The Broadcast Services bill mandates that overseas sites banned by the ABA be blocked. Which would require the approved censorware to regularly download an encrypted list of banned sites to block from an ABA server.
What happens when they go over the logs and find that very few users have been downloading it? They send in auditors, subpoena ISP dialin logs, and determine who hasn't been complying. Then they find a few deviants and make an example of them. Expect heavy fines and possibly jail terms.
If, however, you bypass the filter and access the unfiltered web, you are committing a criminal offense.
Granted, being prosecuted is about as likely as being jailed for having private homosexual sex in Tasmania (also a crime, or at least it was until recently). Unless they have some technical means of checking machines.
Even worse than just your fascists using Australia as a positive example (which will happen) will be Australian-funded lobbies backing your Religious Rightists and morality crusaders. Once this law kicks in, you can bet that the only Australian high-tech information industry with a future will be that which manufactures censorship devices (filtering routers, &c.) China, Saudi Arabia and Singapore may be good export markets at the start, but they can only buy so many, and for further growth, Australia will need to find more repressive states wanting to censor their networks. Thus expect the Australian Government's trade missions and private Australian companies to be funneling money into the Christian Coalition and anti-porn feminist groups and such by the million.
Come to think of it, what? You've got your Bill of Rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, and your high-tech industry, and then you've got software patents, the War on Some Drugs and bans on evolution in Kansas?
Seriously, it's the same deal. The censorship law was pushed through by the conservative Liberal Party to appease a religious-rightist senator from a small, highly conservative state best known from jokes about inbreeding. You can bet that most of the people in Melbourne and Sydney who are aware of the issues believe that this law is an ass; but in the name of political expediency, it got passed.
-- acb [who won't be voting for the Liberals anytime soon... sod them...]
Then you have to notify your ISP and they'll filter it for you and charge you extra.
Why doesn't the Australian Government just do what the People's Republic of China did and declare Microsoft Windows to be the national operating system? It'd save them a lot of problems controlling everyone. </SARCASM>
It is not technically possible to make Red Book (i.e., conventional audio) CDs uncopiable whilst keeping them compatible with current players.
CDs already have an ineffectual "copy protection" mechanism; a flag in the table of contents can specify whether copying is permitted for each track. Most commercial CDs have this set to 'no'. In theory, this affects the SCMS code sent on digital outputs, so if you copy a protected CD to a DAT, you can't later copy it. CD-ROM drives, however, will happily read any CD audio track, regardless of the flag.
The only other protection mechanism I can think of is individually watermarking each CD with a serial number and using that to trace the origins of pirated copies. The problem with this is that manufacturing non-identical CDs would get rather expensive. It could be done with CD-Rs burned from SDMI data, though.
SDMI on an open-source operating system is impossible, as anyone could hack the kernel to capture audio or snoop into the decoder's memory. SDMI depends on the system restricting the user's access.
You can bet that the owners of the SDMI technology will never licence their patents for a Linux-based software decoder, just as you'll never see a Linux-based software-only DVD video player. In either case, the copyright industry would oppose any such move.
It's not a matter of who owns it; rather, the underlying pattern of lax security that has become a hallmark of Microsoft implementations. This is not the first example; take, for example, Windows' e-mail attachment handling (which allowed the Melissa virus to flourish, over a decade after the Internet Worm should have taught everyone a lesson), ActiveX (which can either be disabled or insecure), and the numerous NT security flaws.
Microsoft have a culture which assumes that networks are controlled and orderly, much like corporate LANs, rather than the chaos of the Internet. This comes up in their assumptions, and their lack of attemption to security. The Microsoft Passport hole is merely the latest example.
True, if Unisys behave like Scientologists and sic the lawyers willy-nilly just to harass.
Though such a lawsuit, especially if it can be shown that no GIFs are LZWed, would be thrown out of court, and end up costing Unisys. Assuming that their intent is to make money rather than to harass, they'd give up pretty soon.
If I understand it correctly, most Linux software (as shipped with US distributions anyway) does not come with LZW code. Rather than libgif, they use libungif, which only does RLE compression. As such, GIFs created in this way are not in violation of UNISYS' patent.
Given that the machines in question have keyboards, reasonable CPUs and decent amounts of storage, they may actually make quite respectable portable UNIX boxes once the port is usable. It'd save one from having to lug around a laptop to have something that speaks UNIX and holds one's files.
At least this makes more sense than the PalmPilot port; unless someone makes a handwriting recognition engine for Linux (and a shell that's not hideously painful to use in this manner), a Linux-based PalmPilot is useless unless you carry around a terminal to plug into it.
Does this mean we finally find out what an enfilade is, and whether Ted Nelson really did invent an unprecedentedly brilliant data structure in the 1960s or whether he was bluffing?
Convenience doesn't justify bad decisions
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
If Borland choose Motif as their standard Linux GUI, I will be greatly disappointed. Laziness will have won over good design criteria, and several layers of design mistakes will be entrenched as a Linux standard. Many upcoming Linux applications will then be dependent on Motif, consigning Gtk and Qt to also-ran status.
If Borland want something that promises easy porting from Windows, the obvious choice would be WINE, in its function as a compatibility library. If they want a toolkit for new Linux applications, Gtk or Qt (provided the licensing issues can be worked out) would be best.
Lesstif is a stopgap, a way to replace Motif to compile legacy Motif applications (I believe one of the original applications for it was NCSA Mosaic). Being such, it still suffers from the congenital flaws of the Xt and Motif legacy.
Writing new applications in Motif will merely entrench this monstrous bogosity as a standard, cursing programmers to having to work with it. And bad standards stay around for ages (witness COBOL, for example).
Were there a RAD tool for Gtk, that would go a long way to putting a stake through the heart of the abomination known as Motif.
If you need Windows API calls, you could just link with the WINE compatibility library which would provide that layer. It wouldn't be as elegant or efficient as writing it natively, but it'd be good enough for quick ports.
The Borland poll specifically referred to Linux; as such, they seem more interested in porting to Linux than to one of the commercial unices. Motif is no standard on Linux, given that the only way to distribute binaries ordinary Linux users can use is to statically link them, and having a tool that leaves lots of redundant Motif crud in one's binaries wouldn't look good.
Besides, if they chose Motif they'd have to licence it, adding it to the price of Delphi. For that, they may as well use Qt (one of the most programmer-friendly toolkits I have seen).
According to the Darwin projects page, tcsh stands for "Turbo C Shell". That's the first time I've heard that explanation; the manpage says that it's named after TENEX...
Motif and CDE "beautiful interfaces"? More like baroque, committee-designed monstrosities.
"Stick to just Xlib and Xt?" Eugh. I'll bet this guy has never written a real GUI program. (Xt is painful to program in.)
X makes a decent, functional substrate, but it must evolve. In particular, the GUI toolkit layer needs improvement. And the market has spoken; most new applications use Gtk or Qt, rather than Xt-based systems. Motif itself appears to be, mercifully, on the way out.
If you looked around oss.sgi.com, you'd notice that there are lots of OSS projects. For example, there have been about 20 patches to the Linux kernel, mostly dealing with performance enhancements; some of these are already in the 2.2 and 2.3 trees.
The more the merrier. If you have several dozen filesystems to choose from, each with its own unique features (some historical, some futuristic), that is a good thing.
Of course, most people will probably only use one or two general-purpose filesystems, though the others will find their niches.
Fortunately, back then the Net was run by hackers, not politicians; in fact, most politicians were unaware of its existence. And the hackers who ran it didn't see any reason to bring it under the heel of politics.
The problem with this is that even if the US took such a policy, and cut off the connections to states who didn't implement US policies, there's nothing preventing them from networking without the US. The US could threaten to cut off anyone who gave them service, but that would lead to trade wars and such. Also, do we really want the US government imposing its standards (puritanical sexual morality, bans on drug-related content, and various FBI/NSA surveillance proposals, to name a few) on the whole wired world? Especially since there's enough of a consensus on things such as child pornography. Besides, how do you think Cuba, Iran, &c., are connected to the Net?
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This law can actually be technically enforced.
The Broadcast Services bill mandates that overseas sites banned by the ABA be blocked. Which would require the approved censorware to regularly download an encrypted list of banned sites to block from an ABA server.
What happens when they go over the logs and find that very few users have been downloading it? They send in auditors, subpoena ISP dialin logs, and determine who hasn't been complying. Then they find a few deviants and make an example of them. Expect heavy fines and possibly jail terms.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Or just mandate the use of a "secure" operating system, which the user cannot hack into bypassing censorship, i.e., Windows.
Linux users may still be able to use hardware filters, akin to the situation with hardware DVD decoders.
If, however, you bypass the filter and access the unfiltered web, you are committing a criminal offense.
Granted, being prosecuted is about as likely as being jailed for having private homosexual sex in Tasmania (also a crime, or at least it was until recently). Unless they have some technical means of checking machines.
Even worse than just your fascists using Australia as a positive example (which will happen) will be Australian-funded lobbies backing your Religious Rightists and morality crusaders. Once this law kicks in, you can bet that the only Australian high-tech information industry with a future will be that which manufactures censorship devices (filtering routers, &c.) China, Saudi Arabia and Singapore may be good export markets at the start, but they can only buy so many, and for further growth, Australia will need to find more repressive states wanting to censor their networks. Thus expect the Australian Government's trade missions and private Australian companies to be funneling money into the Christian Coalition and anti-porn feminist groups and such by the million.
Come to think of it, what? You've got your Bill of Rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, and your high-tech industry, and then you've got software patents, the War on Some Drugs and bans on evolution in Kansas?
Seriously, it's the same deal. The censorship law was pushed through by the conservative Liberal Party to appease a religious-rightist senator from a small, highly conservative state best known from jokes about inbreeding. You can bet that most of the people in Melbourne and Sydney who are aware of the issues believe that this law is an ass; but in the name of political expediency, it got passed.
-- acb [who won't be voting for the Liberals anytime soon... sod them...]
Then you have to notify your ISP and they'll filter it for you and charge you extra.
Why doesn't the Australian Government just do what the People's Republic of China did and declare Microsoft Windows to be the national operating system? It'd save them a lot of problems controlling everyone.
</SARCASM>
It is not technically possible to make Red Book (i.e., conventional audio) CDs uncopiable whilst keeping them compatible with current players.
CDs already have an ineffectual "copy protection" mechanism; a flag in the table of contents can specify whether copying is permitted for each track. Most commercial CDs have this set to 'no'. In theory, this affects the SCMS code sent on digital outputs, so if you copy a protected CD to a DAT, you can't later copy it. CD-ROM drives, however, will happily read any CD audio track, regardless of the flag.
The only other protection mechanism I can think of is individually watermarking each CD with a serial number and using that to trace the origins of pirated copies. The problem with this is that manufacturing non-identical CDs would get rather expensive. It could be done with CD-Rs burned from SDMI data, though.
SDMI on an open-source operating system is impossible, as anyone could hack the kernel to capture audio or snoop into the decoder's memory. SDMI depends on the system restricting the user's access.
You can bet that the owners of the SDMI technology will never licence their patents for a Linux-based software decoder, just as you'll never see a Linux-based software-only DVD video player. In either case, the copyright industry would oppose any such move.
It's not a matter of who owns it; rather, the underlying pattern of lax security that has become a hallmark of Microsoft implementations. This is not the first example; take, for example, Windows' e-mail attachment handling (which allowed the Melissa virus to flourish, over a decade after the Internet Worm should have taught everyone a lesson), ActiveX (which can either be disabled or insecure), and the numerous NT security flaws.
Microsoft have a culture which assumes that networks are controlled and orderly, much like corporate LANs, rather than the chaos of the Internet. This comes up in their assumptions, and their lack of attemption to security. The Microsoft Passport hole is merely the latest example.
True, if Unisys behave like Scientologists and sic the lawyers willy-nilly just to harass.
Though such a lawsuit, especially if it can be shown that no GIFs are LZWed, would be thrown out of court, and end up costing Unisys. Assuming that their intent is to make money rather than to harass, they'd give up pretty soon.
If I understand it correctly, most Linux software (as shipped with US distributions anyway) does not come with LZW code. Rather than libgif, they use libungif, which only does RLE compression. As such, GIFs created in this way are not in violation of UNISYS' patent.
Given that the machines in question have keyboards, reasonable CPUs and decent amounts of storage, they may actually make quite respectable portable UNIX boxes once the port is usable. It'd save one from having to lug around a laptop to have something that speaks UNIX and holds one's files.
At least this makes more sense than the PalmPilot port; unless someone makes a handwriting recognition engine for Linux (and a shell that's not hideously painful to use in this manner), a Linux-based PalmPilot is useless unless you carry around a terminal to plug into it.
Does this mean we finally find out what an enfilade is, and whether Ted Nelson really did invent an unprecedentedly brilliant data structure in the 1960s or whether he was bluffing?
If Borland choose Motif as their standard Linux GUI, I will be greatly disappointed. Laziness will have won over good design criteria, and several layers of design mistakes will be entrenched as a Linux standard. Many upcoming Linux applications will then be dependent on Motif, consigning Gtk and Qt to also-ran status.
If Borland want something that promises easy porting from Windows, the obvious choice would be WINE, in its function as a compatibility library. If they want a toolkit for new Linux applications, Gtk or Qt (provided the licensing issues can be worked out) would be best.
Lesstif is a stopgap, a way to replace Motif to compile legacy Motif applications (I believe one of the original applications for it was NCSA Mosaic). Being such, it still suffers from the congenital flaws of the Xt and Motif legacy.
Writing new applications in Motif will merely entrench this monstrous bogosity as a standard, cursing programmers to having to work with it. And bad standards stay around for ages (witness COBOL, for example).
Were there a RAD tool for Gtk, that would go a long way to putting a stake through the heart of the abomination known as Motif.
If you need Windows API calls, you could just link with the WINE compatibility library which would provide that layer. It wouldn't be as elegant or efficient as writing it natively, but it'd be good enough for quick ports.
The Borland poll specifically referred to Linux; as such, they seem more interested in porting to Linux than to one of the commercial unices. Motif is no standard on Linux, given that the only way to distribute binaries ordinary Linux users can use is to statically link them, and having a tool that leaves lots of redundant Motif crud in one's binaries wouldn't look good.
Besides, if they chose Motif they'd have to licence it, adding it to the price of Delphi. For that, they may as well use Qt (one of the most programmer-friendly toolkits I have seen).
According to the Darwin projects page, tcsh stands for "Turbo C Shell". That's the first time I've heard that explanation; the manpage says that it's named after TENEX...
Motif and CDE "beautiful interfaces"? More like baroque, committee-designed monstrosities.
"Stick to just Xlib and Xt?" Eugh. I'll bet this guy has never written a real GUI program. (Xt is painful to program in.)
X makes a decent, functional substrate, but it must evolve. In particular, the GUI toolkit layer needs improvement. And the market has spoken; most new applications use Gtk or Qt, rather than Xt-based systems. Motif itself appears to be, mercifully, on the way out.
"If we're not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?"
I imagine the PETA people would be none too happy about "GNU STABS".
If you looked around oss.sgi.com, you'd notice that there are lots of OSS projects. For example, there have been about 20 patches to the Linux kernel, mostly dealing with performance enhancements; some of these are already in the 2.2 and 2.3 trees.
The more the merrier. If you have several dozen filesystems to choose from, each with its own unique features (some historical, some futuristic), that is a good thing.
Of course, most people will probably only use one or two general-purpose filesystems, though the others will find their niches.
Fortunately, back then the Net was run by hackers, not politicians; in fact, most politicians were unaware of its existence. And the hackers who ran it didn't see any reason to bring it under the heel of politics.
The problem with this is that even if the US took such a policy, and cut off the connections to states who didn't implement US policies, there's nothing preventing them from networking without the US. The US could threaten to cut off anyone who gave them service, but that would lead to trade wars and such. Also, do we really want the US government imposing its standards (puritanical sexual morality, bans on drug-related content, and various FBI/NSA surveillance proposals, to name a few) on the whole wired world? Especially since there's enough of a consensus on things such as child pornography. Besides, how do you think Cuba, Iran, &c., are connected to the Net?