Wouldn't it just be a lot easier if, for example, when you hear a telemarketer on the phone just say "get bent" and then hang up on them?
Seems like a much less troublesome and a much more effortless solution to me!:)
You must not get many telemarketer's calls then. They are incessant. Many times an hour. I have caller ID, and never pick up the "Number Unknown" calls. But, already, that annoying ringing coupled with having to go over and look at the box is a hassle. No, not a big deal once or twice, but when it's all the time, it gets hard to have a conversation, or be able to think for any sustained period of time.
If the Telezapper really reduces the number of calls you get, that would be great. If it just disconnects that call, and doesn't delete you from databases, then it won't do much for me.
Already, most of the time, I just let the answering machien field the calls. I'm seriously considering turning off the ringer on my phone, and only having the answering machine answer calls. Of course, the problem with that is that as soon as somebody I actually want to do it uses the same telemarketer solution, it becomes nearly impossible for us to reach each other on the phone; we just get each other's answering machine....
To my mind, phone telemarketers are way worse the spammers. With spam, a quick delete gets rid of it, and it's faster than dealing with telemarketers. Plus, I get to choose when to read my E-mail, and so I can steel myself for it. I don't get to choose when my phone will ring.
It is legal to create MP3s of music you own. How is it possible to determine which are legal and which are illegal, given only a list of files on your computer? Do they have a catalogue of the CDs I own?
The RIAA does not want you to be able to create MP3s of music you own. They'd rather you get them from an officially approved source after you have your CD, or (even better) pay more to get the songs in formats other than the CD. With things like anti-circumvention laws, pretty soon the only MP3s of CDs possible will be ones that, even if they can exist legally, will have required an illegal activity to create.
It's plain that the RIAA doesn't want you making digial copies, even for your own use, of CDs you own: that's why un-rippable CDs are starting to come out.
Fair use practises allow you to make MP3s or Vorbises of CDs you own, as long as they are for your own use. But it's a whole lot easier for the RIAA to outlaw this indirectly than to directly assault fair use. Hence, they come up with laws that, while not outlawing fair use, outlaw the things which allow you to execrcise fair use. E.g. the DMCA. A useless law, unless your goal is to restrict legal activity. Copyright violation was already illegal, and the DMCA just makes the act of doing it illegal in another way. It also makes the act of exercising fair use rights under certain circumstances illegal. It gives the RIAA two things. First, another way to go after copyright violaters; you might argue that there is some purpose to this. (It's analogous to going after Al Capone for tax violation.) Two, it lets them bang on people exercising fair use, so that hopefully those people will start paying for additional copies of things they own.
The digital was untouched and the polaroid took 405 pics before we ran out of film.
Polaroids are instant (no shutter lag), give you a hard, permanent picture within seconds.
This is key for some uses. I'm thinking of a community theater, where we would hold auditions and more than a hundred people would show up. For those who didn't bring head shots, we'd take one quickly, and have it for the director and staff to use almost immediately. If he needed it the next day, or even just "on file for reference," a digital camera would have been just fine or better (cheaper), but not for immediate use.
There is a market here: a cheap, small, self-contained printer for digital cameras (or, best, for digital images in general). I bet we'll see these come out (if they aren't already), and I also bet that at first we'll see them mostly as accessories to individual specific cameras. Ideally, what I'd love to see is all digital cameras use to moving (say) compact flash cards for storage, and then digital printers that have a simple and fast way of printing images from a built-in flash reader.
Lawrence berkely labs uses unix extensively for simulation. Particle accelerator simulation and weather simulation are huge there. Its running on a nice speedy cray. No Linux tho:)
Actually, there's quite a lot of Linux at LBL. I worked there until June, so I have some idea what I'm talking about. There is PDSF, which is a giant node farm of a couple of hundred machines in a beowulf-like system. There are development systems at NERSC which are smaller but which are looking at better ways to put clusters together; I've worked with a 32-node i386 Linux cluster, and the same guys have a 20-someodd-node alpha Linux cluster.
The Supernova Cosmology Project, which I worked with, almost exclusively uses Linux at LBL. There are a few unenlightened people who use Windows for some stuff (one guy is addicted to Adobe Illustrator), and we still had a couple of Solaris machines bumping around, but there were >20 Linux machines in that group.
Open source and free software is very common on the web today-- free browsers, servers, and anything else vaguely connected to the web and the internet are very widely used.
The very distribution terms of free software make them fundamentally incompatable with any standard whose licensing requires a fee. Some licenses explicitly forbid the use of algorithms burdened by patents, while others may "just" face the practical problem that the software is widely distributed for no charge, and often isn't even written by a for-profit company.
Given the prevalance and importance of free and open source software on the Web, and given the fundamental incompatability of such software with a standard that requires any licensing fee, how can any such standard be called "reasonable and non-discriminatory"? How would the W3C argue that any "RAND" standards at all requiring licensing fees do not descriminate against a large and important fraction of the web sofwtare out there today, specifically free and open-source software? (This is not a rhetorical question-- I really want to know what the W3C would say in answer to this latter question.)
On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.
You already note one good way of getting past this: stenography, hiding the message in something that looks legitimate. (Your low-bandwidth Quake motion idea was a good one.) There is another: nested encryption. Presumably, unless somebody is already suspected, the monitoring agencies aren't going to be allowed to read the contents of all of this mail and so forth without a warrant. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm being foolish, but bear with me.) As such, all they will be able to do is verify that the message is encrypted with a legal, escrow-available key.
So somebody wanting to use illegal encryption encrypts their message with their own crypto, and then encryptes that ciphertext with legal crypto. It will pass the sniffer, but will still be unreadable if somebody gets a warrant and uses the escrowed key on the outer crypto. It won't do the statistical guys any good since their statistics pass will say that these people are using the legal crypto just like everybody else.
As has been noted elsewhere, trying to put controls and limits on this sort of thing is completely quixotic. The only thing which is going to make people copy is a desire to be compliant with the laws. As such, the only people that the laws hinder and restrict are the law-abiding citiziens that (theoretically) the laws aren't directed at. There are two possible motivations for these laws: one, a real misunderstanding of how quixotic trying to regulate crypto would really be. Or, two, a much more sinister desire to get the mechanism in place to monitor every citizen. Choose which motivation you think is behind all of this based on your own level of paranoia and how cynical you are about how naive our leaders are vs. how sinister they are.
There's nothing wrong with actually creating the crack, but distribution and especially sale of it should be illegal.
Then explain to me why it shouldn't be illegal for somebody to publish instructions for building a bomb. Yet the Supreme Court has held that up as allowed under the first amendment. It is the use of those instructions which is the illegal act. The same goes with computer code: the script kiddie's crack is instructions for how to perform an illegal act. Therefore, as odious as it may be, it should be protected under the first amendment. The illegal act is using those instructions.
Freedom of speech means that other people have the freedom to say things that we think they should't say. But we have to allow that, so that they will allow us to say the things that they don't like.
And, of course, I have the freedom to ask (but not require) you to self censor: next time think twice before using such profane terms to refer to somebody who has the gall to disagree with you. Your position seems to be that those who disagree are "slashbots", that anybody who thinks for themselves would naturally agree with you. I submit that if you really believe what you seem to believe, you don't understand what thinking for one's self really is.
He wasn't locked up for presenting the information, he was locked up for selling it to people.
The day a skript kidding charges $10 for his leet crack to Windows 2005 is the day I tell the government to lock his ass up.
YOU SCARE ME. You think the script kiddie should be locked up for selling software? That's not even a vaild comparison, because Sklyarov's software had legitimate uses for legitimate eBook owners. But even in the case of the script kiddie, I say lock up the person who uses it to crack somebody else's computer, not the person who sold the software.
What you are calling for is equivalent to requiring that all employes of Ford, GM, and every other auto maker be locked up because they sold the cars which drunk drivers used to commit manslaughter.
As long as they don't outlaw encryption and free press, I'll keep my mouth shut. Feel free to argue, it's my opinion, not yours.
And what do you think will go first?
Most americans, including our congressmen, will outlaw encryption much faster than they will institute laws requiring searches of cars at state borders. Most of the world simply doesn't understand why cyrptography is anything other than what "people with something to hide" use.
I agree with the sense of your post: I don't object at all to increased airport security, or anything of that sort. However, I really am worried that fundamental freedoms, especially in the computational realm, are going to be severely curtailed because "we are at war" and because "this is a different kind of war."
On a more serious note, what makes people think a fundamentalist Islamic group would hide pictures in porn? Wouldn't that require them to go against most of their fundamental beliefs and actually look at nakedness and fornication?
Oh, come on. They may claim to follow it, but those terrorists don't really have anything to do with Islam, any more than white supremists have anything to do with Christianity.
I'm not terribly familiar with the tenets of Islam myself, but "thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments, and those do appear in the Quaran. These people seemed to be willing to violate that one, to the tune of thousands of murders. I'm sure they'd be perfectly willing to violate much lesser religious restrictions all in the name of their "cause".
It's currently popular to judge our past with the standards of today. Let's hope our children forgive us of our transgressions, and seek to understand out times before passing judgment upon us.
Let's do one better. Let's learn from the transgressions of the past and do our best to avoid commiting them now. The fewer we commit, the easier they will be to forgive.
I don't think that many people today, in retrospect, would doubt that the internment of Japanese Americans was foolish, disrespectful of individual dignity, and downright wrong. Let us remember that before we do anything in response to the current crisis, blinded as we are by the lack of time for hindsight.
WE ARE AT WAR. I think this story is to spit on the graves of everyone who died this week.
Quite the contrary. If we start to sell out basic freedoms, on which this country was founded, that will be spitting on the graves of those who died.
One of the first things that President Bush said after the attacks was that our resolve for freedom would not be shaken. And it must not be-- for if it is, the terrorists have won.
We have to take a level-headed, rational approach to responding to last Tuesday. Rushing forward doing all sorts of ill-considered things-- be it restricting freedom of speech, or nuking random middle-eastern countries-- simply to be seen "doing something" would be a mistake. Any response must make sense: it must address the issue at hand, and we must carefully weight the sacrifices we make in exchange for making that response. To act foolishly or unwisely by way of trying to respond-- that is truly what would show disrespect for the dead.
Specifically with regard to cryptography: back-door-less cryptography is already out there. Terrorists won't hesitate to use it just because it's illegal. Restricting cryptography only restricts law abiding citiziens, and does nothing to address the issue at hand. Hence, it would be rash and foolish to implement such laws in the name of "combating terrorism," since they would do no such thing.
There is a difference between cutting back on freedom of speech, and having food rationing, and even having travel restrictions.
Food is necessary for life; but if it is in limited supply, then we must do what we must do to preserve that supply. Freedom of Speech, on the other hand, is one of the philosophical building blocks of this country. Sell that out, and we've lost our soul.
My first reaction is, "why would anybody care?" There are a lot of Linx distributions out there, so we're hardly hurting for choice at the moment. Why would we need another one?
But, reading the intereview, where they say they intend to contribute back to the community, I saw why I should care. Perhaps, just perhaps these folks will appeal to somebody that no current Linux distro does. If they succeed, and they're another company employing Linux hackers to hack Linux, then that's a good thing.
And, unlike Red Hat, VA, and a number of others, since they're based in Canada their business won't be outlawed after the US Government finishes passing its defense-of-copyright laws.
I haven't done a whole lot of contributing to big open source projects, I have to admit.
I did send the GLE author some RPMs a while back, and heard back from him. And, I sent in some patches for the Atlas project (map software for FlightGear), which made it in quickly.
The law is, as a whole, not a "bad" law-- it could be worse. The real problem is that security measures have to be certified, and this would undoubtedly require an expensive application. OTOH, I think that having a certification process in place could be a good thing.
Are you nuts? Think about how free software works. You write it. You put it out there under the BSD or GPL license. Other people modify it, send patches back to you, or publish their versions. It gets bigger, it gets better. Somebody else writes something else small compatable with it.
Done by individuals. Companies can have Government Compliance deapartments to get official certification and approval of their products before they're released. But individuals writing free software will not be able to; it will be too cumbersome for words.
What's more, do you really believe that these security certifications will allow for operating systems where anybody can modify the source code (and, say, remove the security measures) and recompile their own version? At the very worst, all but closed software would be outlawed. At the very best, it would just be illegal to connect your own modified version to the net. It would seriously hamper a lot of people who like to "play" with Linux by modifying it and running their own version. We're not just talkign hackers-- how many people run Alan Cox kernels? How many people have patched the kernel for this or that hardware driver? If they have to get certification before even plugging that modified version into the internet.... Well, it kills free software as we know it in the USA. It is no less than that, and if you think it is, you're either an industry shill, a rose-glassesed blind optimist, or completely and totally deluded.
Requiring certified security protocols be in any piece of software, simply because somebody somewhere might use a computer to commit copyright violation, makes about as much sense as requiring that anybody driving must have a police officer in the back seat, simply because somebody somewhere might drive a car to a bank and rob it.
Requiring government certification of everything we run on our computer would be a very, serious sacrifice of our freedom of action. It's about one step, if that, from requiring government certification of anything we write or say, even within the privacy of our own home. If you think this sounds like a good idea, then you scare me.
Just a few weeks ago I used to think that it was important to figure out how to get Linux to compete with Microsoft, so that Microsoft's dominance might be broken, so that those of us who use Linux wouldn't be stuck with people sending us things in proprietary Microsoft formats, and telling us to boot into Windows to configure this or that piece of hardware. I would have thought that strategic questions of what sort of office aps free software developers were working on was very important.
And they are important. But that's not the primary call to arms any more. The issue is no longer whether Linux can compete with Microsoft. The issue is how long those of us in the USA will still be able to legally use Linux at all. The front has changed. It's not dominance; it's survival.
See the article on slashdot a few days back about the SSSCA. See this week's Linux Weekly News (September 13). There's a law out there about to be proposed which would make it illegal for those of us in the USA to continue to use Linux (at least connected to the internet) or any other free software as we know it.
To heck with the Microsoft monopoloy. It's a terrible thing, but at least we can use Linux now. We have to make sure we don't lose that. This is the call to arms that every Linux, BSD, Perl, Apache, or other free software has to heed. Write your congressmen. Write your senators. Don't sit back and let apathy win the day, as it did three years ago with the DMCA. We have to fight this fight, and we have to fight it now, or soon we won't have the luxury of debating what sort of office software will be best to strategically position Linux.
James P. Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time. It's actually a time travel novel, but one of the subplots involves a particle collider which is making lots and lots of tiny black holes. This was written a couple of decades ago, I believe. A good read if you like Hogan's stuff.
Aditionally, I just heard, that Barbara Olsen, passenger on one of the planes, told her husband, that the terrorists were armed with no more than "knives and cardboard cutters".
Ummm...without trying to sound callous...how did CNN hear of this? Aren't all the passengers dead? Moderators, please READ the posts prior to hitting MODERATE. It helps.
The report I heard on one of the news stations was that Barbara Olsen called her husband from the plane to tell him that it had been hijacked. I believe that this was the plane that went into the Pentagon.
I have nothing to back this up other than what I heard on (I believe) CBS.
Remember, it's big corps like that that bring us DRM, CRPM, DMCA, soon the SSSCA, and other things which are morally bankrupt (indeed often downright evil). Why on earth wouldn't you expect them to be emotionally bankrupt?
People often form a bond with their pets. This bond can be highly individual and have great emotional depth. Therefore, it is bad for the economy. Thinking, independent individuals are hard for marketing departments to profile. What we need are consumers. Robot dogs can be targeted at consumers, just like prepackaged megacorp entertainment "content". If you are thinking for yourself, you're hurting the economy, and harming the business of the megacorps, so stop it right now.
Only commies, intellectual property pirates (like library patrons), and dangerous anti-american open source software users would want a real pet when one could have a Market Approved robot pet!! (Warning: reverse engineering or modifying your Robot Pet is a violation of the DMCA, and an un-American thing to do. Rest assured that you will be protected from the dangers of such violaters as they spend 5 years in prison and pay $250,000 in fines.)
the score is not copyrighted, you can rearrange it as you see fit, as you can with any music over 65 years old as in my understanding (IANAL). The performances ARE copyrighted, now if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars paying for your favorite orchestra to rehearse/record your favorite classical songs, so be it. The music is free the performance is not.
I understand all that... I believe I noted that in my original query. And, indeed, perhaps I should have mentioned that I am aware of the Mutopia Project which uses GNU Lilypond to put classic scores online. But I was hoping that there might be some repository of performances of classical music in digital format which had been made freely available.
I really don't expect to find much in the way of the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, or other orchestras with big-ticket CDs. But this world has a wealth of good quality small-name orchestra, including some of the better University orchestras. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were willing to release recordings of their concerts for free. (I mean, heck, sometimes the performances are free to the public.)
My question about free music: where's the Classical? That's even a different deal, because a good portion of it (i.e. everything written before the world starting getting excited about extending the copyright period at a rate faster than things were coming out of copyright) is not copyrighted itself; only the performances would be. Surely there are classical music groups out there who've recorded music that they wouldn't mind giving away for free? For instance, university orchestras?
Is there a good repository for this sort of thing in Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3 format? (The former preferred since we're talking about Free stuff here.)
Evil Stem Cell Researchers Work to Stop Red Cross Blood Drives!!
...followed by a long set of statistics about how many lives blood drives have saved and about how awful it will be if they stop happening, or even become less common.
just a quick not, Word & PowerPoint & Eceel docs can be read in other apps. You can live with out/
They are never read in perfectly, in my experience. Sometimes it fails altogheter. It's still a proprietary format, and the controller of that format keeps it a moving target. You may argue whether this is the intent, but the effect is to thwart and delay those who try to make other products compatable.
But while we're talking lost productivity costs: how much productivity has been lost by developers of other products (including open source ones such as KOffice and OpenOffice) by having to write import/export filters by reverse engineering Microsoft formats? How much further along would those products be if they only had to support an open, well-documented product?
The fact that these things all have to be Microsoft compatable to be viable merely proves my point. Those of us who choose not to use Microsoft OSes and apps can't simply ignore Microsoft, but have to dance to their tune. Even if some have learned the dance, I regret that it was necessary.
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Wouldn't it just be a lot easier if, for example, when you hear a telemarketer on the phone just say "get bent" and then hang up on them?
Seems like a much less troublesome and a much more effortless solution to me! :)
You must not get many telemarketer's calls then. They are incessant. Many times an hour. I have caller ID, and never pick up the "Number Unknown" calls. But, already, that annoying ringing coupled with having to go over and look at the box is a hassle. No, not a big deal once or twice, but when it's all the time, it gets hard to have a conversation, or be able to think for any sustained period of time.
If the Telezapper really reduces the number of calls you get, that would be great. If it just disconnects that call, and doesn't delete you from databases, then it won't do much for me.
Already, most of the time, I just let the answering machien field the calls. I'm seriously considering turning off the ringer on my phone, and only having the answering machine answer calls. Of course, the problem with that is that as soon as somebody I actually want to do it uses the same telemarketer solution, it becomes nearly impossible for us to reach each other on the phone; we just get each other's answering machine....
To my mind, phone telemarketers are way worse the spammers. With spam, a quick delete gets rid of it, and it's faster than dealing with telemarketers. Plus, I get to choose when to read my E-mail, and so I can steel myself for it. I don't get to choose when my phone will ring.
-Rob
It is legal to create MP3s of music you own. How is it possible to determine which are legal and which are illegal, given only a list of files on your computer? Do they have a catalogue of the CDs I own?
The RIAA does not want you to be able to create MP3s of music you own. They'd rather you get them from an officially approved source after you have your CD, or (even better) pay more to get the songs in formats other than the CD. With things like anti-circumvention laws, pretty soon the only MP3s of CDs possible will be ones that, even if they can exist legally, will have required an illegal activity to create.
It's plain that the RIAA doesn't want you making digial copies, even for your own use, of CDs you own: that's why un-rippable CDs are starting to come out.
Fair use practises allow you to make MP3s or Vorbises of CDs you own, as long as they are for your own use. But it's a whole lot easier for the RIAA to outlaw this indirectly than to directly assault fair use. Hence, they come up with laws that, while not outlawing fair use, outlaw the things which allow you to execrcise fair use. E.g. the DMCA. A useless law, unless your goal is to restrict legal activity. Copyright violation was already illegal, and the DMCA just makes the act of doing it illegal in another way. It also makes the act of exercising fair use rights under certain circumstances illegal. It gives the RIAA two things. First, another way to go after copyright violaters; you might argue that there is some purpose to this. (It's analogous to going after Al Capone for tax violation.) Two, it lets them bang on people exercising fair use, so that hopefully those people will start paying for additional copies of things they own.
-Rob
The digital was untouched and the polaroid took 405 pics before we ran out of film.
Polaroids are instant (no shutter lag), give you a hard, permanent picture within seconds.
This is key for some uses. I'm thinking of a community theater, where we would hold auditions and more than a hundred people would show up. For those who didn't bring head shots, we'd take one quickly, and have it for the director and staff to use almost immediately. If he needed it the next day, or even just "on file for reference," a digital camera would have been just fine or better (cheaper), but not for immediate use.
There is a market here: a cheap, small, self-contained printer for digital cameras (or, best, for digital images in general). I bet we'll see these come out (if they aren't already), and I also bet that at first we'll see them mostly as accessories to individual specific cameras. Ideally, what I'd love to see is all digital cameras use to moving (say) compact flash cards for storage, and then digital printers that have a simple and fast way of printing images from a built-in flash reader.
-Rob
Lawrence berkely labs uses unix extensively for simulation. Particle accelerator simulation and weather simulation are huge there. Its running on a nice speedy cray. No Linux tho :)
Actually, there's quite a lot of Linux at LBL. I worked there until June, so I have some idea what I'm talking about. There is PDSF, which is a giant node farm of a couple of hundred machines in a beowulf-like system. There are development systems at NERSC which are smaller but which are looking at better ways to put clusters together; I've worked with a 32-node i386 Linux cluster, and the same guys have a 20-someodd-node alpha Linux cluster.
The Supernova Cosmology Project, which I worked with, almost exclusively uses Linux at LBL. There are a few unenlightened people who use Windows for some stuff (one guy is addicted to Adobe Illustrator), and we still had a couple of Solaris machines bumping around, but there were >20 Linux machines in that group.
-Rob
Open source and free software is very common on the web today-- free browsers, servers, and anything else vaguely connected to the web and the internet are very widely used.
The very distribution terms of free software make them fundamentally incompatable with any standard whose licensing requires a fee. Some licenses explicitly forbid the use of algorithms burdened by patents, while others may "just" face the practical problem that the software is widely distributed for no charge, and often isn't even written by a for-profit company.
Given the prevalance and importance of free and open source software on the Web, and given the fundamental incompatability of such software with a standard that requires any licensing fee, how can any such standard be called "reasonable and non-discriminatory"? How would the W3C argue that any "RAND" standards at all requiring licensing fees do not descriminate against a large and important fraction of the web sofwtare out there today, specifically free and open-source software? (This is not a rhetorical question-- I really want to know what the W3C would say in answer to this latter question.)
-Rob
On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.
You already note one good way of getting past this: stenography, hiding the message in something that looks legitimate. (Your low-bandwidth Quake motion idea was a good one.) There is another: nested encryption. Presumably, unless somebody is already suspected, the monitoring agencies aren't going to be allowed to read the contents of all of this mail and so forth without a warrant. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm being foolish, but bear with me.) As such, all they will be able to do is verify that the message is encrypted with a legal, escrow-available key.
So somebody wanting to use illegal encryption encrypts their message with their own crypto, and then encryptes that ciphertext with legal crypto. It will pass the sniffer, but will still be unreadable if somebody gets a warrant and uses the escrowed key on the outer crypto. It won't do the statistical guys any good since their statistics pass will say that these people are using the legal crypto just like everybody else.
As has been noted elsewhere, trying to put controls and limits on this sort of thing is completely quixotic. The only thing which is going to make people copy is a desire to be compliant with the laws. As such, the only people that the laws hinder and restrict are the law-abiding citiziens that (theoretically) the laws aren't directed at. There are two possible motivations for these laws: one, a real misunderstanding of how quixotic trying to regulate crypto would really be. Or, two, a much more sinister desire to get the mechanism in place to monitor every citizen. Choose which motivation you think is behind all of this based on your own level of paranoia and how cynical you are about how naive our leaders are vs. how sinister they are.
-Rob
There's nothing wrong with actually creating the crack, but distribution and especially sale of it should be illegal.
Then explain to me why it shouldn't be illegal for somebody to publish instructions for building a bomb. Yet the Supreme Court has held that up as allowed under the first amendment. It is the use of those instructions which is the illegal act. The same goes with computer code: the script kiddie's crack is instructions for how to perform an illegal act. Therefore, as odious as it may be, it should be protected under the first amendment. The illegal act is using those instructions.
Freedom of speech means that other people have the freedom to say things that we think they should't say. But we have to allow that, so that they will allow us to say the things that they don't like.
And, of course, I have the freedom to ask (but not require) you to self censor: next time think twice before using such profane terms to refer to somebody who has the gall to disagree with you. Your position seems to be that those who disagree are "slashbots", that anybody who thinks for themselves would naturally agree with you. I submit that if you really believe what you seem to believe, you don't understand what thinking for one's self really is.
-Rob
He wasn't locked up for presenting the information, he was locked up for selling it to people.
The day a skript kidding charges $10 for his leet crack to Windows 2005 is the day I tell the government to lock his ass up.
YOU SCARE ME. You think the script kiddie should be locked up for selling software? That's not even a vaild comparison, because Sklyarov's software had legitimate uses for legitimate eBook owners. But even in the case of the script kiddie, I say lock up the person who uses it to crack somebody else's computer, not the person who sold the software.
What you are calling for is equivalent to requiring that all employes of Ford, GM, and every other auto maker be locked up because they sold the cars which drunk drivers used to commit manslaughter.
-Rob
As long as they don't outlaw encryption and free press, I'll keep my mouth shut. Feel free to argue, it's my opinion, not yours.
And what do you think will go first?
Most americans, including our congressmen, will outlaw encryption much faster than they will institute laws requiring searches of cars at state borders. Most of the world simply doesn't understand why cyrptography is anything other than what "people with something to hide" use.
I agree with the sense of your post: I don't object at all to increased airport security, or anything of that sort. However, I really am worried that fundamental freedoms, especially in the computational realm, are going to be severely curtailed because "we are at war" and because "this is a different kind of war."
-Rob
On a more serious note, what makes people think a fundamentalist Islamic group would hide pictures in porn? Wouldn't that require them to go against most of their fundamental beliefs and actually look at nakedness and fornication?
Oh, come on. They may claim to follow it, but those terrorists don't really have anything to do with Islam, any more than white supremists have anything to do with Christianity.
I'm not terribly familiar with the tenets of Islam myself, but "thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments, and those do appear in the Quaran. These people seemed to be willing to violate that one, to the tune of thousands of murders. I'm sure they'd be perfectly willing to violate much lesser religious restrictions all in the name of their "cause".
-Rob
It's currently popular to judge our past with the standards of today. Let's hope our children forgive us of our transgressions, and seek to understand out times before passing judgment upon us.
Let's do one better. Let's learn from the transgressions of the past and do our best to avoid commiting them now. The fewer we commit, the easier they will be to forgive.
I don't think that many people today, in retrospect, would doubt that the internment of Japanese Americans was foolish, disrespectful of individual dignity, and downright wrong. Let us remember that before we do anything in response to the current crisis, blinded as we are by the lack of time for hindsight.
-Rob
WE ARE AT WAR. I think this story is to spit on the graves of everyone who died this week.
Quite the contrary. If we start to sell out basic freedoms, on which this country was founded, that will be spitting on the graves of those who died.
One of the first things that President Bush said after the attacks was that our resolve for freedom would not be shaken. And it must not be-- for if it is, the terrorists have won.
We have to take a level-headed, rational approach to responding to last Tuesday. Rushing forward doing all sorts of ill-considered things-- be it restricting freedom of speech, or nuking random middle-eastern countries-- simply to be seen "doing something" would be a mistake. Any response must make sense: it must address the issue at hand, and we must carefully weight the sacrifices we make in exchange for making that response. To act foolishly or unwisely by way of trying to respond-- that is truly what would show disrespect for the dead.
Specifically with regard to cryptography: back-door-less cryptography is already out there. Terrorists won't hesitate to use it just because it's illegal. Restricting cryptography only restricts law abiding citiziens, and does nothing to address the issue at hand. Hence, it would be rash and foolish to implement such laws in the name of "combating terrorism," since they would do no such thing.
There is a difference between cutting back on freedom of speech, and having food rationing, and even having travel restrictions. Food is necessary for life; but if it is in limited supply, then we must do what we must do to preserve that supply. Freedom of Speech, on the other hand, is one of the philosophical building blocks of this country. Sell that out, and we've lost our soul.
-Rob
My first reaction is, "why would anybody care?" There are a lot of Linx distributions out there, so we're hardly hurting for choice at the moment. Why would we need another one?
But, reading the intereview, where they say they intend to contribute back to the community, I saw why I should care. Perhaps, just perhaps these folks will appeal to somebody that no current Linux distro does. If they succeed, and they're another company employing Linux hackers to hack Linux, then that's a good thing.
And, unlike Red Hat, VA, and a number of others, since they're based in Canada their business won't be outlawed after the US Government finishes passing its defense-of-copyright laws.
-Rob
I haven't done a whole lot of contributing to big open source projects, I have to admit.
I did send the GLE author some RPMs a while back, and heard back from him. And, I sent in some patches for the Atlas project (map software for FlightGear), which made it in quickly.
-Rob
The law is, as a whole, not a "bad" law-- it could be worse. The real problem is that security measures have to be certified, and this would undoubtedly require an expensive application. OTOH, I think that having a certification process in place could be a good thing.
Are you nuts? Think about how free software works. You write it. You put it out there under the BSD or GPL license. Other people modify it, send patches back to you, or publish their versions. It gets bigger, it gets better. Somebody else writes something else small compatable with it.
Done by individuals. Companies can have Government Compliance deapartments to get official certification and approval of their products before they're released. But individuals writing free software will not be able to; it will be too cumbersome for words.
What's more, do you really believe that these security certifications will allow for operating systems where anybody can modify the source code (and, say, remove the security measures) and recompile their own version? At the very worst, all but closed software would be outlawed. At the very best, it would just be illegal to connect your own modified version to the net. It would seriously hamper a lot of people who like to "play" with Linux by modifying it and running their own version. We're not just talkign hackers-- how many people run Alan Cox kernels? How many people have patched the kernel for this or that hardware driver? If they have to get certification before even plugging that modified version into the internet.... Well, it kills free software as we know it in the USA. It is no less than that, and if you think it is, you're either an industry shill, a rose-glassesed blind optimist, or completely and totally deluded.
Requiring certified security protocols be in any piece of software, simply because somebody somewhere might use a computer to commit copyright violation, makes about as much sense as requiring that anybody driving must have a police officer in the back seat, simply because somebody somewhere might drive a car to a bank and rob it.
Requiring government certification of everything we run on our computer would be a very, serious sacrifice of our freedom of action. It's about one step, if that, from requiring government certification of anything we write or say, even within the privacy of our own home. If you think this sounds like a good idea, then you scare me.
-Rob
Just a few weeks ago I used to think that it was important to figure out how to get Linux to compete with Microsoft, so that Microsoft's dominance might be broken, so that those of us who use Linux wouldn't be stuck with people sending us things in proprietary Microsoft formats, and telling us to boot into Windows to configure this or that piece of hardware. I would have thought that strategic questions of what sort of office aps free software developers were working on was very important.
And they are important. But that's not the primary call to arms any more. The issue is no longer whether Linux can compete with Microsoft. The issue is how long those of us in the USA will still be able to legally use Linux at all. The front has changed. It's not dominance; it's survival.
See the article on slashdot a few days back about the SSSCA. See this week's Linux Weekly News (September 13). There's a law out there about to be proposed which would make it illegal for those of us in the USA to continue to use Linux (at least connected to the internet) or any other free software as we know it.
To heck with the Microsoft monopoloy. It's a terrible thing, but at least we can use Linux now. We have to make sure we don't lose that. This is the call to arms that every Linux, BSD, Perl, Apache, or other free software has to heed. Write your congressmen. Write your senators. Don't sit back and let apathy win the day, as it did three years ago with the DMCA. We have to fight this fight, and we have to fight it now, or soon we won't have the luxury of debating what sort of office software will be best to strategically position Linux.
-Rob
James P. Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time. It's actually a time travel novel, but one of the subplots involves a particle collider which is making lots and lots of tiny black holes. This was written a couple of decades ago, I believe. A good read if you like Hogan's stuff.
-Rob Knop
Aditionally, I just heard, that Barbara Olsen, passenger on one of the planes, told her husband, that the terrorists were armed with no more than "knives and cardboard cutters".
Ummm...without trying to sound callous...how did CNN hear of this? Aren't all the passengers dead? Moderators, please READ the posts prior to hitting MODERATE. It helps.
The report I heard on one of the news stations was that Barbara Olsen called her husband from the plane to tell him that it had been hijacked. I believe that this was the plane that went into the Pentagon.
I have nothing to back this up other than what I heard on (I believe) CBS.
-Rob
Who would be so emotionally bankrupt?
Sony would.
Remember, it's big corps like that that bring us DRM, CRPM, DMCA, soon the SSSCA, and other things which are morally bankrupt (indeed often downright evil). Why on earth wouldn't you expect them to be emotionally bankrupt?
People often form a bond with their pets. This bond can be highly individual and have great emotional depth. Therefore, it is bad for the economy. Thinking, independent individuals are hard for marketing departments to profile. What we need are consumers. Robot dogs can be targeted at consumers, just like prepackaged megacorp entertainment "content". If you are thinking for yourself, you're hurting the economy, and harming the business of the megacorps, so stop it right now.
Only commies, intellectual property pirates (like library patrons), and dangerous anti-american open source software users would want a real pet when one could have a Market Approved robot pet!! (Warning: reverse engineering or modifying your Robot Pet is a violation of the DMCA, and an un-American thing to do. Rest assured that you will be protected from the dangers of such violaters as they spend 5 years in prison and pay $250,000 in fines.)
-Rob
the score is not copyrighted, you can rearrange it as you see fit, as you can with any music over 65 years old as in my understanding (IANAL). The performances ARE copyrighted, now if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars paying for your favorite orchestra to rehearse/record your favorite classical songs, so be it. The music is free the performance is not.
I understand all that... I believe I noted that in my original query. And, indeed, perhaps I should have mentioned that I am aware of the Mutopia Project which uses GNU Lilypond to put classic scores online. But I was hoping that there might be some repository of performances of classical music in digital format which had been made freely available.
I really don't expect to find much in the way of the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, or other orchestras with big-ticket CDs. But this world has a wealth of good quality small-name orchestra, including some of the better University orchestras. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were willing to release recordings of their concerts for free. (I mean, heck, sometimes the performances are free to the public.)
-Rob
My question about free music: where's the Classical? That's even a different deal, because a good portion of it (i.e. everything written before the world starting getting excited about extending the copyright period at a rate faster than things were coming out of copyright) is not copyrighted itself; only the performances would be. Surely there are classical music groups out there who've recorded music that they wouldn't mind giving away for free? For instance, university orchestras?
Is there a good repository for this sort of thing in Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3 format? (The former preferred since we're talking about Free stuff here.)
-Rob
Evil Stem Cell Researchers Work to Stop Red Cross Blood Drives!!
...followed by a long set of statistics about how many lives blood drives have saved and about how awful it will be if they stop happening, or even become less common.
-Rob
Hum. You can read slashdot via pseudo-NNTP interface.
What is pseudo?
Can you point to a page that documents this?
-Rob
I have a feeling NASA doesn't use outlook for email, or run unpatched systems, even if they did use IIS.
I dunno if NASA runs IIS, but I do hear that they run ISS.
-Rob
just a quick not, Word & PowerPoint & Eceel docs can be read in other apps. You can live with out/
They are never read in perfectly, in my experience. Sometimes it fails altogheter. It's still a proprietary format, and the controller of that format keeps it a moving target. You may argue whether this is the intent, but the effect is to thwart and delay those who try to make other products compatable.
But while we're talking lost productivity costs: how much productivity has been lost by developers of other products (including open source ones such as KOffice and OpenOffice) by having to write import/export filters by reverse engineering Microsoft formats? How much further along would those products be if they only had to support an open, well-documented product?
The fact that these things all have to be Microsoft compatable to be viable merely proves my point. Those of us who choose not to use Microsoft OSes and apps can't simply ignore Microsoft, but have to dance to their tune. Even if some have learned the dance, I regret that it was necessary.
-Rob