Btrey wrote: We have a massive War on Drugs at which we throw billions of dollars, and you can buy crack on just about any street corner. Do we want to create a "War on Piracy" that endlessly gobbles money with little or no return?
The war War on Piracy will be just as devastating as the War on Drugs and it will be fought for the same reason, not to stop drugs and not to stop piracy. There is only one reason for these wars:
Power
The US war on drugs makes the government more powerful because citizen's rights must be violated to "win" it. Just one result is "no knock" police raids on people's homes in the name of the war. Those too young to remember should know that in the US before the 1970s the police had to knock at your door and let you read the search warrant before they could enter your home. When I tell young people this, at first they think I'm lying. They can't imagine such constraints on the power of the police. This constraint went away when the Supreme Court ruled that no knock warrants were ok if the police thought that somebody might be flushing the drugs down the toilet as the police were standing at the door. Now no knock warrants are common even for instances where there are no drugs.
The War on Drugs makes the politicians more powerful because they write the laws. Enough said. The War on Drugs makes the mafia more powerful because they make huge amounts of money. To the mafia, this is the American Dream. Find a product that lots of people want. Sell it. Make tons of money. Build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door.
Now we've come to something new: The War on Piracy. The War on Piracy makes the corporations more powerful. It doesn't matter whether the war is winnable or not. The power is the important part.
Note also, that the War on Pornography (actually child pornography) also gives the government and the politicians huge amounts of new power. For those who don't remember, anon.penet.fi was a public anonymous remailer site in Finland. You could send and receive email without revealing your identity. The site was shut down when the US sent an Interpol search warrant to the Finnish government. What was it looking for? Child pornographers. Of course, they didn't find any pornographers. That wasn't the reason for the raid. The site shut down, just as the US government wanted it to. As I remember it, he guy who ran it wrote that it wasn't worth the trouble. And who can blame him.
The internet is the battleground where this conflict will take place and it will affect all of us.
Also remember anon.penet.fi the anonymous remailer service. In the relatively free land of Linus and Nokia and saunas, the US government was unable to get the service provider to cut them off. But the US government was able to get an Interpol search warrant to get information on alleged child pornographers who were allegedly being shielded by the service. The Finnish police stormed in and anon.penet.fi was history. As I remember, the guy who administered the server, later wrote that the server had become way too much trouble for him, and who can blame him. Nobody, anywhere in the world has set up an easy to use public anonymous remailer since.
I would recommend that you get a high speed DSL/Cable connection to your home and use one of the free DNS providers to ensure that people can always reach your IP from a domain.
I think that going offshore/self-hosting encourages a false sense of security. It seems like you have solved the problem but you haven't. This encourages apathy because the problem seems to go away. It seems like you have freedom of speech when you really don't.
You can still be shut down by your DSL service provider in the same way that your web host provider can shut you down. Nothing has changed.
Remember how in the old days, the internet was designed to discourage spam/commercial activity. When you got internet access, you promise not to do a bunch of things. One of them is spam so let's use spam as an example. The penalty for sending spam is that you get your service pulled and your account terminated. Your service provider had the same kind of contract with it's service provider. If your service provider allows it's customers to spam then it's service provider can cut it off. This continues down the line to the backbones. They have the same kind of contract. The agreement states that they will exchange data as long as there is no spam. The penalty for a backbone allowing it's customers to spam is that the other backbones will cut them off, they will not exchange data.
Remember the Spam King and the Ageis network? The Spam King became his own service provider connected directly to the Ageis backbone. It seemed like an ideal solution. The problem was that all the other backbones threatened to cut off Ageis' access to their backbones. Ageis was forced to pull the plug on the Spam King even though they didn't want to. If the other backbones had cut them off, they would have gone out of business.
Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go.
If you don't think that this can be done, remember that until very recently, the US phone networks were prohibited from connecting to the Cuban phone network so you couldn't easily make a phone call from the US to Cuba. Yes, I know that the internet has obvious ways to route around this kind of block but big governments can put a lot of pressure on service providers.
Remember that service providers are corporations. Like it or not, they are amoral. Their loyalty is to shareholders not to your freedom of speech. If the CEO of a corporation puts your freedom of speech above shareholder value, he can be sued and he will certainly loose his job.
our OS doesn't have a central, consistent, configuration database, for apps and system resources alike.
Thankfully
Or is my judgment clouded by experience with this particular implementation? Are there other OSes that implement such a configuration database without getting it so badly wrong?
Well, maybe. The Macintosh handles configuration data in an interesting way. Ooooww! please don't flame me! The Mac has its shortcomings but the way it handles configuration is kind of a cool thing that no other OS has. The Macintosh configuration system allows configuration data to be organized in files with a standard format, without having to be centralized.
The Macintosh saves its configuration data in the Preferences folder in a special file format called Resources. This covers not only what format the data should be stored in but also where on the disk the data should be stored.
Macintosh resources are used for saving all sorts of things like program settings, icons, pictures, executable binary code, and a bunch of other things. Resources have the advantage that they are a standard (for the Mac) database format files that you can put just about anything into. A resource file is kind of like a binary format file that can contain a bunch of items that can be read or written to with standard OS calls or with the Resource Editor application. No application has its own code that parses the format of resource files. The OS does all this. The Resource Editor is just a specialized application that allows a user to edit any resource file's contents like strings and integers as a text editor would. The resource Editor even allows a user to edit bitmaps and icons and a bunch of other things that are in a resource file. The resource editor presents the data to the user to edit, actual editing of the file is done by the OS.
But the most useful aspect of Macintosh resources is that while they are a standardized format, they NOT centralized. This database format can be put into ANY file in any folder, not just one huge single centralized database. Generally applications (and parts of the OS) put their own configuration files (in resource editor format) into the Preferences folder. The result is that the entire system's configuration is in one folder. The configuration data is not scattered around in several directories as in Linux, or scattered around one huge monolithic Registry database as in Windows. The OS and application configuration data are organized, without having to be centralized.
The nice thing about the use of the Preferences folder is that the OS and the applications never refer to the Preferences folder with an absolute directory name but a relative name. This is kind of like using ~/joe/prefs for Joe's user preferences or ~/root/prefs for system preferences. The preferences files also refer to the system in a relative way. This is kind of like using ~/system rather than using c:\winnt\system. This is nothing new to Unix users but Windows has nothing like it.
The best thing about this kind of organization is that, as long as you keep a copy of the Preferences folder you have all the settings for the entire system no matter what folder the system itself is in. You can delete and reinstall, or move, the entire system without the Windoze nightmare of loosing every system, user, and application setting. In Windows, it's impossible to delete or rename C:\WINNT without also deleting every single setting on the system and having to reinstall every application. Crazy.
We are all becoming dependant upon data spread out all over the world, data over which we have no control and which could disappear at any moment. What do we do when sites die? This has to be a huge problem.
I once had a favorite site that I used for all kinds of references. One day the maintainer died. Since he stopped paying his bills, his ISP closed his account and erased his files. I've never again seen a copy of these files:( Since then I suck down entire web sites that are valuable to me and archive them to CD, if they fit. This seems like overkill, but what else is there to do?
This simple method doesn't work for sites like Slashdot that have their data in a database, rather than in separate web pages that can be sucked down by a web bot. If Slashdot suddenly went away, how could we resurrect it? I wonder if we could.
3. Target other markets: schools, colleges and universities could use cheap machines with standardized, open-source OS installed. Target large corporations, who need a computer on every desk, and sell them these machines. With Linux or one of the BSDs, you can overturn the Microsoft monopoly.
And what's to stop the same Trojan from posting the information on Usenet? Or IRC or whatever.
As thecap said, don't use trojans.;-)
The issue is not the accidental use of trojans, it's the purposeful, malicious, use of trojans to corrupt the data on the network. The question is, how do you know whether a certain Freenet node is really a Freenet node and not a subtly malicious program in disguise? If you can't know whether a Freenet node on the other side of the world is really a genuine Freenet node, then that node can potentially corrupt the data on the entire network.
I mentioned the GPL, and my teacher looked at me as if I were green and had antennae. When I described it to her, she passed me off as if I were off my rocker.
The real problem here is not technology or marketing, it's the fact that our educational system treats our kids like children. When I was in school, I took that kind of treatment as the highest insult, not that it mattered. Many of our teachers and most of our administrators just want their children to be seen and not heard. It's easier for them that way. It's one of the main reasons that school is such an alienating place.
..is that most (if not all) of it is based on a "black-list" model.
That is, the basic assumption is that all sites are accessable except for a specific list of sites flagged as "bad".
Perhaps a better approach would be a "white-list" model, where only those sites explicitly designated "safe" are allowed.
Why are we setting ouseleves up for failure? Whatever method of blocking that you choose, you are bound to have sites that are blocked incorrectly. Even if all sites were blocked correctly, you are bound to have people who disagree with your choice of blocked/unblocked sites. Blocking doesn't even work technically. At my library where there is a block, I figured out how to get around the block in about five minutes. Easy. Any kid can do it even if the adults can't.
Why do we seem to have such a deep need to dictate to others what sites they can and cannot view? Why the power thing? Isn't it just simpler to have each person decide for themselves what is appropriate and what is not? Really. Even children can do this. Here's how:
Place all the internet terminals in the library in publicly viewable places so that anybody can walk by and see what is on the screens. This way people, yes even kids, will decide for themselves. what is appropriate and what is not. What kid wants to view porn in public anyway?
Yes, there is one problem with this. Eventually somebody is going to view something really sexually offensive. Great. There are laws, real laws, against being lewd in public. Call the police. That's their job.
One of these kids was on Luvox, a Prozac/Zoloft type drug. It's in the same class as Ritalin, it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. Dopamine reuptake inhibitors are available on the street, they are powder and crack coccaine.
These drugs drive people mad. Their feelings have nothing to do with what they did.
Katz, you're trying to explain drug induced madness. Forget it, you're wasting bandwidth.
Really?
The first three drugs are seratonin uptake inhibitors. They're antidepressants. For some of us, they make life livable, sometimes even happy.
Ritalin is a stimulant that increases the amount of dopamine that is created in the brain. For some of us, it helps us stay out of a half sleepy fog. It helps us concentrate and remember. Yes, it's speed. Deal with it. Some of us need it. You should feel lucky that you don't.
Get a grip. None of these drugs makes anyone kill anybody.
Trap children for six hours a day in a cutthroat social environment where the strong are encouraged to abuse the weak and where adults refuse to notice, you will create a huge amount of hatred and alienation. Out of millions of kids in our schools, hundreds of thousands of them would love to get back at their oppressors some way. How many of these kids would love to kill or blow up their school, even if their morals prevent them from actually doing so?
How many of these kids are so depressed, so desperate, so alienated, and so numb that they will actually resort to murder? The answer is two. We should be amazed that this number is so low.
Slashdot Mirror
The war War on Piracy will be just as devastating as the War on Drugs and it will be fought for the same reason, not to stop drugs and not to stop piracy. There is only one reason for these wars:
Power
The US war on drugs makes the government more powerful because citizen's rights must be violated to "win" it. Just one result is "no knock" police raids on people's homes in the name of the war. Those too young to remember should know that in the US before the 1970s the police had to knock at your door and let you read the search warrant before they could enter your home. When I tell young people this, at first they think I'm lying. They can't imagine such constraints on the power of the police. This constraint went away when the Supreme Court ruled that no knock warrants were ok if the police thought that somebody might be flushing the drugs down the toilet as the police were standing at the door. Now no knock warrants are common even for instances where there are no drugs.
The War on Drugs makes the politicians more powerful because they write the laws. Enough said. The War on Drugs makes the mafia more powerful because they make huge amounts of money. To the mafia, this is the American Dream. Find a product that lots of people want. Sell it. Make tons of money. Build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door.
Now we've come to something new: The War on Piracy. The War on Piracy makes the corporations more powerful. It doesn't matter whether the war is winnable or not. The power is the important part.
Note also, that the War on Pornography (actually child pornography) also gives the government and the politicians huge amounts of new power. For those who don't remember, anon.penet.fi was a public anonymous remailer site in Finland. You could send and receive email without revealing your identity. The site was shut down when the US sent an Interpol search warrant to the Finnish government. What was it looking for? Child pornographers. Of course, they didn't find any pornographers. That wasn't the reason for the raid. The site shut down, just as the US government wanted it to. As I remember it, he guy who ran it wrote that it wasn't worth the trouble. And who can blame him.
The internet is the battleground where this conflict will take place and it will affect all of us.
Also remember anon.penet.fi the anonymous remailer service. In the relatively free land of Linus and Nokia and saunas, the US government was unable to get the service provider to cut them off. But the US government was able to get an Interpol search warrant to get information on alleged child pornographers who were allegedly being shielded by the service. The Finnish police stormed in and anon.penet.fi was history. As I remember, the guy who administered the server, later wrote that the server had become way too much trouble for him, and who can blame him. Nobody, anywhere in the world has set up an easy to use public anonymous remailer since.
You can still be shut down by your DSL service provider in the same way that your web host provider can shut you down. Nothing has changed.
Remember how in the old days, the internet was designed to discourage spam/commercial activity. When you got internet access, you promise not to do a bunch of things. One of them is spam so let's use spam as an example. The penalty for sending spam is that you get your service pulled and your account terminated. Your service provider had the same kind of contract with it's service provider. If your service provider allows it's customers to spam then it's service provider can cut it off. This continues down the line to the backbones. They have the same kind of contract. The agreement states that they will exchange data as long as there is no spam. The penalty for a backbone allowing it's customers to spam is that the other backbones will cut them off, they will not exchange data.
Remember the Spam King and the Ageis network? The Spam King became his own service provider connected directly to the Ageis backbone. It seemed like an ideal solution. The problem was that all the other backbones threatened to cut off Ageis' access to their backbones. Ageis was forced to pull the plug on the Spam King even though they didn't want to. If the other backbones had cut them off, they would have gone out of business.
Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go.
If you don't think that this can be done, remember that until very recently, the US phone networks were prohibited from connecting to the Cuban phone network so you couldn't easily make a phone call from the US to Cuba. Yes, I know that the internet has obvious ways to route around this kind of block but big governments can put a lot of pressure on service providers.
Remember that service providers are corporations. Like it or not, they are amoral. Their loyalty is to shareholders not to your freedom of speech. If the CEO of a corporation puts your freedom of speech above shareholder value, he can be sued and he will certainly loose his job.
Or is my judgment clouded by experience with this particular implementation? Are there other OSes that implement such a configuration database without getting it so badly wrong?
Well, maybe. The Macintosh handles configuration data in an interesting way. Ooooww! please don't flame me! The Mac has its shortcomings but the way it handles configuration is kind of a cool thing that no other OS has. The Macintosh configuration system allows configuration data to be organized in files with a standard format, without having to be centralized.
The Macintosh saves its configuration data in the Preferences folder in a special file format called Resources. This covers not only what format the data should be stored in but also where on the disk the data should be stored.
Macintosh resources are used for saving all sorts of things like program settings, icons, pictures, executable binary code, and a bunch of other things. Resources have the advantage that they are a standard (for the Mac) database format files that you can put just about anything into. A resource file is kind of like a binary format file that can contain a bunch of items that can be read or written to with standard OS calls or with the Resource Editor application. No application has its own code that parses the format of resource files. The OS does all this. The Resource Editor is just a specialized application that allows a user to edit any resource file's contents like strings and integers as a text editor would. The resource Editor even allows a user to edit bitmaps and icons and a bunch of other things that are in a resource file. The resource editor presents the data to the user to edit, actual editing of the file is done by the OS.
But the most useful aspect of Macintosh resources is that while they are a standardized format, they NOT centralized. This database format can be put into ANY file in any folder, not just one huge single centralized database. Generally applications (and parts of the OS) put their own configuration files (in resource editor format) into the Preferences folder. The result is that the entire system's configuration is in one folder. The configuration data is not scattered around in several directories as in Linux, or scattered around one huge monolithic Registry database as in Windows. The OS and application configuration data are organized, without having to be centralized.
The nice thing about the use of the Preferences folder is that the OS and the applications never refer to the Preferences folder with an absolute directory name but a relative name. This is kind of like using ~/joe/prefs for Joe's user preferences or ~/root/prefs for system preferences. The preferences files also refer to the system in a relative way. This is kind of like using ~/system rather than using c:\winnt\system. This is nothing new to Unix users but Windows has nothing like it.
The best thing about this kind of organization is that, as long as you keep a copy of the Preferences folder you have all the settings for the entire system no matter what folder the system itself is in. You can delete and reinstall, or move, the entire system without the Windoze nightmare of loosing every system, user, and application setting. In Windows, it's impossible to delete or rename C:\WINNT without also deleting every single setting on the system and having to reinstall every application. Crazy.
I once had a favorite site that I used for all kinds of references. One day the maintainer died. Since he stopped paying his bills, his ISP closed his account and erased his files. I've never again seen a copy of these files :( Since then I suck down entire web sites that are valuable to me and archive them to CD, if they fit. This seems like overkill, but what else is there to do?
This simple method doesn't work for sites like Slashdot that have their data in a database, rather than in separate web pages that can be sucked down by a web bot. If Slashdot suddenly went away, how could we resurrect it? I wonder if we could.
Also check out the The Award Winning Story from the Linux Terminal Server Project.
Slashdot has a discussion about this kind of thing on their front page: Voices from the Hellmouth, More Stories from the Hellmouth and The Price of Being Different
Why do we seem to have such a deep need to dictate to others what sites they can and cannot view? Why the power thing? Isn't it just simpler to have each person decide for themselves what is appropriate and what is not? Really. Even children can do this. Here's how:
Place all the internet terminals in the library in publicly viewable places so that anybody can walk by and see what is on the screens. This way people, yes even kids, will decide for themselves. what is appropriate and what is not. What kid wants to view porn in public anyway?
Yes, there is one problem with this. Eventually somebody is going to view something really sexually offensive. Great. There are laws, real laws, against being lewd in public. Call the police. That's their job.
Really?
The first three drugs are seratonin uptake inhibitors. They're antidepressants. For some of us, they make life livable, sometimes even happy.
Ritalin is a stimulant that increases the amount of dopamine that is created in the brain. For some of us, it helps us stay out of a half sleepy fog. It helps us concentrate and remember. Yes, it's speed. Deal with it. Some of us need it. You should feel lucky that you don't.
Get a grip. None of these drugs makes anyone kill anybody.
Trap children for six hours a day in a cutthroat social environment where the strong are encouraged to abuse the weak and where adults refuse to notice, you will create a huge amount of hatred and alienation. Out of millions of kids in our schools, hundreds of thousands of them would love to get back at their oppressors some way. How many of these kids would love to kill or blow up their school, even if their morals prevent them from actually doing so?
How many of these kids are so depressed, so desperate, so alienated, and so numb that they will actually resort to murder? The answer is two. We should be amazed that this number is so low.