What exactly does the DMCA limit your right to do? Your right to rip CDs? Listen I think the DMCA is stupid too but I don't think it has anything to do with your "rights", either that or you and I have a very different view of what rights are.
To get stuck on what the definition of "rights" is would be to miss two important points:
1) There are things worth fighting for that might not be considered "rights".The DMCA has been instrumental in compromising peoples' abilities to exercise their fair use rights and allowing corporations to artificially restrict competition in ways that were previously impossible. Perhaps the ability to read a book aloud or the ability to sing a nursery rhyme aren't "rights" in some strict academic legal sense, but they are important fundamental modes of human expression that many people believe should not be governable by monied interests.
2) Whatever you consider your rights to be, the twistedness of the DMCA is that it legally codifies the notion that rights can be restricted via technological means. If you love guns and think you have a right to them, well, the DMCA can be used to prevent you from having a gun you can use, even if the parts of the constitution relevant to gun toting remain unchanged and continue to be interpreted in as pro-gun a light as possible. If you think you have a right to privacy, and the courts even agree with you, the DMCA can still be used to do an end run around those legal protections. The point is this: whatEVER you think rights are, the DMCA provides a legal construct in the technological domain that can potentially render those rights moot.
You, and the rest of [the readers I respect here], need to do better than highlighting some piece of legislation to make your point. It is plainly obvious to me that NAT, VPN, SSL, SSH, HTTP proxies or any of the other mechanisms you folks claim will be made illegal by this law are simply not.
But have your fun. It's what you're all about...
Once the DMCA passed it became obvious that law makers actually ARE perpetrating the insane. Rights are destroyed when people hear about it happening and just hit the snooze button. It's happening right now.
My take is that the post was not flaming for bloat... it proposed an alternate solution - and a technically much simpler one - to potentially achieve the same end, and inquired as to why that path wasn't being taken. So far (at the time I write this) nobody has actually answered this question; that doesn't mean there isn't a cogent answer to be had, but it remains to be seen.
Finally, let's use a non-digital example. If (e.g.) Consumer Reports found a flaw in a popular child car seat that could cause severe injury to a child, which path would you prefer they take:
1. Notify the manufacturer, then wait for said manufacturer to discover a fix and write a press release.
2. Loudly notify the entire world so that parents can reduce the risk themselves.
In the above case, the only reason to delay is to protect the manufacturer, so the analogy isn't perfect. Home burglar alarms would be a better analogy, but less vivid.
I agree that the analogy isn't perfect, but I'd go even further and say the analogy is seriously flawed. The question being explored is whether an affected party would or would not want the earliest possible public revelation of an exploit. In the case of a child car seat problem, there is no incentive for remote parties to try to exploit the problem; there's no way for them to do it, and there wouldn't be any gain for them if there was. And the downsides of the situations being compared - lost data/revenue vs dead child - cast the analogy as attempting to leverage understandable parental hysteria in order to make a point about computer security that really would be better served by a more rational portrayal.
Also noticed that the opening paragraph discusses a comparison between a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 and a 1GHz dual-processor G4, saying "the graphs below show some of the results"... while said graphs are labeled with "Dell P4 3.06GHz" and "Mac G4 dual 1.25GHz". Perhaps Moore's Law was in effect, and between the time that he typed the opener and the time he put in the graph, his computers had gotten faster.
Chief Wiggum: "We can use this new techology console thingy here to track the exact whereabout of your vehicle." Automated voice from console: "Car gone. Car gone." Wiggum: "Sheesh, we KNOW it's gone, now where is it?" Automated voice (louder,faster): "CAR GONE! CAR GONE! CAR GONE!"
All I want is an email proxy (in java, perl, or python, or *extremely* portable C/C++) that I can run on my local node, using whatever email client I want. This proxy would allow me to whitelist, blacklist, and administrate challenge/response as I see fit. Anybody know of such a beast? If not, anybody want to collaborate on one?
Challenge/response systems have the problem that if two parties both use a challenge/response system, they may not be able to communicate with each other at all. The challenge message may not get through. Worst case, they create a mail loop.
The solution would be to adhere to the following protocol:
challenges always include the original message's subject line in the challenge email's subject line, and
non-challenge emails sent from a system result end up creating a temporary whitelist for emails returning from the destination server addressed to the original sender which include the subject line.
My daily commute to/from work near Silicon Valley takes me on highway 101 in the Redwood City area. There are tons of billboards around but one always stands out, because it is the only billboard that is electronic. It is brighter than all the others, and it changes what it shows every five seconds or so.
One of the most commonly seen ads on this electronic billboard is Oracle's "Unbreakable" farce.
Last week a fellow cohort of mine was driving in at 6:30am and happened to glance at the billboard. It was showing the Blue Screen of Death.
the so called "Shock & Awe" mentioned by the White House earlier
The White House has now trademarked this phrase. The trademark is to help ensure that the phrase does not get diluted by careless knockoffs such as "overwhelm", "blitzkrieg", or any other competing phrases that might not fit the PR roadmap for this event. Everyone get your S&A t-shirts while they last!
It looks like freenet is coming along very nicely. One of the items high on my wishlist is the ability to run a node that is behind a firewall. Various p2p packages do this (e.g. kazaa, winmx). Perhaps the implementation of such would require the participation of a non-firewalled freenet node to route sessions, but that doesn't strike me as so bad. Having the ability to run from behind a firewall could dramatically increase the number of participating nodes.
Re:I must be ignorant
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
if anything prevents the BSD community from benefiting from Apple's efforts, it is Apple's use of a GPL-like license
Maybe the meta-message here is that the GPL's utter simplicity can be relied upon and easily comprehended. The bsd license allows relicensing of the variety that Apple has undertaken, making it necessary to hire some expert legal firepower to determine what consequences the new licensing terms will have.
Granted, Apple is being a better open-source-like citizen than most corporations. But the bsd folks would find objectionable the following clauses in the APSL, which are rather pointedly not aligned with the GPL (analyzed further here):
CENTRAL CONTROL OF MODIFICATIONS
2.2 (c) if You Deploy Covered Code containing Modifications made by You, inform others of how to obtain those Modifications by filling out and submitting the information found at http://www.apple.com/publicsour ce/modifications.html, if available.
TERMINATION OF LICENCE
9.1 Infringement. If any portion of, or functionality implemented by, the Original Code becomes the subject of a claim of infringement, Apple may, at its option: (a)... (b)... or (c) suspend Your rights to use, reproduce, modify, sublicense and distribute the Affected Original Code until a final determination of the claim is made by a court or governmental administrative agency of competent jurisdiction and Apple lifts the suspension as set forth below. Such suspension of rights will be effective immediately upon Apple's posting of a notice to such effect on the Apple web site that is used for implementation of this License....
12.1 (c) This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple.
...and then, if even for only a moment, remind yourself that they provided for you for at least the first dozen or so years of your life, and that this is really a small favour for them to ask in the grand scheme of things.
I've got kids of my own to even out the karma there. And they're more of a handful than me and my siblings were... now that I think of it, I should be requiring my parents to do tech support for ME.
The post referred to claims that the GPL is largely responsible for the success of linux. You're asserting that the reason linux has more momentum than bsd has little to do with the GPL and more to do with legal red tape that bsd got temporarily snared in.
Regardless of bsd's legal woes, the GPL has a starring role in the success of linux. The GPL guarantees that every corporation that releases versions of linux will contribute to the code available for everyone to use. This is not the case with bsd; look at Apple's wholesale adoption of bsd, yet the bsd development effort will not substantially benefit from the hundreds of thousands of engineering hours that Apple puts into OSX code. This is a slam-dunk advantage for linux, directly attributable to the GPL. Despite bsd's legal woes having been over for a decade, they will not overtake linux's momentum for this reason. And competing GPL OSes like hurd will only gain mindshare to the extent that they confer some overall advantage over linux.
This creates a need for independent websites listing the manufacturers known to be placing RFID tags in their products. Such websites will allow informed consumerism, whether they change the manufacturers' practices or not.
collectivization of property... has been discredited time and time again
Could you illustrate this with some examples? (I'm hoping that communism isn't among them, as I don't really consider communism's problems to be compellingly mappable onto software licenses.)
Why is the burben of proof on the individual and not the government?
Because if the files you were exchanging were legitimate, you wouldn't need to use peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella, Freenet etc etc
You're supposing that the only motivation to use p2p software is to cloak illegal activity. But consider that the vast majority of people have no idea how to share a file via a web site. Ask ten random people on the street to describe to you the process of sharing a file on a web site; chances are they have no clue how to go about registering a domain, getting that domain hosted, editing html, and uploading files via ftp to the site. And even for the few that do, what's going to be more attractive: doing all of the above, or downloading a piece of p2p software from the web, hitting a button that says "share", and being done?
Ned Flanders is warming up the peewee football team he's coaching when Lisa appears at the gate.
Lisa: What position have you got for me?
[crowd gasps]
Lisa: Thats right. A girl want to play football. How about that.
Ned: Well, thats super-duper, Lisa. We've already got four girls on the team.
Lisa: [let down] You do?
Ned: Ah huh. But we'd love to have you onboard!
Lisa: Well... football's not really my thing... after all [indignance returning]... what kind of civilised person would play a game with the skin of an innocent pig?!
Ned: Well, actually, Lisa, these balls are synthetic!
Janey: And for every ball you buy, a dollar goes to Amnesty International!
[The Prius uses] an electric motor to top off the output of a small (1.5-L) engine. When more power is needed, the gearbox draws on nickel metal-hydride batteries to drive an electric motor.
I have a friend who purchased a Prius, and according to her it is a gas-assisted electric vehicle, NOT an electric-assisted gas vehicle... in other words, the gas is not always on. The article seems to suggest the opposite, but having driven in her car I'd have to agree with her.
And if a person doesn't like the politics in this country, perhaps they should move to another country...
When people claim (as you essentially are) that market forces will keep commercial entities in line, their false assumptions are typically that there is near-zero cost of changing suppliers, and that suppliers play by free market rules to start with. If these were both true then we wouldn't have laws and regulation agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but if less is more, then just think how much more "more" would be.
To get stuck on what the definition of "rights" is would be to miss two important points:
Once the DMCA passed it became obvious that law makers actually ARE perpetrating the insane. Rights are destroyed when people hear about it happening and just hit the snooze button. It's happening right now.
Chief Wiggum: I would rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase them.
My take is that the post was not flaming for bloat... it proposed an alternate solution - and a technically much simpler one - to potentially achieve the same end, and inquired as to why that path wasn't being taken. So far (at the time I write this) nobody has actually answered this question; that doesn't mean there isn't a cogent answer to be had, but it remains to be seen.
Also noticed that the opening paragraph discusses a comparison between a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 and a 1GHz dual-processor G4, saying "the graphs below show some of the results"... while said graphs are labeled with "Dell P4 3.06GHz" and "Mac G4 dual 1.25GHz". Perhaps Moore's Law was in effect, and between the time that he typed the opener and the time he put in the graph, his computers had gotten faster.
Chief Wiggum: "We can use this new techology console thingy here to track the exact whereabout of your vehicle."
Automated voice from console: "Car gone. Car gone."
Wiggum: "Sheesh, we KNOW it's gone, now where is it?"
Automated voice (louder,faster): "CAR GONE! CAR GONE! CAR GONE!"
All I want is an email proxy (in java, perl, or python, or *extremely* portable C/C++) that I can run on my local node, using whatever email client I want. This proxy would allow me to whitelist, blacklist, and administrate challenge/response as I see fit. Anybody know of such a beast? If not, anybody want to collaborate on one?
The solution would be to adhere to the following protocol:
My daily commute to/from work near Silicon Valley takes me on highway 101 in the Redwood City area. There are tons of billboards around but one always stands out, because it is the only billboard that is electronic. It is brighter than all the others, and it changes what it shows every five seconds or so.
One of the most commonly seen ads on this electronic billboard is Oracle's "Unbreakable" farce.
Last week a fellow cohort of mine was driving in at 6:30am and happened to glance at the billboard. It was showing the Blue Screen of Death.
The White House has now trademarked this phrase. The trademark is to help ensure that the phrase does not get diluted by careless knockoffs such as "overwhelm", "blitzkrieg", or any other competing phrases that might not fit the PR roadmap for this event. Everyone get your S&A t-shirts while they last!
It looks like freenet is coming along very nicely. One of the items high on my wishlist is the ability to run a node that is behind a firewall. Various p2p packages do this (e.g. kazaa, winmx). Perhaps the implementation of such would require the participation of a non-firewalled freenet node to route sessions, but that doesn't strike me as so bad. Having the ability to run from behind a firewall could dramatically increase the number of participating nodes.
Maybe the meta-message here is that the GPL's utter simplicity can be relied upon and easily comprehended. The bsd license allows relicensing of the variety that Apple has undertaken, making it necessary to hire some expert legal firepower to determine what consequences the new licensing terms will have.
Granted, Apple is being a better open-source-like citizen than most corporations. But the bsd folks would find objectionable the following clauses in the APSL, which are rather pointedly not aligned with the GPL (analyzed further here):
I've got kids of my own to even out the karma there. And they're more of a handful than me and my siblings were... now that I think of it, I should be requiring my parents to do tech support for ME.
>the post... is wrong
The post referred to claims that the GPL is largely responsible for the success of linux. You're asserting that the reason linux has more momentum than bsd has little to do with the GPL and more to do with legal red tape that bsd got temporarily snared in.
Regardless of bsd's legal woes, the GPL has a starring role in the success of linux. The GPL guarantees that every corporation that releases versions of linux will contribute to the code available for everyone to use. This is not the case with bsd; look at Apple's wholesale adoption of bsd, yet the bsd development effort will not substantially benefit from the hundreds of thousands of engineering hours that Apple puts into OSX code. This is a slam-dunk advantage for linux, directly attributable to the GPL. Despite bsd's legal woes having been over for a decade, they will not overtake linux's momentum for this reason. And competing GPL OSes like hurd will only gain mindshare to the extent that they confer some overall advantage over linux.
This creates a need for independent websites listing the manufacturers known to be placing RFID tags in their products. Such websites will allow informed consumerism, whether they change the manufacturers' practices or not.
Could you illustrate this with some examples? (I'm hoping that communism isn't among them, as I don't really consider communism's problems to be compellingly mappable onto software licenses.)
I *live* for the day when I score a job by going to a sushi bar with someone and hunkering down on sea urchin!
Quick, make sure both Ashcroft and the Department Of Homeland Posturing know that anybody whistling Jimmy Crack Corn needs to be tackled at the knees!
Lisa: What position have you got for me?
[crowd gasps]
Lisa: Thats right. A girl want to play football. How about that.
Ned: Well, thats super-duper, Lisa. We've already got four girls on the team.
Lisa: [let down] You do?
Ned: Ah huh. But we'd love to have you onboard!
Lisa: Well... football's not really my thing... after all [indignance returning]... what kind of civilised person would play a game with the skin of an innocent pig?!
Ned: Well, actually, Lisa, these balls are synthetic!
Janey: And for every ball you buy, a dollar goes to Amnesty International!
Lisa: [verge of tears] I've gotta go.
Also, he failed to mention that Apple users would be "roiled" by Apple's failure, should it come to pass.
I have a friend who purchased a Prius, and according to her it is a gas-assisted electric vehicle, NOT an electric-assisted gas vehicle... in other words, the gas is not always on. The article seems to suggest the opposite, but having driven in her car I'd have to agree with her.
And if a person doesn't like the politics in this country, perhaps they should move to another country...
When people claim (as you essentially are) that market forces will keep commercial entities in line, their false assumptions are typically that there is near-zero cost of changing suppliers, and that suppliers play by free market rules to start with. If these were both true then we wouldn't have laws and regulation agencies.