"Someone who tunnels to/from the office is no more dangerous than the same person who takes their laptop home and plugs it into their home network."
Laptops would be one of those problems with vastly higher ROI. And I'd consider them a far more common and practical danger than excessive tunneling.
"VPN changes the network topology and can cause havoc and confusion."
I suspect the comparison is usually not with permanent VPN's, but with temporary VPN tunnels that cut off outside access to the host in question. These tend to be less fraught with beaurocracy and are often used for roaming workers.
Of course, sometimes-on VPN's that just cut the connection to the local network are just as much a viral and intrusion vector as anything else. There's nothing preventing the host from infections and intrustions when the VPN isnt on, and when it is, there's nothing preventing the infected host from punching tunnels through the corporate firewall to the outside.
Like you say, any IP enabled device is a risk, and when I see articles like this one I usually suspect someone's been trying to sell the author something. After all, there's no snake oil like security snake oil.
Of course, any user sufficiently proficient to set up their own ssh tunnel to home will probably be more concerned with opening an easy route into their home network from the office intranet than the other way around (which says more about the state of many office intranets than the ease of ssh tunneling).
As for the article, as long as you allow arbitrary connections through the firewall, there simply is no way you can technically prevent tunneling over those connections. You can create an ip tunnel over anything from http through smtp to telnet.
As such, the problem becomes merely a policy issue; tell your 'power users' they're not allowed to create tunnels outside the intranet (and if the firewall policy has them creating tunnels to do their job, there's a serious problem with the firewall policy), and concentrate your efforts on problems with a vastly higher ROI.
Without a doubt. Yet, instead of paying out the money they dont know what to do with in dividends or doing stock buybacks, like so many others they try to pretend they're better than their shareholders at deciding what the shareholders money should be invested in.
It's a classic, probably a psychological control issue for boards, they're have a compulsive need to expand until they collapse into unprofitability.
"That's the proof that DRM is completely pointless, and harmful for competition and business.."
Copyright itself is harmful for competition, but that doesnt stop many supposed 'free market' supporters from embracing it.
And just listen to the rhetoric; "state sponsored piracy". That's like someone on social security yelling about theft if the government didnt want to give them money to build a pool.
The social benefit of intellectual property as is is starting to get seriously questioned. I'd suggest the DRM supporters keep their heads down and learn a lesson or two from french history about what happens when you let unmitigated greed steer your actions.
"Now I have to reassess just how very difficult it is to avoid picking up the prevailing misconceptions of your society."
You know, every time I read one of those China censorship/political control stories I cant help but think about how unecessary it is. We in the west have proven how utterly fragile and insufficient free speech is in the face of overwhelming media blitzes...
"Is 4 competitors (if there is only 1 of each) to your front door too few?"
Do you have 4 competing delivery companies running their own roads to your front door?
"That is already spreading the margins too thin for anyone to think it worth it to build in to that area. It really is economics."
It really is economics, and infrastructure isnt most economically developed as owned by single, or even multiple competing entities (which wastes resources in unutilized redundancy). Like the roads, the economy would be better served by common ownership, competetive maintenance and construction, and competetive service use.
"Actually, you could do something simpler: only allow a small, fixed number of valid patents at any given time (10,000?)."
I recall reading some time that, I think it was Jefferson, envisioned having maybe a dozen patents active at any one time.
But, yes, a fixed number would work too, altho that wouldnt specifically control the economic consequences and constraints of the system, just build in a self-regulation, which is the most important thing.
Re:Not unique to open source
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"However, Microsoft and other upgrades are binaries, and installable by end users."
Of course, the Microsoft equivalent of 'it's fixed in CVS' is even less useful to the end user, as the end user quite likely neither has nor will get access to the Windows source code.
The project devs are not the end packager. If you submit your bug reports to the project devs, the CVS fix is what you get. If you want a binary end-user fix, then submit your bug report to your packager who can provide you with a binary, and propagate the bugfix upstream.
There's a reason the package systems allow patch-the-pristine-sources and build functionality...
The only way to create a non-skewed system would be to introduce fiscal responsibility, like for any other state-run welfare system.
The implementing agency for the patent system (PTO plus courts) should get a limit; patents are only allowed to exact a tax of 5% of the economy as a whole. Once it surpasses that they either have to stop granting patents at all, or each patent holder would get lower royalties.
With the current situation, none of the involved parties have an interest in keeping any form of limit, and those paying for it dont even see the costs (as they're largely distributed and hidden and are only hinted at in sector problems like runaway medical costs).
"If Western governments really wanted to change things out there, they should have spent a half of the cost of the war effort so far with sponsoring Western style schools throughout the middle east."
"It would be a package that even Saddam Hussein couldn't have stopped the country from taking up."
By. God. The IRONY. You do realize that western style schools and a western style legal system was _exactly_ what Saddam did implement during the 70's-80's?
Iraq was more or less a western oriented secular society in the late 80's, until a decade and a half of the incompetent shaved bloody _apes_ in Washington screwed the country backwards with a hoe.
While I agree with your suggestions, you vastly underestimate the capacity of our dear leaders to turn anything they touch into shit.
Wether it is done through sheer incompetence, greedy malice or a combination of both I leave up to you.
"CG actors and actresses don't come close to the realism..."
Various anime come to mind for being very good at conveying a far more 'realistic' sense. CGI is an artistic medium, and as long as you treat it like 'film on a budget', you wont be any more successful than a painter using his paint as 'photographs on a budget'. Once you start using the medium for its strengths, I dont think it's inherently any less expressive than real film.
"The reason they do get the money though is marketing."
Actually, the reason they get the money is the monopoly structure of intellectual 'property'. Marketing acts as a force-multiplier when you have a monopoly, which inherently results in the non-competetive cost structure conductive to such salaries. In a competetive market, such gross abberations would be unlikely to appear; with competitors undercutting you with interchangable products, there's a limit to the ROI on marketing.
"Do we need an outright epidemic to get people to realize the threat of emerging infectious diseases?"
Nah. We need to redesign the financing structure of pharmaceutical development so research is profitable by itself, and the production/marketing/administration of the pharmaceuticals has to play by competetive market rules. Funding models comparable to other public-interest development would be far more appropriate than the current monopoly incentive.
Another funny thing is, you owning a property with a pond does not preclude anyone else from having a property with a pond.
"Also, there's something called eminent domain"
Eminent domain, or rather the lack of eminent domain at the expiry of so-called 'intellectual property', is another good indication that it is no form of property at all, nor should ever be thought about as any form of property.
Actually, the best generic descriptive term instead of 'intellectual property' would be something more like 'exclusive taxation rights', to indicate its actual place and function in the economy.
-Oh, yeah? Why can we find the evidence then, eh? Now hand over the keys.
-But there isnt anything encrypted on my computer!
-Prove it!
Of course, as you cant prove there is no encrypted information on your computer, they basically have a carte blanche to lock up anyone they feel like for no reason at all.
Probably not even that. The increasing simplicity of disk mergers and unconventionally attached storage will drive the larger capacity disks into the region of best price per GB faster.
"I'm honestly surprised that the state of optical media has progressed so slowly though."
Personally, I'm not so much surprised as I am disappointed. It was more or less obvious it would go this way once you realized the companies were too deeply tied to the film industry. By the time they become popularized now, they're already too small to be useful.
Again, they want to be able to sue the cable company if it doesnt implement broadcast flags, and they want to be able to sue your DVR maker if your DVR doesnt honor them.
"it will be difficult to figure out exactly where to draw the line."
It is impossible to draw the line simply because it's not based on specific logical grounds founded in reality. It's simply not a physical product, and there is no line between transmission, conversion, duplication and storage.
Basically, the RIAA wants to get paid for anything and everything. They'd like to get paid for you hearing a song in the background of a phone conversation, they'd even like to get paid for you whistling a song. The only limitation is what technological means exist to enforce it.
I suspect this type of sociopathic behaviour is more or less unavoidable when you hand over state-protected monopoly powers to private parties.
"How am I supposed to know what the GPL means by linking if its not in technical terms?"
The GPL is not a contract, it's a permission slip for doing things when you would otherwise run afoul of copyright law. From the GPL's point of view there is no grey area; you're not allowed to create derived works containing GPL code without the whole derived work being distributable under the terms of the GPL. Period.
The only question becomes wether the GPL applies at all, and that grey area is entirely within copyright law itself. It wouldnt be a fight about what the GPL means, it'd be a fight about wether you were allowed to mix two copyrighted works together and distribute them without permission from the copyright holders.
And take a wild guess how that one would work out.
"trying to piggy back off someone elses' hard labor."
Everyone piggybacks off everyone elses hard labour. That's the primary reason you're not sitting in the jungle wearing a leaf and trying to figure out how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together.
"We (at least in places like the US) live in a world run by real-world capitalism,"
Oh, bullshit. Intellectual 'property' is the anti-thesis of capitalism, it's a state-protected monopoly. The IP huggers are just looking for a free ride and protection from having to actually compete. Yes, keeping ahead of the competition is hard labour when the government isnt holding your competition back. Get used to it. Everyone else, from farmers through steelworkers to automechanics have had to.
"US consumption has tripled, because prices have tripled."
The actual price isnt directly related to the amount consumed; For fairly unelastic demand it's driven by the price at which the poorest consumers cannot any longer afford it and will go without. Then factor in things like the demand from Chinas richer classes, and you'll see that the price can rapidly rise without any increase in the amount consumed.
Of course, this imbalance will adjust itself eventually. At first we'll see inflation as companies and workers pass the costs on to the consumers, but as they're usually the same people this doesnt work out well in the long run, so the Fed will raise the interest rates. Then a whole load of companies will go bankrupt, people get unemployed, we get a recession, and demand shrinks, rapidly lowering prices as speculators fall over eachother to get out of the oil bubble.
But of course you're right there's also a whole lot of quasi-monopolistic shenanigans going on; the generation who learned from this mistake during the 70's oil crisis probably isnt alive to point out the idiocy to their offspring, or they plan to cash out before the crash.
"For just one very small example: UPS worldship software, used my many businesses, doesn't run on Linux."
For this small example, take a look at Mercury Web Shipping.
"Tons of specialized proprietary software doesn't run on Linux."
And tons of specialized proprietary software doesnt run on Windows. The only conclusion you can draw from that is that proprietary software limits your options, yet another reason to avoid it.
For most things you want to do, a specific program might not be supported (and might not even work with Wine(x, codeweavers,etc), but there are often fully functional replacements.
"But nobody runs an OS just to run an OS: it's all about the apps."
Actually, I'd say it's all about the functionality.
"I tried an OSS implementation of some Nvidia drivers and it could barely spit out any video at all"
Of course, I tried running proprietary NVidia drivers with a xen-enabled kernel, resulting in total lockups, while the opensource driver worked flawlessly. The proprietary video card drivers are hardly the best example to bring up.
Your mileage may vary.
"I haven't been a serious user of any Linux Desktop software"
Yeah, well, I was surfing around on Microsoft's site and just couldnt find the "download ISO's" link, so I gave up on the project to run anything but Linux as a desktop.
Of course, proprietary software is more or less guaranteed to break, get outdated or become abandonware in the future, which means it, by its very nature, isnt functional.
Slashdot Mirror
"Someone who tunnels to/from the office is no more dangerous than the same person who takes their laptop home and plugs it into their home network."
Laptops would be one of those problems with vastly higher ROI. And I'd consider them a far more common and practical danger than excessive tunneling.
"VPN changes the network topology and can cause havoc and confusion."
I suspect the comparison is usually not with permanent VPN's, but with temporary VPN tunnels that cut off outside access to the host in question. These tend to be less fraught with beaurocracy and are often used for roaming workers.
Of course, sometimes-on VPN's that just cut the connection to the local network are just as much a viral and intrusion vector as anything else. There's nothing preventing the host from infections and intrustions when the VPN isnt on, and when it is, there's nothing preventing the infected host from punching tunnels through the corporate firewall to the outside.
Like you say, any IP enabled device is a risk, and when I see articles like this one I usually suspect someone's been trying to sell the author something. After all, there's no snake oil like security snake oil.
Of course, any user sufficiently proficient to set up their own ssh tunnel to home will probably be more concerned with opening an easy route into their home network from the office intranet than the other way around (which says more about the state of many office intranets than the ease of ssh tunneling).
As for the article, as long as you allow arbitrary connections through the firewall, there simply is no way you can technically prevent tunneling over those connections. You can create an ip tunnel over anything from http through smtp to telnet.
As such, the problem becomes merely a policy issue; tell your 'power users' they're not allowed to create tunnels outside the intranet (and if the firewall policy has them creating tunnels to do their job, there's a serious problem with the firewall policy), and concentrate your efforts on problems with a vastly higher ROI.
Without a doubt. Yet, instead of paying out the money they dont know what to do with in dividends or doing stock buybacks, like so many others they try to pretend they're better than their shareholders at deciding what the shareholders money should be invested in.
It's a classic, probably a psychological control issue for boards, they're have a compulsive need to expand until they collapse into unprofitability.
"This article seems to completely miss the point."
Indeed. These are two completely different issues; QoS for specific protocols vs. QoS for generic protocols to _specific destinations_.
It's same-treatment-for-everything vs. same-treatment-for-everyone. I havent seen any suggestions about legislating for the former, only the latter.
"That's the proof that DRM is completely pointless, and harmful for competition and business.."
Copyright itself is harmful for competition, but that doesnt stop many supposed 'free market' supporters from embracing it.
And just listen to the rhetoric; "state sponsored piracy". That's like someone on social security yelling about theft if the government didnt want to give them money to build a pool.
The social benefit of intellectual property as is is starting to get seriously questioned. I'd suggest the DRM supporters keep their heads down and learn a lesson or two from french history about what happens when you let unmitigated greed steer your actions.
"Now I have to reassess just how very difficult it is to avoid picking up the prevailing misconceptions of your society."
You know, every time I read one of those China censorship/political control stories I cant help but think about how unecessary it is. We in the west have proven how utterly fragile and insufficient free speech is in the face of overwhelming media blitzes...
"Is 4 competitors (if there is only 1 of each) to your front door too few?"
Do you have 4 competing delivery companies running their own roads to your front door?
"That is already spreading the margins too thin for anyone to think it worth it to build in to that area. It really is economics."
It really is economics, and infrastructure isnt most economically developed as owned by single, or even multiple competing entities (which wastes resources in unutilized redundancy). Like the roads, the economy would be better served by common ownership, competetive maintenance and construction, and competetive service use.
"What this means is that the same kind of films are done over and over again."
Sounds like it's definitely time to end the farce called copyright.
Promoting "the progress..." eh.
"Actually, you could do something simpler: only allow a small, fixed number of valid patents at any given time (10,000?)."
I recall reading some time that, I think it was Jefferson, envisioned having maybe a dozen patents active at any one time.
But, yes, a fixed number would work too, altho that wouldnt specifically control the economic consequences and constraints of the system, just build in a self-regulation, which is the most important thing.
"However, Microsoft and other upgrades are binaries, and installable by end users."
Of course, the Microsoft equivalent of 'it's fixed in CVS' is even less useful to the end user, as the end user quite likely neither has nor will get access to the Windows source code.
The project devs are not the end packager. If you submit your bug reports to the project devs, the CVS fix is what you get. If you want a binary end-user fix, then submit your bug report to your packager who can provide you with a binary, and propagate the bugfix upstream.
There's a reason the package systems allow patch-the-pristine-sources and build functionality...
The only way to create a non-skewed system would be to introduce fiscal responsibility, like for any other state-run welfare system.
The implementing agency for the patent system (PTO plus courts) should get a limit; patents are only allowed to exact a tax of 5% of the economy as a whole. Once it surpasses that they either have to stop granting patents at all, or each patent holder would get lower royalties.
With the current situation, none of the involved parties have an interest in keeping any form of limit, and those paying for it dont even see the costs (as they're largely distributed and hidden and are only hinted at in sector problems like runaway medical costs).
There are a lot of tools like, for example, the redhat directory servers gui that it's just plain annoying to have to install Sun java for.
So, I most definitely appreciate the work done with gcj for that.
"If Western governments really wanted to change things out there, they should have spent a half of the cost of the war effort so far with sponsoring Western style schools throughout the middle east."
"It would be a package that even Saddam Hussein couldn't have stopped the country from taking up."
By. God. The IRONY. You do realize that western style schools and a western style legal system was _exactly_ what Saddam did implement during the 70's-80's?
Iraq was more or less a western oriented secular society in the late 80's, until a decade and a half of the incompetent shaved bloody _apes_ in Washington screwed the country backwards with a hoe.
While I agree with your suggestions, you vastly underestimate the capacity of our dear leaders to turn anything they touch into shit.
Wether it is done through sheer incompetence, greedy malice or a combination of both I leave up to you.
"CG actors and actresses don't come close to the realism..."
Various anime come to mind for being very good at conveying a far more 'realistic' sense. CGI is an artistic medium, and as long as you treat it like 'film on a budget', you wont be any more successful than a painter using his paint as 'photographs on a budget'. Once you start using the medium for its strengths, I dont think it's inherently any less expressive than real film.
"The reason they do get the money though is marketing."
Actually, the reason they get the money is the monopoly structure of intellectual 'property'. Marketing acts as a force-multiplier when you have a monopoly, which inherently results in the non-competetive cost structure conductive to such salaries. In a competetive market, such gross abberations would be unlikely to appear; with competitors undercutting you with interchangable products, there's a limit to the ROI on marketing.
"Do we need an outright epidemic to get people to realize the threat of emerging infectious diseases?"
Nah. We need to redesign the financing structure of pharmaceutical development so research is profitable by itself, and the production/marketing/administration of the pharmaceuticals has to play by competetive market rules. Funding models comparable to other public-interest development would be far more appropriate than the current monopoly incentive.
Another funny thing is, you owning a property with a pond does not preclude anyone else from having a property with a pond.
"Also, there's something called eminent domain"
Eminent domain, or rather the lack of eminent domain at the expiry of so-called 'intellectual property', is another good indication that it is no form of property at all, nor should ever be thought about as any form of property.
Actually, the best generic descriptive term instead of 'intellectual property' would be something more like 'exclusive taxation rights', to indicate its actual place and function in the economy.
"they want the power..."
No shit.
-Hand over those keys!
-What? I havent encrypted anything!
-Oh, yeah? Why can we find the evidence then, eh? Now hand over the keys.
-But there isnt anything encrypted on my computer!
-Prove it!
Of course, as you cant prove there is no encrypted information on your computer, they basically have a carte blanche to lock up anyone they feel like for no reason at all.
"Another 2-3 years, perhaps."
Probably not even that. The increasing simplicity of disk mergers and unconventionally attached storage will drive the larger capacity disks into the region of best price per GB faster.
"I'm honestly surprised that the state of optical media has progressed so slowly though."
Personally, I'm not so much surprised as I am disappointed. It was more or less obvious it would go this way once you realized the companies were too deeply tied to the film industry. By the time they become popularized now, they're already too small to be useful.
"I wonder how the RIAA plans to stop /that/?"
It's called broadcast flag.
"becasue I can save stuff to my DVR"
Again, they want to be able to sue the cable company if it doesnt implement broadcast flags, and they want to be able to sue your DVR maker if your DVR doesnt honor them.
"it will be difficult to figure out exactly where to draw the line."
It is impossible to draw the line simply because it's not based on specific logical grounds founded in reality. It's simply not a physical product, and there is no line between transmission, conversion, duplication and storage.
Basically, the RIAA wants to get paid for anything and everything. They'd like to get paid for you hearing a song in the background of a phone conversation, they'd even like to get paid for you whistling a song. The only limitation is what technological means exist to enforce it.
I suspect this type of sociopathic behaviour is more or less unavoidable when you hand over state-protected monopoly powers to private parties.
"How am I supposed to know what the GPL means by linking if its not in technical terms?"
The GPL is not a contract, it's a permission slip for doing things when you would otherwise run afoul of copyright law. From the GPL's point of view there is no grey area; you're not allowed to create derived works containing GPL code without the whole derived work being distributable under the terms of the GPL. Period.
The only question becomes wether the GPL applies at all, and that grey area is entirely within copyright law itself. It wouldnt be a fight about what the GPL means, it'd be a fight about wether you were allowed to mix two copyrighted works together and distribute them without permission from the copyright holders.
And take a wild guess how that one would work out.
"trying to piggy back off someone elses' hard labor."
Everyone piggybacks off everyone elses hard labour. That's the primary reason you're not
sitting in the jungle wearing a leaf and trying to figure out how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together.
"We (at least in places like the US) live in a world run by real-world capitalism,"
Oh, bullshit. Intellectual 'property' is the anti-thesis of capitalism, it's a state-protected monopoly. The IP huggers are just looking for a free ride and protection from having to actually compete. Yes, keeping ahead of the competition is hard labour when the government isnt holding your competition back. Get used to it. Everyone else, from farmers through steelworkers to automechanics have had to.
"US consumption has tripled, because prices have tripled."
The actual price isnt directly related to the amount consumed; For fairly unelastic demand it's driven by the price at which the poorest consumers cannot any longer afford it and will go without. Then factor in things like the demand from Chinas richer classes, and you'll see that the price can rapidly rise without any increase in the amount consumed.
Of course, this imbalance will adjust itself eventually. At first we'll see inflation as companies and workers pass the costs on to the consumers, but as they're usually the same people this doesnt work out well in the long run, so the Fed will raise the interest rates. Then a whole load of companies will go bankrupt, people get unemployed, we get a recession, and demand shrinks, rapidly lowering prices as speculators fall over eachother to get out of the oil bubble.
But of course you're right there's also a whole lot of quasi-monopolistic shenanigans going on; the generation who learned from this mistake during the 70's oil crisis probably isnt alive to point out the idiocy to their offspring, or they plan to cash out before the crash.
"For just one very small example: UPS worldship software, used my many businesses, doesn't run on Linux."
For this small example, take a look at Mercury Web Shipping.
"Tons of specialized proprietary software doesn't run on Linux."
And tons of specialized proprietary software doesnt run on Windows. The only conclusion you can draw from that is that proprietary software limits your options, yet another reason to avoid it.
For most things you want to do, a specific program might not be supported (and might not even work with Wine(x, codeweavers,etc), but there are often fully functional replacements.
"But nobody runs an OS just to run an OS: it's all about the apps."
Actually, I'd say it's all about the functionality.
"I tried an OSS implementation of some Nvidia drivers and it could barely spit out any video at all"
Of course, I tried running proprietary NVidia drivers with a xen-enabled kernel, resulting in total lockups, while the opensource driver worked flawlessly. The proprietary video card drivers are hardly the best example to bring up.
Your mileage may vary.
"I haven't been a serious user of any Linux Desktop software"
Yeah, well, I was surfing around on Microsoft's site and just couldnt find the "download ISO's" link, so I gave up on the project to run anything but Linux as a desktop.
Of course, proprietary software is more or less guaranteed to break, get outdated or become abandonware in the future, which means it, by its very nature, isnt functional.