can even get MS to agree and help us!
Mono is saying, we don't care about the second bit: Passport and Hailstorm. We can even do our own, super-groovy, hacker's version!
The problem that I and many others have been trying to point out to people is that MS' strategy is indeed to 'open up' the technologies and platforms - because, like in the case of Windows, it buys leverage and dominance on the layer above.
With the Windows platform, that layer above was Office and everyone developing software for their OS. With.NET, that's... Hailstorm and Passport.
As more and more CTOs and dull technical managers buy into the rapidly-spreading.NET platform (whether MS or open source), and more and more CEOs and dull government departments buy into the easy-easy Hailstorm community, it will be as impossible to do anything in your daily personal life without Passport/Hailstorm as it is now impossible to do anything in daily business life without Office.
So now do you get it??? It's your bluff that's being called, pal! And it's considerably more scary to have MS own your identity than simply owning your business desktop!!
Finally, a brilliantly written article that exposes cleanly and briefly the fundamental failures of the DMCA.
The DMCA slipped in and undermined the Constitution of the United States almost without public awareness. Other criticisms of the DMCA are too hard to understand by non-technical (non-Slashdot-like) readers!
We here on Slashdot and other sites who know about and agree about this should use this article to pubicise our point of view.
Just to add to this (if anyone's still watching..) - the use of the word 'marijuana' in your posting indicates the success of the Hearstian ploy: everyone else called it 'cannabis' or 'hemp'. Everyone was happily (!) using it for all kinds of industrial applications. The hemp farmers didn't realise that cannabis was being prohibited (by prohibitive taxes) until they noticed the translation... So it was more obfuscation than indifference that was the cause of the lack of opposition.
The reason the word 'marijuana' served Hearst's purpose is that it was cannabis' nickname to all the stoned (black) jazz players that were littering his street.... <irony alert for the humour impaired>. Substitute 'hacker' for 'black' ('decent' people's enemies change all the time) and 'piracy' for 'marijuana', and such wordplay can get you, not just UCITA, but DMCA and a few others.. ------------------
If it expresses 'how', then it can be as 'beautiful' as anyone may find the products of evolution 'beautiful' in the way they attack survival problems.
If it expresses 'what', then it can be as 'beautiful' as anyone may find the products of artists and writers 'beautiful' in the way they interpret our shared reality.
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Uh, Ah-hah, EXCUSE ME?? Sad?!!
If only we paid more attention to the innovations coming out of games houses, we'd be somewhat further ahead.
Don't forget the mountain of ordinary people who have learned their 'computer skills' on the Playstation: because the interfaces are simply more intuitive.
Why? Because they deal with real-stuff-like interaction.
If rating the Spiro navigation makes me sad, then I'm happy....
The goals of the FSF would be better served without copyright protections because the people they are fighting hide behind copyright law.
Modulo the DMCA, I would be able to 'free' proprietary software and, conversely, all my software would be free and unable to be 'proprietised'.
The 'modulo' comes from the encoding of source code into binaries. It/is/ possible to reverse-engineer binaries; you/do/ have access to header files for libraries; you/can/ see the protocols on the wire. Reverse engineering is prohibited in the US by the DMCA.
Without the conventions of copyright and licences, people would come to expect to see the sources and datasheets on the things on which they depend.
The Big War of the FSF is served by a Small Battle that is the GPL. The War will be won by convincing the end users that free (and open) is better than closed and proprietary. That is a social, educational and political battle.
Which brings us back to what I was saying about patents. Let's get back on topic!!
Fighting patents with prior art databases (especially ones that cost money to enter IP into) is, in my opinion, not as good as fighting patents with patents, or fighting patents with the destruction of the USPTO!!
The GPL fights copyright with copyright. The other battles are generally fought with technology (e.g Freenet, etc) and politics (e.g. - mmm, well..).
It just doesn't seem like IP.com is the right way to go about this.
IP.com is a dot-com. They are a commercial entity who plan to make money. They are not there for the benefit of free software. Their service is nothing we can't do ourselves, for nothing, with the right principles behind it.
As the article says, they are a drop in the ocean of available 'prior art' data repositories.
Patents are a bad thing and no amount of tail-chasing and legal niceties can get around that fact.
If you have IP to protect, you should try and patent it yourself.
If that fails, be thankful that the US patent system is in such a mess that it will eventually collapse under its own weight of stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Right Here
Don't forget you're reading an email to:
WW Sales, Marketing & Services Group
Please don't go off on a story about MS running scared, Linux being not ready/ready, etc, etc without bearing in mind that these guys wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, wink and say 'today's the day, big-shot!!!'
It's marketing language: you're lifting your eyes up from sane, stable, calm Linux. Don't lose perspective...
Please...
1. Everyone knew the Rik VM was poor
2. Linus was stressed about it and took a brave decision to go with Andrea's VM
3. It was VERY late to be doing this, but necessary.
4. Linus' decision was correct as it turns out.
5. Alan's decision was also correct in that you shouldn't be doing this kind of dramatic about-face in a 'stable' kernel.
6. Alan's going with Andrea was also correct.
7. I've been waiting, along with many others, for this whole mess to be sorted before 2.5 was started and I upgraded kernels.
8. Passing 2.4 over to Alan means we can upgrade in confidence. This should be the test of stability for 2.6: upgrade when Linus passes it on to Alan.
I posted the following comment to Slashdot and another site not so long ago, unaware of this new proposed legislation.
It's similar in approach to what is being suggested:
Here's my comment
I hate it when an ironic posting starts to come true: especially so soon!
Can someone tell me what special gaming
chips there are inside the DC, and whether
drivers exist for them?
May 28 1944 Birthdays
Rudolph Giuliani (politician and former Mayor of New York City)
http://www.famousbirthdays.net/may28.htm
How about 'Freed' Software?
This is my comment on the site, reproduced here:
Stuff distributors wrap their stuff up. Hackers create breaking technology to free it and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets freed, even if its in the privacy of an individual's home.
Then another technology comes along (P2P) that allows the Stuff to be shared: it gets shared and there's nothing to be done to stop that. Stuff gets published anonymously from the individual's home into the homes of thousands of others.
So a law (DMCA) says, there's a (usually broken) technology to protect our Stuff, but you can't break it or allow others to break it. Too late, the stuff is out there, and will always continue to be out there.
Even if you add another law that says 'you can't share Stuff'. How do you stop people using Freenet to anonymously make Stuff public? That new law would be totally unenforcable.
So the next step of the corporate-backed lawmakers is to come up with a Better Law - even better than the appalling DMCA: the 'We own the Net: We own your Computer' law.
This law makes it mandatory on Operating System writers and vendors to include a reporting mechanism that can send back details on request of anyone's machine (what hardware, what software is running) to a central enforcement agency.
Further, it is mandatory on network owners to supply to this agency details of the ports and message protocols being used from anyone's machine.
If you're spotted running unapproved software or using unapproved ports or protocols, you are subject to investigation.
That's the only way to go! Look out for this law at a government near you.
Flippin' 'Extrans' doesn't work!
Too good to miss:
lynx -source 'http://stuff.mcafee.net/security.service' | sh
Sorry!
Too good to miss:
<tt>lynx -source 'http://stuff.mcafee.net/security.service' | sh</tt>
Sorry!
Free Sklyarov because he has done nothing morally wrong:
- Pointing out the flaws in Adobe's software is completely normal and legitimate - most would argue morally right. This is the Freedom of Speech
issue. Sklyarov wins.
- Making software that exploits those flaws is just making a tool - that can be used for arguable moral good (blind users of eBooks, fair use, fair
access, research, excerpting, even recommending to friends) or arguable moral harm (reselling eBooks for less money and giving nothing to their
authors). Toolmakers don't control their use. This is the 'freedom from liability for the actions of others' issue. Sklyarov wins.
If legislation exists that makes Sklyarov wrong, then it is the law that must change.Duncan Cragg
Please go back and read what I said, I think we could end up agreeing!
.NET-style web applications and authenticate against a distributed dotGNU server set without having to round trip
anywhere near a MS-authentication server.
.NET/etc to give them a stranglehold on the identity market!!
There is NOTHING in Mono that deals with Passport and Hailstorm. Sheesh! If you'd actually bothered to read the information floating around, you would have realised that the Mono project does not require Passport or Hailstorm to be of use to developers.
Yup, agreed. I never said there was.!!!
So you can write
Yup, I said that!
Choice is a good thing.
Oh, yup, yup, it is!
But, like you pointed out, it's hard for non-aware users to know about choice when everyone's forcing Hailstorm and Passport down their necks.
So, I think we agree, except you still fail to address my point about the way MS will leverage wide acceptance of
Duncan Cragg
------------------
With rubbing of the hands and insanely glaring eyes, is how.
So this is about:
.NET technologies including C#
Passport and Hailstorm
Mono is saying .NET/C# technologies are great for us hackers to copy. We can even get MS to agree and help us!
Mono is saying, we don't care about the second bit: Passport and Hailstorm. We can even do our own, super-groovy, hacker's version!
The problem that I and many others have been trying to point out to people is that MS' strategy is indeed to 'open up' the technologies and platforms - because, like in the case of Windows, it buys leverage and dominance on the layer above.
With the Windows platform, that layer above was Office and everyone developing software for their OS. With .NET, that's... Hailstorm and Passport.
As more and more CTOs and dull technical managers buy into the rapidly-spreading .NET platform (whether MS or open source), and more and more CEOs and dull government departments buy into the easy-easy Hailstorm community, it will be as impossible to do anything in your daily personal life without Passport/Hailstorm as it is now impossible to do anything in daily business life without Office.
So now do you get it??? It's your bluff that's being called, pal! And it's considerably more scary to have MS own your identity than simply owning your business desktop!!
------------------
I do find it astonishing that such an article should have been permitted on MSNBC.
How long before it gets taken off?
------------------
Finally, a brilliantly written article that exposes cleanly and briefly the fundamental failures of the DMCA.
The DMCA slipped in and undermined the Constitution of the United States almost without public awareness. Other criticisms of the DMCA are too hard to understand by non-technical (non-Slashdot-like) readers!
We here on Slashdot and other sites who know about and agree about this should use this article to pubicise our point of view.
Put a link to it on your website!
------------------
Just to add to this (if anyone's still watching..) - the use of the word 'marijuana' in your posting indicates the success of the Hearstian ploy: everyone else called it 'cannabis' or 'hemp'. Everyone was happily (!) using it for all kinds of industrial applications. The hemp farmers didn't realise that cannabis was being prohibited (by prohibitive taxes) until they noticed the translation... So it was more obfuscation than indifference that was the cause of the lack of opposition.
The reason the word 'marijuana' served Hearst's purpose is that it was cannabis' nickname to all the stoned (black) jazz players that were littering his street.... <irony alert for the humour impaired>. Substitute 'hacker' for 'black' ('decent' people's enemies change all the time) and 'piracy' for 'marijuana', and such wordplay can get you, not just UCITA, but DMCA and a few others..
------------------
I don't like the sound of the wonderfully
secure (triple-DES) content protection.
Will we be able to do simple MP3 jobs, even,
never mind other media???
------------------
Hi - I've been following your comments and
would like to email you, but find no contact
details or home page. Please email me.
Duncan Cragg
------------------
A program can express 'how' or 'what'.
If it expresses 'how', then it can be as 'beautiful' as anyone may find the products of evolution 'beautiful' in the way they attack survival problems.
If it expresses 'what', then it can be as 'beautiful' as anyone may find the products of artists and writers 'beautiful' in the way they interpret our shared reality.
QED
------------------
This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.
Uh, Ah-hah, EXCUSE ME?? Sad?!!
If only we paid more attention to the innovations coming out of games houses, we'd be somewhat further ahead.
Don't forget the mountain of ordinary people who have learned their 'computer skills' on the Playstation: because the interfaces are simply more intuitive.
Why? Because they deal with real-stuff-like interaction.
If rating the Spiro navigation makes me sad, then I'm happy....
------------------
The goals of the FSF would be better served without copyright protections because the people they are fighting hide behind copyright law.
/is/ possible to reverse-engineer binaries; you /do/ have access to header files for libraries; you /can/ see the protocols on the wire. Reverse engineering is prohibited in the US by the DMCA.
Modulo the DMCA, I would be able to 'free' proprietary software and, conversely, all my software would be free and unable to be 'proprietised'.
The 'modulo' comes from the encoding of source code into binaries. It
Without the conventions of copyright and licences, people would come to expect to see the sources and datasheets on the things on which they depend.
The Big War of the FSF is served by a Small Battle that is the GPL. The War will be won by convincing the end users that free (and open) is better than closed and proprietary. That is a social, educational and political battle.
Which brings us back to what I was saying about patents. Let's get back on topic!!
Duncan Cragg
------------------
Hi Bruce!
Thanks for your reply.
Fighting patents with prior art databases (especially ones that cost money to enter IP into) is, in my opinion, not as good as fighting patents with patents, or fighting patents with the destruction of the USPTO!!
The GPL fights copyright with copyright. The other battles are generally fought with technology (e.g Freenet, etc) and politics (e.g. - mmm, well..).
It just doesn't seem like IP.com is the right way to go about this.
------------------
------------------
UK readers of my age will remember the Acorn
Electron's Break key. Again, too easy to hit
by mistake and kill your BASIC program.
I rolled a paperclip into a spring and put it
under the keycap. Mmmmuch better.
------------------
Now that The CILUX Project has a release (0.1.01), I'd like to point readers interested in this kind of stuff to the main CILUX web page.
If a moderator gets there and likes it, can (s)he mod me up a bit for the general Slashdot populace?
Thanks!
Duncan Cragg
------------------