Do a search on Google. You'll find nearly identical articles going back at least two years. Is anyone really surprised that the NSA is strongarming software companies into giving them backdoors?
The question is, how will the NSA try to fight open-source backdoor-free software? Don't think that they won't. They tried for a long time to keep crypto export restrictions. Having lost that, they are not just sitting there -- "oh woe is me, the open-source guys beat us!" Remember, these are the Echelon guys. They don't send cease-and-desist orders through a bunch of lawyers. They bug your house and tap your phone. They're working on the way to open up strong encryption like a can of tuna.
From the article:
Color printing has been getting cheaper, and full color, though still fantastically expensive to set up for production, is now considered mandatory for high school and introductory college textbooks.
Why is that mandatory? My thermodynamics book had only the barest of black-and-white line-drawing illustrations, yet it was one of the most useful books I had in college. I think a big reason why open-source books have not caught on is that many college professors write/contribute to textbooks. If your book is a Kinko's production used by your own students only, next to a full-color nationwide-selling slick-looking textbook by one of your peers, you don't get the same respect or financial gain. Content doesn't matter, so it's not really the issue. It's marketing.
Production costs for something less than the finest full-color production are incredibly cheap (since the days of Gutenberg -- the German inventor, not the web site -- black and white has always been pretty cheap), there's no reason textbooks couldn't be close to free, other than greed. We've been sold the idea that slick packaging means better education.
Maybe if every parent who pays for their kid's education made a fuss about the cost of textbooks, schools would look for other solutions.
You don't need a GPS to play!
on
Geocaching
·
· Score: 2
For the old-schoolers, or if you want to handicap: lose the GPS and get your USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) maps out. Navigate using a compass, or, for an additional challenge, on pure terrain association. That's actually quite a bit more fun than using a GPS -- it's actually *possible* to get lost.
The FBI could get into the business of counting hits. I mean, they'd be reading through all the traffic anyway; they might as well do something useful with it...
From the article: Earlier this year, Nascar, the stock-car racing league, backed off an attempt to make reporters agree that Nascar was sole owner of "images, sounds and data arising from and during any Nascar event" -- including the racing times and scoring information.
"They were saying, `If it happens during the event, we own the intellectual property rights to it,' " said Michael Persinger, the sports editor of The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, the epicenter of the Nascar universe. "You can't own the news."
If the IOC is able to squash anyone broadcasting "their" information, what's to stop a political candidate from demanding that anything happening during one of his rallies (let's say he calls someone a major-league %$#@%$) cannot be reported by anyone but those whom he selects. After all, "any use of the term 'major-league %$#@%$' is the sole property of candidate --------"
Unfortunately, there are many people whose lives were destroyed during the 50's and 60's when the cold war was raging who might disagree with you. People get railroaded (it's still happening-just ask Wen Ho Lee). It's been happening since the beginning of civilization. It's probably far better in the US today than in the past, and compared to other nations throughout history. But where there is power of surveillance, there will be abuse. The framers of the constitution believed that it is better that "ten guilty men go free than one innocent man put in jail". That is the economy of freedom. The FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) is almost always completely unapologetic when it is confronted with the fact that it put away an innocent man. That is their economy -- better ten innocent men go to jail than a guilty man go free.
As I see it, helping with this effort would be agreeing to the music industry's "right" to keep people from engaging in fair use of recordings they have bought.
If the DVD-CCA said "dear hacker community, please help us make it possible for people not do anything with DVD's but watch them on a DVD-CCA licensed player", how many people would go for it?
This is not much different. But most people have their price. Maybe $10k is enough to overcome conscience on this one.
The penalty for cracking seems to be way out of proporion to the damage. Government seems to go after crackers with abandon, though many do less real damage than your average spraypaint-enabled vandal. Why is this? Partly, it is out of the fact that it is hard to catch and prove cracking. "We shoot horse thieves out here." In a frontier society, with a lot of space and not much law presence, justice is swift and brutal. Things that would get a fine in the city would get you executed on the frontier. I think this reaction is what we are seeing in law enforcement for cracking. The net is like the frontier. It's really hard to catch anyone doing something illegal. Even if the damage is slight, it's treated like a major offense. This is an attempt to limit behavior that the government recognizes it has no real way to monitor or control. It's acting in order to preserve society as it sees it from the threat of complete lawlessness.
I really don't think that 1) persecuting crackers who do minimal damage is right or 2) that it will really stop the problem. But that is where we are at.
"creating the first of a new kind of digital library."
I think Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg had this "new kind of library" very much in mind in 1971 when he started PG. I think that ibiblbibiblbiblio is a great site, it's just that it is not quite as groundbreaking as an idea as that.
MicroMachines is proud to announce its most durable line of toy vehicles ever! Made of space-age Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film, these little cars and trucks are virtually indestructible and now weigh as much as the full sized vehicle!
CAUTION: Do not drop Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on your little brother's head. Placing Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on railroad tracks may cause derailment and death.
This is a great development - for professionals and serious photographers. The average consumer has no real need for 16.8 million pixels. A million or two is more than fine for taking photos of the dog and sending them to Aunt Rita. Plus, now you're working with some pretty huge files. If you've ever tried to edit a 4000 x 4000 image on your computer, you know what I mean. It would be nice -- and more relevant to the average consumer -- if this technology can be used to bring 1-2 million pixel cameras into the $200-300 range and be competitive with decent low-end 35mm film cameras.
AOL is the *default* choice of internet provider for most people who buy computers these days. And they do a great job of making it so simple that most of their customers don't think there is any other way. Saying "AOL sucks. Get a real ISP." doesn't work. All I have to do is show an AOL user Outlook Express. While not the best e-mail client, it is far far better than AOL's e-mail. "You mean it automatically saves the messages on my computer? They don't get deleted after two weeks?" and so on.
Many many people have enough ability to use dial-up networking and configure Outlook or Eudora or whatever, and use ICQ. Once they see that life without AOL is actually better, they will switch. But it means you might have to take the time to educate someone a bit. Help them out. Once people with AOL feel "closed off" to their friends without it, there will be the demand from AOL's own customer base to implement access. They don't care about you on the outside. AOL doesn't win many customers from other ISP's, so you're not and never will be an AOL user. But they care about losing their existing customers. Once their users are ticked because their friends can't talk to them through IM, they will make AOL give in. AOL does listen to it's customers. They just don't listen to you. So make their customers do the work.
-------------
The truth is out th- oh, wait, here is is...
My company was fucked long before the web site existed. Therefore they are infringing on my IP. I believe I'll ask for it back as soon as we clear all those escaped zoo monkeys out of shipping/receiving.
Is worth a ton of firewalls and proxies. The fact is, if you make it possible to get at the credit card numbers over a public network, someone smarter than you will work harder to get them than you worked to secure them. The solution is simply to physically isolate the long-term storage of credit card numbers -- put them on a database server which is not accessible to the Net. Use a zip disk or a tape or whatever to batch what comes in to your web site. Every day (or hour or whatever), you have a process on the web database server dump the info to removable media, you physically walk it over to the isolated server, and you load it there. Once the batch is transferred successfully, you run a second process that deletes the credit card numbers from the web database server. If anyone manages to crack your web server, they can only credit cards entered from the time the previous batch was completed. If you don't have repeat customers enter their information again (you have the transactions go through the isolated server), then there's even that much more protection. The compromise of a few dozen credit cards (or even a few hundred) is a very manageable situation.
Putting all customers' credit card info on a publicly-accessible server is saying "we don't think anyone can get in" because the result of someone getting in would be catastrophic. That's a foolish and arrogant position. It's like not having homeowner's insurance. If you design your system, which, to some people's surprise, includes actual physical and human considerations, to minimize the effect of failure on any one piece, then you don't have to say "everyone who was ever our customer is now at risk".
Well, now we are seeing the (possibly lack of) disaster recovery plans by Western Union. We didn't ever think it would happen -- now what do we do?
----------------
The truth is out th - oh, wait, here it is...
It's going to hurt a bit. That's what I tell people when they say they want to "know" how to use a computer. There's a real gap between expectations and reality. A great many of the non-tech think that you can just "know" what to do, like a pill you ingest and suddenly you have it. The very same people would not ask my carpenter friend "I want to know how to do carpentry." They would say "I want to learn carpentry." They simply understand that it's a process of learning, that you can't just "get it" and move on to constructing complex forms. They realize that if they really want to learn carpentry, they have to get their boots, their old jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of work gloves and show up ready to get slivers, cuts, and maybe even yelled at by the foreman. They'd be doing only the simplest tasks to start. And so on...The point is, that with most "hard" skills, people are aware that they must count the cost of attaining skill. No matter how "user friendly" I make a saw or drill or whatever, you can still FUBAR your project with a simple mistake. You can use tools that skip/automate steps, sure, but you had better know and understand all the steps that are being performed automatically. If you don't, your results may not match your expectations.
It doesn't mean that you need to be able to read assembler to use Word. You don't need to know how to work on your car's engine in order to drive it. But you should know the basics of the fuel, transmission, exhaust, and suspension systems of the car. Just because your car has automatic transmission (it automates the steps of shifting for you for EASE), it doesn't mean you should not know at least that your car is changing gears as you accelerate. "I just step on this pedal here and it goes and the one over here to stop" would inspire little confidence in one's driving ability.
Likewise, you should know the basics of the filesystem, the OS, the hardware, even if you want to just make a spreadsheet. Hardware and software manufacturers have spread the notion that you do not. If it was a car instead of a computer, someone might get killed; with a computer people just "run over" their files. Oops.
Basically, I try to educate people that the reality is that if you really want to "know" how to use a computer, you're going to have to learn. And it can hurt. And it's easier for some to pick up than others. And you screw up. And who told you that it wasn't like that?
If this really is to take off for the average guy, it might be worthwhile to add a DVD player to the mix (you would just need a pc DVD drive and possibly a hardware decoder). With that, you could get away without a VCR. You can tape broadcast and rent movies. Without DVD capability, you still need a separate VCR or DVD to watch rentals.
It seems very possible that it isn't even true. The Aug 30 post on the site says:
"Here's our last release before we take a little break from the DC scene. We are frankly tired of all of you ungrateful assholes out there who do nothing but whine about our releases. We will give you this game today, but we have chosen to keep our current rips of Ultimate Fighting Championship and Sega GT internal. We don't have to release to the public nor are we really interested in doing so right now with the attitude that most of the end-user base shows."
So this may be just a bit of a prank played on the "ungrateful" hordes who don't appreciate the work that they do...
But if the stock option thing is true, this may encourage the people who doing the same thing or even contemplating getting into ripping DC games. Either you get the thrill of being part of the "underground" scene, or you get recognition and money from Sega saying "you're too good for us, please stop, we surrender, here's some money." There isn't much of a downside.
"Calling themselves the Order of Reason, some mages banded together to educate and enlighten the masses, using science and technology to brighten the world's darker corners. Over the years, however, as this Order became dominant, it began to promote conformity. Iconoclasts and deviants were gradually eliminated through the use of science, financial pressure and social ostracism."
Hey, is he talking about the jocks, administrators, guidance counselors, and cheerleaders at Columbine again?
Jon, you have a very tenuous hold on reality yourself. Perhaps when we hear every phone in the world ringing at once, we'll know you have finally entered the Net and soon the white magic will flow like water, bringing peace, geek-dom, and a Gattica-free future for all! But be careful, you might end up like the big bad Order of Reason if you get too full of your cyber-self.
but what if he took the hex RBG values for a bitmap that would be identical to one of those icons and put it on a T-Shirt? Would that still be copyright infringement?
Slashdot Mirror
We need to start exporting script kidd3z -- and it'll help the trade deficit!
-------------
Do a search on Google. You'll find nearly identical articles going back at least two years. Is anyone really surprised that the NSA is strongarming software companies into giving them backdoors?
The question is, how will the NSA try to fight open-source backdoor-free software? Don't think that they won't. They tried for a long time to keep crypto export restrictions. Having lost that, they are not just sitting there -- "oh woe is me, the open-source guys beat us!" Remember, these are the Echelon guys. They don't send cease-and-desist orders through a bunch of lawyers. They bug your house and tap your phone. They're working on the way to open up strong encryption like a can of tuna.
-------------
From the article:
Color printing has been getting cheaper, and full color, though still fantastically expensive to set up for production, is now considered mandatory for high school and introductory college textbooks.
Why is that mandatory? My thermodynamics book had only the barest of black-and-white line-drawing illustrations, yet it was one of the most useful books I had in college. I think a big reason why open-source books have not caught on is that many college professors write/contribute to textbooks. If your book is a Kinko's production used by your own students only, next to a full-color nationwide-selling slick-looking textbook by one of your peers, you don't get the same respect or financial gain. Content doesn't matter, so it's not really the issue. It's marketing.
Production costs for something less than the finest full-color production are incredibly cheap (since the days of Gutenberg -- the German inventor, not the web site -- black and white has always been pretty cheap), there's no reason textbooks couldn't be close to free, other than greed. We've been sold the idea that slick packaging means better education.
Maybe if every parent who pays for their kid's education made a fuss about the cost of textbooks, schools would look for other solutions.
-------------
...Fair F*ckin' Use?
-------------
For the old-schoolers, or if you want to handicap: lose the GPS and get your USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) maps out. Navigate using a compass, or, for an additional challenge, on pure terrain association. That's actually quite a bit more fun than using a GPS -- it's actually *possible* to get lost.
-------------
The FBI could get into the business of counting hits. I mean, they'd be reading through all the traffic anyway; they might as well do something useful with it...
-------------
Sorry, that last paragraph is not part of the article (obvious to anyone who actually read it) - I hit the submit button when I meant preview...
-------------
From the article:
Earlier this year, Nascar, the stock-car racing league, backed off an attempt to make reporters agree that Nascar was sole owner of "images, sounds and data arising from and during any Nascar event" -- including the racing times and scoring information.
"They were saying, `If it happens during the event, we own the intellectual property rights to it,' " said Michael Persinger, the sports editor of The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, the epicenter of the Nascar universe. "You can't own the news."
If the IOC is able to squash anyone broadcasting "their" information, what's to stop a political candidate from demanding that anything happening during one of his rallies (let's say he calls someone a major-league %$#@%$) cannot be reported by anyone but those whom he selects. After all, "any use of the term 'major-league %$#@%$' is the sole property of candidate --------"
-------------
Unfortunately, there are many people whose lives were destroyed during the 50's and 60's when the cold war was raging who might disagree with you. People get railroaded (it's still happening-just ask Wen Ho Lee). It's been happening since the beginning of civilization. It's probably far better in the US today than in the past, and compared to other nations throughout history. But where there is power of surveillance, there will be abuse. The framers of the constitution believed that it is better that "ten guilty men go free than one innocent man put in jail". That is the economy of freedom. The FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) is almost always completely unapologetic when it is confronted with the fact that it put away an innocent man. That is their economy -- better ten innocent men go to jail than a guilty man go free.
-------------
As I see it, helping with this effort would be agreeing to the music industry's "right" to keep people from engaging in fair use of recordings they have bought.
If the DVD-CCA said "dear hacker community, please help us make it possible for people not do anything with DVD's but watch them on a DVD-CCA licensed player", how many people would go for it?
This is not much different. But most people have their price. Maybe $10k is enough to overcome conscience on this one.
-------------
The penalty for cracking seems to be way out of proporion to the damage. Government seems to go after crackers with abandon, though many do less real damage than your average spraypaint-enabled vandal. Why is this? Partly, it is out of the fact that it is hard to catch and prove cracking. "We shoot horse thieves out here." In a frontier society, with a lot of space and not much law presence, justice is swift and brutal. Things that would get a fine in the city would get you executed on the frontier. I think this reaction is what we are seeing in law enforcement for cracking. The net is like the frontier. It's really hard to catch anyone doing something illegal. Even if the damage is slight, it's treated like a major offense. This is an attempt to limit behavior that the government recognizes it has no real way to monitor or control. It's acting in order to preserve society as it sees it from the threat of complete lawlessness.
I really don't think that 1) persecuting crackers who do minimal damage is right or 2) that it will really stop the problem. But that is where we are at.
-------------
"creating the first of a new kind of digital library."
I think Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg had this "new kind of library" very much in mind in 1971 when he started PG. I think that ibiblbibiblbiblio is a great site, it's just that it is not quite as groundbreaking as an idea as that.
-------------
********PRESS RELEASE***********
MicroMachines is proud to announce its most durable line of toy vehicles ever! Made of space-age Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film, these little cars and trucks are virtually indestructible and now weigh as much as the full sized vehicle!
CAUTION: Do not drop Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on your little brother's head. Placing Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on railroad tracks may cause derailment and death.
-------------
http://www.techtransfer.a nl.gov/techtour/diamondmems.html
-------------
This is a great development - for professionals and serious photographers. The average consumer has no real need for 16.8 million pixels. A million or two is more than fine for taking photos of the dog and sending them to Aunt Rita. Plus, now you're working with some pretty huge files. If you've ever tried to edit a 4000 x 4000 image on your computer, you know what I mean. It would be nice -- and more relevant to the average consumer -- if this technology can be used to bring 1-2 million pixel cameras into the $200-300 range and be competitive with decent low-end 35mm film cameras.
-------------
AOL is the *default* choice of internet provider for most people who buy computers these days. And they do a great job of making it so simple that most of their customers don't think there is any other way. Saying "AOL sucks. Get a real ISP." doesn't work. All I have to do is show an AOL user Outlook Express. While not the best e-mail client, it is far far better than AOL's e-mail. "You mean it automatically saves the messages on my computer? They don't get deleted after two weeks?" and so on.
Many many people have enough ability to use dial-up networking and configure Outlook or Eudora or whatever, and use ICQ. Once they see that life without AOL is actually better, they will switch. But it means you might have to take the time to educate someone a bit. Help them out. Once people with AOL feel "closed off" to their friends without it, there will be the demand from AOL's own customer base to implement access. They don't care about you on the outside. AOL doesn't win many customers from other ISP's, so you're not and never will be an AOL user. But they care about losing their existing customers. Once their users are ticked because their friends can't talk to them through IM, they will make AOL give in. AOL does listen to it's customers. They just don't listen to you. So make their customers do the work.
-------------
The truth is out th- oh, wait, here is is...
-------------
My company was fucked long before the web site existed. Therefore they are infringing on my IP. I believe I'll ask for it back as soon as we clear all those escaped zoo monkeys out of shipping/receiving.
-------------
Is worth a ton of firewalls and proxies. The fact is, if you make it possible to get at the credit card numbers over a public network, someone smarter than you will work harder to get them than you worked to secure them. The solution is simply to physically isolate the long-term storage of credit card numbers -- put them on a database server which is not accessible to the Net. Use a zip disk or a tape or whatever to batch what comes in to your web site. Every day (or hour or whatever), you have a process on the web database server dump the info to removable media, you physically walk it over to the isolated server, and you load it there. Once the batch is transferred successfully, you run a second process that deletes the credit card numbers from the web database server. If anyone manages to crack your web server, they can only credit cards entered from the time the previous batch was completed. If you don't have repeat customers enter their information again (you have the transactions go through the isolated server), then there's even that much more protection. The compromise of a few dozen credit cards (or even a few hundred) is a very manageable situation.
Putting all customers' credit card info on a publicly-accessible server is saying "we don't think anyone can get in" because the result of someone getting in would be catastrophic. That's a foolish and arrogant position. It's like not having homeowner's insurance. If you design your system, which, to some people's surprise, includes actual physical and human considerations, to minimize the effect of failure on any one piece, then you don't have to say "everyone who was ever our customer is now at risk".
Well, now we are seeing the (possibly lack of) disaster recovery plans by Western Union. We didn't ever think it would happen -- now what do we do?
----------------
The truth is out th - oh, wait, here it is...
-------------
Download 'em (while you can) and decide for yourself:
http://www.mvpsoft.com/soft-arcade.html
http://www.webfootgames.com/newindex.html
http://www.egames.com/_asp/ egames.asp?nav=home&con=home
---------
The truth is out th - oh, wait, here it is...
-------------
It's going to hurt a bit. That's what I tell people when they say they want to "know" how to use a computer. There's a real gap between expectations and reality. A great many of the non-tech think that you can just "know" what to do, like a pill you ingest and suddenly you have it. The very same people would not ask my carpenter friend "I want to know how to do carpentry." They would say "I want to learn carpentry." They simply understand that it's a process of learning, that you can't just "get it" and move on to constructing complex forms. They realize that if they really want to learn carpentry, they have to get their boots, their old jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of work gloves and show up ready to get slivers, cuts, and maybe even yelled at by the foreman. They'd be doing only the simplest tasks to start. And so on...The point is, that with most "hard" skills, people are aware that they must count the cost of attaining skill. No matter how "user friendly" I make a saw or drill or whatever, you can still FUBAR your project with a simple mistake. You can use tools that skip/automate steps, sure, but you had better know and understand all the steps that are being performed automatically. If you don't, your results may not match your expectations.
It doesn't mean that you need to be able to read assembler to use Word. You don't need to know how to work on your car's engine in order to drive it. But you should know the basics of the fuel, transmission, exhaust, and suspension systems of the car. Just because your car has automatic transmission (it automates the steps of shifting for you for EASE), it doesn't mean you should not know at least that your car is changing gears as you accelerate. "I just step on this pedal here and it goes and the one over here to stop" would inspire little confidence in one's driving ability.
Likewise, you should know the basics of the filesystem, the OS, the hardware, even if you want to just make a spreadsheet. Hardware and software manufacturers have spread the notion that you do not. If it was a car instead of a computer, someone might get killed; with a computer people just "run over" their files. Oops.
Basically, I try to educate people that the reality is that if you really want to "know" how to use a computer, you're going to have to learn. And it can hurt. And it's easier for some to pick up than others. And you screw up. And who told you that it wasn't like that?
-------------
If this really is to take off for the average guy, it might be worthwhile to add a DVD player to the mix (you would just need a pc DVD drive and possibly a hardware decoder). With that, you could get away without a VCR. You can tape broadcast and rent movies. Without DVD capability, you still need a separate VCR or DVD to watch rentals.
-------------
It seems very possible that it isn't even true. The Aug 30 post on the site says: "Here's our last release before we take a little break from the DC scene. We are frankly tired of all of you ungrateful assholes out there who do nothing but whine about our releases. We will give you this game today, but we have chosen to keep our current rips of Ultimate Fighting Championship and Sega GT internal. We don't have to release to the public nor are we really interested in doing so right now with the attitude that most of the end-user base shows."
So this may be just a bit of a prank played on the "ungrateful" hordes who don't appreciate the work that they do...
But if the stock option thing is true, this may encourage the people who doing the same thing or even contemplating getting into ripping DC games. Either you get the thrill of being part of the "underground" scene, or you get recognition and money from Sega saying "you're too good for us, please stop, we surrender, here's some money." There isn't much of a downside.
-------------
Go to the actual site (http://forums.itworld.com/webx?14@@.ee6 caf5) to post a question. /. is not hosting the interview.
Thrashing...please wait...
-------------
"Calling themselves the Order of Reason, some mages banded together to educate and enlighten the masses, using science and technology to brighten the world's darker corners. Over the years, however, as this Order became dominant, it began to promote conformity. Iconoclasts and deviants were gradually eliminated through the use of science, financial pressure and social ostracism."
Hey, is he talking about the jocks, administrators, guidance counselors, and cheerleaders at Columbine again?
Jon, you have a very tenuous hold on reality yourself. Perhaps when we hear every phone in the world ringing at once, we'll know you have finally entered the Net and soon the white magic will flow like water, bringing peace, geek-dom, and a Gattica-free future for all! But be careful, you might end up like the big bad Order of Reason if you get too full of your cyber-self.
-------------
but what if he took the hex RBG values for a bitmap that would be identical to one of those icons and put it on a T-Shirt? Would that still be copyright infringement?
-------------