look around on their obnoxious sales page, there is a one-line text link to the free real 8. It took me 5 minutes to find it, but it's there, and includes links to unix versions as well. whee.
Yeah, I got all excited because I am going to Montreal tomorrow, I was going to stop by and have a drink to Mr. Adams' memory... but alas, Ottawa is a bit too far out of my way.
At least, they did before last christmas when I bought two sets of the CDs. Very reasonably priced as well, I think it was around $40US for each 6 disc set (which come as two 3 disc sets, so make sure you order both of them!)
Re:I don't agree about the ending
on
Review: Memento
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· Score: 1
I agree with not agreeing about the ending.:-)
When I first saw it and walked out of the theater, I felt like Katz did -- it seemed kind of a let-down. The friends who saw the film with me felt the same way. However, after a few minutes of discussing the movie and the ending, we realized that we all had very different takes on the implications it had for the other parts of the movie! There was a lot to discover, a lot to debate, and I'm sure, a lot that would be rediscovered on a second viewing.
It's definitely a movie to see. It's by far the best I've seen in a while, and you should go see it too.
No doubt that vague laws are a bad thing. Keep in mind, though, that any law can be enforced selectively. One that is obviously inspecific will, at least, have trouble hiding itself as a fair and even-handed one.
I don't think anyone can argue that you can reasonably lay down a formula to define whether something is indecent/obscene. In the end, someone needs to make a subjective judgement, and this document from the FCC attempts to explain what factors will go into that judgement. I hope the courts will find that these are too vague and could frighten well-intentioned would-be broadcasters away from expressing themselves freely for fear of differing opinions.
It's fairly obvious that you can't lay down specific rules to determine what is indecent/obscene. If they'd written down a precise specification for obscene materials, next week we'd see Howard Stern do a clearly obscene bit that skirted every rule. To be effective, the rules have to be vague -- someone has to consider the whole context.
But...
Maybe that's a good thing -- the more vague and open to "interpretation" (read: selective enforcement) the rules are, the less likely the regulations (and the underlying laws?) are to stand up to judicial scrutiny. If the regulations have the potential for arbitrary and over-broad application, I'd at least hope that the courts would strike them down. They've done that before (read the intro to the regulations, for starters).
On a related note, I thought the comments from one of the board members (I don't remember his name, I think it was P.25 or so) in the appendix were interesting. Essentially, he was arguing that in the new environment where broadcast media (in the usual sense, not including the internet) are starting to take a back seat to opt-in media like videos, the already-weak constitutionality of the regulations will vanish. Worth reading and thinking about...
Ahh, but you can typeset it as H^2G^2 (H-squared G-squared) and then it looks hip and fresh and appeals to the new generation of cybergeeks.
hmm, better than eHHGTTG, I suppose.:-)
But really, I followed the link and couldn't tell what the site / community did. Can someone please enlighten those of us who didn't see it previously as to what it was?
Would you be willing or able to invest potentially tens of thousands of dollars in your legal defense should CCS somehow get the idea that you are violating copyrights? If they could be guaranteed of only chasing guilty parties, then your argument would make more sense. The issue is that they will invariably make mistakes and go after innocent parties.
Even if you are (in your mind) unquestionably innocent, think about the expected cost of your lawsuit. First, don't count on recouping your legal fees just because you're found innocent -- they only need to show that they weren't being reckless (IANAL, BTW). Being wrong with their accusations isn't going to be enough. So figure legal fees + (probability of being wrongly found guilty) * (penalties if you're found guilty). Using the $100k statutory penalty per violation that they quote (which, granted, is a maximum penalty), I'm guessing that at around a 5% chance of being found wrongly guilty, you're going to win by just paying out.
Further, their behavior can easily prevent people from freely exercising rights that they may have to use copyrighted materials. Consider the questionable process of downloading an MP3 of a song you own on CD in order to space-shift that song for play on your Rio. Maybe you want to help your less technically-minded friends do this by providing them with MP3s for songs you know they own on CD. Is this fair use? No one knows for sure. If CCS might slap you with a $10k "penalty" for these violations and your only way out is to bet thousands in legal fees that you'll be protected, an awful lot of people will be afraid to do anything.
I don't really have a solution to this problem -- our society is such that in many ways, the small guy can't help but be screwed in some situations. But being innocent is *not* necessarily enough in order not to have to worry about these guys.
Remember, though, that the total number of people expected to suffer from a given ailment has not changed, although the ability to predict who will suffer is improved. Thus, any increase in Bob's insurance premium after he is diagnosed with the About-to-Keel-Over gene had better be accompanied by a reduction in everyone else's rates if you want to make any economic arguments.
The total cost of insurance for everyone can only (ethically) stay the same or go down in response to such a development, unless the disease suddenly becomes a lot more prevalent.
Note that I'm not arguing that it's right or wrong to charge everyone a little more rather than Bob a *lot* more...
Yes, this is real-time DGPS using carrier tracking. Carrier tracking is common on high-end survey class receivers. On consumer grade / lower-end stuff where you're not doing DGPS, there's not much point in tracking carrier because atmospheric fluctuations overwhelm any gain you might make.
Could this give an advantage to their official server over free servers that others put up? When you play on a free server, you'll have no assurances that it's not cheating somehow. On the official server, however, you would be guaranteed that the server is fair.
Of course, sites running hacked servers would probably be caught rather quickly, and just a few reputable free sites might be enough to put the official one under.
Is writing character build-up scripts really cheating? When I used to MUD, I would alias commonly-used battle commands to simpler, 1- or 2-character commands. This gave me an advantage over people who played via raw telnet. Was I therefore cheating? Obviously the client-server architecture needs to be carefully constructed with the assumption that the client is always compromised... but you should already be doing that, even with closed-source clients!
So as I see it, either the game will be fundamentally broken because of bad architecture, or the GPLedness of the client won't matter. If server exploits become a problem, then that's good news for the company running the official unhacked server... but as an example, MUDs have plenty of opportunity for server exploits, but people keep playing those. "Bad" servers quickly become unpopular and die.
If they have already made a big pile of PSX boxes and people buy bleem! instead of the sony hardware, then sony will lose the total cost of each PSX rather than total cost minus selling price. There are also likely other reasons (such as maintaining control over their platform, etc), but if bleem! makes it harder for them to predict how many PSXes to make or causes them to be left with a bunch of unsellable boxes on their hands, they won't be happy.
Just cut the wire / damage / jam / shield the antenna and you're free. The only way I can think of to get around people's doing this would be to cause the car to shut down if it doesn't get a signal. Hopefully that is sufficiently unacceptable to the general population...
If Sony's contract says they have the right to terminate the service of anyone at any time, with a simple repayment, they're wrong.
Contracts like that don't fly in any other industry and they wouldn't fly here. If a business wants to kick out one customer and let another stay they need a fairly good reason or they open themselves up to lawsuit.
Is refusing to play by the rules of the game not a valid reason to disallow someone's playing the game? Obviously, Sony needs to have some control over the service they're providing -- there are good arguments against discrimination (of the sort you discussed) by those providing services, but suppose WalMart's rule was that no bags at all may be brought into the store. Should they be forced to allow you to enter with your duffel bag then?
They probably ought to have some sort of disclaimer on the game packaging with a reference to the rules so you can check them out before you buy. Maybe they do, I don't know. However, it doesn't seem reasonable to prevent them from protecting the service they provide from tampering. Do they sell you the right to play the game? Yes. Do they then have to let you play the game however you want? I would imagine this out-of-game buying/selling of items is not something they expected when they set up shop. Are they forever to be prevented from changing their rules to address what they see as threats to the playability of their game?
Here's the way I am thinking about it. Should Sony / Verant have the right to prevent you from playing the game using your friend's character and building it up? I don't think so.
Suppose your friend wants to pay you for going to that trouble? Is that something they should legally be allowed to prevent? Again, I very strongly feel that they should not -- someone is paying for the time in the game, and they have no legal grounds (or rather, imo they _should_ have no legal grounds) to even know who is pushing the buttons for that person.
So can someone explain how selling a character you have powered up or items you have collected is materially different from game-playing for hire?
Now, some of you seem to be arguing that the game balance is upset by these sales. While I can see how that could be the case (I don't know because I have never played, I have played MUDs quite a bit so I can imagine the impact, though), I think you need a stronger argument than that for allowing a corporation the legal power to step in and prevent a private business agreement between two individuals that happens to involve a service provided by that corporation. It doesn't seem clear to me that the law needs to provide remedy for someone's game being played in ways they don't like.
However, I guess no one has the right to be allowed to play. If Sony wants to kill your character and stop letting you pay them to play, that is their prerogative and you should have no recourse. But I don't believe they should really have any power beyond revoking the accounts of violators.
It is a more complicated issue than I first thought, however. I'd particularly be interested in comments re: my 4th paragraph -- I guess I am not quite sure where the law belongs in terms of protecting games that a company is making money from. There may be some arguments that they deserve damages from someone who acts to make the game less enjoyable and therefore profitable, but that's a really murky area in my mind.
Oh, and I don't think your VMU analogy is a strong one. Sega has no rights whatsoever to the works that you create by using their hardware and software. The save-game files are *your* bits and you have not signed any contracts agreeing "Any bits generated through the use of this console and software are the sole property of Sega." Just like Adobe doesn't own the rights to that artwork you just put together in Photoshop, Sega has no rights to anything you create by using their hardware or software. So you are free to sell your VMU, copy the data onto blank VMUs and sell those, etc. (Actually, if you're not, let me know and I'm moving to a small desert island and starting my own civilization.) This situation is different from the VMU case in that your gameplay behavior substantially impacts the experience of their other customers since it is a shared universe. If you are violating their rules in such a way as to cause them financial damages, they *may* have the right to sue you for that.
That's a little misleading. The GPS ephemeris and almanac data (the info that tells you how to predict where a satellite should be) is sent at 50bps, it's true. However, the real job of positioning is done using a pseudorandom sequence that's chipped at about a megahertz -- this will get you ~10 meter accuracy. That's just for crappy cheapo civilian stuff... there are higher bandwidth signals available for military use (and civilians can get down to cm levels using differential GPS, but that's a different story that involves counting 1.5GHZ carrier phase cycles and generally using extreme cleverness)
WAAS is similarly not directly used for positioning in its 250bps bandwidth -- it provides a useful data message that helps to remove uncertainties from the GPS signals you receive, but it's not really letting you do positioning with a 250bps signal.
In principle you could use a 50bps (or even slower) signal to do GPS work, but in practice it would be too hard and expensive to nail down bit transitions accurately enough and would make initialization *very* slow. Enough so that it would be a silly thing to do.
But a couple megahertz of BW isn't bad for what GPS can do, when you think about it... but it really is a lot more than 50bps.
Nah, no hoax... they happen to be working on NMR quantum computing in the same lab in the Media Lab where two of the three pengachu developers work. The "quantum computer" they have is essentially a low-cost special purpose NMR spectrometer (note that low-cost is a relative thing...). The QC research they are doing at the moment is trying to bring a couple of qubits into a tabletop NMR spectrometer.
At least that was the case last year when I was working there. Probably still true today...
Note that using pengachu as the interface is almost certainly for show more than anything. I'd guess that these slides were used for a sponsor presentation at a Media Lab gathering. I would suppose they were mostly trying to draw connections between various projects being presented to the sponsors.
It looks like (in the first few paragraphs of your post, anyway) you are interpreting their use of "end-to-end" in the wrong way. It's not an issue of having a single provider / service from one end of the connection to the other (a la your AT&T example) but rather a design philosophy for placing intelligence in a system. The end-to-end "paradigm" calls for, in effect, putting the intelligence at as high a level as you can get away with. Lower level services should be implemented with just enough intelligence to do their job efficiently.
Read the Saltzer, et al, paper that was referenced in the first post in this series -- it explains the end-to-end argument well and gives some examples.
So anyway, an end-to-end argument says nothing about who should own or run which parts of the network. It _does_ argue that people running the IP services shouldn't be doing anything other than moving packets through the network. The modularity of the network stack should be respected, so decisions made at the IP level should not be made using, eg, the contents of the IP packets.
I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment that gaming is the cause/victim/whatever of a moral panic in the previous generation. However, I'm less convinced that these are really growing more violent as time passes. Obviously there was the 60s with rock 'n' roll, free love, etc, but I'd love to hear evidence that supports the statement that this was the first noticeable widening in the generational gap. I'm thinking in particular that moves from rural family-oriented life to urban professional lifestyles early 20th century must have caused some upheaval, just as an example. Perhaps what's different now is that national forums for voicing outrage and concern with regard to these moral panics are easier to come by. Is this not just another case of the now elder generation knowing better than their parents, just as before? "You thought you had it bad when we started listening to rock'n'roll, you didn't know anything -- look at my children with their mortal combat and their final fantasy."
Anyway, I am just thinking out loud here -- I'd love to hear discussion pro/con wrt my thoughts.
Legally, a contract is not binding unless both sides understand the terms to which they are agreeing. The contract must come from a "meeting of the minds," not from deception or coercion. Merely signing the document is not enough to create a contract. The courts have often denied contracts where, eg, a strong party threatened or otherwise frightened a weaker party into accepting a contract.
Note that IANAL, but my father is a law prof, so I've had a few discussions on this topic with an expert. But don't use this as legal advice.
When you sign a physical document, you definitely came in contact with it and left physical artifacts of your contact with the document. If you go around signing papers you haven't read, you should be more careful, but that's another issue. I think the concern he raises is a very valid one -- it is easier to steal a (and harder to detect a stolen) private key than it is to steal a "real" signature. Physical forgeries happen all the time, but because of the local nature of the physical world, it is very hard not to leave a trail of evidence.
Be careful who you trust. No matter how careful I am about installing software, scanning for viruses, etc, I wouldn't trust any PC fully. Can you be _sure_ that Win98 has no backdoors? Can you be _sure_ that Linux has no backdoors?
The real danger in digi signatures is considering them to have the potential to be any different from regular signatures. If you require a notary to witness a physical signature, then you damn well better require a notary to _physically_ witness the real person issuing a digital signature. Maybe there's a digital means for authenticating a person better than a human notary, so that may be an option. But authenticating the person in a truly secure way is necessary. This is not only an issue for the signer, but also for the party with whom he is contracting -- if there is any doubt that the signature was inauthentic, they are open to litigation... so really, everyone wants authentication from human->document.
Of course, I am of the opinion that physical artifacts should not be done away with. For many tasks, they may be the best solution available -- if security is really at stake, you may be better off _not_ moving at full internet speed.
While it's always frightening to discover that "they" are watching us in a new way, I'm not convinced this is really a scary thing. As many have pointed out, the service is not infallible. Since IP addresses are not necessarily geographically segregated, so if you are truly concerned about this, you can (rather easily) find ways around it.
However, do we really need to? In "the real world," advertisers can avoid spamming people with irrelevant ads. Allowing this type of targetting online seems reasonable. Occasionally, advertising is useful -- it is a good way to learn about what's out there. Not every corporate practice is wicked and evil, even if it removes some level of the anonymity that was previously found on the internet.
While privacy is important to protect, the internet is a changing place and I believe that the level of casually available anonymity will inevitably decrease. Some losses should be protected against, but I don't think this is one of them. Which step in their collection process should have been prevented? If your activities are traceable to _your_ IP address, then they are not anonymous, and I don't think any knowledgable individuals would expect them to be. Security through obscurity... The only difference is that it's now a little easier to figure out where (some of) those IP addresses are. If the information is out there to be collected by legal procedures, it will be collected.
Re:quantum security and the new elite
on
Quantum Security
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· Score: 2
The first classical computers were government projects, available only to government institutions. One of the first such machines was Britain's Collossus, which was exclusively capable of cracking codes. Even today, I'd bet that the NSA/CIA/etc have better code breaking machines than most of us do... maybe even beowulf clusters of them...
As long as there is wide research to develop these machines, they will eventually become publicly available. There may be a lag before the price drops to the point where you can have PQCs (personal quantum computers), just as it took a third of a century to go from ENIACesque systems to affordable home machines. But there are enough huge corporations that would like to protect their secrets that I bet the developments will take place in the public sector.
Of course, be on the lookout for anti-QC laws to prevent this. After all, unless you're a criminal distributing kiddie porn photos and terrorist information, you wouldn't mind Big Brother reading your private communications, would you?
Slashdot Mirror
300 / (1 start + 8 data + 1 stop) = 30.
look around on their obnoxious sales page, there is a one-line text link to the free real 8. It took me 5 minutes to find it, but it's there, and includes links to unix versions as well. whee.
Yeah, I got all excited because I am going to Montreal tomorrow, I was going to stop by and have a drink to Mr. Adams' memory... but alas, Ottawa is a bit too far out of my way.
At least, they did before last christmas when I bought two sets of the CDs. Very reasonably priced as well, I think it was around $40US for each 6 disc set (which come as two 3 disc sets, so make sure you order both of them!)
I agree with not agreeing about the ending. :-)
When I first saw it and walked out of the theater, I felt like Katz did -- it seemed kind of a let-down. The friends who saw the film with me felt the same way. However, after a few minutes of discussing the movie and the ending, we realized that we all had very different takes on the implications it had for the other parts of the movie! There was a lot to discover, a lot to debate, and I'm sure, a lot that would be rediscovered on a second viewing.
It's definitely a movie to see. It's by far the best I've seen in a while, and you should go see it too.
I don't think anyone can argue that you can reasonably lay down a formula to define whether something is indecent/obscene. In the end, someone needs to make a subjective judgement, and this document from the FCC attempts to explain what factors will go into that judgement. I hope the courts will find that these are too vague and could frighten well-intentioned would-be broadcasters away from expressing themselves freely for fear of differing opinions.
But...
Maybe that's a good thing -- the more vague and open to "interpretation" (read: selective enforcement) the rules are, the less likely the regulations (and the underlying laws?) are to stand up to judicial scrutiny. If the regulations have the potential for arbitrary and over-broad application, I'd at least hope that the courts would strike them down. They've done that before (read the intro to the regulations, for starters).
On a related note, I thought the comments from one of the board members (I don't remember his name, I think it was P.25 or so) in the appendix were interesting. Essentially, he was arguing that in the new environment where broadcast media (in the usual sense, not including the internet) are starting to take a back seat to opt-in media like videos, the already-weak constitutionality of the regulations will vanish. Worth reading and thinking about...
hmm, better than eHHGTTG, I suppose. :-)
But really, I followed the link and couldn't tell what the site / community did. Can someone please enlighten those of us who didn't see it previously as to what it was?
Even if you are (in your mind) unquestionably innocent, think about the expected cost of your lawsuit. First, don't count on recouping your legal fees just because you're found innocent -- they only need to show that they weren't being reckless (IANAL, BTW). Being wrong with their accusations isn't going to be enough. So figure legal fees + (probability of being wrongly found guilty) * (penalties if you're found guilty). Using the $100k statutory penalty per violation that they quote (which, granted, is a maximum penalty), I'm guessing that at around a 5% chance of being found wrongly guilty, you're going to win by just paying out.
Further, their behavior can easily prevent people from freely exercising rights that they may have to use copyrighted materials. Consider the questionable process of downloading an MP3 of a song you own on CD in order to space-shift that song for play on your Rio. Maybe you want to help your less technically-minded friends do this by providing them with MP3s for songs you know they own on CD. Is this fair use? No one knows for sure. If CCS might slap you with a $10k "penalty" for these violations and your only way out is to bet thousands in legal fees that you'll be protected, an awful lot of people will be afraid to do anything.
I don't really have a solution to this problem -- our society is such that in many ways, the small guy can't help but be screwed in some situations. But being innocent is *not* necessarily enough in order not to have to worry about these guys.
Remember, though, that the total number of people expected to suffer from a given ailment has not changed, although the ability to predict who will suffer is improved. Thus, any increase in Bob's insurance premium after he is diagnosed with the About-to-Keel-Over gene had better be accompanied by a reduction in everyone else's rates if you want to make any economic arguments.
The total cost of insurance for everyone can only (ethically) stay the same or go down in response to such a development, unless the disease suddenly becomes a lot more prevalent.
Note that I'm not arguing that it's right or wrong to charge everyone a little more rather than Bob a *lot* more...
Yes, this is real-time DGPS using carrier tracking. Carrier tracking is common on high-end survey class receivers. On consumer grade / lower-end stuff where you're not doing DGPS, there's not much point in tracking carrier because atmospheric fluctuations overwhelm any gain you might make.
Of course, sites running hacked servers would probably be caught rather quickly, and just a few reputable free sites might be enough to put the official one under.
Is writing character build-up scripts really cheating? When I used to MUD, I would alias commonly-used battle commands to simpler, 1- or 2-character commands. This gave me an advantage over people who played via raw telnet. Was I therefore cheating? Obviously the client-server architecture needs to be carefully constructed with the assumption that the client is always compromised... but you should already be doing that, even with closed-source clients!
So as I see it, either the game will be fundamentally broken because of bad architecture, or the GPLedness of the client won't matter. If server exploits become a problem, then that's good news for the company running the official unhacked server... but as an example, MUDs have plenty of opportunity for server exploits, but people keep playing those. "Bad" servers quickly become unpopular and die.
If they have already made a big pile of PSX boxes and people buy bleem! instead of the sony hardware, then sony will lose the total cost of each PSX rather than total cost minus selling price. There are also likely other reasons (such as maintaining control over their platform, etc), but if bleem! makes it harder for them to predict how many PSXes to make or causes them to be left with a bunch of unsellable boxes on their hands, they won't be happy.
Just cut the wire / damage / jam / shield the antenna and you're free. The only way I can think of to get around people's doing this would be to cause the car to shut down if it doesn't get a signal. Hopefully that is sufficiently unacceptable to the general population...
Contracts like that don't fly in any other industry and they wouldn't fly here. If a business wants to kick out one customer and let another stay they need a fairly good reason or they open themselves up to lawsuit.
Is refusing to play by the rules of the game not a valid reason to disallow someone's playing the game? Obviously, Sony needs to have some control over the service they're providing -- there are good arguments against discrimination (of the sort you discussed) by those providing services, but suppose WalMart's rule was that no bags at all may be brought into the store. Should they be forced to allow you to enter with your duffel bag then?
They probably ought to have some sort of disclaimer on the game packaging with a reference to the rules so you can check them out before you buy. Maybe they do, I don't know. However, it doesn't seem reasonable to prevent them from protecting the service they provide from tampering. Do they sell you the right to play the game? Yes. Do they then have to let you play the game however you want? I would imagine this out-of-game buying/selling of items is not something they expected when they set up shop. Are they forever to be prevented from changing their rules to address what they see as threats to the playability of their game?
Suppose your friend wants to pay you for going to that trouble? Is that something they should legally be allowed to prevent? Again, I very strongly feel that they should not -- someone is paying for the time in the game, and they have no legal grounds (or rather, imo they _should_ have no legal grounds) to even know who is pushing the buttons for that person.
So can someone explain how selling a character you have powered up or items you have collected is materially different from game-playing for hire?
Now, some of you seem to be arguing that the game balance is upset by these sales. While I can see how that could be the case (I don't know because I have never played, I have played MUDs quite a bit so I can imagine the impact, though), I think you need a stronger argument than that for allowing a corporation the legal power to step in and prevent a private business agreement between two individuals that happens to involve a service provided by that corporation. It doesn't seem clear to me that the law needs to provide remedy for someone's game being played in ways they don't like.
However, I guess no one has the right to be allowed to play. If Sony wants to kill your character and stop letting you pay them to play, that is their prerogative and you should have no recourse. But I don't believe they should really have any power beyond revoking the accounts of violators.
It is a more complicated issue than I first thought, however. I'd particularly be interested in comments re: my 4th paragraph -- I guess I am not quite sure where the law belongs in terms of protecting games that a company is making money from. There may be some arguments that they deserve damages from someone who acts to make the game less enjoyable and therefore profitable, but that's a really murky area in my mind.
Oh, and I don't think your VMU analogy is a strong one. Sega has no rights whatsoever to the works that you create by using their hardware and software. The save-game files are *your* bits and you have not signed any contracts agreeing "Any bits generated through the use of this console and software are the sole property of Sega." Just like Adobe doesn't own the rights to that artwork you just put together in Photoshop, Sega has no rights to anything you create by using their hardware or software. So you are free to sell your VMU, copy the data onto blank VMUs and sell those, etc. (Actually, if you're not, let me know and I'm moving to a small desert island and starting my own civilization.) This situation is different from the VMU case in that your gameplay behavior substantially impacts the experience of their other customers since it is a shared universe. If you are violating their rules in such a way as to cause them financial damages, they *may* have the right to sue you for that.
In principle you could use a 50bps (or even slower) signal to do GPS work, but in practice it would be too hard and expensive to nail down bit transitions accurately enough and would make initialization *very* slow. Enough so that it would be a silly thing to do.
But a couple megahertz of BW isn't bad for what GPS can do, when you think about it... but it really is a lot more than 50bps.
At least that was the case last year when I was working there. Probably still true today...
Note that using pengachu as the interface is almost certainly for show more than anything. I'd guess that these slides were used for a sponsor presentation at a Media Lab gathering. I would suppose they were mostly trying to draw connections between various projects being presented to the sponsors.
Read the Saltzer, et al, paper that was referenced in the first post in this series -- it explains the end-to-end argument well and gives some examples.
So anyway, an end-to-end argument says nothing about who should own or run which parts of the network. It _does_ argue that people running the IP services shouldn't be doing anything other than moving packets through the network. The modularity of the network stack should be respected, so decisions made at the IP level should not be made using, eg, the contents of the IP packets.
Anyway, I am just thinking out loud here -- I'd love to hear discussion pro/con wrt my thoughts.
Note that IANAL, but my father is a law prof, so I've had a few discussions on this topic with an expert. But don't use this as legal advice.
Be careful who you trust. No matter how careful I am about installing software, scanning for viruses, etc, I wouldn't trust any PC fully. Can you be _sure_ that Win98 has no backdoors? Can you be _sure_ that Linux has no backdoors?
The real danger in digi signatures is considering them to have the potential to be any different from regular signatures. If you require a notary to witness a physical signature, then you damn well better require a notary to _physically_ witness the real person issuing a digital signature. Maybe there's a digital means for authenticating a person better than a human notary, so that may be an option. But authenticating the person in a truly secure way is necessary. This is not only an issue for the signer, but also for the party with whom he is contracting -- if there is any doubt that the signature was inauthentic, they are open to litigation... so really, everyone wants authentication from human->document.
Of course, I am of the opinion that physical artifacts should not be done away with. For many tasks, they may be the best solution available -- if security is really at stake, you may be better off _not_ moving at full internet speed.
Actually, the speed of light is _exactly_ 299,792,458 m/s. That number is what defines a meter. :-)
However, do we really need to? In "the real world," advertisers can avoid spamming people with irrelevant ads. Allowing this type of targetting online seems reasonable. Occasionally, advertising is useful -- it is a good way to learn about what's out there. Not every corporate practice is wicked and evil, even if it removes some level of the anonymity that was previously found on the internet.
While privacy is important to protect, the internet is a changing place and I believe that the level of casually available anonymity will inevitably decrease. Some losses should be protected against, but I don't think this is one of them. Which step in their collection process should have been prevented? If your activities are traceable to _your_ IP address, then they are not anonymous, and I don't think any knowledgable individuals would expect them to be. Security through obscurity... The only difference is that it's now a little easier to figure out where (some of) those IP addresses are. If the information is out there to be collected by legal procedures, it will be collected.
As long as there is wide research to develop these machines, they will eventually become publicly available. There may be a lag before the price drops to the point where you can have PQCs (personal quantum computers), just as it took a third of a century to go from ENIACesque systems to affordable home machines. But there are enough huge corporations that would like to protect their secrets that I bet the developments will take place in the public sector.
Of course, be on the lookout for anti-QC laws to prevent this. After all, unless you're a criminal distributing kiddie porn photos and terrorist information, you wouldn't mind Big Brother reading your private communications, would you?