This company is brilliant. eBay wants to deliver their app to the Palm platform, so they come in with a bid to put a Perl regex layer in the middle of everything as a translator. HAHAAHAAHAHAAHAHA!!! *wipes tears from eyes*
--Cut to a smoke filled room....
We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.
But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!
Amen. What a hideous cludge and sad excuse for an architecture. I can understand the motivation for a translator or IBM's transcoder product for a site with massive amounts of static content they don't want to convert, but eBay?
If anybody in this world has the money to spend and the reason to spend it on a good architecture it is eBay.(They lost, what, $5B in market cap due to their recurring crashes?)
Separating presentation from business logic has been standard software architecture practice since the MVC pattern in Smalltalk, 1988. Do they think that this doesn't apply to the Web, or do they just not think at all about architecture?
Where is eBay's head? Maybe mod_perl is the right tool for the job they're doing, but they're DOING THE WRONG JOB.
Market confidence doesn't give you instant knowledge of how to architect a large scale software system, but it does give you the money to get people who can. I noticed that Amazon had a big booth at OOPSLA last week doing recruiting, and was sending their staff to lots of seminars and tutorials. eBay didn't seem to be around. Which company's stock would I recommend?
A distributed.net/seti@home type client called SpamSlam. When you get spam, you paste the originating address into the client and it sends it to the master blacklist server. The blacklist server allocates work units to that address whenever the number of votes for it exceedes a certain threshold, then based on the percentage of votes sent in for that offender.
Then, all your spare cycles are dedicated to retrieving server IPs from the blacklist main server and ping-flooding the offenders. Potential for abuse is high, but it would certainly get the point across to spammers if the selection of targets could be well regulated. The spammers couldn't sue you for unwelcome use of their network without undermining their own position and business model.
You could probably look it up in the library. I found some abstracts on AltaVista by Ran Canetti, Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor and Rafi Ostrovsky.
There was also a short piece on it in 2600 a few issues back, I think in enough detail to implement it if you know basic crypto programming. I think it mentioned some prototypical crypto-stego filesystems already available that use this idea.
IIRC, you divide the cyphertext into blocks, which are either chaff or real data. You use the key to scan along, decoding blocks until you get a decrypt that checks out, and then that block has some of the data and the key to the next valid block. Thus, depending on what key you start with, you can pull out any one of many embedded plaintexts. You can set the ratio of chaffing to be whatever you want, but it generally needs to be pretty high for it to be truly effective. I think, for example, that if you wanted a secure 2 GB filesystem, you'd want an 8 GB disk, with 2 GB of filesystem, 2 GB of alternate plaintext and 4 GB of random chaff. Not very effective or fast, but when you need to be secure...
There are systems out there that use "deniable encryption". They chaff the data to a high degree, and allow you to encrypt multiple messages within the same cyphertext using multiple keys.
So if Mr. Fed demands a key, you give him one, and it pulls a couple of porn pictures and some old issues of Phrack out of the cyphertext. You gave him a key, it produced plaintext from a cypertext- get out of jail free.
That there's another key that decrypts entirely other information from the file is impossible to prove, due to the chaffing.
Any sensible criminal would just use this type of encryption.
I can't speak to the laws in France, but I can say that software licensing agreements in the US turn standard copyright practice on its head.
(In the US) If I buy a book, it is treated as a hybrid of physical and intellectual property in which I as a consumer get the best sides of both.
To the extent that it is treated as a physical object, I *own* it. I can sell it, read it backwards, cut it apart and glue the pages back together in a wrong order (and then sell it!) analyze the grammatical structure, the plot progression, etc. That copy of the work becomes my property.
To the extent that it is intellectual property, I own rights to fair personal use. I can make a photocopy of the book and take it to work to read at my leisure. If it's a CD, I can copy it to a tape to listen to in my car. Nothing bars me from having two copies open simultaneously. (if I do sell the book or CD, I do have to destroy my copies, though)
Software licenses take the opposite stance. It is regarded as physical property, in that you need a license for each and every copy, not merely for the content of the software. It is intellectual property in that you don't own it, can't transfer it or resell it, or even look at it the wrong way.
Whether software companies have a natural right to do business in this way is another debate, but it is unarguable that this agreement is quite contrary to people's expected view of what they're getting when they "buy" Windows or Office at the store, boxed as a consumer product, given normal practices regarding copyrighted work. If countries wish to make laws enforcing these standard practices in the name of 'fairness', I'm all for it. It's worked this long for all other copyrighted properties.
For years, one of the biggest arguments from the hacker community against the harsh prosecution of people like Kevin Mitnick has been the idea that looking at source code doesn't harm a company. The argument is thus: "If you're not using it to compete against them, they suffer no harm; it was just curiosity and a desire to learn."
Finally a company, Sun, is doing exactly what hackers have been demanding all these years: letting them have a look at interesting technology, to learn from and satisfy their curiosity.
This isn't about open source evangelism and your imagined right to free computer hardware. It's about giving students and other interested people a tool to learn from, in a way that doesn't hurt Sun's business.
Nobody loses anything from this. People interested in microprocessor design gain. Why are you complaining?
If you expect Sun to license people to compete against it with it's own technology, you're living in a dream world. It's not going to hurt the GPL to have more information available in the world, and with your hypothetical binary choice between GPL and total secrecy, most companies would choose total secrecy. Be glad some have chosen to imagine a third alternative that *is* much better than nothing.
So you're saying that Sun's going to fire their staff of chip architects, scrap the UltraIII and rely entirely on ad-hoc extensions to an old 32 bit processor contributed by the enormous pool of bored and unemployed hobbist microprocessor designers, just to save a few bucks?
I'm no radio expert, and don't know the details of the AirPort spec, but how easy would it be to jam a network that relied on these?
Can any punk with a 1/2 watt transmitter point it at your office and take down your network? Seems like a great and cheap way to incapactate the competition, and the SOHO market doesn't exactly have easy access or the even the mindset to call the FCC and track down attackers.
Are they using some kind of spread-spectrum packet radio to make this more difficult?
I think one of the only things keeping our country from becoming a police state is the "right" of people to commit "crimes" that don't give any probable cause for suspicion.
Victimless "crimes" committed in your own home are a good example. 90% of the adult US population engages in oral sex, even though it is illegal in many states. Because the police cannot snoop on your bedroom without damn good reason, they can't ever collect the evidence to prosecute on these sorts of crimes, and their criminalization is a joke. (thank god!)
Your justification that "they're committing a crime, after all" and "punish the evidence gatherer" solution is easily perveted into very unfelicitous results. Take for example, a camera installed in everybody's home connected to a sophisticated AI.
The AI dumps in the bitbucket any non-criminal footage, but can recognize you getting a blow job and call the the police. Nobody but the AI is responsible for snooping on you (i.e., who are you going to prosecute?) and since it didn't save any information that wasn't directly relevant to your criminal act, your privacy wasn't really invaded. After all, you don't have a right to privacy if you're using it to do unspeakable things, you criminal!!
Preemptive privacy violation, done without due process, only makes sense if you don't consider the ridiculous laws our society has made and continues to make with great regularity.
The unfortunate consequence of privacy protection is the "right" to commit "the perfect crime". Fortunately, no crime of consequence- one that really hurts somebody else- is ever "perfect", only things like masturbating or smoking a joint in the privacy of your bedroom.
"I think court decisions that prevent the prosecution from presenting evidence against dangerous criminals just because of the way it was obtained are heinous."
In light of this sentiment, the rest of your article makes absolutely NO sense. Why bother to complain about the legalization of new evidence gathering methods if you don't think the government should be held to any law in this area? Why be upset over the possibility of a court order if you think the cops sould be able to just break in to somebody's house with no probable cause and examine their computer? After all, they might be dangerous!
Do you think that your personal standard of what criminals are "dangerous" is going to be used to decide who gets due process and who doesn't?
They only way protections like this work at all is if everybody recieves them, all the time. No individual or group of people should be allowed to declare an individual or group "dangerous" and void their rights. That's what the whole idea of the Bill of Rights is about.
The consequences of moving the direction you tacitly propose are far more terrifying than any creeping expansion of the idea of "due process", as that will always have the static text of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court as checks. Throw that out for anybody and you lose everything for everybody.
Porn on the net is great. We just need to make it more *technically* difficult to get to.
I learned to use UNIX, vi, UUCP, uudecode, trn, ftp, telnet, etc. all back in the late 80's (in my early teen years) because I could get porn that way. (this was before all the newsgroups were spam-a-ramas)
Now I make big bucks in a high tech job because knowing those skills in jr. high/early high school put me on the cutting edge of the Internet when I got to college and the WWW was exploding. No damage done from seeing nekkid ladies, and my career/finances couldn't be in a better position as a result of that rather unothodox reason to learn some (at the time) rather obscure technology.
I should market this! An Internet-connected calculus tutor program that displays freshly downloaded porn if you get the differential equation correct! The problems keep getting harder to get new pictures. Turn your slacker son into a math genius! Doya think parents would go for it?:)
I will not mourn the passing of Wired. Good riddance, I say. It was the herald of the modern web, but in a, big-ass animated GIF, funky backgrounds & illegible text, oh, you wanted to READ something, sorry, way.
I read MONDO 2000, which was about expanding your world and experiences in every way, and really using the web as a tool to connect and have fun and play with the boundaries of culture and your mind.
My friend's middle-aged Mormon marketroid dad read Wired, or rather, used the ads in Wired as a hipper-than-the-guy-in-the-next-cube sharper image catalogue of new toys to buy and forget in a week. As "revolutionary" as they claimed to be, Wired was always about moneymoneymoney, and was kept on a tight editorial leash by their advertisers.
The true herald of the Web should be the herald of free thought and new ideas. The idea of exploiting a fad to make piles of money is nothing new.
7 years- patent law on non-functional designs.
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
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· Score: 1
Actually, this situation is covered under patent law. There is a special category of patents, "design patents", that a company or individual can apply for to protect new and unusual (non-functional) designs even on everyday items and technology. Even if there's prior art for the product idea of an all in one case computer, the specific design of the iMac can be protected. I think it's clear in this case;) that Apple's design *was* innovative and distinct enough to be worth stealing and thus probably also patent worthy.
The protection afforded by design patents doesn't, however, last as long as for product or process patents. I think it's 7 years as opposed to 17.
All industries are "smart" enough to deny everything if they're allowed to. That's why we have laws about implied warranties.
If a company sells a shovel, everybody knows and expects how a shovel should be used. If it breaks as soon as I push it into the ground, I'm entitled to a refund, no matter if the shovel manufacturer put a little sticker on the handle that said "This is just a random assembly of wood and metal and not fit for any particular purpose." We all know it's a shovel; we all know it's supposed to be able to shovel. By the same token, McDondalds can't just put a warning on their packaging that says, "This is not food." and get away with poisioning everybody. It is implied by the fact of their selling it that it is a product fit for some use.
Why then, if my word processor breaks when I try to print a file, save a file, indent a paragraph or perform other functions described in the manual, should the law treat it as if it were not a real product?
Absolutely. For software which is "life critical" companies are already held liable for quality by the armies of lawyers roaming the countryside. Systems that are internally business critical are thoroughly tested before being put into production use. Big interests can avoid getting scammed already.
The real rip-offs being perpetrated by the software industry are on the consumer goods level, not the critical systems level. Often, this is not directly the fault of bad engineering, but is a calculated business decision. Microsoft has become one of the most profitable companies in history by using its monopoly to force customers to pay for a constant stream of bug-fixes^H^H^H^Hupgrades.
Sadly, the law is moving to favor those practices. Changes to the commercial code are already under consideration to make enforcable shrink-wrap EULAs that effectively say, "Even if this box is filled entirely with real and actual horse shit, you are entitled to no refund." Even if damages are disallowed, the implied warranty of merchantability should be enforced for the refund of the purchase price of software.
I'm no expert on the history of programming languages, but it seems to me that one of the big advantages of Java is that it doesn't carry around a lot of baggage; baggage from C or even it's own baggage.
Java is still a young language, and even the best designs have problems that become apparent with use. I'd give Java some time to mature under the direction of an entity more nimble than the ISO. Rigorously enforced standards are most important for constraining the future of languages with a lot of extant code (C, Fortran). A young language should be able to make some deprecations and fix some mistakes because the tradeoff of making some amount of JDK1.0 or even 1.1 code incompatible is small compared to the importance of getting it right for the long run.
Ok, so I'm typing (verrryyy slowly) and oops, I have to open a door/tie my shoe/shake somebody's hand/unzip my fly for a pee/unlock my car/etc. and I've got this clunky borg glove on my hand. Unless you can remove your hand/body from the interface quickly, I don't see something like this being useful or enjoyable.
How about a combination of flexible and split keyboards that you could wear on the tops of your thighs? You couldn't use it while walking, but it'd be convienient when sitting or standing. It'd look super geeky, but no worse than this glove or other MIT borg devices.
The point of this is that the games are *NOT* the cause of the hatred the drove these kids. I agree that the parents could've stopped this massacre, but they weren't the cause of it.
If you smoke 2 packs a day for 30 years, then die of lung cancer, we may blame your doctor for not finding that tumor when it was small enough to be operable, but fundamentally it was the cigarettes that caused your cancer.
These kids were being forced to smoke 2 packs a day of dehumanization, and their parents didn't catch the tumor of hate in time. The problem with expecting the parents to prevent this is that we'll never be able to catch all the cases in time. There are kids who are clever enough to hide it well and parents who are too uninvolved or too much in denial to do anything effective. Denial is epedemic. What about all the parents who've no idea that their "good kids" are daily tormenting and physically abusing their peers? Who never instilled compassion and the need to treat everybody as human in their children? I think that at the very root they're just as much to blame for this whole horrible chain of events.
To prevent this from happening again, we need to remove the cause of the hate. This is the motivation behind our posts. Nobody is trying to justify or condone what happened. We're speaking out because we don't want to ever see it happen again, and we feel like we have a better insight into the crucial "why" of this than mainstream society is able or willing to.
Stop the hate. Humanize high school.
Why only in "perfect" towns?
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 3
The fact that these killings only occurr in "perfect" suburban and rural communities shouldn't be one of the mysteries of these killings, it is rather a glaring indicator of why they happen.
I think the recent killings are different than those prior. I'd especially draw a line between incidents where the kids kill their parents and where they only kill peers. Kids from middle class, "good" families kill their peers in "perfect" suburbia because this environment is a pressure cooker for adolescents.
In "perfect" suburbia, there is no escape from the fact that you don't fit in. There is no escape from ridicule, abuse, threats and the daily victimization that goes on for years in the lives of many many kids around the country. In a big city there are places to escape, other things to do. In suburbia, you can't even go to a movie or the arcade without all the kids from your school being right there, without all the ridicule being right there. Computers and fantasy games are common passtimes among these kids because it's their only escape.
These killers came from middle class families in a middle class community where they'd been told all their life that they should be smart, do well in school, be polite and respectful of girls and they'd get ahead. They found themselves doing all the right things, and getting shat on for it. In that position, at that age, without the perspective of adulthood, the whole world begins to feel like a lie and a sham. There's no such thing as "kids stuff" at this age, because there's no big picture yet. School is your life, and in the emotional confusion of adolescence it's easy to lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel, and just how close that end is.
These kids weren't noticed as problems because they weren't violent or maladjusted to begin with. They were the daily victims of violent and maladjusted kids, and they were just expected to take it and push on through. Nearly everybody else does, but these kids didn't have the steam valves in their life and they burst under the strain instead.
Nobody would've noticed, or even been surprised, if these kids had just quietly killed themselves. All the reasons were there. What they decided to do instead was inexcusable, absolutely unforgivable, but sadly understandable. It seems more a testament to the success of our society so far that this doesn't happen on a monthly basis.
More than anything, what these kids needed was some perspective. They needed somebody to take them aside and tell them that in a year or two they'll be in college. They'll hit puberty, their intelligence will be valued, and high school will seem like a distant dream. The jocks will be pumping gas or in jail, and college girls will want somebody who can help them with calculus. When they get out of school, they'll be making big $$ at a respected job while those other kids are selling shoes. Tell them that, yes, high school sucks, it's a huge sham and a lie, but that your life hasn't even started yet, and these jerks you have to deal with are going to spend the rest of their lives wishing they were back in high school while you leave them in the dirt on the way to new frontiers with experiences and people so vivid and exciting that they make h.s. look like a puppet show.
We need a Slashdot young professional "You're drinking milk!" outreach program to reach young nerds before they crack.
I think this article misses a huge point. Code can be defined as pure expression on par with verbal communication and that still won't protect encryption code from regulation.
It has long been upheld that the government, despite the blanket nature of the First Amendment, does have the right to regulate and forbid certain kinds of speech. They do so quite often where national security or public safety would be at issue if the "speech" were allowed to continue AND when the restrictions can be done in a manner that reasonably accomodates the spirit of freedom.
You can circulate instructions for a generic bomb because it's knowledge that is in the public domain. It would require a witch hunt of astounding proportions to remove that knowledge from the public domain, so even if it is threatening, the government can't forbid it without intruding unreasonably into freedom and public life.
By the same token, you can't circulate instructions for our most advanced nuclear weapons because these are a closely kept secret and the regulation of that speech can be closely targeted and still have it's desired effect. However if sombody dropped ten million copies of the plans over NYC by airplane, it's dubious if the courts would uphold prosecuting anybody but those involved in the air drop.
Specifically on the matter of strong encryption, I think that this is the case that needs to be made. Since laws can do nothing to revoke access to knowledge about strong cryptographic algorythms already in widespread circulation in the international public domain, continuing to prosecute people for "saying" this stuff is absurd.
On virii, supercomputer code for nuclear blast simulations and the like, it may well be the case that the government can recognize the code as speech and still have quite good reasons to throw your ass in jail for publishing it. That is the case THEY should be making, not some bogus garbage about code being a "device".
Commercial Unixes are certified for use on government secure networks. Linux is not, and is unlikely to become so anytime soon. We should all be very glad for this project because it may keep NT off that many more critical government systems. Also, this market alone is enough to keep companies like SCO in business.
(I know NT is also not approved, but it is and will become the defacto standard before Linux does if there is no viable commercial UNIX competition.)
How about making the default score be based on the average score of all previous posts (or previous posts in the last n days), instead of on a total point basis?
IMHO, somebody who posts 10 things a day scored zero or +1 deserves a default score of 4 less than somebody who only posts once a week but always gets scored +3. The alignment system seems to reward meidocre quantity over true quality.
Also, this would eliminate the need to be constantly adjusting the alignment thresholds over time. An average is always an average.
Slashdot Mirror
--Cut to a smoke filled room....
We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.
But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!
If anybody in this world has the money to spend and the reason to spend it on a good architecture it is eBay.(They lost, what, $5B in market cap due to their recurring crashes?)
Separating presentation from business logic has been standard software architecture practice since the MVC pattern in Smalltalk, 1988. Do they think that this doesn't apply to the Web, or do they just not think at all about architecture?
Where is eBay's head? Maybe mod_perl is the right tool for the job they're doing, but they're DOING THE WRONG JOB.
Market confidence doesn't give you instant knowledge of how to architect a large scale software system, but it does give you the money to get people who can. I noticed that Amazon had a big booth at OOPSLA last week doing recruiting, and was sending their staff to lots of seminars and tutorials. eBay didn't seem to be around. Which company's stock would I recommend?
A distributed.net/seti@home type client called SpamSlam. When you get spam, you paste the originating address into the client and it sends it to the master blacklist server. The blacklist server allocates work units to that address whenever the number of votes for it exceedes a certain threshold, then based on the percentage of votes sent in for that offender.
Then, all your spare cycles are dedicated to retrieving server IPs from the blacklist main server and ping-flooding the offenders. Potential for abuse is high, but it would certainly get the point across to spammers if the selection of targets could be well regulated. The spammers couldn't sue you for unwelcome use of their network without undermining their own position and business model.
hee hee hee.
A Ron Rivest paper
and a postscript document on deniable encryption by Canetti, Dwork, Noir and Ostrovsky.
Happy hacking!
There was also a short piece on it in 2600 a few issues back, I think in enough detail to implement it if you know basic crypto programming. I think it mentioned some prototypical crypto-stego filesystems already available that use this idea.
IIRC, you divide the cyphertext into blocks, which are either chaff or real data. You use the key to scan along, decoding blocks until you get a decrypt that checks out, and then that block has some of the data and the key to the next valid block. Thus, depending on what key you start with, you can pull out any one of many embedded plaintexts. You can set the ratio of chaffing to be whatever you want, but it generally needs to be pretty high for it to be truly effective. I think, for example, that if you wanted a secure 2 GB filesystem, you'd want an 8 GB disk, with 2 GB of filesystem, 2 GB of alternate plaintext and 4 GB of random chaff. Not very effective or fast, but when you need to be secure...
So if Mr. Fed demands a key, you give him one, and it pulls a couple of porn pictures and some old issues of Phrack out of the cyphertext. You gave him a key, it produced plaintext from a cypertext- get out of jail free.
That there's another key that decrypts entirely other information from the file is impossible to prove, due to the chaffing.
Any sensible criminal would just use this type of encryption.
(In the US) If I buy a book, it is treated as a hybrid of physical and intellectual property in which I as a consumer get the best sides of both.
To the extent that it is treated as a physical object, I *own* it. I can sell it, read it backwards, cut it apart and glue the pages back together in a wrong order (and then sell it!) analyze the grammatical structure, the plot progression, etc. That copy of the work becomes my property.
To the extent that it is intellectual property, I own rights to fair personal use. I can make a photocopy of the book and take it to work to read at my leisure. If it's a CD, I can copy it to a tape to listen to in my car. Nothing bars me from having two copies open simultaneously. (if I do sell the book or CD, I do have to destroy my copies, though)
Software licenses take the opposite stance. It is regarded as physical property, in that you need a license for each and every copy, not merely for the content of the software. It is intellectual property in that you don't own it, can't transfer it or resell it, or even look at it the wrong way.
Whether software companies have a natural right to do business in this way is another debate, but it is unarguable that this agreement is quite contrary to people's expected view of what they're getting when they "buy" Windows or Office at the store, boxed as a consumer product, given normal practices regarding copyrighted work. If countries wish to make laws enforcing these standard practices in the name of 'fairness', I'm all for it. It's worked this long for all other copyrighted properties.
Finally a company, Sun, is doing exactly what hackers have been demanding all these years: letting them have a look at interesting technology, to learn from and satisfy their curiosity.
This isn't about open source evangelism and your imagined right to free computer hardware. It's about giving students and other interested people a tool to learn from, in a way that doesn't hurt Sun's business.
Nobody loses anything from this. People interested in microprocessor design gain. Why are you complaining?
If you expect Sun to license people to compete against it with it's own technology, you're living in a dream world. It's not going to hurt the GPL to have more information available in the world, and with your hypothetical binary choice between GPL and total secrecy, most companies would choose total secrecy. Be glad some have chosen to imagine a third alternative that *is* much better than nothing.
Are you stupid?
Can any punk with a 1/2 watt transmitter point it at your office and take down your network? Seems like a great and cheap way to incapactate the competition, and the SOHO market doesn't exactly have easy access or the even the mindset to call the FCC and track down attackers.
Are they using some kind of spread-spectrum packet radio to make this more difficult?
If Apple wants to market to the top end of the PC user market, they'll have to sacrifice some "friendliness" for utility.
How do you PPC Linux people get anything done, anyway?
Victimless "crimes" committed in your own home are a good example. 90% of the adult US population engages in oral sex, even though it is illegal in many states. Because the police cannot snoop on your bedroom without damn good reason, they can't ever collect the evidence to prosecute on these sorts of crimes, and their criminalization is a joke. (thank god!)
Your justification that "they're committing a crime, after all" and "punish the evidence gatherer" solution is easily perveted into very unfelicitous results. Take for example, a camera installed in everybody's home connected to a sophisticated AI.
The AI dumps in the bitbucket any non-criminal footage, but can recognize you getting a blow job and call the the police. Nobody but the AI is responsible for snooping on you (i.e., who are you going to prosecute?) and since it didn't save any information that wasn't directly relevant to your criminal act, your privacy wasn't really invaded. After all, you don't have a right to privacy if you're using it to do unspeakable things, you criminal!!
Preemptive privacy violation, done without due process, only makes sense if you don't consider the ridiculous laws our society has made and continues to make with great regularity.
The unfortunate consequence of privacy protection is the "right" to commit "the perfect crime". Fortunately, no crime of consequence- one that really hurts somebody else- is ever "perfect", only things like masturbating or smoking a joint in the privacy of your bedroom.
In light of this sentiment, the rest of your article makes absolutely NO sense. Why bother to complain about the legalization of new evidence gathering methods if you don't think the government should be held to any law in this area? Why be upset over the possibility of a court order if you think the cops sould be able to just break in to somebody's house with no probable cause and examine their computer? After all, they might be dangerous!
Do you think that your personal standard of what criminals are "dangerous" is going to be used to decide who gets due process and who doesn't?
They only way protections like this work at all is if everybody recieves them, all the time. No individual or group of people should be allowed to declare an individual or group "dangerous" and void their rights. That's what the whole idea of the Bill of Rights is about.
The consequences of moving the direction you tacitly propose are far more terrifying than any creeping expansion of the idea of "due process", as that will always have the static text of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court as checks. Throw that out for anybody and you lose everything for everybody.
I learned to use UNIX, vi, UUCP, uudecode, trn, ftp, telnet, etc. all back in the late 80's (in my early teen years) because I could get porn that way. (this was before all the newsgroups were spam-a-ramas)
Now I make big bucks in a high tech job because knowing those skills in jr. high/early high school put me on the cutting edge of the Internet when I got to college and the WWW was exploding. No damage done from seeing nekkid ladies, and my career/finances couldn't be in a better position as a result of that rather unothodox reason to learn some (at the time) rather obscure technology.
I should market this! An Internet-connected calculus tutor program that displays freshly downloaded porn if you get the differential equation correct! The problems keep getting harder to get new pictures. Turn your slacker son into a math genius! Doya think parents would go for it? :)
I read MONDO 2000, which was about expanding your world and experiences in every way, and really using the web as a tool to connect and have fun and play with the boundaries of culture and your mind.
My friend's middle-aged Mormon marketroid dad read Wired, or rather, used the ads in Wired as a hipper-than-the-guy-in-the-next-cube sharper image catalogue of new toys to buy and forget in a week. As "revolutionary" as they claimed to be, Wired was always about moneymoneymoney, and was kept on a tight editorial leash by their advertisers.
The true herald of the Web should be the herald of free thought and new ideas. The idea of exploiting a fad to make piles of money is nothing new.
The protection afforded by design patents doesn't, however, last as long as for product or process patents. I think it's 7 years as opposed to 17.
If a company sells a shovel, everybody knows and expects how a shovel should be used. If it breaks as soon as I push it into the ground, I'm entitled to a refund, no matter if the shovel manufacturer put a little sticker on the handle that said "This is just a random assembly of wood and metal and not fit for any particular purpose." We all know it's a shovel; we all know it's supposed to be able to shovel. By the same token, McDondalds can't just put a warning on their packaging that says, "This is not food." and get away with poisioning everybody. It is implied by the fact of their selling it that it is a product fit for some use.
Why then, if my word processor breaks when I try to print a file, save a file, indent a paragraph or perform other functions described in the manual, should the law treat it as if it were not a real product?
The real rip-offs being perpetrated by the software industry are on the consumer goods level, not the critical systems level. Often, this is not directly the fault of bad engineering, but is a calculated business decision. Microsoft has become one of the most profitable companies in history by using its monopoly to force customers to pay for a constant stream of bug-fixes^H^H^H^Hupgrades.
Sadly, the law is moving to favor those practices. Changes to the commercial code are already under consideration to make enforcable shrink-wrap EULAs that effectively say, "Even if this box is filled entirely with real and actual horse shit, you are entitled to no refund." Even if damages are disallowed, the implied warranty of merchantability should be enforced for the refund of the purchase price of software.
Java is still a young language, and even the best designs have problems that become apparent with use. I'd give Java some time to mature under the direction of an entity more nimble than the ISO. Rigorously enforced standards are most important for constraining the future of languages with a lot of extant code (C, Fortran). A young language should be able to make some deprecations and fix some mistakes because the tradeoff of making some amount of JDK1.0 or even 1.1 code incompatible is small compared to the importance of getting it right for the long run.
How about a combination of flexible and split keyboards that you could wear on the tops of your thighs? You couldn't use it while walking, but it'd be convienient when sitting or standing. It'd look super geeky, but no worse than this glove or other MIT borg devices.
If you smoke 2 packs a day for 30 years, then die of lung cancer, we may blame your doctor for not finding that tumor when it was small enough to be operable, but fundamentally it was the cigarettes that caused your cancer.
These kids were being forced to smoke 2 packs a day of dehumanization, and their parents didn't catch the tumor of hate in time. The problem with expecting the parents to prevent this is that we'll never be able to catch all the cases in time. There are kids who are clever enough to hide it well and parents who are too uninvolved or too much in denial to do anything effective. Denial is epedemic. What about all the parents who've no idea that their "good kids" are daily tormenting and physically abusing their peers? Who never instilled compassion and the need to treat everybody as human in their children? I think that at the very root they're just as much to blame for this whole horrible chain of events.
To prevent this from happening again, we need to remove the cause of the hate. This is the motivation behind our posts. Nobody is trying to justify or condone what happened. We're speaking out because we don't want to ever see it happen again, and we feel like we have a better insight into the crucial "why" of this than mainstream society is able or willing to.
Stop the hate. Humanize high school.
I think the recent killings are different than those prior. I'd especially draw a line between incidents where the kids kill their parents and where they only kill peers. Kids from middle class, "good" families kill their peers in "perfect" suburbia because this environment is a pressure cooker for adolescents.
In "perfect" suburbia, there is no escape from the fact that you don't fit in. There is no escape from ridicule, abuse, threats and the daily victimization that goes on for years in the lives of many many kids around the country. In a big city there are places to escape, other things to do. In suburbia, you can't even go to a movie or the arcade without all the kids from your school being right there, without all the ridicule being right there. Computers and fantasy games are common passtimes among these kids because it's their only escape.
These killers came from middle class families in a middle class community where they'd been told all their life that they should be smart, do well in school, be polite and respectful of girls and they'd get ahead. They found themselves doing all the right things, and getting shat on for it. In that position, at that age, without the perspective of adulthood, the whole world begins to feel like a lie and a sham. There's no such thing as "kids stuff" at this age, because there's no big picture yet. School is your life, and in the emotional confusion of adolescence it's easy to lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel, and just how close that end is.
These kids weren't noticed as problems because they weren't violent or maladjusted to begin with. They were the daily victims of violent and maladjusted kids, and they were just expected to take it and push on through. Nearly everybody else does, but these kids didn't have the steam valves in their life and they burst under the strain instead.
Nobody would've noticed, or even been surprised, if these kids had just quietly killed themselves. All the reasons were there. What they decided to do instead was inexcusable, absolutely unforgivable, but sadly understandable. It seems more a testament to the success of our society so far that this doesn't happen on a monthly basis.
More than anything, what these kids needed was some perspective. They needed somebody to take them aside and tell them that in a year or two they'll be in college. They'll hit puberty, their intelligence will be valued, and high school will seem like a distant dream. The jocks will be pumping gas or in jail, and college girls will want somebody who can help them with calculus. When they get out of school, they'll be making big $$ at a respected job while those other kids are selling shoes. Tell them that, yes, high school sucks, it's a huge sham and a lie, but that your life hasn't even started yet, and these jerks you have to deal with are going to spend the rest of their lives wishing they were back in high school while you leave them in the dirt on the way to new frontiers with experiences and people so vivid and exciting that they make h.s. look like a puppet show.
We need a Slashdot young professional "You're drinking milk!" outreach program to reach young nerds before they crack.
It has long been upheld that the government, despite the blanket nature of the First Amendment, does have the right to regulate and forbid certain kinds of speech. They do so quite often where national security or public safety would be at issue if the "speech" were allowed to continue AND when the restrictions can be done in a manner that reasonably accomodates the spirit of freedom.
You can circulate instructions for a generic bomb because it's knowledge that is in the public domain. It would require a witch hunt of astounding proportions to remove that knowledge from the public domain, so even if it is threatening, the government can't forbid it without intruding unreasonably into freedom and public life.
By the same token, you can't circulate instructions for our most advanced nuclear weapons because these are a closely kept secret and the regulation of that speech can be closely targeted and still have it's desired effect. However if sombody dropped ten million copies of the plans over NYC by airplane, it's dubious if the courts would uphold prosecuting anybody but those involved in the air drop.
Specifically on the matter of strong encryption, I think that this is the case that needs to be made. Since laws can do nothing to revoke access to knowledge about strong cryptographic algorythms already in widespread circulation in the international public domain, continuing to prosecute people for "saying" this stuff is absurd.
On virii, supercomputer code for nuclear blast simulations and the like, it may well be the case that the government can recognize the code as speech and still have quite good reasons to throw your ass in jail for publishing it. That is the case THEY should be making, not some bogus garbage about code being a "device".
(I know NT is also not approved, but it is and will become the defacto standard before Linux does if there is no viable commercial UNIX competition.)
IMHO, somebody who posts 10 things a day scored zero or +1 deserves a default score of 4 less than somebody who only posts once a week but always gets scored +3. The alignment system seems to reward meidocre quantity over true quality.
Also, this would eliminate the need to be constantly adjusting the alignment thresholds over time. An average is always an average.