I remember the Mad Scientists Club and also Space Child's Mother Goose, and would have been delighted to see them back in print so I could buy copies. But it looks like they're acting obnoxious about copyrights.
A friend of mine
quoted a four-line poem from Space Child's Mother Goose ("Probable Probable My Black Hen") on her web page, and Purple House Press sent
this letter (discussion accompanies it at that url). While Purple House didn't specifically brandish actual litigation, they threatened to hassle my friend's ISP about the quote (presumably under the DMCA), thus outdoing even the Scientologists (who famously hassled people for posting seven lines from an OT rundown, rather than a mere four lines).
It's nice that these books are back in print but Purple House's behavior bugs me enough that I can't let myself buy anything from them. Sigh.
Keith hasn't gotten refugee status in Canada yet. He's been let out of jail, and his application for refugee status has been accepted. That means Canada's immigration authorities accepted some papers from Keith's lawyers and said they'd think about it. What happens next is a bunch of investigation, hearings, etc. that can take up to two years, though Keith hopes to make things go faster than that.
This is as good an immediate outcome as could be hoped for. Some alternatives were that he could have been kept in jail longer, or booted back across the border to the US.
For more info and updates, see here.
and I agree with the the above. I had pretty much the same deal that Oskar has: I worked for a summer at about 1/3 the salary I could have gotten working for a company. It's the same way with the FSF now. The FSF programmers are very good, and they take a big financial hit to work there because that's what they want to be doing. I also learned a hell of a lot working for RMS. He can be a pain to be around, but he is the best programmer most of us will ever meet, and the experience of those many late night hacking sessions with him was more valuable than any amount of money that industry might have paid.
It's important for these projects to have some fulltime staff around because they do ongoing grunt work (writing unglamorous utilities etc.) that it's hard to find volunteers for. So I just donated some $ to the Freenet project and hope that they can continue to keep people like Oskar on board. One thing the FSF found is that it's generally preferable to keep people around for longer periods than a few months, so they can do bigger projects, but one does what one can.
The book
Mindstorms:Children Computers and Powerful Ideas
by Seymour Papert, while somewhat dated (it was written in 1980), says a lot about teaching computers to children. Papert was a student of Jean Piaget who was a pioneer in developmental psychology. The Mindstorms software uses the Logo language and there is a bunch of Lego hardware being made for it now. It's cool stuff.
I really don't have much sympathy -- even if you don't want to pay for the guide data, plugging the thing into the wall to use Tivo's dialup to access Tivo's network to sync to Tivo's NTP servers means you're using their service and therefore are going to get the upgrades and other such things, and rightly so.
That's like saying if you look at Microsoft's web site to check the latest security alerts, you're using their service so they have the right to "upgrade" your operating system. Things aren't that bad yet!
I would find it very obnoxious that a record was created showing who was visiting my apartment and exactly when they came and left. It wouldn't help if everyone in the building could see the video.
The legal situation is unclear, at least to me. There's lots of precedent that you can shoot video of comings and goings a public street or sidewalk. However, I'm under the impression that you're not allowed to point the camera into private property.
Here's a link called Continuous Video Surveillance that has a bunch of citations and further links, but doesn't have a clearcut answer. I found it in about half a minute of Googling, so there might be better stuff out there that's still easy to find.
If you write your passphrases on a slip of paper that you keep in your pocket or wallet (or maybe in your PDA or wristwatch), it will be safe from pretty much any type of computer attack. Unless you're afraid of maurauding crackers or FBI agents actually mugging or searching you, a long passphrase written down so you won't forget it is safer than a short memorized one that an attacker can guess or search for by brute force.
The main caution is, don't write your passphrase down and leave it near your computer. Carry it with you.
In the early days, CD-ROM drives couldn't rip audio, mostly for the precise reason you describe--pressure from music publishers. You could modify the early Philips drives to rip audio but of course few people bothered. Then some drive vendors started putting in the ripping feature, and the cat was out of the bag. I think the Toshiba XM-3401B (the premier 2x SCSI drive for a few weeks) was one of the first to offer reliable ripping. But soon nearly every new drive could rip.
While gzip was written to replace "compress", it's simply a packaging of the existing "deflate" algorithm from the info-zip utility and in fact uses the same code. I don't know about PNG but it's hardly rocket science.
and I don't even use Napster. But I'm outraged at the RIAA litigation and I don't like the industry any more.
Am I boycotting CD's, meaning going without something I need/want as a protest? Nah. If there's a specific CD that I want, then I'll buy it. But I no longer browse cd's in record stores and buy them just to find stuff to listen to. So I buy 2 or 3 cd's a year now, instead of 2 or 3 a month. There's other ways I can spend the time. The same goes for DVD's--though actually I pretty much refuse to buy new DVD's, though I have a few used ones.
Sorry RIAA and Hollywood, I just don't need your product.
It's been done already. Check out the
Free World License--a clickthrough
license that permits use of the program only
under free operating systems. Yes, among
the advertised features are "Denounced by Richard Stallman!"
and "Rejected by Eric Raymond!".
RMS's objection, by the way, isn't the restriction
to free OS's (he seems sympathetic to that). Rather, it's that he doesn't like click-through licenses and wants to stay with copyright licenses like the GPL. The FWL author, though, felt that the FWL terms would be harder to enforce without the clickthrough agreement.
I'd be very careful if I was the plaintiff. Somehow I expect to see Craig Mundie on the Sunday gasbag news shows commenting on the case, and expensive anti-GPL lawyers appearing for the defense, funded by unknown sources but who all seem to come from the area of Redmond, Washington.:-(((
The previous message had a typing error--I meant to say, in order to be added to the bug-gnu-emacs mailing list,
write to bug-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org.
Always use the -request convention for requests to be added or removed from a list. Sorry for the slip.
An often overlooked aspect of most GNU software
on
Closed-Source Tests
·
· Score: 1
is that the bug lists are public. For example,
you can report Emacs bugs to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, a mailing list of people who see all the bug reports. Want to see all
the bug reports yourself? Write bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org and ask to be added to the bug-gnu-emacs list. Some other free software projects, but not all of them, publish their bug info like that. A non-software example is Intel's errata list, which was secret until the media uproar over the FDIV bug. Now it's public.
I think publishing bug lists does a lot to keep developers honest. Simply opening source isn't enough. If the bug reports for those tests were available--not necessarily to the whole public, but say, to the test administrators of school districts using those tests--that would have prevented a lot of the consequences of this problem.
called Visabuxx. If the card number doesn't somehow disclose that the holder is underage, then AVS can't operate by credit cards. On the other hand, if the card does reveal the holder's age, that's a bad privacy violation and exposes the teenager to all kinds of unwanted attention. The mailing lists of teens who use those cards would become a hot commodity for pedophiles as well as more traditional greedy merchants.
Many years ago, a friend of mine was asked to rerelease a copylefted program under non-copyleft terms, and he responded more or less like this:
Sometimes I work on free software, and sometimes I work on proprietary software--but when I work on proprietary software, I expect to get
paid.
He was willing to share his work with a community that shares software, but saw no reason to give a handout to a business making products that would be off-limits to our community. His goal was different from mine, but he decided that the GNU GPL was useful for his goal too.
This is the approach I've used at various times over the years (and I think I'm the guy RMS is referring to in that quote). I prefer to work on free software and will sometimes give a discount to clients who agree to release what I write for them as free software. But it's the client's money, so he calls the shots and I either have to come to an agreement with him or work for someone else instead. However, if it's entirely up to me--as is the case when I'm not getting paid at all--I use the GPL.
Anonymizer.com heck. Hotmail is
what most people think of as anonymous.
They make no attempt to verify the personal
info you enter. Of course they reveal the
sender's IP address--but if you're posting from
a school or library, that's not much to go on.
It's another medium of information exchange, protected )at least in the US) by the First Amendment, just like a newspaper. That means people have the right to publish on the internet including anonymously (see ACLU vs. Reno, and Ohio Board of Elections vs. McIntyre, or EFF for more info).
The question to ask isn't why should this new and dangerous "anonymity" thing be allowed on the internet. It's why should our old and familiar freedom be stopped on the internet. And of course, it shouldn't.
Keith's sentencing hearing was yesterday and his motion to postpone sentencing pending appeal apparently didn't go anywhere. So he'd have been thrown in jail and by the time his appeals were complete, his 200-day recommended sentence would have been over. However, since he wouldn't have had any income in jail, he'd have likely lost his house (he's permitted to keep it in bankruptcy under the homestead exemption). As it is, he's applying for permission to work in Canada, so he'll be able to keep making payments. There's some more info on this on the currently-slashdotted Free Henson site, which will hopefully be back in operation soon.
If of any interest,
Skipjack (used by Clipper) and KEA (used by Capstone) were declassified in 1998 because the Fortezza hardware was too expensive for the Defense Messaging System. They wanted to switch to software implementations, so they had to declassify the algorithms.
But I thought law offices had libraries full of law books that had all the laws relevant to the jurisdiction. So what happens if you get into a lawsuit with somebody over a zoning dispute? Your lawyer is supposed to go to the city office to find out what the law says? And if the 5th circuit says the text is supposed to be available "for inspection and copying" (emph. added), then what copyright issue does that create?
We should know by now that the more politicians know about technology, the more ways they can figure out to screw it up. Gore and Clinton were quite tech-literate, and as a result we got the CDA, DMCA, and almost got the Clipper chip. I'd rather have had them asleep at the wheel.
Here's an article from "Patent Lawyer" calling Rohrabacher a "hero" for fighting in favor of submarine patents. And here's Rohrabacher in his own words on get this, the Reagan.com site. This NAWBO page is also interesting:
"Co-sponsorship [of HR 1907] by Rohrabacher and Campbell is quite a coup for the proponents of patent reform legislation given Rohrabacher's four year campaign to obstruct any reform of the U.S. patent system."
Typing "rohrabacher patent" into Google finds any amount of other creepy stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine quoted a four-line poem from Space Child's Mother Goose ("Probable Probable My Black Hen") on her web page, and Purple House Press sent this letter (discussion accompanies it at that url). While Purple House didn't specifically brandish actual litigation, they threatened to hassle my friend's ISP about the quote (presumably under the DMCA), thus outdoing even the Scientologists (who famously hassled people for posting seven lines from an OT rundown, rather than a mere four lines).
It's nice that these books are back in print but Purple House's behavior bugs me enough that I can't let myself buy anything from them. Sigh.
This is as good an immediate outcome as could be hoped for. Some alternatives were that he could have been kept in jail longer, or booted back across the border to the US. For more info and updates, see here.
It's important for these projects to have some fulltime staff around because they do ongoing grunt work (writing unglamorous utilities etc.) that it's hard to find volunteers for. So I just donated some $ to the Freenet project and hope that they can continue to keep people like Oskar on board. One thing the FSF found is that it's generally preferable to keep people around for longer periods than a few months, so they can do bigger projects, but one does what one can.
The book Mindstorms:Children Computers and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert, while somewhat dated (it was written in 1980), says a lot about teaching computers to children. Papert was a student of Jean Piaget who was a pioneer in developmental psychology. The Mindstorms software uses the Logo language and there is a bunch of Lego hardware being made for it now. It's cool stuff.
If you're not a subscriber, how can the subscriber agreement be binding on you???
I would find it very obnoxious that a record was created showing who was visiting my apartment and exactly when they came and left. It wouldn't help if everyone in the building could see the video. The legal situation is unclear, at least to me. There's lots of precedent that you can shoot video of comings and goings a public street or sidewalk. However, I'm under the impression that you're not allowed to point the camera into private property. Here's a link called Continuous Video Surveillance that has a bunch of citations and further links, but doesn't have a clearcut answer. I found it in about half a minute of Googling, so there might be better stuff out there that's still easy to find.
The main caution is, don't write your passphrase down and leave it near your computer. Carry it with you.
Here's a Javascript page that I wrote to generate secure random passphrases, by the way.
In the early days, CD-ROM drives couldn't rip audio, mostly for the precise reason you describe--pressure from music publishers. You could modify the early Philips drives to rip audio but of course few people bothered. Then some drive vendors started putting in the ripping feature, and the cat was out of the bag. I think the Toshiba XM-3401B (the premier 2x SCSI drive for a few weeks) was one of the first to offer reliable ripping. But soon nearly every new drive could rip.
While gzip was written to replace "compress", it's simply a packaging of the existing "deflate" algorithm from the info-zip utility and in fact uses the same code. I don't know about PNG but it's hardly rocket science.
Am I boycotting CD's, meaning going without something I need/want as a protest? Nah. If there's a specific CD that I want, then I'll buy it. But I no longer browse cd's in record stores and buy them just to find stuff to listen to. So I buy 2 or 3 cd's a year now, instead of 2 or 3 a month. There's other ways I can spend the time. The same goes for DVD's--though actually I pretty much refuse to buy new DVD's, though I have a few used ones.
Sorry RIAA and Hollywood, I just don't need your product.
RMS's objection, by the way, isn't the restriction to free OS's (he seems sympathetic to that). Rather, it's that he doesn't like click-through licenses and wants to stay with copyright licenses like the GPL. The FWL author, though, felt that the FWL terms would be harder to enforce without the clickthrough agreement.
I'd be very careful if I was the plaintiff. Somehow I expect to see Craig Mundie on the Sunday gasbag news shows commenting on the case, and expensive anti-GPL lawyers appearing for the defense, funded by unknown sources but who all seem to come from the area of Redmond, Washington. :-(((
The previous message had a typing error--I meant to say, in order to be added to the bug-gnu-emacs mailing list, write to bug-gnu-emacs-request@gnu.org. Always use the -request convention for requests to be added or removed from a list. Sorry for the slip.
I think publishing bug lists does a lot to keep developers honest. Simply opening source isn't enough. If the bug reports for those tests were available--not necessarily to the whole public, but say, to the test administrators of school districts using those tests--that would have prevented a lot of the consequences of this problem.
called Visabuxx. If the card number doesn't somehow disclose that the holder is underage, then AVS can't operate by credit cards. On the other hand, if the card does reveal the holder's age, that's a bad privacy violation and exposes the teenager to all kinds of unwanted attention. The mailing lists of teens who use those cards would become a hot commodity for pedophiles as well as more traditional greedy merchants.
Anonymizer.com heck. Hotmail is what most people think of as anonymous. They make no attempt to verify the personal info you enter. Of course they reveal the sender's IP address--but if you're posting from a school or library, that's not much to go on.
The question to ask isn't why should this new and dangerous "anonymity" thing be allowed on the internet. It's why should our old and familiar freedom be stopped on the internet. And of course, it shouldn't.
Keith's sentencing hearing was yesterday and his motion to postpone sentencing pending appeal apparently didn't go anywhere. So he'd have been thrown in jail and by the time his appeals were complete, his 200-day recommended sentence would have been over. However, since he wouldn't have had any income in jail, he'd have likely lost his house (he's permitted to keep it in bankruptcy under the homestead exemption). As it is, he's applying for permission to work in Canada, so he'll be able to keep making payments. There's some more info on this on the currently-slashdotted Free Henson site, which will hopefully be back in operation soon.
If of any interest, Skipjack (used by Clipper) and KEA (used by Capstone) were declassified in 1998 because the Fortezza hardware was too expensive for the Defense Messaging System. They wanted to switch to software implementations, so they had to declassify the algorithms.
Nautilus (the phone encryption program, not the Gnome thing) was written in response to EPIC's obtaining those documents via the FOIA.
But I thought law offices had libraries full of law books that had all the laws relevant to the jurisdiction. So what happens if you get into a lawsuit with somebody over a zoning dispute? Your lawyer is supposed to go to the city office to find out what the law says? And if the 5th circuit says the text is supposed to be available "for inspection and copying" (emph. added), then what copyright issue does that create?
We should know by now that the more politicians know about technology, the more ways they can figure out to screw it up. Gore and Clinton were quite tech-literate, and as a result we got the CDA, DMCA, and almost got the Clipper chip. I'd rather have had them asleep at the wheel.
Typing "rohrabacher patent" into Google finds any amount of other creepy stuff.