someone is downloading a particular movie/song/etc and not simply a file named as a movie/song/etc? I mean, someone can simply be downloading a file containing PI to the 10,000th digit or something stupid like that?
Conversely, a given downloader typically has no way of being certain of what they're downloading until it's complete. What if my friend says that there's an amateur porn movie with the title "Sideways", I download it, and it turns out to be the current theater release? I had no way of knowing this before completing the download. Is there a law that says that once a studio uses a word as a title, that no other work may be distributed while named the same word? IMO that would amount to copyrighting the word itself, which is clearly public domain.
Going by what [Apple's] asking for in the court papers, this isn't an area where they are planning on being particularly merciful when it comes to damages.
For the record, the supplied document lists Apple's requests as follows:
Compensatory and examplary damages to be determined at trial
Injunctions restraining the distribution of the software
Injunctions restraining the breach of the agreements (not clear what that means)
An accounting of any profits the defendants have derived from their distribution of the software
The cost of the suit
Any other relief the court deems just and proper.
Some/. postings on this topic assert that Apple seeks to financially ruin the defendant. Given the lack of a stated dollar amount above, do we have a foundation for believing this? I'm not pro-Apple on this, I'd simply like to know if we're going on (warranted) cynicism, or general precedent, or specific precedent, or logic....
a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 m deep) has been discovered by the ESA's Mars Express Probe. Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator.
That's it, I will no longer fantasize about retiring to the Martian equator.
Throughout Europe, telephone service used to be state-run. All of them have noticed how bad this system was and some are still in the progress of moving away from it.
If this is true, it still doesn't legitimize banning government from participating... it simply warrants caution and should be taken as encouragement by prospective non-governmental competitors.
I do not understand how people can be so cinnic.... If the city town spends money on it, then it will have to recover them from somewhere.... I think the true reason/.ers like it is because... they want their neighbours that do not connect to share the connection costs.
Huh? And you accuse others of being cynical? I try not to be cliche often, but: you must be new here. In fact, checking your history of posts, your account was started less than a week ago... so your non-comprehension of/. is perhaps understandable, though your presumption of pettiness is something you'd do well to work on
The reason most slashdotters would be against this is because it harms the free market, in particular an area of the market where emerging technology has the ability to democratize information. If that makes us self-centered and greedy, what's your opinion of the corporate hogs who are pushing this initiative?
The study of such numbers has a long and interesting history
Reminds me of when Bart Simpson's 4th-grade class was forced by Principal Skinner to have their annual field trip take place at a box company (instead of the hoped for chocolate factory / fireworks outlet / circus):
Tour guide (speaking in monotone nasal voice): The story of how two brothers (and five other men) parlayed a small
business loan into a thriving paper-goods concern is a long and
interesting one. And, here it is: it all began with the filing of form
637/A, the application for a small business or farm...
I often paint my face, thereby creating unique works of art over which I assert copyright. While standing near The Bean, I was horrified to see that it was making unauthorized reflected copies of my face! I tried to stop it by yelling at it, hitting it with things... but nothing worked. What kind of world are we living in today??
Here's a summary of the article (and for the record, I do wish Microsoft gone):
I'm Michael Malone and I pose the question: is Microsoft dying? It's hard to say, and making guesses is something not to do lightly. Perhaps my most notable credential is coining the label "Folding Table Theory of Start-Ups" to refer to startups focused on flash rather than substance. I have insight. Most of all... (*whispering*) I smell dead companies. I called SGI years ago. Ditto HP. The case against Microsoft: open source is making inroads, Longhorn is late, MSN sucks, and new grads don't want to work at Microsoft. My smell-dead-companies sense is tingling.
IMO this is more of a subjective judgement than a compendium of evidence or insight. Nothing wrong with subjective judgements, by the way, just that I like to see them presented in ways that make it clear that the author understands the distinction.
On Jan. 26, an edited version of the blog reappeared on the site, with a new entry explaining the on-again, off-again commentary. Gone was the first day's post explaining his reasons for creating the blog, as well as a description of an employee orientation event that vaguely touched on discussions of Google's booming business.
Anyone got a link to the original, unedited blog post(s)? (And how ironic would it be if it were in the google cache?)
It practicaly demonstrates that acting selfish is not way to go
There's another interesting practical demonstration of this notion laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas (an amazing book covering a lot of ground, Hofstadter being the author of Godel Escher Bach). There's a chapter covering The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a problem involving a 2x2 decision matrix for two accomplices to a crime who've been separated, and what motivations and payoffs are dangled in front of them. I'll spare the details here, but the chapter goes on to a more general discussion of cooperation vs backstabbing, and covers an extensive darwinian simulation involving numerous differently coded entities which compete and replicate with other kinds of coded entities. Many of the algorithms in the competition were exceeding crafty, subtle, and complex. The end result, however, was that an extremely simple type of algorithm dominated all others time after time. The algorithm was called "Tit for tat", and its simple logic was "cooperate the first encounter with any given entity; then on subsequent encounters, do to that entity whatever it did to you last time you encountered it."
I found this result to be fascinating and inspirational.
I already specifically answered that, so I shouldn't expect that repeating the answer again will help.
It's always good to try. I'm dense, but repetition sometimes makes it stick.:)
The difference is that there is a plausible explanation for why the police can't find a hidden message in the picture: because the suspect isn't hiding any messages- he just likes to trade pictures of flowers and kittens. What possible excuse could a suspect use to to explain why he repeatedly transmits invalid zip files?
Firstly, they wouldn't be recognizeable as zip files because they'd been randomly rearranged, after being encrypted, after being zipped. But more to the point, the scenario I'm proposing is that this zipped then encrypted then swizzled data would then be steganography-ied by (say) putting its bits into the low bits of a picture. I think perhaps this part of my intent did not transmit, which would explain why you think I may not appreciate steganography (I do) and why you think the police would be questioning me about invalid zip files (they'd have no basis to even think zip data existed).
If the government has the power to abduct citizens for lengthy torture, they also can enforce access logging at the ISP level, so you weren't actually anonymous when you posted. (And no, you can't use any kind of mass-anonymizing proxy system, because just distributing or executing such an application is enough reason to get dragged off in the night)
Distributing such a program is not a draggable-off-in-the-night offense everywhere, clearly, so not to put too fine a point on it but I think what you mean is that IF one lives in a police state where there is no anonymity then one has no anonymity. Agreed. For the record I happen to not live in such a police state. I'd concede that perhaps my musings are the luxury of those like myself who don't live in such a state, but on the other hand I'm not really trying to address utter totalitarianism. But even in such a state, if one successfully downloads an anonymizing program, then said download may not have been anonymous, and the distributor of said program may be about to experience much pain, BUT once the program is downloaded, subsequent posts of data are, well, anonymous.
While I don't want to be a don't-complain-if-you-don't-have-a-solution-guy
But you are being that, just so you know. Nothing wrong with that, by the way.:)
this kind of complaint suggests that the whole system as we know it is hopeless.
Many people indeed feel exactly that sentiment.
Without any idea what a system that would work would be like (or at least a vote for anarchy) the complaint is pointless.
Disagreed. A complaint without a proposed solution at least allows other people to (a) debate the legitimacy of the complaint, as well as (b) apply many minds to the sometimes difficult task of coming up with a realistic solution.
And for the record, it's not as though proposed solutions don't exist. Capping individuals' wealth at 10M Euro, capping politicians' wealth at 1M Euro for life, banning political contributions of any kinds, stricter anti-corruption standards and enforcement thereof, changing parliamentary voting procedures and records, the list goes on.
But whether you or anyone believes any of these solutions is feasible has no bearing on the accuracy and validity of the initial complaint itself.
If you have difficulty understanding why steganography can be important
I fully understand why steganography is important. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.
The data stream from a zip is mathmatically quite random, but it's also easy to tell that something's been hidden there: simply try to decrypt it, and it reports as totally corrupted.
So I've zipped data to increase randomness, swizzled the resulting bits around a bit, and stuck these bits into a steganographic picture. You say it's easy to tell the picture has data because decryption attempts produce garbage. How is that result different from the garbage produced by trying to decrypt information from a picture that in fact has no hidden message?
[Deciphering a message is enabled if] they know there's information there, 6 to 9 strong guys with machine guns break into your house in the middle of the night. They chain you in their basement for a punching back for 2-3 weeks, and eventually you tell them the encryption code to decipher it.
Touche, but I meant "decipher by breaking the code", not "figure out what's there using George Bush methods". If I *anonymously* post a stego picture with unbreakable encryption, then breaking into my house is not an option, even if they figure out the picture is a stego. If swinging clubs is the smartest thing someone can come up with to break encryption, our intelligence community is up the creek without a paddle.
it's incredibly hard to really hide stuff. If you stick data into the unimportant pixelbits of A/V data, statistical analysis of the sort of data that is created by the source (camera, scanner, etc) makes it *trivial* to detect that stuff is being hidden.
What if that 'stuff' is basically random? Random data is essentially the output of programs like zip. If I encrypt information, zip it, scramble the zip output, and encrypt one more time, I cannot imagine how even knowing there's information there could lead to deciphering it. I'm not saying it's flat out impossible, and I admit I'm a layperson not a crypto guy, but I'm pretty skeptical. Anyone who knows about cryptanalysis case to enlighten me?
Gertrude Walton, a deceased eighty-three-year-old woman, was named as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by a group of record companies. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name 'smittenedkitten.'
I'm just glad Walton had the balls to demand a trial rather than knuckling under and paying the typical $3,000 settlement.
If someone (Gentoo, Microsoft, whoever) releases an OS that requires central authority signature to execute code, then how would a developer iteratively build and test against the platform?
A University of Utah study claims that drivers who use a cell phone will be 'more impaired than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.'
So is it the case that driving on cellphones kills and injures more people than drunk driving? If not, then whatever metrics they used (braking times, whatever) must not be the only factors affecting the overall kill/maim outcome, and as such their headlining the comparison to drunk driving might just qualify as specious hype... since the propaganda and administrative and legal efforts surrounding drunk driving are specifically aimed at lowering death and injury rates, rather than at reducing braking times.
I take it as a given that companies operate on whatever basis they feel will maximize their profit... independent of the motivation to make customers happy except to the extent that doing so translates into more profit. This isn't just a cynical take on modern corporations, it's a fairly straightforward interpretation of the corporate bylaws for the vast majority of corporations that have stockholders. I believe that this is short-sighted, as exemplified by the recording industry only responding to threats. The industry's economic models aren't accounting for the long-term benefits - to them - derived from customer goodwill. I believe they'd make more money in the long run if they didn't pursue the current course of playing whack-a-mole by suing their customers. But "long run" is a term that isn't in their vocabulary, and they run like frightened ponies from any proposition that is hard to quantify.
Humans are evolved in small social groups, where favours were more likely to pay off.
One could model corporations as individuals; in fact, using such a model is a common occurrence in legal discussions of corporate rights. Your observation about human evolution has inspired me to use the corporation-as-individual model in the context of anthropology. Here's my stab at it (with "one day in a person's life" representing "one fiscal quarter of a company"):
There's a tribe of people who sometimes do favors for each other, sometimes not. Thag is one member of this tribe. Like everyone else in the tribe, Thag has another member of the tribe tracking his activity every day; this tracker's designation is ThagStockholder (TS). When Thag met TS, TS said,
"Hi Thag. I'm going to come to you every evening and demand some coconuts. If you don't have those coconuts for me, I'm going to require you to explain to me how your actions during the day maximized the likelihood that you would have the coconuts for me. If I am not satisfied by your explanation then I will beat you over the head with my club, not necessarily but possibly to death."
After this introduction, Thag no longer does favors for anyone except those favors that:
have a nearly guaranteed and quantifiable return by the end of the same day, and
are - in the event of their failure to produce expected returns - relatively easy to explain to a person like TS.. even if TS doesn't make it a point to listen carefully, and even if TS's patience will simply run out at some hard to predict time.
Finally... An entertainment industry which realizes that if it treats it own customers like criminals, they won't exactly be creating good will..
To paraphrase Syndrome's observation in The Incredibles: the only reason the industry is paying attention is because the leverage possessed by its consumers is a threat. A *threat* gets their attention. Nothing else... not, for example, a simple desire to please their customers or create good will.
For all his rough edges, the simple truth is RMS is right about the GPL and technology. Freedom matters, and it is an end in itself unlike technology and wealth which are a means.
Absolutely. It's funny, I see cycles of RMS bashing, followed by swings towards recognition of his vision, followed by more bashing... lather rinse repeat. When OSS has a good day people love to nitpick about RMS's beard, his social awkwardness, what have you. When OSS is on the ropes, people realize that the only f'ing thing holding it together is the GPL and RMS's refusal to "find a middle ground".
I bet you do; if OpenSolaris succeeds, it's going to break your $300/hour rice bowl. (Or is that the $5300/talk rice bowl?) However you figure it, you have a huge economic interest in the failure of OpenSolaris...
What a petty and misguided attack on Bruce.
Bruce's analysis and instincts about this issue are right on target.
Something very bad is going on at Sun... management is consistently posturing and conniving, rather than focusing on producing value. As a reluctant stockholder of Sun, I'm concerned. As a spectator, I'm disgusted. I almost have more respect for the SCO people... because I don't really believe that SCO management is deluded enough to think that what they're doing is anything but a naked grab for money. Sun thinks it's on a holy mission.
Any debit card with the Visa or MC logo has the same level of fraud protection as a credit card
Hmm, I think you missed a crucial part of the link you supplied. At the top they start off with a strong statement that sounds like what you're saying, but it has an asterisk... which leads to this statement:
Visa's Zero Liability policy does not apply to commercial card or ATM transactions, or to PIN transactions not processed by Visa....
Slashdot Mirror
Conversely, a given downloader typically has no way of being certain of what they're downloading until it's complete. What if my friend says that there's an amateur porn movie with the title "Sideways", I download it, and it turns out to be the current theater release? I had no way of knowing this before completing the download. Is there a law that says that once a studio uses a word as a title, that no other work may be distributed while named the same word? IMO that would amount to copyrighting the word itself, which is clearly public domain.
For the record, the supplied document lists Apple's requests as follows:
- Compensatory and examplary damages to be determined at trial
- Injunctions restraining the distribution of the software
- Injunctions restraining the breach of the agreements (not clear what that means)
- An accounting of any profits the defendants have derived from their distribution of the software
- The cost of the suit
- Any other relief the court deems just and proper.
SomeThat's it, I will no longer fantasize about retiring to the Martian equator.
If this is true, it still doesn't legitimize banning government from participating... it simply warrants caution and should be taken as encouragement by prospective non-governmental competitors.
Huh? And you accuse others of being cynical? I try not to be cliche often, but: you must be new here. In fact, checking your history of posts, your account was started less than a week ago... so your non-comprehension of /. is perhaps understandable, though your presumption of pettiness is something you'd do well to work on
The reason most slashdotters would be against this is because it harms the free market, in particular an area of the market where emerging technology has the ability to democratize information. If that makes us self-centered and greedy, what's your opinion of the corporate hogs who are pushing this initiative?
Reminds me of when Bart Simpson's 4th-grade class was forced by Principal Skinner to have their annual field trip take place at a box company (instead of the hoped for chocolate factory / fireworks outlet / circus):
What if I don't *want* to dislike choosing not to be against banning it? :)
I often paint my face, thereby creating unique works of art over which I assert copyright. While standing near The Bean, I was horrified to see that it was making unauthorized reflected copies of my face! I tried to stop it by yelling at it, hitting it with things... but nothing worked. What kind of world are we living in today??
IMO this is more of a subjective judgement than a compendium of evidence or insight. Nothing wrong with subjective judgements, by the way, just that I like to see them presented in ways that make it clear that the author understands the distinction.
Anyone got a link to the original, unedited blog post(s)? (And how ironic would it be if it were in the google cache?)
There's another interesting practical demonstration of this notion laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas (an amazing book covering a lot of ground, Hofstadter being the author of Godel Escher Bach). There's a chapter covering The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a problem involving a 2x2 decision matrix for two accomplices to a crime who've been separated, and what motivations and payoffs are dangled in front of them. I'll spare the details here, but the chapter goes on to a more general discussion of cooperation vs backstabbing, and covers an extensive darwinian simulation involving numerous differently coded entities which compete and replicate with other kinds of coded entities. Many of the algorithms in the competition were exceeding crafty, subtle, and complex. The end result, however, was that an extremely simple type of algorithm dominated all others time after time. The algorithm was called "Tit for tat", and its simple logic was "cooperate the first encounter with any given entity; then on subsequent encounters, do to that entity whatever it did to you last time you encountered it."
I found this result to be fascinating and inspirational.
It's always good to try. I'm dense, but repetition sometimes makes it stick. :)
The difference is that there is a plausible explanation for why the police can't find a hidden message in the picture: because the suspect isn't hiding any messages- he just likes to trade pictures of flowers and kittens. What possible excuse could a suspect use to to explain why he repeatedly transmits invalid zip files?
Firstly, they wouldn't be recognizeable as zip files because they'd been randomly rearranged, after being encrypted, after being zipped. But more to the point, the scenario I'm proposing is that this zipped then encrypted then swizzled data would then be steganography-ied by (say) putting its bits into the low bits of a picture. I think perhaps this part of my intent did not transmit, which would explain why you think I may not appreciate steganography (I do) and why you think the police would be questioning me about invalid zip files (they'd have no basis to even think zip data existed).
If the government has the power to abduct citizens for lengthy torture, they also can enforce access logging at the ISP level, so you weren't actually anonymous when you posted. (And no, you can't use any kind of mass-anonymizing proxy system, because just distributing or executing such an application is enough reason to get dragged off in the night)
Distributing such a program is not a draggable-off-in-the-night offense everywhere, clearly, so not to put too fine a point on it but I think what you mean is that IF one lives in a police state where there is no anonymity then one has no anonymity. Agreed. For the record I happen to not live in such a police state. I'd concede that perhaps my musings are the luxury of those like myself who don't live in such a state, but on the other hand I'm not really trying to address utter totalitarianism. But even in such a state, if one successfully downloads an anonymizing program, then said download may not have been anonymous, and the distributor of said program may be about to experience much pain, BUT once the program is downloaded, subsequent posts of data are, well, anonymous.
But you are being that, just so you know. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. :)
this kind of complaint suggests that the whole system as we know it is hopeless.
Many people indeed feel exactly that sentiment.
Without any idea what a system that would work would be like (or at least a vote for anarchy) the complaint is pointless.
Disagreed. A complaint without a proposed solution at least allows other people to (a) debate the legitimacy of the complaint, as well as (b) apply many minds to the sometimes difficult task of coming up with a realistic solution.
And for the record, it's not as though proposed solutions don't exist. Capping individuals' wealth at 10M Euro, capping politicians' wealth at 1M Euro for life, banning political contributions of any kinds, stricter anti-corruption standards and enforcement thereof, changing parliamentary voting procedures and records, the list goes on.
But whether you or anyone believes any of these solutions is feasible has no bearing on the accuracy and validity of the initial complaint itself.
I fully understand why steganography is important. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.
The data stream from a zip is mathmatically quite random, but it's also easy to tell that something's been hidden there: simply try to decrypt it, and it reports as totally corrupted.
So I've zipped data to increase randomness, swizzled the resulting bits around a bit, and stuck these bits into a steganographic picture. You say it's easy to tell the picture has data because decryption attempts produce garbage. How is that result different from the garbage produced by trying to decrypt information from a picture that in fact has no hidden message?
[Deciphering a message is enabled if] they know there's information there, 6 to 9 strong guys with machine guns break into your house in the middle of the night. They chain you in their basement for a punching back for 2-3 weeks, and eventually you tell them the encryption code to decipher it.
Touche, but I meant "decipher by breaking the code", not "figure out what's there using George Bush methods". If I *anonymously* post a stego picture with unbreakable encryption, then breaking into my house is not an option, even if they figure out the picture is a stego. If swinging clubs is the smartest thing someone can come up with to break encryption, our intelligence community is up the creek without a paddle.
What if that 'stuff' is basically random? Random data is essentially the output of programs like zip. If I encrypt information, zip it, scramble the zip output, and encrypt one more time, I cannot imagine how even knowing there's information there could lead to deciphering it. I'm not saying it's flat out impossible, and I admit I'm a layperson not a crypto guy, but I'm pretty skeptical. Anyone who knows about cryptanalysis case to enlighten me?
I'm just glad Walton had the balls to demand a trial rather than knuckling under and paying the typical $3,000 settlement.
If someone (Gentoo, Microsoft, whoever) releases an OS that requires central authority signature to execute code, then how would a developer iteratively build and test against the platform?
So is it the case that driving on cellphones kills and injures more people than drunk driving? If not, then whatever metrics they used (braking times, whatever) must not be the only factors affecting the overall kill/maim outcome, and as such their headlining the comparison to drunk driving might just qualify as specious hype... since the propaganda and administrative and legal efforts surrounding drunk driving are specifically aimed at lowering death and injury rates, rather than at reducing braking times.
One could model corporations as individuals; in fact, using such a model is a common occurrence in legal discussions of corporate rights. Your observation about human evolution has inspired me to use the corporation-as-individual model in the context of anthropology. Here's my stab at it (with "one day in a person's life" representing "one fiscal quarter of a company"):
There's a tribe of people who sometimes do favors for each other, sometimes not. Thag is one member of this tribe. Like everyone else in the tribe, Thag has another member of the tribe tracking his activity every day; this tracker's designation is ThagStockholder (TS). When Thag met TS, TS said,
After this introduction, Thag no longer does favors for anyone except those favors that:To paraphrase Syndrome's observation in The Incredibles: the only reason the industry is paying attention is because the leverage possessed by its consumers is a threat. A *threat* gets their attention. Nothing else... not, for example, a simple desire to please their customers or create good will.
Definitely un-American at least. And now terrorists will be able to save their documents to valid microsoft formats.
Absolutely. It's funny, I see cycles of RMS bashing, followed by swings towards recognition of his vision, followed by more bashing... lather rinse repeat. When OSS has a good day people love to nitpick about RMS's beard, his social awkwardness, what have you. When OSS is on the ropes, people realize that the only f'ing thing holding it together is the GPL and RMS's refusal to "find a middle ground".
What a petty and misguided attack on Bruce.
Bruce's analysis and instincts about this issue are right on target.
Something very bad is going on at Sun... management is consistently posturing and conniving, rather than focusing on producing value. As a reluctant stockholder of Sun, I'm concerned. As a spectator, I'm disgusted. I almost have more respect for the SCO people... because I don't really believe that SCO management is deluded enough to think that what they're doing is anything but a naked grab for money. Sun thinks it's on a holy mission.
Nope, nor is open source about low cost. Open source is about transparency. Low cost and a variety of alternatives are incidental.
Hmm, I think you missed a crucial part of the link you supplied. At the top they start off with a strong statement that sounds like what you're saying, but it has an asterisk... which leads to this statement: