It's clearly impossible to make a 100% effective block against "bad stuff" on the internet. But as a parent and an engineer, that's OK. It's enough to put up a road block that prevents casual or accidental "crossing the line". If the kid is determined enough to do real work to get to online porn, then at least hopefully he learned something about computers.
And for people that think that it's wrong for a parent to try to control what their kids see/do online, well, I can sympathize, but what you see and do online affects you, and there are some things that it's not a good idea to put into a teenager's head. I'm certainly no prude, but if my kids were looking around the internet for snuff films, I certainly wouldn't want it to be EASY.
While the overall population of programmers may be shifting slowly away from Windows, the shift new developers coming out of school is much more dramatic. My company (Pando Networks) ships an application on Windows, Mac and Linux, and when we recruit new developers from school we see ZERO experience with Windows development coming from the universities. Schools are completely focused on modern, portable languages (e.g. Java, Ruby), and they're writing mainly "web apps", so few students have more than a passing acquaintence with C++, a few played with.Net on servers, and none have written a "Windows app". If our experience is typical, I'd say that MS has completely lost the next generation of softare developers.
From the corporate IT perspective, I think that this also the case. IT would rather implement Web apps, which are easy to deploy and support. So while the developers might use Windows computers on their desktops, and perhaps as the servers, that doesn't particularly affect the software - Java, PHP, etc., are effectively the same on all platforms. And even the developers writing.Net server software are less tied to Windows than they would have been if they were writing a Win32 client/server app.
"do you realize bluetooth is just one option, the devices implementing DAVE can also provide USB transfer" "I suppose the only reason for bluetooth inside is because they saw some empty space in the drive left underutilized"
You've missed out on the main value of BlueTooth, which is universality. All high-end phones provide bluetooth, so they could work with DAVE devices by adding software. According to TFA that means Java, BREW (ick), Symbian, Windows Mobile, and (soon) Palm, which covers the vast majority of phones sold that are capable of playing music and video. Admittedly there will still be the issue of debugging all of the bugs in each specific phone, which isn't a minor task given how terrible telephone manufacturers are at software. But software debugging is solvable. Virtually no consumer phones provide USB, which can't be addressed except by upgrading hardware, which is a lot harder and more expensive than software.
You're right that USB is better than BlueTooth, in the universe where all phones were going to be redesigned to have USB ports and everyone was about to buy a new phone.
"I don't pretend for one second that the liberal politicians or groups are any "better" or "worse" than their conservative counterparts; even independents have their problems."
To make the point more directly, while it's a "safe" pose to argue that "all politicians are corrupt" as if the differences between them don't matter, in reality there are important differences between different groups of politicians, because those groups have different standards and different goals.
To illustrate the difference in standards mattering, compare the administrations of Nixon and Bush Jr. Both groups were philosophically similar in many ways (and many of the same individuals were active in both administrations), but Nixon's administration was constrained by the standards that punished unethical behavior, at least when it became public and exceeded the public's tolerance. Nixon was resigned over a relatively incompetent attempt to gain inside information on his opposition in an election and then lying to cover that up. But Bush Jr.'s administration has dramatically lower standards of acceptable behavior, resulting in less punishment for far more serious errors - there is far more corruption than under Nixon, a record number of members of the administration have gone to jail (or resigned to avoid punishment), a foreign policy that has put the US in the worst position during my lifetime, actively working to subvert habeas corpus, the separation of church and state, and the system of "checks and balances" that has made our country work for centuries, and they've even given medals to the people that launched a failed war that has reduced our national security and resulted in 25,000 american casualties while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars that our children's children will be paying off. Of course, it's fairly easy to identify less corrupt administrations than either Nixon or Bush Jr., but I hope that the point is clear even from one comparison.
To illustrate that goals matter, imagine that there are two competing groups of politicians, equally corrupt, but that the first group's goal was raising the income of the poor, and the second group's goal was personal wealth. They're both "corrupt", in that both groups are willing to break the law, lie, cheat and steal, if it advances their goals. But the rest of the country is probably better of with politicians that cheat to help the poor than with the politicians that cheat to make themselves rich. Similarly, the country benefits from the government being run competently, we're better off having the government run by people whose goal is to make the government effective than people whose goal is to shut the government shut down, even if both groups of people were equally corrupt.
You make an interesting ethical point, but in a properly designed voting system the outcome of the election does not depend on the honesty or integrity of any of the participants. Specifically, the system should work even if EVERY participant in the process is a partisan that is highly motivated to steal the election, because the process should be designed to assume that and still ensure the integrity of the result. That's why, for example, there should always be multiple witnesses for every step of the process representing all interested parties, each of whom is highly motivated to keep the other participants from getting away with anything.
Unfortunately, many states give quite a bit of power in determining how elections are run to a Secretary of State that is elected based on party affiliation, which undermines the system significantly. Combining that with the deployment of voting systems (DRE's) that are designed to be impossible to audit, it's hard to have faith in the integrity of the election process, because you have good reasons not to trust the people adminstering the process, and no way to verify the results independently.
"Ms. Jennings assumes because there is an undervote that all those undervotes went for her"
This is incorrect. Ms. Jennings believes that there were abnormally high undervotes in some counties, but not others, which changed the outcome of the race. This position was supported by ES&S, the vendor of the machines, in court testimony. This didn't require all of the undervotes to be case for her, just for the undervotes to be cast consistently with the votes counted in the same counties.
To quote the local papers (http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20061109/NEWS/611090343):
"More than 18,000 voters who showed up at the polls voted in other races but not the Buchanan-Jennings race.
That means nearly 13 percent of voters did not vote for either candidate -- a massive undercount compared with other counties, including Manatee, which reported a 2 percent undervote.
If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368, according to a Herald-Tribune review. Even if the undervote had been 8 percent -- more than three times what it was in Manatee -- Jennings would have won by one vote."
Given that voters generally go to vote for the most important election, and then occasionally vote for the other races, undervoting is generally considered the error rate of the voting system. Thus, you consistently see very low undervotes reported by accurate voting mechanisms (e.g. precinct count optical scan typically reports 1% undervotes, probably a measure of voters actually intending to undervote) and very high undervotes by inaccurate voting mechanisms (e.g. punch card ballots typically report 7% undervotes, indicating that they probably fail to record 6% of votes cast). This pattern has been observed consistently across numerous elections for decades - bad voting systems create high undervote counts, and good voting systems don't, even when both systems are used in parallel by the same voters in the same place in the same election. Undervotes are considered such a problem in voting that the best argument for electronic voting systems is to reduce undervotes. Based on historical data, a 13% undervote rate is nearly unheard of, indicating that there was something seriously wrong with the way that the voting was conducted. Since DRE's (direct recording electronic votnig systems, meaning no paper ballots) are by definition impossible to audit, the only indication of a systemic failure would be based on the results looking implausible, such as two neighboring counties in the same election reporting wildly different undervote rates"
The odds of these two counties randomly having such a range of undervotes is 1:5,000,000.
Keeping in mind that DRE's by design can't be audited, you have to decide whether (1) it's impossible to challenge the results of an election run on DRE's, no matter what happens, or (2) you can challenge the results of an election run on DRE's if the results appear implausible.
I'm with NIST on this one. All DRE's should be decertified. Voting is too important to treat this way.
"Except that Microsoft probably didn't blame the CD company for allowing a virus to be put on the CDs... "
Actually, in http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html MS specifically blamed the company that they hired to translate their software into Korean for injecting the virus into the document that MS then distributed on the CD. So you're technically right that in that case MS didn't blame the CD duplication company, but they certainly passed the buck to a vendor.
That being said, when reporting the details of how something like this happened, there's nothing wrong with documenting that a vendor introduced the virus, if that's what actually happened.
"Macs speak Windows/FAT32 but Windows still won't read HFS"
My solution was to install MacOS X (Intel) on all of the computers that I use. Not only did it solve the iPod filesystem "problem", but I don't get pop-ups when browsing the web, or adware when I install software, etc.:-)
From what's been announced, the disk duplication step of manufacturing was fine. Ironically, it sounds like the virus got onto the iPods as a post-manufacturing quality check where the manufacturer connected a few iPods to PC's to check them, and some of those iPods got infected from an infected PC. But this apparently affected a very small number if iPods.
To keep this in perspective, in 1995, the first Word macro virus -- now called Concept -- was massively distributed by Microsoft on a CD-ROM called Microsoft Windows 95 Software Compatibility Test. The shipment went to hundreds of companies in August 1995. And MS has distributed viruses on CD's to huge numbers of their customers numerous times. (http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/onestop.htm,http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/wazzu.shtml, http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html) So while I am sure that MS' quality control has gotten better, I think that MS isn't in much of a position to play "holier than thou" on the issue of distributing viruses in their products.
Election fraud is something that any American ought to be concerned about, because free and fair elections are the basis for democracy. Anyone with any sort of technical background out to be (and generally is) horrified about the heavy reliance on electronic voting in the US.
"Considering there is no unbiased proof (yes, speculation and people pushing an overly biased agenda don't count) that the 2006 election was stolen, I doubt there is any point to discussing whether the next one will be."
Given the design of DRE's (most electronic voting machines), it's literally impossible to prove vote fraud. This is because there is no auditable record of the votes, so there is nothing to compare to the "results" to determine whether they are an accurate recording of people's votes. Or, as Sharon Machlis put it in ComputerWorld, "Without a paper trail, there's simply nothing to check against in order to verify accuracy. For a vendor, it's great work if you can get it: Install systems where your users have no way to measure achieving the desired results," she wrote. "For our democracy, though, it's unacceptable."
Let's consider a hypothetical case of fraud, and see what evidence there would be. If in 2004 DRE's all claimed that Bush won with 60% of the vote, while other voting machines machines showed Kerry winning 55%, and exit polls showed that Kerry won 55%, that would have been extremely unlikely, but impossible to "prove" as fraud.
If the DRE's were hacked, but other voting machines weren't, what would we see? - Consistent results between non-DRE vote counts and exit polls. - Extreme varience between DRE vote counts and non-DRE vote counts, all in favor of Bush. - Extreme varience between DRE vote counts and exit polls, all in favor of Bush.
We saw all of the above in 2004.
There are other reasons to suspect the legitimacy of electronic voting: - 80% of american votes are counted by two DRE systems (ES&S and Diebold). This consolidation makes it easier to commit fraud than if there were more, competing electronic voting systems. - Both ES&S and Diebold management are vocal Republicans. Their overt political advocacy, rather than the official neutrality that you see from polling companies, makes it easy to suspect that their advocacy might have lead to fraud. - Several of Diebold's software developers were convicted felons, including one who was convicted of embezzling using sophisticated software techniques to defraud his employer. Specifically, he put "back doors" into software, which he later triggered to steal money. It's not hard to imagine him taking those skills and applying them to votes. It's hard to see why a company concerned about trust would employ such people. - There are thousands of recorded incidents of DRE's voting problems, leading to a general distrust in the quality of their engineering.
"The standard isn't really going to make a difference. What matters is how good the processing device on the controller is and the read/write speeds of your drives."
This is exactly right. I run about 50 TB of RAID drive sets under extremely heavy 24/7 load, and the SCSI drives and RAID controllers outperform the SATA drives and controllers by about 4x. This has been mystifying, because by the numbers the SATA drives and the SCSI drives should perform almost identically. My current theory is that the SCSI RAID controllers are that much better than the SATA RAID controllers; the SATA controllers we're using have very few configuration options and provide very little performance data, so it's hard to be sure. Quite frustrating.:-(
Re:Private Voting, Public Counting
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Brave New Ballot
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"The most reliable, secure way to vote in the USA today is to use voter-correctable precinct-based optical scanners. That means paper ballots at poll sites fed into a ballot scanner."
"Unfortunately, the VVPAT is a placebo. What guarantees what's recorded is what's printed? Nothing. And experiences to date demonstrate that actually auditing the VVPAT is infeasible (1h 15m per ballot cast)."
I agree that precinct-based optical scanners are great.
The combination that you miss is voter verified paper ballots. This is different from VVPT in that the paper _is_ the vote, not an audit trail. So what is printed on the ballot is by definition the actual vote. The voter is responsible for reviewing the printed ballot and making sure that it's accurate, and printing a new ballot if the previous one is incorrect. Of course, if a voter doesn't want to use the touchscreen, they could fill out a paper ballot without using the ballot printing machine.
OVC's recommendation is that people use touchscreen ballot printing machines that walk them through the voting process, and then print out a paper ballot. These can have all of the advantages of touchscreen electronic voting systems (no way to overvote, able to support audio-voting for illiterate or vision impaired voters, etc.) but when the voter is done the machine prints out a paper ballot which the voter places in an envelope and hands to a poll worker, who puts it into the ballot box. So all the touchscreen does is help the user neatly and accurately fill out a ballot, but the user could do so using a pencil if they preferred. When the polls close, the poll workers (in front of witnesses) open the ballot box, scan all of the ballots using a stand-alone scanner/tabulator, print out the totals, post the printout publicly, and report the totals for central tabulation. Since the precinct totals are posted publicly, any interested party can perform their own tabulation of all precinct totals. The ballots are locked back up, and collected for archival storage. A random sample of precincts are then audited, manually recounting the ballots to make sure that the total reported is accurate, and if there's a question the ballots can be re-scanned and re-tabulated.
"OVC is great, but I'm still putting too much trust in others without publicly auditable records."
Please go read what OVC proposes. They advocate a multi-layered approach, so that you don't have to trust any official or vendor, but the system as a whole can be composed of untrusted, self-inteterested parties and still produce a trustable result.
They advocate open source software because it's open to inspection, can be provided by multiple competing vendors, etc. They also advocate voter verified paper ballots which are the true votes, because then you don't have to trust the software at all, but can inspect the paper ballots, and all traditional security mechanisms that have been developed over the last few hundred years for handling paper can apply. And they advocate that the entire voting and vote counting process take place in front of the public (or at least witnesses representing all interested parties). And they advocate audits in random precincts to make sure that the electronic tallies match the paper ballots. And they advocate that each precinct immediately publicly post their totals, before reporting them for central tabulation, so that any interested party can perform their own tabulation as a check against the official tally (otherwise an easy place to affect large numbers of votes).
"Apple's cheapest products are midrange in the market, and they shine at the high-end. Apple is competing with Lenovo, Toshiba, and Sony for customers with an eye toward total presentation & overall quality, and a bit more flexibility in the pocketbook."
You're exactly right that Apple's market is mid-range to high-end, while Dell shines at the low-end.
So why does Apple say "cheaper than Dell" instead of "cheaper than Sony" or "cheaper than IBM"? Apple said that their computers were cheaper than Sony (which, of course, is true) it would have no impact at all, because people's reactions would be "So what? Dell's computers cost less than Sony's, too, and that's why I buy Dell". Apple and Dell being in different market segments is exactly why Apple's statements that their computers are cheaper than Dell's have such impact. Everyone knows that Apple's quality is fantastic, and many people would like to buy an Apple computer but are put off by the perceived higher cost. Apple is making the point that you can get Apple's quality at better than Dell pricing.
"You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand."
You've basically described what the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org) has implemented and is promoting. Go help out!
"Don't underestimate the power of Marketing, and the power of Inertia"
Good points. I think that you're right, the PS3's ability to run PS2 games (and being "the next Playstation") will help Sony and hurt Nintendo. But I think that in hte case of the PS3 vs. the Wii, the high price of the PS3 more than offsets the value of running older games, since (assuming the publicly speculated numbers are correct) you can buy a Wii and a _lot_ of games for the price of the PS3. The XBOX 360 is as expensive as the PS3, but lost the last round, so MS' only advantage is that they launched sooner. Perhaps MS will force game companies to ship XBOX 360 games to be able to claim Vista compatability? It's odd, but stranger things have happened before - MS required NT compatibility in order to use the Win95 logo!:-)
The ruling didn't say that Echostar had to kill all of their DVR's. The ruling said that Echostar had 30 days to negotiate a licensing arrangement with TiVo. TiVo has some great leverage in the negotiations, but that's because Echostar refused to negotiate previously, preferring to play "hard ball" in court, and lost.
This is, by the way, how basic patents work. There's no "it's popular, so you don't have to pay to license the patent" rule. For example, Motorolla has a patent on putting a heat sink on a transistor, and every other electronics company pays them for it. There's an engineer that has the patent on on-screen programmable VCR's, and he gets paid for every single VCR manufactured. The way the world works, that engineer doesn't have a monopoly on on-screen programmable VCR's, but every VCR manufacturer has to negotiate a license before they can (legally) ship their product.
This won't affect Echostar customers, or technical support representatives, unless Echostar decides that they'd rather screw their customers than cut a deal with TiVo. At that point, resigning is a reasonable course of action.
I agree. Sony and Microsoft have gotten arrogant and are trying to sell what they want to sell, not what people want to buy. That is, Sony and MS both want to "own the living room" with a high-end PC-class machine with DVD player/internet/game/do everything hardware with the best spec's. What people want to buy is some cheap entertainment. If the Wii is more fun to play with, and costs half of what the PS3 and the XBOX 260 cost, it will win.
To compare to the previous generations, MS and Sony are selling the 3DO, N64 and DreamCast (too expensive to buy, too expensive to develop for, too big, over-engineered) and Nintento is selling the 2600/NES/PlayStation (cheap, fun, simple). This is also why the Nintendo DS is crushing the Sony PSP in the portable market.
If the Wii is cheap, easy and fun, it doesn't matter what the spec's are for the XBOX 360 or PS3.
"The only real solution that I can think of is to have independent contractors verify the software the machines are running. (But then: can you trust the contractors?)"
An approach I rather like is to have every voting machine booted from a CD-ROM that contains the OS, voting software, ballot template, etc. As a part of the set-up process, the CD's would be taken from a sealed package and inserted into each machine, with multiple witnesses from each interested party watching. And when the polls close, the CD's would be collected (with witnesses watching) and stored in a sealed package and archived, with the ballots. (Yes, paper ballots) That way, all of the software that ran the machine is archived for inspection, and the voting machines only contain a small ROM sufficient to boot (BIOS) that is more easily verifiable than a hard drive.
To verify the CD's, it's easy to generate a checksum to compare to the master CD. And the master CD can be verified by inspection by all interested parties.
The Open Voting Consortium (www.openvotingconsortium.org) has created a proof-of-concept system that implements secure voting based on voter-verified paper ballots. The next step is to get some funding so that enough people can work on it to take it from proof-of-concept through certification. Unfortunately, there are significant financial costs to the certification process, so it can't be purely a FOSS project, though the software development aspect can of course be FOSS.
There are other reasons that systems fail - but all of the "over-spec'd, over-priced, overly complex" systems failed (which, I think, is what will happen with the PS3 and Xbox 360). Then, between the companies that are selling products that people actually want, there are winners and losers. The N64 failed (IMO) because it was cartridge-based, with Nintendo forcing all game companies to use Nintendo to manufacture the cartridges, making it much more expensive and risky to sell N64 games than Playstation games. The DreamCast, well, Sega ran out of money.
At least Nintendo remembers why people buy videogame consoles instead of (or in addition to) general purpose computers. People bought all of the most successful game systems because they were a cheap and easy to entertain your kids, NOT because they were higher powered - consoles are all low powered compared to loaded gamer PC's. Of course, for every generation of game systems there is competition about who has the best spec's and, more importantly, the best games, but every time a company forgets that the most important thing is to be cheap and easy, they end up making an absurdly over-spec'd, over-priced, overly complex system that fails in the marketplace because they chased after the high-end niche market instead of the mainstream.
Winning Systems: NES, GameBoy, PlayStation, PlayStation 2 (pushing the high-end of pricing at launch, but came down).
Losing Systems: Intellivision, Atari Lynx, NEC Turbo Graphix, 3DO, DreamCast, Xbox. All tried to sell more functionality for more money than people were willing to pay.
When I look at the next generation systems, the Wii looks like the NES and GameBoy - a cheap and easy way to entertain your kids. And Sony and MS's next boxes look a lot like 3DO - great spec's, but wiped out by more pragmatic competition.
Sony's only hope is that they can somehow convince people to buy PS3's as their HD DVD player, which might get home theater enthusiasts to buy PS3's. The Xbox 360 seems doomed to me, once its real competition arrives.
My prediction is that the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by massive amounts, because Nintendo is (1) targeting the mainstream market, and (2) focusing on gameplay, innovating in areas like the controllers, and their downloadable game service, that don't price them out of their market. The risk I see to the Wii is that if game publishers don't think it'll do well, they won't sell games for it, hurting it in the general marketplace. But if Nintendo is committed to the Wii's success, I think it'll do decently well just on the strength that you can buy it (if rumors are true). As a parent, I think I'm more likely to buy a Wii for $200 just to play whatever the next cool Mario game is, rather than to spend $4-500 (or more?!) for the competition. Heck, the Wii controller is the only interesting thing I've read about any of these units, and it's on the cheapest one...
"How much capital does an originization really need to code up a secure counting machine?"
While implementing a voting system isn't as trivial as you make it sound, the cost isn't so much in the development of the software to implement voting as the political and certification processes to allow it to be used. It costs $millions to work with the states to get each state to modify their laws to allow for the use of a secure, open source voting system, and then to them get the system certified in each state. Keep in mind that the US, unlike most countries, runs elections at the state level, with state laws about the election process that are unique to each state, and the states have VERY specific laws concerning the voting process, down to the level of what order the candidates must be listed in, and which font must be used. For example, laws detailing ballot layout written assuming printed paper ballots (for example) must be changed to allow for touch-screen voting, voting by the visually impaired (via the computer reading the ballot to the voter and collecting the votes), etc.
"And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data?"
Pretty easily, actually. If the communications are wrapped in SSL so that the entire TCP stream is encrypted so that the ISP can't recognize the application protocol, then you can recognize the TLS handshake and the SSL packets, and throttle them. This might slow down loading web pages from banks, etc., but they're not so large that throttling would be a major issue.
If the TCP stream isn't encrypted, so that the protocol is visible but transports encrypted data, then you know what the protocol is, so you can throttle it or not based on the protocol.
So the only other case is one where you don't recognize the protocol, which could either be because it's encrypted in some proprietary scheme or is a proprietary protocol. In either case, you can throttle it. This is a bit anti-social, but if you're an ISP with 60% of its traffic in a proprietary, encrypted protocol, it's worth a little effort to come up with a router rule to recognize and throttle it.
"So she may have never used a computer, but I assume she is paying for the cable or dsl service that is likely attached to her television or phone bill?"
Exactly. The process that the RIAA goes through is rather contorted in order to protect ISP's customer's privacy. A few years ago they could get the customer's name from the ISP, do some research, then decide if they want to sue. But a court ruled that ISP's could refuse the request until there was a suit filed. The court ruling was well a good idea (protecting privacy is good), but it means that now the RIAA has to file a lawsuit with nothing more than an IP address and a timestamp (and a record of x-hundred files served by that IP address), and only finds out the name of the person paying for the account with that IP address after filing the lawsuit. Of course, they can't know the name of the person actually doing the file sharing, since there's no way to know who's sitting in front of the computer.
So far as I recall, the RIAA hasn't ever been wrong about the IP address or the file sharing, but has been embarassed a few times because the person paying for the internet account was obviously not the one doing the file sharing. So while "I've never even turned on a computer" is a great line, my guess is that the reality is more along the lines of "Don't blame me, blame my kids/grandkids".
One of these cases will be interesting when the file sharing is done by a neighbor over an open WiFi connection. Are you responsible for what someone else does if they're using your internet connection without your knowledge or permission? Given that WiFi gateways are all open by default, and plenty of people in apartment buildings "borrow" neighbor's internet connections, I'm surprised that this hasn't occurred yet.
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It's clearly impossible to make a 100% effective block against "bad stuff" on the internet. But as a parent and an engineer, that's OK. It's enough to put up a road block that prevents casual or accidental "crossing the line". If the kid is determined enough to do real work to get to online porn, then at least hopefully he learned something about computers.
And for people that think that it's wrong for a parent to try to control what their kids see/do online, well, I can sympathize, but what you see and do online affects you, and there are some things that it's not a good idea to put into a teenager's head. I'm certainly no prude, but if my kids were looking around the internet for snuff films, I certainly wouldn't want it to be EASY.
While the overall population of programmers may be shifting slowly away from Windows, the shift new developers coming out of school is much more dramatic. My company (Pando Networks) ships an application on Windows, Mac and Linux, and when we recruit new developers from school we see ZERO experience with Windows development coming from the universities. Schools are completely focused on modern, portable languages (e.g. Java, Ruby), and they're writing mainly "web apps", so few students have more than a passing acquaintence with C++, a few played with .Net on servers, and none have written a "Windows app". If our experience is typical, I'd say that MS has completely lost the next generation of softare developers.
.Net server software are less tied to Windows than they would have been if they were writing a Win32 client/server app.
From the corporate IT perspective, I think that this also the case. IT would rather implement Web apps, which are easy to deploy and support. So while the developers might use Windows computers on their desktops, and perhaps as the servers, that doesn't particularly affect the software - Java, PHP, etc., are effectively the same on all platforms. And even the developers writing
"do you realize bluetooth is just one option, the devices implementing DAVE can also provide USB transfer" "I suppose the only reason for bluetooth inside is because they saw some empty space in the drive left underutilized"
You've missed out on the main value of BlueTooth, which is universality. All high-end phones provide bluetooth, so they could work with DAVE devices by adding software. According to TFA that means Java, BREW (ick), Symbian, Windows Mobile, and (soon) Palm, which covers the vast majority of phones sold that are capable of playing music and video. Admittedly there will still be the issue of debugging all of the bugs in each specific phone, which isn't a minor task given how terrible telephone manufacturers are at software. But software debugging is solvable. Virtually no consumer phones provide USB, which can't be addressed except by upgrading hardware, which is a lot harder and more expensive than software.
You're right that USB is better than BlueTooth, in the universe where all phones were going to be redesigned to have USB ports and everyone was about to buy a new phone.
"I don't pretend for one second that the liberal politicians or groups are any "better" or "worse" than their conservative counterparts; even independents have their problems."
To make the point more directly, while it's a "safe" pose to argue that "all politicians are corrupt" as if the differences between them don't matter, in reality there are important differences between different groups of politicians, because those groups have different standards and different goals.
To illustrate the difference in standards mattering, compare the administrations of Nixon and Bush Jr. Both groups were philosophically similar in many ways (and many of the same individuals were active in both administrations), but Nixon's administration was constrained by the standards that punished unethical behavior, at least when it became public and exceeded the public's tolerance. Nixon was resigned over a relatively incompetent attempt to gain inside information on his opposition in an election and then lying to cover that up. But Bush Jr.'s administration has dramatically lower standards of acceptable behavior, resulting in less punishment for far more serious errors - there is far more corruption than under Nixon, a record number of members of the administration have gone to jail (or resigned to avoid punishment), a foreign policy that has put the US in the worst position during my lifetime, actively working to subvert habeas corpus, the separation of church and state, and the system of "checks and balances" that has made our country work for centuries, and they've even given medals to the people that launched a failed war that has reduced our national security and resulted in 25,000 american casualties while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars that our children's children will be paying off. Of course, it's fairly easy to identify less corrupt administrations than either Nixon or Bush Jr., but I hope that the point is clear even from one comparison.
To illustrate that goals matter, imagine that there are two competing groups of politicians, equally corrupt, but that the first group's goal was raising the income of the poor, and the second group's goal was personal wealth. They're both "corrupt", in that both groups are willing to break the law, lie, cheat and steal, if it advances their goals. But the rest of the country is probably better of with politicians that cheat to help the poor than with the politicians that cheat to make themselves rich. Similarly, the country benefits from the government being run competently, we're better off having the government run by people whose goal is to make the government effective than people whose goal is to shut the government shut down, even if both groups of people were equally corrupt.
You make an interesting ethical point, but in a properly designed voting system the outcome of the election does not depend on the honesty or integrity of any of the participants. Specifically, the system should work even if EVERY participant in the process is a partisan that is highly motivated to steal the election, because the process should be designed to assume that and still ensure the integrity of the result. That's why, for example, there should always be multiple witnesses for every step of the process representing all interested parties, each of whom is highly motivated to keep the other participants from getting away with anything.
Unfortunately, many states give quite a bit of power in determining how elections are run to a Secretary of State that is elected based on party affiliation, which undermines the system significantly. Combining that with the deployment of voting systems (DRE's) that are designed to be impossible to audit, it's hard to have faith in the integrity of the election process, because you have good reasons not to trust the people adminstering the process, and no way to verify the results independently.
"Ms. Jennings assumes because there is an undervote that all those undervotes went for her"
l e?AID=/20061109/NEWS/611090343):
This is incorrect. Ms. Jennings believes that there were abnormally high undervotes in some counties, but not others, which changed the outcome of the race. This position was supported by ES&S, the vendor of the machines, in court testimony. This didn't require all of the undervotes to be case for her, just for the undervotes to be cast consistently with the votes counted in the same counties.
To quote the local papers (http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic
"More than 18,000 voters who showed up at the polls voted in other races but not the Buchanan-Jennings race.
That means nearly 13 percent of voters did not vote for either candidate -- a massive undercount compared with other counties, including Manatee, which reported a 2 percent undervote.
If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368, according to a Herald-Tribune review. Even if the undervote had been 8 percent -- more than three times what it was in Manatee -- Jennings would have won by one vote."
Given that voters generally go to vote for the most important election, and then occasionally vote for the other races, undervoting is generally considered the error rate of the voting system. Thus, you consistently see very low undervotes reported by accurate voting mechanisms (e.g. precinct count optical scan typically reports 1% undervotes, probably a measure of voters actually intending to undervote) and very high undervotes by inaccurate voting mechanisms (e.g. punch card ballots typically report 7% undervotes, indicating that they probably fail to record 6% of votes cast). This pattern has been observed consistently across numerous elections for decades - bad voting systems create high undervote counts, and good voting systems don't, even when both systems are used in parallel by the same voters in the same place in the same election. Undervotes are considered such a problem in voting that the best argument for electronic voting systems is to reduce undervotes. Based on historical data, a 13% undervote rate is nearly unheard of, indicating that there was something seriously wrong with the way that the voting was conducted. Since DRE's (direct recording electronic votnig systems, meaning no paper ballots) are by definition impossible to audit, the only indication of a systemic failure would be based on the results looking implausible, such as two neighboring counties in the same election reporting wildly different undervote rates"
"SARASOTA
Total votes cast = 142,283
Undervote = 18,382
Difference = 12.92%
MANATEE
Total votes cast = 96,705
Undervote = 2,312
Difference = 2.39%
The odds of these two counties randomly having such a range of undervotes is 1:5,000,000.
Keeping in mind that DRE's by design can't be audited, you have to decide whether (1) it's impossible to challenge the results of an election run on DRE's, no matter what happens, or (2) you can challenge the results of an election run on DRE's if the results appear implausible.
I'm with NIST on this one. All DRE's should be decertified. Voting is too important to treat this way.
"Except that Microsoft probably didn't blame the CD company for allowing a virus to be put on the CDs... "
l e.html MS specifically blamed the company that they hired to translate their software into Korean for injecting the virus into the document that MS then distributed on the CD. So you're technically right that in that case MS didn't blame the CD duplication company, but they certainly passed the buck to a vendor.
Actually, in http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/artic
That being said, when reporting the details of how something like this happened, there's nothing wrong with documenting that a vendor introduced the virus, if that's what actually happened.
"Macs speak Windows/FAT32 but Windows still won't read HFS"
:-)
My solution was to install MacOS X (Intel) on all of the computers that I use. Not only did it solve the iPod filesystem "problem", but I don't get pop-ups when browsing the web, or adware when I install software, etc.
From what's been announced, the disk duplication step of manufacturing was fine. Ironically, it sounds like the virus got onto the iPods as a post-manufacturing quality check where the manufacturer connected a few iPods to PC's to check them, and some of those iPods got infected from an infected PC. But this apparently affected a very small number if iPods.
, http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/wazzu.shtml, http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html) So while I am sure that MS' quality control has gotten better, I think that MS isn't in much of a position to play "holier than thou" on the issue of distributing viruses in their products.
To keep this in perspective, in 1995, the first Word macro virus -- now called Concept -- was massively distributed by Microsoft on a CD-ROM called Microsoft Windows 95 Software Compatibility Test. The shipment went to hundreds of companies in August 1995. And MS has distributed viruses on CD's to huge numbers of their customers numerous times. (http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/onestop.htm
"2 left biased politcal stories on the frontpage"
Election fraud is something that any American ought to be concerned about, because free and fair elections are the basis for democracy. Anyone with any sort of technical background out to be (and generally is) horrified about the heavy reliance on electronic voting in the US.
"Considering there is no unbiased proof (yes, speculation and people pushing an overly biased agenda don't count) that the 2006 election was stolen, I doubt there is any point to discussing whether the next one will be."
Given the design of DRE's (most electronic voting machines), it's literally impossible to prove vote fraud. This is because there is no auditable record of the votes, so there is nothing to compare to the "results" to determine whether they are an accurate recording of people's votes. Or, as Sharon Machlis put it in ComputerWorld, "Without a paper trail, there's simply nothing to check against in order to verify accuracy. For a vendor, it's great work if you can get it: Install systems where your users have no way to measure achieving the desired results," she wrote. "For our democracy, though, it's unacceptable."
Let's consider a hypothetical case of fraud, and see what evidence there would be. If in 2004 DRE's all claimed that Bush won with 60% of the vote, while other voting machines machines showed Kerry winning 55%, and exit polls showed that Kerry won 55%, that would have been extremely unlikely, but impossible to "prove" as fraud.
If the DRE's were hacked, but other voting machines weren't, what would we see?
- Consistent results between non-DRE vote counts and exit polls.
- Extreme varience between DRE vote counts and non-DRE vote counts, all in favor of Bush.
- Extreme varience between DRE vote counts and exit polls, all in favor of Bush.
We saw all of the above in 2004.
There are other reasons to suspect the legitimacy of electronic voting:
- 80% of american votes are counted by two DRE systems (ES&S and Diebold). This consolidation makes it easier to commit fraud than if there were more, competing electronic voting systems.
- Both ES&S and Diebold management are vocal Republicans. Their overt political advocacy, rather than the official neutrality that you see from polling companies, makes it easy to suspect that their advocacy might have lead to fraud.
- Several of Diebold's software developers were convicted felons, including one who was convicted of embezzling using sophisticated software techniques to defraud his employer. Specifically, he put "back doors" into software, which he later triggered to steal money. It's not hard to imagine him taking those skills and applying them to votes. It's hard to see why a company concerned about trust would employ such people.
- There are thousands of recorded incidents of DRE's voting problems, leading to a general distrust in the quality of their engineering.
"The standard isn't really going to make a difference. What matters is how good the processing device on the controller is and the read/write speeds of your drives."
:-(
This is exactly right. I run about 50 TB of RAID drive sets under extremely heavy 24/7 load, and the SCSI drives and RAID controllers outperform the SATA drives and controllers by about 4x. This has been mystifying, because by the numbers the SATA drives and the SCSI drives should perform almost identically. My current theory is that the SCSI RAID controllers are that much better than the SATA RAID controllers; the SATA controllers we're using have very few configuration options and provide very little performance data, so it's hard to be sure. Quite frustrating.
"The most reliable, secure way to vote in the USA today is to use voter-correctable precinct-based optical scanners. That means paper ballots at poll sites fed into a ballot scanner."
"Unfortunately, the VVPAT is a placebo. What guarantees what's recorded is what's printed? Nothing. And experiences to date demonstrate that actually auditing the VVPAT is infeasible (1h 15m per ballot cast)."
I agree that precinct-based optical scanners are great.
The combination that you miss is voter verified paper ballots. This is different from VVPT in that the paper _is_ the vote, not an audit trail. So what is printed on the ballot is by definition the actual vote. The voter is responsible for reviewing the printed ballot and making sure that it's accurate, and printing a new ballot if the previous one is incorrect. Of course, if a voter doesn't want to use the touchscreen, they could fill out a paper ballot without using the ballot printing machine.
OVC's recommendation is that people use touchscreen ballot printing machines that walk them through the voting process, and then print out a paper ballot. These can have all of the advantages of touchscreen electronic voting systems (no way to overvote, able to support audio-voting for illiterate or vision impaired voters, etc.) but when the voter is done the machine prints out a paper ballot which the voter places in an envelope and hands to a poll worker, who puts it into the ballot box. So all the touchscreen does is help the user neatly and accurately fill out a ballot, but the user could do so using a pencil if they preferred. When the polls close, the poll workers (in front of witnesses) open the ballot box, scan all of the ballots using a stand-alone scanner/tabulator, print out the totals, post the printout publicly, and report the totals for central tabulation. Since the precinct totals are posted publicly, any interested party can perform their own tabulation of all precinct totals. The ballots are locked back up, and collected for archival storage. A random sample of precincts are then audited, manually recounting the ballots to make sure that the total reported is accurate, and if there's a question the ballots can be re-scanned and re-tabulated.
"OVC is great, but I'm still putting too much trust in others without publicly auditable records."
Please go read what OVC proposes. They advocate a multi-layered approach, so that you don't have to trust any official or vendor, but the system as a whole can be composed of untrusted, self-inteterested parties and still produce a trustable result.
They advocate open source software because it's open to inspection, can be provided by multiple competing vendors, etc. They also advocate voter verified paper ballots which are the true votes, because then you don't have to trust the software at all, but can inspect the paper ballots, and all traditional security mechanisms that have been developed over the last few hundred years for handling paper can apply. And they advocate that the entire voting and vote counting process take place in front of the public (or at least witnesses representing all interested parties). And they advocate audits in random precincts to make sure that the electronic tallies match the paper ballots. And they advocate that each precinct immediately publicly post their totals, before reporting them for central tabulation, so that any interested party can perform their own tabulation as a check against the official tally (otherwise an easy place to affect large numbers of votes).
"Apple's cheapest products are midrange in the market, and they shine at the high-end. Apple is competing with Lenovo, Toshiba, and Sony for customers with an eye toward total presentation & overall quality, and a bit more flexibility in the pocketbook."
You're exactly right that Apple's market is mid-range to high-end, while Dell shines at the low-end.
So why does Apple say "cheaper than Dell" instead of "cheaper than Sony" or "cheaper than IBM"? Apple said that their computers were cheaper than Sony (which, of course, is true) it would have no impact at all, because people's reactions would be "So what? Dell's computers cost less than Sony's, too, and that's why I buy Dell". Apple and Dell being in different market segments is exactly why Apple's statements that their computers are cheaper than Dell's have such impact. Everyone knows that Apple's quality is fantastic, and many people would like to buy an Apple computer but are put off by the perceived higher cost. Apple is making the point that you can get Apple's quality at better than Dell pricing.
"You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand."
You've basically described what the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org) has implemented and is promoting. Go help out!
"Don't underestimate the power of Marketing, and the power of Inertia"
:-)
Good points. I think that you're right, the PS3's ability to run PS2 games (and being "the next Playstation") will help Sony and hurt Nintendo. But I think that in hte case of the PS3 vs. the Wii, the high price of the PS3 more than offsets the value of running older games, since (assuming the publicly speculated numbers are correct) you can buy a Wii and a _lot_ of games for the price of the PS3. The XBOX 360 is as expensive as the PS3, but lost the last round, so MS' only advantage is that they launched sooner. Perhaps MS will force game companies to ship XBOX 360 games to be able to claim Vista compatability? It's odd, but stranger things have happened before - MS required NT compatibility in order to use the Win95 logo!
The ruling didn't say that Echostar had to kill all of their DVR's. The ruling said that Echostar had 30 days to negotiate a licensing arrangement with TiVo. TiVo has some great leverage in the negotiations, but that's because Echostar refused to negotiate previously, preferring to play "hard ball" in court, and lost.
This is, by the way, how basic patents work. There's no "it's popular, so you don't have to pay to license the patent" rule. For example, Motorolla has a patent on putting a heat sink on a transistor, and every other electronics company pays them for it. There's an engineer that has the patent on on-screen programmable VCR's, and he gets paid for every single VCR manufactured. The way the world works, that engineer doesn't have a monopoly on on-screen programmable VCR's, but every VCR manufacturer has to negotiate a license before they can (legally) ship their product.
This won't affect Echostar customers, or technical support representatives, unless Echostar decides that they'd rather screw their customers than cut a deal with TiVo. At that point, resigning is a reasonable course of action.
I agree. Sony and Microsoft have gotten arrogant and are trying to sell what they want to sell, not what people want to buy. That is, Sony and MS both want to "own the living room" with a high-end PC-class machine with DVD player/internet/game/do everything hardware with the best spec's. What people want to buy is some cheap entertainment. If the Wii is more fun to play with, and costs half of what the PS3 and the XBOX 260 cost, it will win.
To compare to the previous generations, MS and Sony are selling the 3DO, N64 and DreamCast (too expensive to buy, too expensive to develop for, too big, over-engineered) and Nintento is selling the 2600/NES/PlayStation (cheap, fun, simple). This is also why the Nintendo DS is crushing the Sony PSP in the portable market.
If the Wii is cheap, easy and fun, it doesn't matter what the spec's are for the XBOX 360 or PS3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crdak-1qhMo captures the market positioning perfectly.
"The only real solution that I can think of is to have independent contractors verify the software the machines are running. (But then: can you trust the contractors?)"
An approach I rather like is to have every voting machine booted from a CD-ROM that contains the OS, voting software, ballot template, etc. As a part of the set-up process, the CD's would be taken from a sealed package and inserted into each machine, with multiple witnesses from each interested party watching. And when the polls close, the CD's would be collected (with witnesses watching) and stored in a sealed package and archived, with the ballots. (Yes, paper ballots) That way, all of the software that ran the machine is archived for inspection, and the voting machines only contain a small ROM sufficient to boot (BIOS) that is more easily verifiable than a hard drive.
To verify the CD's, it's easy to generate a checksum to compare to the master CD. And the master CD can be verified by inspection by all interested parties.
The Open Voting Consortium (www.openvotingconsortium.org) has created a proof-of-concept system that implements secure voting based on voter-verified paper ballots. The next step is to get some funding so that enough people can work on it to take it from proof-of-concept through certification. Unfortunately, there are significant financial costs to the certification process, so it can't be purely a FOSS project, though the software development aspect can of course be FOSS.
There are other reasons that systems fail - but all of the "over-spec'd, over-priced, overly complex" systems failed (which, I think, is what will happen with the PS3 and Xbox 360). Then, between the companies that are selling products that people actually want, there are winners and losers. The N64 failed (IMO) because it was cartridge-based, with Nintendo forcing all game companies to use Nintendo to manufacture the cartridges, making it much more expensive and risky to sell N64 games than Playstation games. The DreamCast, well, Sega ran out of money.
Assuming that the rumored unit pricing is true...
At least Nintendo remembers why people buy videogame consoles instead of (or in addition to) general purpose computers. People bought all of the most successful game systems because they were a cheap and easy to entertain your kids, NOT because they were higher powered - consoles are all low powered compared to loaded gamer PC's. Of course, for every generation of game systems there is competition about who has the best spec's and, more importantly, the best games, but every time a company forgets that the most important thing is to be cheap and easy, they end up making an absurdly over-spec'd, over-priced, overly complex system that fails in the marketplace because they chased after the high-end niche market instead of the mainstream.
Winning Systems: NES, GameBoy, PlayStation, PlayStation 2 (pushing the high-end of pricing at launch, but came down).
Losing Systems: Intellivision, Atari Lynx, NEC Turbo Graphix, 3DO, DreamCast, Xbox. All tried to sell more functionality for more money than people were willing to pay.
When I look at the next generation systems, the Wii looks like the NES and GameBoy - a cheap and easy way to entertain your kids. And Sony and MS's next boxes look a lot like 3DO - great spec's, but wiped out by more pragmatic competition.
Sony's only hope is that they can somehow convince people to buy PS3's as their HD DVD player, which might get home theater enthusiasts to buy PS3's. The Xbox 360 seems doomed to me, once its real competition arrives.
My prediction is that the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by massive amounts, because Nintendo is (1) targeting the mainstream market, and (2) focusing on gameplay, innovating in areas like the controllers, and their downloadable game service, that don't price them out of their market. The risk I see to the Wii is that if game publishers don't think it'll do well, they won't sell games for it, hurting it in the general marketplace. But if Nintendo is committed to the Wii's success, I think it'll do decently well just on the strength that you can buy it (if rumors are true). As a parent, I think I'm more likely to buy a Wii for $200 just to play whatever the next cool Mario game is, rather than to spend $4-500 (or more?!) for the competition. Heck, the Wii controller is the only interesting thing I've read about any of these units, and it's on the cheapest one...
"How much capital does an originization really need to code up a secure counting machine?"
While implementing a voting system isn't as trivial as you make it sound, the cost isn't so much in the development of the software to implement voting as the political and certification processes to allow it to be used. It costs $millions to work with the states to get each state to modify their laws to allow for the use of a secure, open source voting system, and then to them get the system certified in each state. Keep in mind that the US, unlike most countries, runs elections at the state level, with state laws about the election process that are unique to each state, and the states have VERY specific laws concerning the voting process, down to the level of what order the candidates must be listed in, and which font must be used. For example, laws detailing ballot layout written assuming printed paper ballots (for example) must be changed to allow for touch-screen voting, voting by the visually impaired (via the computer reading the ballot to the voter and collecting the votes), etc.
"And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data?"
Pretty easily, actually. If the communications are wrapped in SSL so that the entire TCP stream is encrypted so that the ISP can't recognize the application protocol, then you can recognize the TLS handshake and the SSL packets, and throttle them. This might slow down loading web pages from banks, etc., but they're not so large that throttling would be a major issue.
If the TCP stream isn't encrypted, so that the protocol is visible but transports encrypted data, then you know what the protocol is, so you can throttle it or not based on the protocol.
So the only other case is one where you don't recognize the protocol, which could either be because it's encrypted in some proprietary scheme or is a proprietary protocol. In either case, you can throttle it. This is a bit anti-social, but if you're an ISP with 60% of its traffic in a proprietary, encrypted protocol, it's worth a little effort to come up with a router rule to recognize and throttle it.
"So she may have never used a computer, but I assume she is paying for the cable or dsl service that is likely attached to her television or phone bill?"
Exactly. The process that the RIAA goes through is rather contorted in order to protect ISP's customer's privacy. A few years ago they could get the customer's name from the ISP, do some research, then decide if they want to sue. But a court ruled that ISP's could refuse the request until there was a suit filed. The court ruling was well a good idea (protecting privacy is good), but it means that now the RIAA has to file a lawsuit with nothing more than an IP address and a timestamp (and a record of x-hundred files served by that IP address), and only finds out the name of the person paying for the account with that IP address after filing the lawsuit. Of course, they can't know the name of the person actually doing the file sharing, since there's no way to know who's sitting in front of the computer.
So far as I recall, the RIAA hasn't ever been wrong about the IP address or the file sharing, but has been embarassed a few times because the person paying for the internet account was obviously not the one doing the file sharing. So while "I've never even turned on a computer" is a great line, my guess is that the reality is more along the lines of "Don't blame me, blame my kids/grandkids".
One of these cases will be interesting when the file sharing is done by a neighbor over an open WiFi connection. Are you responsible for what someone else does if they're using your internet connection without your knowledge or permission? Given that WiFi gateways are all open by default, and plenty of people in apartment buildings "borrow" neighbor's internet connections, I'm surprised that this hasn't occurred yet.