I'm pro reverse engineering, but here is my take on why Sony would be against emulation even if they actually lose money on each box of hardware sold.
1) Due diligence: Sony is a public company so it has a legal obligation to look out for the well being of its investors. Most investors would look at the possibility of a third party developing a work alike solution as a potential for harm. If the stock price were to plummet, even if the actual reason wasn't directly related, investors could go for a class action law suit claiming Sony didn't adhere to due dilligence guidelines.
2) Control: If you can reverse engineer the ROMs in the PlayStation you could probably also reverse engineer a fairly open development environment. Sony is pretty strict about who gets to develop a PlayStation game and who doesn't. This could result in the loss of that control.
3) It's what we've always done!: It's hard for large companies to change with the times. We've seen reported before on Slashdot even with companies that have good intentions such as the various license agreement rumblings or seemingly insane actions by corporate lawyers which are later nullified. Sony hasn't tried to be a nice company, its tried its hardest to destroy its competition so this is even more true here.
4) Piracy: This one will always be present, not everybody plays nice and pays for what they use and from Sony's point of view things like VGS are a weak point in that regard. This in spite of the fact that Connectix has tried hard to make piracy difficult (which is all you EVER can do)
I'd like to see monitors with high DPI, it'd make it more possible for me to avoid sending things to the printer down the hall. Resolution in the 200 dpi range might be enough to enable this though.
I see a weak spot though and thats the bandwidth required to keep screen response reasonably interactive. Comparing a high end 100 dpi monitor to a 200 dpi monitor means that 4 times the memory bandwidth would be required to maintain the status quo. This requirement is pushed all the way up from the underlying hardware into the software technologies such as the X servers or whatever it is that handles display primitives in Windows.
I don't follow the windowing developments under Linux very closely, with the V3.X servers running on a TNT with 16 megs of memory linux graphics are a lot slower performing than they were under Windows 98. Will V4.X achieve parity (or perhaps go beyond parity) and would it keep up with a 4X throughput increase?
Alternatively you could argue that adaptive resolution would be a useful approach at cutting bandwidth. Text is usually black and white and suffers greatly at todays resolutions while colour images are acceptable at todays resolutions. If the display could handle addressing multiple pixels for colour information to form a less fine resolution the overall bandwidth could be greatly reduced.
It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover. I realize you're just a troll with unusually high karma but since you admittedly usually browse with banners blocked you could at least have checked the facts.
I'm not even sure why you're so up in arms about JAVA banner adds. You can not click it, use junkbuster like you normally do or disable JAVA. Just because somethings there doesn't mean you HAVE to click on it.
A little over a year ago somebody did try and hijack a domain for a game I help code. Fortunately we caught it before it was hijacked but if email hadn't happened to be checked at the appropriate time we would've lost it. We're not absolutely sure who did it but the evidence did narrow the suspects down. Unfortunately there was little that could actually be done over it.
As a side note Network Solutions should automatically flag rather radical requests. In this case every field other than the billing field was changed.
I've never really thought of accesibility on the internet till now, I had thought that for the most part it was pretty disability neutral but now I realize that its not true. That this isn't true is a failure on the part of the web site designers.
A web site should be all about exchanging information just like an advertising brochure should be. Sure, the information is obviously biased but the goal is to feed that information to the holder of the brochure. The best brochures I've seen, such as some of the better car brochures, have layers of information. There are usually attractive graphics and with each graphic there is at least a bullet of text describing what you see. You could argue that its redundant, if you can't see the luxurious leather interior you're probably not going to buy a car, but its still there. The text is carefully crafted and you could read the brochure without looking at the pictures and get an idea of what the manufacturer is trying to get across. I've seen early mock ups of these brochures with crude sketches in place of the real eye candy and it is true.
Many web designers are guilty of propogating the eye candy without disemminating any information. They're more concerned with the overall look of the site (ooh, pretty buttons with dazzling roll overs that light up when you click!) than providing any content. It's like a 30 second prime time commercial for beer rather than an actual advertisement. If you're with the 90% of the population who is sighted, runs Internet Explorer and uses Windows you're fine. Pick any random change in variable from here and you don't get any message at all.
So not only are they making things hard for users with vision problems, users with alternate operating systems or browsers, but they're actually violating what should be the basic tenet of advertising: get the message out.
I'm not saying get rid of the eye candy, I like it personally. Just make sure that anybody and everybody can read your clients message.
Apple is using this to simply exploit linux. They do very little from what I see to help other operating systems. </quote> Apple funded or at least provided a good chunk of funding to produce a Linux variant on the Mac called MkLinux. They did this before any of the other companies even thought of jumping on the bandwagon. The project kind of died because the monolithic LinuxPPC port was better for a variety of reasons.
<quote> BeOS does not support the macintosh G4's (G3's also..) because Apple wont help them &/or release specs to help them. </quote> And your point? BeOS is their competition and even more proprietary than Apple. Be would have laughed their asses off if Apple asked for help porting MacOS onto Be hardware. Intel doesn't help TransMeta build fast processers either. That's called business. Now since a bunch of developers could figure out how to get Linux booting on modern Apple machines that means Be is just whining. Sorry, no sympathy. They don't want to support Apple and are using this as a convenient scape goat. <quote> They opensource parts of their OS X that they want to use in their operating system.. how convenient.. </quote> I'm not even sure what you're whining about here. It would be better to Open Source none of it?
Apple isn't perfect, but they've put in an honest effort on some things and have been improving.
Fundraisers like the EFF affair are a good way to get the typical suit-and-tie types to contribute. It's probably not the best way to get the typical geek to contribute though. Even if I lived near the Boston area I probably wouldn't go, wearing a suit is about as enjoyable for me as a good swift kick in the butt.
What I'd be more interested is more of a birds of a feather affair: a couple kegs of beer, a few pizzas and no dress code. Make your donation and get a cheap plastic cup to fill with beer.
There wouldn't be enough interest where I am, but possibly in Minneapolis, which is only about 100 miles away. Is there anything like this planned?
The fund-raiser at the Harvard Club is a great idea, its just not a great fit for everybody. It will probably make news and thus raise awareness. Smaller get togethers can at least raise money for the defense fund and may also be able to make news and bring out the message "we're not in it to pirate, we honestly want to watch purchased DVD" to the public. Something that I've rarely seen even mentioned in the press.
When folks on slashdot complain about patents stifling innovation what they really mean is:
Open Source doesn't innovate, it imitates. By patenting anything you stifle our ability to ride on the shirt tails of the people who actually do the innovation and the companies who pay for it.
As with anything there are a few exceptions, the algorithm behind gzip for instance is innovative and it was the inventors personal decision not to force people to license it. That's fine, even admirable. Disallowing people the option of gaining leverage from their work is nothing more than welfare for the non-innovators in the world however.
Patents don't really stifle innovation, they stifle imitation. Patents are public documents, anybody can look at them. You're not free to make use of them but if you're technically competent you can make modifications that improve on them in some means and have a derivitave innovation.
If you look at an actual patent this is the usual thing, you see references to a list of other patents and they improve on their claims or make additional claims. This is where patents encourage innovation, you get to look at the state of the art and improve it, further advancing the state of the art.
Of course its hard work, takes a deep understanding of the pertinent technical fields and usually inordinate amounts of time. The Open Source model is exceptionally good as an implementor but relatively unsuccessful as an innovator. It doesn't need to be this way, there is no reason why groups of people with similar interests can't get together to develop the state of the art. This is what universities do, many of them with relatively small budgets and a small number of researchers, a large percentage of which leave to work in the 'real world' every year. Interested people should be able to beat that model.
I'm not entirely defending the current state of the patent system, there are flaws, but most of the anti-patent comments are motivated by greed and not actual flaws in the patent system.
Does anybody have the original weblog that was on the DeCSS site? It's gone, I can't even find a cached copy at this point. I'm not sure if this is fuzzy recollection or not, but on the weblog I remember something about trying to purify the sources and I assumed (or read) that it was because somebody originally leaked the encryption code. Was anything leaked to produce this code?
Have any of the companies which recently have decided to support Linux (Creative or Diamond etc) made any commitment to produce a DVD driver under Linux?
Where is the EFF? I've yet to see them actually practice free speech about anything, somebody needs to release a statement to the press about how DeCSS was derived, that most people won't pirate DVD data and that there are no existing commecial DVD solutions under Linux. They're good at litigating but they are lousy at trying to communicate with the public.
I for one don't actually care whether Linux, Windows, MacOS or any other OS can play DVD's, I'd rather watch them on a nice large TV but it would be in everybodies best interest if the capability were available.
What about groups of individuals, or at least people who think they're individuals? There are religious and militia 'leaders' who feed these peoples fears that the government is trying to exert too much control on peoples lives. So these people who already have a pretty tenuous grasp on reality get brainwashed into believing: that federal agents in black helicopters are going to heard everybody and execute them; that all of societies ills are the fault of the Jewish|African|Insert-your-prejiduice-here and so on.
I'm not so worried about the lone nut, I'm worried about the congregation of nuts and the sociopath that controls them.
The number of people that actually pay for QuickTime for Linux will probably be negligible regardless of whats said in the poll. A better approach would be to build a financial case for releasing a LGPL QuickTime Codec library and maybe a player that makes use of it.
Enabling QuickTime in Linux would add a substantial amount to the QuickTime installed userbase which in turn would give Apple favourable credentials in selling QuickTime server solutions... which is where the money really is.
It says a lot about how immature the world at large is when we actually need to update the list of nasty things we're not allowed to do to each other as technology advances. It's depressing in a way that this list is even a deterrent yet it is, we've got international treaties saying we're not allowed to poison each other with biological or chemical agents and so on. A sane civilization would be offended that anybody would think that they required some big list of things not to do.
I don't like the idea of a standard organization reviewing research though, the only way it could be capable of reviewing is if they are the experts in the field already. In that case things will get partisan and impede the technology. Better to at least put the technology in a fast advancement track at first and make sure it has enough momentum to keep going. Individual research areas may need controls, i.e. military applications, but that goes for any technology.
This would probably be the most effective way to deal with keeping something from getting patented. It would be a good idea to make provisions for a paper trail and time stamp to be kept as well (the napkin where the concept first appeared and so on)
All this stuff is important, it should be treated as if the intention was to file a patent. The first questions a patent attourney asks are on what date was the patent conceived and send me over copies of the relavent information.
We need a FAQ on patent proofing your inventions which unfortunately would require a patent attourney, maybe somebody from one of the commercial Linux companies (Red Hat, valinux etc) would be willing to do this?
It's simple, if I get an encrypted trival email from somebody I educate them first, if it happens again I bit bucket them based on the sending address. This simple algorithm works well for all forms of communication (I highly recommend it for nit pickers)
I'm not sure of the actual numbers anymore, with the popularity of Linux and the renewed interest in the Macintosh, but the percentage of Microsoft desktops is still probably over 80%. Microsoft already licensed the technology (and from what the article said for much cheaper than the average company could) and apparently uses it.
Encryption is for most people invisible, they go to an online shop and buy stuff. Maybe they notice that the little lock in the lower left corner is closed and maybe they don't. If RSA is a part of the protocol then its already there.
Most people don't care about pervasive encryption. When they're forwarding the latest joke they received to their friends and families they don't worry about encryption or digital signatures. People don't even bother encrypting email to their mistresses, their mistress probably can't be bothered to remember a private key.
The difference it will make is to people who sell the technology, it'll be a bit cheaper to them which might be important since for good or bad the current cost model for Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator etc. is to be free (like beer, not speech)
I don't see that RSA patents has hampered the widespread deployment of PGP. Apathy on the part of the public has hampered the widespread deployment of PGP. I know personally that if people started sending me trivial things encrypted it'd probably hit the bit bucket unread.
Re:I have often wondered why it is so hard ...
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GPL for Books?
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Part of the problem is that search engines are dumb. They don't really know what you're looking for or the context. For instance I used Google to search for information on Sleep Paralysis. Google did its job well, it retrieved URL's about Sleep Paralysis and ranked them according to how many different sites linked to them. I figured the better texts would have more links, right?
Well... that isn't exactly what happened. Almost all of the first links returned were about sleep paralysis and alien abduction and posession. A lot more people link to alien abduction information than information on sleep paralysis I guess.
You can't really fault Google, as I said, it did it's job.
This happens with other things to, you'll find a lot of references to the say sound under linux, but few references to see who is(are) the expert(s) on it.
This is where something like Yahoo can work better where human beings categorize things by topic and sub topic etc. ad infinitum. It's not necessarily that the information is there, its just not assembled and categorized.
GPL'd Documentation and a Canonical Source
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GPL for Books?
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Putting information under the GPL or something GPL-like would be a good thing in my opinion. I would imagine that it would need to be both under this license and in most cases have some authorative source however. Not to restrict it from being modified but to make sure that the modifications are sound. Everybody is free to modify the Linux kernel but the modifications don't necessarily get rolled back into the main kernel (but the GPL forces them to be available for doing so if the modified work is distributed) This is a good restriction, it keeps the kernel running fairly well. A similar concept can be used to keep incorrect information from being introduced to the canonical document.
I'd be willing to contribute to such a document, I'm sure many others are. I might be able to contribute sane information to the GNU Guide to GPL ECAD Software but the information I contribute to the GNU Guide to Kernel Development would be pretty suspect.
From the looks of things this is a valid patent, I don't really have the inclination to look for relavent prior art but there are other fast approaches to the cosine transform. This would represent at the very least an incremental improvement over an existing procedure.
Now, as far as some of the comments that I've seen stating "No, don't patent this" most of them are based on a pretty wild abuse of what is being patented.
This is not like Einstein patenting relativistic effects. This is so wrong I can't even draw a parallel. Slashdot poster credibility goes "Boink".
This isn't like patenting a form of arithmetic. There are patents on fast ways of doing various arithmetic operation, you're still free to do arithmetic. What you're not free to do is to use that particular method of speeding operations. For the average person it doesn't matter. For somebody designing circuitry for fast computer hardware maybe it matters. If so you license the patent, or you hire your own mathematicians or you just use some other method.
Now, is the patent worth much? Probably not. There are other fast discrete cosine transforms. I used to work/share an office with one of the leading experts on that particular transform. Consider that even if this invention is two fold faster than the preceding state of the art Moore's law means the present state of the art will be as fast as this new transform in 18 months. So for this particular operation if there was a 2 times performance increase some company could say they were 18 months ahead of the competition. Big deal since there are enough other factors that are more important to determine performance for most applications. Expecting a 2X improvement is also terribly optimistic. He compared his algorithm to the short hand notation for the DCT/IDCT. In reality a lot of the multiplications would be handled by shifts anyway and there are already other fast implementations.
There's a substantial difference between telling me that I left the door open and between coming into my house, rifling through my personal belongings and maybe copying down anything you find interesting (maybe you jot down my VISA numbers, maybe you make a copy of the tape that I made with the wild romp I had with my girlfriend last night)
If its the former I thank you and maybe buy you a beer. If its the latter I take out your knee caps with a tire iron to educate you on proper manners.
Mitnik did the latter, you can't even pretend he was doing it over a concern for somebodies security. He never told his victims what he found.
The media has manipulated everybody on this story. The general public has had Mitnick's abilities amplified to mythical status and the terms of his probation suitably magnified. The 'hacker' community has been led on by publications like 2600 to believe that he's been unfairly sentenced to a point where he can't possibly make a living or even pay back the 4000 dollars he owes as restitution.
I happen to agree with C. My computer happens to be my personal property, I don't care if you broke in to steal something or if you broke in just out of curiosity. You broke in. If there was some way to prove that your intentions were good then my viewpoint might change, but you would be pretty hard pressed to prove to me that you a) did nothing malicious, b) had no malicious intentions and c) weren't pleading good intent just as a 'Get Out of Jail Free card'.
If I want security advice I'll hire somebody for that advice. If there isn't some understanding between us (sure, break in, tell me how you got in and don't break anything) I will assume you had the worst possible intentions. I'd do the same if you appeared in my living room at night and told me "don't be alarmed, I'm just testing your security, by the way, your front door was locked".
He got caught doing something illegal and he's being punished. If you don't want to be an ex-con then don't break the law, what a concept. There were legal ways for Mitnick to practice his 'inquisitive mind', he could have got a job as a security consultant. He could even have donated his services as a security consultant to non-profit organizations if getting payed for it was somehow morally reprehensible to him.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for him at all. Personally I wouldn't want him working in my company, he's already demonstrated not only a complete lack of trustworthiness but a surplus of stupidity by violating the terms of his probation.
Let him serve fries at McDonald's, don't complain about the results of his own stupidity.
Online voting isn't yet ready for prime time. I agree that traditional security concerns can be met with existing encryption and security standards. What can't be guaranteed is that your vote will actually be received and counted.
With traditional votes as long as the roads are open and the weather isn't too bad people can make it out to a voting station. The total tally may be larger on nice days than during inclement weather but there will be a respectable cross section of the population who will make the effort to vote. If you make it to the station your vote will be counted.
Votes tend to have geographic biases which is why you have states or municipalities referred to as being 'traditionally democratic' or 'traditionally republican' etc. This could lead to a denial of service attack to alter the outcome of the election. Send out your armed contingent to keep voters from reaching the voting stations. For a variety of reasons this isn't done. It's illegal, frowned upon by the public, tends to get the government pointing its arms at you and so on.
With internet based voting the structure of the internet itself will guarantee that even though some number of voters are at the voting station (their personal computer in this case) but won't be heard during the final tally. Net congestion, ISP problems but we'll assume that their computer is actually working.
A denial of service attack against geographic regions is much easier though and much more anonymous. Just make sure that the traffic in a region is high enough to make voting difficult. Look for misconfigured machines that will allow an avalanche of pings to be sent with information at your local script kiddy database.
You can argue that not allowing online voting will stop some people from casting their vote. To that I say so what? If somebody can't make the effort to make it to the local vote station then they probably aren't concerned enough about what their vote represents to even have formed a real opinion. There are real circumstances such as illness but there is already vote by proxy to cover this.
When the internet has enough bandwidth and redundancy to conceal the effects of net congestion it will be time to look at internet voting for serious elections. Until then all its suited for is informal polls.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pro reverse engineering, but here is my take on why Sony would be against emulation even if they actually lose money on each box of hardware sold.
1) Due diligence: Sony is a public company so it has a legal obligation to look out for the well being of its investors. Most investors would look at the possibility of a third party developing a work alike solution as a potential for harm. If the stock price were to plummet, even if the actual reason wasn't directly related, investors could go for a class action law suit claiming Sony didn't adhere to due dilligence guidelines.
2) Control: If you can reverse engineer the ROMs in the PlayStation you could probably also reverse engineer a fairly open development environment. Sony is pretty strict about who gets to develop a PlayStation game and who doesn't. This could result in the loss of that control.
3) It's what we've always done!: It's hard for large companies to change with the times. We've seen reported before on Slashdot even with companies that have good intentions such as the various license agreement rumblings or seemingly insane actions by corporate lawyers which are later nullified. Sony hasn't tried to be a nice company, its tried its hardest to destroy its competition so this is even more true here.
4) Piracy: This one will always be present, not everybody plays nice and pays for what they use and from Sony's point of view things like VGS are a weak point in that regard. This in spite of the fact that Connectix has tried hard to make piracy difficult (which is all you EVER can do)
I'd like to see monitors with high DPI, it'd make it more possible for me to avoid sending things to the printer down the hall. Resolution in the 200 dpi range might be enough to enable this though.
I see a weak spot though and thats the bandwidth required to keep screen response reasonably interactive. Comparing a high end 100 dpi monitor to a 200 dpi monitor means that 4 times the memory bandwidth would be required to maintain the status quo. This requirement is pushed all the way up from the underlying hardware into the software technologies such as the X servers or whatever it is that handles display primitives in Windows.
I don't follow the windowing developments under Linux very closely, with the V3.X servers running on a TNT with 16 megs of memory linux graphics are a lot slower performing than they were under Windows 98. Will V4.X achieve parity (or perhaps go beyond parity) and would it keep up with a 4X throughput increase?
Alternatively you could argue that adaptive resolution would be a useful approach at cutting bandwidth. Text is usually black and white and suffers greatly at todays resolutions while colour images are acceptable at todays resolutions. If the display could handle addressing multiple pixels for colour information to form a less fine resolution the overall bandwidth could be greatly reduced.
It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover. I realize you're just a troll with unusually high karma but since you admittedly usually browse with banners blocked you could at least have checked the facts.
I'm not even sure why you're so up in arms about JAVA banner adds. You can not click it, use junkbuster like you normally do or disable JAVA. Just because somethings there doesn't mean you HAVE to click on it.
A little over a year ago somebody did try and hijack a domain for a game I help code. Fortunately we caught it before it was hijacked but if email hadn't happened to be checked at the appropriate time we would've lost it. We're not absolutely sure who did it but the evidence did narrow the suspects down. Unfortunately there was little that could actually be done over it.
As a side note Network Solutions should automatically flag rather radical requests. In this case every field other than the billing field was changed.
I've never really thought of accesibility on the internet till now, I had thought that for the most part it was pretty disability neutral but now I realize that its not true. That this isn't true is a failure on the part of the web site designers.
A web site should be all about exchanging information just like an advertising brochure should be. Sure, the information is obviously biased but the goal is to feed that information to the holder of the brochure. The best brochures I've seen, such as some of the better car brochures, have layers of information. There are usually attractive graphics and with each graphic there is at least a bullet of text describing what you see. You could argue that its redundant, if you can't see the luxurious leather interior you're probably not going to buy a car, but its still there. The text is carefully crafted and you could read the brochure without looking at the pictures and get an idea of what the manufacturer is trying to get across. I've seen early mock ups of these brochures with crude sketches in place of the real eye candy and it is true.
Many web designers are guilty of propogating the eye candy without disemminating any information. They're more concerned with the overall look of the site (ooh, pretty buttons with dazzling roll overs that light up when you click!) than providing any content. It's like a 30 second prime time commercial for beer rather than an actual advertisement. If you're with the 90% of the population who is sighted, runs Internet Explorer and uses Windows you're fine. Pick any random change in variable from here and you don't get any message at all.
So not only are they making things hard for users with vision problems, users with alternate operating systems or browsers, but they're actually violating what should be the basic tenet of advertising: get the message out.
I'm not saying get rid of the eye candy, I like it personally. Just make sure that anybody and everybody can read your clients message.
Apple is using this to simply exploit linux. They do very little from what I see to help other operating systems.
</quote>
Apple funded or at least provided a good chunk of funding to produce a Linux variant on the Mac called MkLinux. They did this before any of the other companies even thought of jumping on the bandwagon. The project kind of died because the monolithic LinuxPPC port was better for a variety of reasons.
<quote>
BeOS does not support the macintosh G4's (G3's also..) because Apple wont help them &/or
release specs to help them.
</quote>
And your point? BeOS is their competition and even more proprietary than Apple. Be would have laughed their asses off if Apple asked for help porting MacOS onto Be hardware. Intel doesn't help TransMeta build fast processers either. That's called business. Now since a bunch of developers could figure out how to get Linux booting on modern Apple machines that means Be is just whining. Sorry, no sympathy. They don't want to support Apple and are using this as a convenient scape goat.
<quote>
They opensource parts of their OS X that they want to use in their
operating system.. how convenient..
</quote>
I'm not even sure what you're whining about here. It would be better to Open Source none of it?
Apple isn't perfect, but they've put in an honest effort on some things and have been improving.
Fundraisers like the EFF affair are a good way to get the typical suit-and-tie types to contribute. It's probably not the best way to get the typical geek to contribute though. Even if I lived near the Boston area I probably wouldn't go, wearing a suit is about as enjoyable for me as a good swift kick in the butt.
What I'd be more interested is more of a birds of a feather affair: a couple kegs of beer, a few pizzas and no dress code. Make your donation and get a cheap plastic cup to fill with beer.
There wouldn't be enough interest where I am, but possibly in Minneapolis, which is only about 100 miles away. Is there anything like this planned?
The fund-raiser at the Harvard Club is a great idea, its just not a great fit for everybody. It will probably make news and thus raise awareness. Smaller get togethers can at least raise money for the defense fund and may also be able to make news and bring out the message "we're not in it to pirate, we honestly want to watch purchased DVD" to the public. Something that I've rarely seen even mentioned in the press.
When folks on slashdot complain about patents stifling innovation what they really mean is:
Open Source doesn't innovate, it imitates. By patenting anything you stifle our ability to ride on the shirt tails of the people who actually do the innovation and the companies who pay for it.
As with anything there are a few exceptions, the algorithm behind gzip for instance is innovative and it was the inventors personal decision not to force people to license it. That's fine, even admirable. Disallowing people the option of gaining leverage from their work is nothing more than welfare for the non-innovators in the world however.
Patents don't really stifle innovation, they stifle imitation. Patents are public documents, anybody can look at them. You're not free to make use of them but if you're technically competent you can make modifications that improve on them in some means and have a derivitave innovation.
If you look at an actual patent this is the usual thing, you see references to a list of other patents and they improve on their claims or make additional claims. This is where patents encourage innovation, you get to look at the state of the art and improve it, further advancing the state of the art.
Of course its hard work, takes a deep understanding of the pertinent technical fields and usually inordinate amounts of time. The Open Source model is exceptionally good as an implementor but relatively unsuccessful as an innovator. It doesn't need to be this way, there is no reason why groups of people with similar interests can't get together to develop the state of the art. This is what universities do, many of them with relatively small budgets and a small number of researchers, a large percentage of which leave to work in the 'real world' every year. Interested people should be able to beat that model.
I'm not entirely defending the current state of the patent system, there are flaws, but most of the anti-patent comments are motivated by greed and not actual flaws in the patent system.
Does anybody have the original weblog that was on the DeCSS site? It's gone, I can't even find a cached copy at this point. I'm not sure if this is fuzzy recollection or not, but on the weblog I remember something about trying to purify the sources and I assumed (or read) that it was because somebody originally leaked the encryption code. Was anything leaked to produce this code?
Have any of the companies which recently have decided to support Linux (Creative or Diamond etc) made any commitment to produce a DVD driver under Linux?
Where is the EFF? I've yet to see them actually practice free speech about anything, somebody needs to release a statement to the press about how DeCSS was derived, that most people won't pirate DVD data and that there are no existing commecial DVD solutions under Linux. They're good at litigating but they are lousy at trying to communicate with the public.
I for one don't actually care whether Linux, Windows, MacOS or any other OS can play DVD's, I'd rather watch them on a nice large TV but it would be in everybodies best interest if the capability were available.
What about groups of individuals, or at least people who think they're individuals? There are religious and militia 'leaders' who feed these peoples fears that the government is trying to exert too much control on peoples lives. So these people who already have a pretty tenuous grasp on reality get brainwashed into believing: that federal agents in black helicopters are going to heard everybody and execute them; that all of societies ills are the fault of the Jewish|African|Insert-your-prejiduice-here and so on.
I'm not so worried about the lone nut, I'm worried about the congregation of nuts and the sociopath that controls them.
The number of people that actually pay for QuickTime for Linux will probably be negligible regardless of whats said in the poll. A better approach would be to build a financial case for releasing a LGPL QuickTime Codec library and maybe a player that makes use of it.
Enabling QuickTime in Linux would add a substantial amount to the QuickTime installed userbase which in turn would give Apple favourable credentials in selling QuickTime server solutions... which is where the money really is.
It says a lot about how immature the world at large is when we actually need to update the list of nasty things we're not allowed to do to each other as technology advances. It's depressing in a way that this list is even a deterrent yet it is, we've got international treaties saying we're not allowed to poison each other with biological or chemical agents and so on. A sane civilization would be offended that anybody would think that they required some big list of things not to do.
I don't like the idea of a standard organization reviewing research though, the only way it could be capable of reviewing is if they are the experts in the field already. In that case things will get partisan and impede the technology. Better to at least put the technology in a fast advancement track at first and make sure it has enough momentum to keep going. Individual research areas may need controls, i.e. military applications, but that goes for any technology.
This would probably be the most effective way to deal with keeping something from getting patented. It would be a good idea to make provisions for a paper trail and time stamp to be kept as well (the napkin where the concept first appeared and so on)
All this stuff is important, it should be treated as if the intention was to file a patent. The first questions a patent attourney asks are on what date was the patent conceived and send me over copies of the relavent information.
We need a FAQ on patent proofing your inventions which unfortunately would require a patent attourney, maybe somebody from one of the commercial Linux companies (Red Hat, valinux etc) would be willing to do this?
It's simple, if I get an encrypted trival email from somebody I educate them first, if it happens again I bit bucket them based on the sending address. This simple algorithm works well for all forms of communication (I highly recommend it for nit pickers)
I'm not sure of the actual numbers anymore, with the popularity of Linux and the renewed interest in the Macintosh, but the percentage of Microsoft desktops is still probably over 80%. Microsoft already licensed the technology (and from what the article said for much cheaper than the average company could) and apparently uses it.
Encryption is for most people invisible, they go to an online shop and buy stuff. Maybe they notice that the little lock in the lower left corner is closed and maybe they don't. If RSA is a part of the protocol then its already there.
Most people don't care about pervasive encryption. When they're forwarding the latest joke they received to their friends and families they don't worry about encryption or digital signatures. People don't even bother encrypting email to their mistresses, their mistress probably can't be bothered to remember a private key.
The difference it will make is to people who sell the technology, it'll be a bit cheaper to them which might be important since for good or bad the current cost model for Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator etc. is to be free (like beer, not speech)
I don't see that RSA patents has hampered the widespread deployment of PGP. Apathy on the part of the public has hampered the widespread deployment of PGP. I know personally that if people started sending me trivial things encrypted it'd probably hit the bit bucket unread.
Part of the problem is that search engines are dumb. They don't really know what you're looking for or the context. For instance I used Google to search for information on Sleep Paralysis. Google did its job well, it retrieved URL's about Sleep Paralysis and ranked them according to how many different sites linked to them. I figured the better texts would have more links, right?
Well... that isn't exactly what happened. Almost all of the first links returned were about sleep paralysis and alien abduction and posession. A lot more people link to alien abduction information than information on sleep paralysis I guess.
You can't really fault Google, as I said, it did it's job.
This happens with other things to, you'll find a lot of references to the say sound under linux, but few references to see who is(are) the expert(s) on it.
This is where something like Yahoo can work better where human beings categorize things by topic and sub topic etc. ad infinitum. It's not necessarily that the information is there, its just not assembled and categorized.
Putting information under the GPL or something GPL-like would be a good thing in my opinion. I would imagine that it would need to be both under this license and in most cases have some authorative source however. Not to restrict it from being modified but to make sure that the modifications are sound. Everybody is free to modify the Linux kernel but the modifications don't necessarily get rolled back into the main kernel (but the GPL forces them to be available for doing so if the modified work is distributed)
This is a good restriction, it keeps the kernel running fairly well. A similar concept can be used to keep incorrect information from being introduced to the canonical document.
I'd be willing to contribute to such a document, I'm sure many others are. I might be able to contribute sane information to the GNU Guide to GPL ECAD Software but the information I contribute to the GNU Guide to Kernel Development would be pretty suspect.
From the looks of things this is a valid patent, I don't really have the inclination to look for relavent prior art but there are other fast approaches to the cosine transform. This would represent at the very least an incremental improvement over an existing procedure.
Now, as far as some of the comments that I've seen stating "No, don't patent this" most of them are based on a pretty wild abuse of what is being patented.
This is not like Einstein patenting relativistic effects. This is so wrong I can't even draw a parallel. Slashdot poster credibility goes "Boink".
This isn't like patenting a form of arithmetic. There are patents on fast ways of doing various arithmetic operation, you're still free to do arithmetic. What you're not free to do is to use that particular method of speeding operations. For the average person it doesn't matter. For somebody designing circuitry for fast computer hardware maybe it matters. If so you license the patent, or you hire your own mathematicians or you just use some other method.
Now, is the patent worth much? Probably not. There are other fast discrete cosine transforms. I used to work/share an office with one of the leading experts on that particular transform. Consider that even if this invention is two fold faster than the preceding state of the art Moore's law means the present state of the art will be as fast as this new transform in 18 months. So for this particular operation if there was a 2 times performance increase some company could say they were 18 months ahead of the competition. Big deal since there are enough other factors that are more important to determine performance for most applications. Expecting a 2X improvement is also terribly optimistic. He compared his algorithm to the short hand notation for the DCT/IDCT. In reality a lot of the multiplications would be handled by shifts anyway and there are already other fast implementations.
Far be it from me to dwell on silly things like facts, but Mitnick is only prevented from using or owning cell phones or computers without the consent of his parole officer.
There's a substantial difference between telling me that I left the door open and between coming into my house, rifling through my personal belongings and maybe copying down anything you find interesting (maybe you jot down my VISA numbers, maybe you make a copy of the tape that I made with the wild romp I had with my girlfriend last night)
If its the former I thank you and maybe buy you a beer. If its the latter I take out your knee caps with a tire iron to educate you on proper manners.
Mitnik did the latter, you can't even pretend he was doing it over a concern for somebodies security. He never told his victims what he found.
The terms of his probation have been distorted by the media, both pro and anti-Mitnick. The terms are that he's not to touch or posess a computer or cellular phone without the written approval of his probation officer. So if his probation officer agrees to it he can work at McDonald's and even get to use the deep fryer or use the cash register.
The media has manipulated everybody on this story. The general public has had Mitnick's abilities amplified to mythical status and the terms of his probation suitably magnified. The 'hacker' community has been led on by publications like 2600 to believe that he's been unfairly sentenced to a point where he can't possibly make a living or even pay back the 4000 dollars he owes as restitution.
I happen to agree with C. My computer happens to be my personal property, I don't care if you broke in to steal something or if you broke in just out of curiosity. You broke in. If there was some way to prove that your intentions were good then my viewpoint might change, but you would be pretty hard pressed to prove to me that you a) did nothing malicious, b) had no malicious intentions and c) weren't pleading good intent just as a 'Get Out of Jail Free card'.
If I want security advice I'll hire somebody for that advice. If there isn't some understanding between us (sure, break in, tell me how you got in and don't break anything) I will assume you had the worst possible intentions. I'd do the same if you appeared in my living room at night and told me "don't be alarmed, I'm just testing your security, by the way, your front door was locked".
He got caught doing something illegal and he's being punished. If you don't want to be an ex-con then don't break the law, what a concept. There were legal ways for Mitnick to practice his 'inquisitive mind', he could have got a job as a security consultant. He could even have donated his services as a security consultant to non-profit organizations if getting payed for it was somehow morally reprehensible to him.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for him at all. Personally I wouldn't want him working in my company, he's already demonstrated not only a complete lack of trustworthiness but a surplus of stupidity by violating the terms of his probation.
Let him serve fries at McDonald's, don't complain about the results of his own stupidity.
Online voting isn't yet ready for prime time. I agree that traditional security concerns can be met with existing encryption and security standards. What can't be guaranteed is that your vote will actually be received and counted.
With traditional votes as long as the roads are open and the weather isn't too bad people can make it out to a voting station. The total tally may be larger on nice days than during inclement weather but there will be a respectable cross section of the population who will make the effort to vote. If you make it to the station your vote will be counted.
Votes tend to have geographic biases which is why you have states or municipalities referred to as being 'traditionally democratic' or 'traditionally republican' etc. This could lead to a denial of service attack to alter the outcome of the election. Send out your armed contingent to keep voters from reaching the voting stations. For a variety of reasons this isn't done. It's illegal, frowned upon by the public, tends to get the government pointing its arms at you and so on.
With internet based voting the structure of the internet itself will guarantee that even though some number of voters are at the voting station (their personal computer in this case) but won't be heard during the final tally. Net congestion, ISP problems but we'll assume that their computer is actually working.
A denial of service attack against geographic regions is much easier though and much more anonymous. Just make sure that the traffic in a region is high enough to make voting difficult. Look for misconfigured machines that will allow an avalanche of pings to be sent with information at your local script kiddy database.
You can argue that not allowing online voting will stop some people from casting their vote. To that I say so what? If somebody can't make the effort to make it to the local vote station then they probably aren't concerned enough about what their vote represents to even have formed a real opinion. There are real circumstances such as illness but there is already vote by proxy to cover this.
When the internet has enough bandwidth and redundancy to conceal the effects of net congestion it will be time to look at internet voting for serious elections. Until then all its suited for is informal polls.