Re:The problems are...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
I think it would be better if the user does not
get the token back. Instead, the machine writes the vote into the card and keeps it
in some storage area inside. That way, a manual
count is still possible...
There is a fundamental flaw in Natapoff's argument, which is easy to illustrate
with an example:
Assume a nation of 60 people, 38 white and 22 black, which is divided into
3 districts: A (20 white), B (11 black, 9 white) and C (11 black, 9 white).
This nation would elect Mr. Black as president because he would win in 2
districts, even though the popular vote would be 22 versus 38.
This example illustrates that the voting power of a black elector and the
voting power of a white elector may differ hugely. A good mathematical model
must not focus on the average voting power as a good measure, but
on the fairness of the election, which is more related to the standard
deviation of the voting power than to the average.
(Note: I used black and white, as in chess.
Please use red and blue if you prefer.)
While there are many different points of view among Slashdot readers, I think many readers would like to do something besides just passively read the story or whine. Slashdot needs many posts to because it is financed by advertising. However, there is a community leadership aspect of Slashdot that is not being taken care of properly. With Slashdot's readership, much more could be accomplished than it currently is if some guidance was provided on what to do.
For example, I saw this post yesterday lost in the more than thousand replies to the Microsoft threat:
I certainly do not appreciate Microsoft's attempt to use existing laws to censor unfavorable comments made in a public forum. From all the postings that Microsoft asked to be removed, there is only one which might have infringed Microsoft's copyrights. I believe Microsoft took advantage of just one post to try to suppress lawful and valid critique, and I am very unhappy about that kind of disrespect to the Constitution and the laws of this country. I would also like to warn you that you made some claims under penalty of perjury that are unmistakenly deceiving and suggest a retraction by Microsoft of some of those false claims.
I would like to inform you of a new antitrust practice of Microsoft Corporation regarding its new Windows 2000 operating system.
Microsoft Corporation has purposefully broken interoperability with preexisting secure networking standards in an attempt to grab the portion of the server market currently held by Unix (TM) and Linux operating systems. To this goal, Microsoft has implemented an extension to the widely used Kerberos protocol that is incompatible with all existing implementations and keeps the specifications as a trade secret.
Recently, Microsoft made a restricted release of the specifications of their proprietary extension that requires the licensee to agree to use the information only for security auditing and not for implementing interoperable Unix protocols. However, when this information was leaked to the public Web forum known as Slashdot, Microsoft began an attempt to not only suppress possibly copyrighted information but also criticism and explanations of how the protocol works.
It may be of your interest to investigate this new demonstration of antitrust behavior by Microsoft Corporation.
Write your congressperson with the following text:
Dear Mr/Ms....
I am writing you to inform you about some portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that are clearly being used for a purpose that I am sure is not what Congress intended when it enacted it. I would like you to consider an amendment to this Act to clarify some points.
In particular, Microsoft Corporation is attempting to use the DMCA to suppress free speech in the public Web forum known as Slashdot. While there was a leak of copyrighted information posted to that forum, Microsoft Corporation is using the DMCA to try to also suppress criticism and technical advice offered by some posters. While that technical advice might be unwelcome to Microsoft because it concerns proprietary protocols that Microsoft is unwilling to publicly discuss, this by no means is a copyright infringement, just a possibly unqualified opinion.
I am sure the intention of the DMCA was to prevent and punish illegal acts on the Internet, and not to be used as a vehicle to suppress criticism or dissenting opinions.
The new attempt of Microsoft Corporation to suppress public criticism and dissenting viewpoints in the forum Slashdot shows that Microsoft is continuing its monopolistic practice without regard to the current antitrust trial in which it is involved.
It seems that a breakup of Microsoft Corporation is fully justified, given that in the current situation Microsoft is big enough to just ignore the United States government and judiciary and disrespect the United States Constitution.
The new embrace and extend tactic is using proprietary extensions to a widely used secure networking protocol in order to grab the Unix server market. When the protocol was made public, thus allowing Unix and Linux servers to interoperate with Windows 2000 machines, Microsoft claimed copyright infringement and is attempting to erase the information (and with it also some criticism and technical explanations) by threatening with lawsuits. The basis of its claims is the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was enacted to fight pirates, not to suppress freedom of the press. This outrageous demonstration of contempt must be stopped now.
> I'm not sure the idea of common carrier status translates to German. In the US it is at least > hoped that ISPs are common carriers. I don't believe it has been tried in court, yet. Please tell > me if it has.
In the US, ISPs are protected from such abuses by one of our all favorite laws: the Digital Milenium Copyright Act. Oh, paradoxes of destiny!
To assign copyright to the FSF, you need to sign a written statement to that effect and mail it to them. In your programs, you write: Gnomovision is (c)2000 Free Software Foundation This program is licensed under the GPL
> Think about some beer in a fridge. You can drink the beer -- no problem, it's legal. However, > opening the fridge happens to be illegal. No, nobody is trying to keep you from drinking that > beer, no, no, you have full rights to this beer, it's all yours -- you just can't open the fridge.
That would be considered unlawful seizure of your property, which I think is protected in the US by the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.
By analogy, it seems that the DMCA might not only violate the 1st amendment, but also the 4th one.
Non Americans: The DMCA comes soon to your door!
on
'Battling Censorware'
·
· Score: 3
Here is the preamble of the DMCA:
To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and for other purposes.
As you can see, the DMCA is the result of a World treaty on intellectual property. It is not an only-American thing. It's just that America implemented it first, but soon everybody in the World will be hit by it.
According to this, maybe the GPL is not a contract, but a gift. Does that make any difference? Aren't gifts protected by law too?
If the owner of the copyright wants to give licenses away which allow distribution and modification of his work under certain circumstances he is free to do so.
If he later sells his rights to the work, then it may be the case that since licenses were not sold, but given, licensees lose their rights. That is why the article mentions assigning copyright to the Free Software Foundation is the best way to keep the software free forever.
It seems to me that the cphack package had a dual license. The portion written by Skala is not under the GPL. In fact, it has no license at all. This is equivalent to having an all rights reserved clause. On the other hand, the portion written by Jansson, which is clearly separated in its own directory, was released under the GPL.
Moreover, the news seem to refer to Skala handing down his rights to Mattel, but they do not talk about Jansson. It could therefore be inferred that it is still legal to distribute Jansson's work alone in its own package, which could be called something like cphack-jansson.
I do not know whether cphack-jansson would be useful or not by itself, but it could be used as the foundation for an overhauled totally legal package.
> Kind of interesting. I'm a huge supporter of the GPL, but it looks like it could come back > and bite these programmers in the ass. Basically, they can "give" Mattel the rights to the > program, but anyone who had already downloaded cphack and accepted the GPL owns the > rights to their copy of the software and they are free to distribute and modify it however > they choose. > Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Yes! License the program under the GPL and assign the copyright to the Free Software Foundation
There is another solution: a pledge system. Artists release a song in MP3 with some promotional talk over the music, like if you like this song, please make a pledge of $2. The artist sets a goal to be reached in a certain period of time. If the goal is reached, he releases the uncrippled MP3 to the public domain, or with some free distribution license and collects all the money of the pledges. If the goal is not reached, he does not collect the money and must find some other way to finance himself.
Now, isn't it that a true free market model of music distribution?
An artist distributes free MP3 of his new songs, but the MP3 are somehow crippled, either by a low sample or by including some promotional talk over the music. People who like the music can pledge some small amount of money. The artist has a preset goal, say $10,000. When the goal is reached, a non-crippled MP3 is released and he collects all pledged money. If the goal is not reached in a certain time period, then the pledges are canceled, and the artist is free to not release the MP3 and go for a traditional CD release instead.
This system could also work for software or books. It allows authors to make money before releasing their work to the public domain.
I just fell off a far out planet yesterday. In my planet we use only Linux but I am new to this concept of streaming audio. Can someone here please explain how to listen to this in Linux? I am sure everybody in here knows, except we aliens.
You're a manager at a large corporation. You employ thousands of people, some very experienced, others that you're just beginning to train. Let me tell you what you can't afford. You can't afford the liability of any of your thousands of employees having the ability to commit the company as a whole to damn near anything. It's one thing to be liable if an employee pirates something. It's something completely different if you have to have your very expensive lawyers evaluate every single software EULA that any piss-ant department might be exposing your company to.
You are assuming that the target of UCITA is the business to business market. Make no mistake. The target is the consumer market, where defense against those kinds of EULA is much more difficult because each consumer must risk his own money to challenge the agreement in court. Software will come in two flavors: an expensive but unrestricted business edition and a cheap but restricted home consumer edition. It is a win-win game for big software firms: they will charge more to business for the priviledge and will make consumers powerless against them.
I could not find the code in Altavista site. I guess the code is not open in the sense of the Open Source Definition. If you need to sign an agreement with Altavista to get the code, then it has a somewhat liberal license but not enough to be called open. I hope I am wrong and this is not just another company trying to capitalize on a trendy term without honoring it.
We need to organize quick. We need to open a legal fund for the defense of the cases involved, and even for a possible countersuit. We need to open a fund to maintain an open Web site somewhere where it still is legal to disseminate information about the cases. Being just a loose bunch of geeks is not going to work. We are doomed to lose unless we organize and put the money where our words are.
While Slashdot is a very good place to get many interesting news, its fast pace does not make it good for long calm and lasting conversations. For some issues, like anouncements of the latest geeky gimmick, there is no need for more in-depth analysis. However, for some other, like many issues raised in Jon Katz articles or important political issues (patents,free software,etc) a one-day (or even less) time frame is clearly not enough.
Sometimes I have something that I believe worthwhile to say but I am too busy to spend time posting it the day the Slashdot article appears. When I finally have the time, maybe a few hours later, the forum is already dead and it is not worth wasting time posting something that nobody is going to read. I am sure many other readers have had similary experiences and many good ideas have been lost due to the short lifespan of Slashdot forums.
I think one solution could be to have Slashdot to break into two services: a fast-paced one mainly for posting and commenting news and a slower-paced one with the same structure but with weekly postings instead of daily postings so that people can discuss more about issues not so attached to a specific date but more important in the long term.
Another solution would be to have a good site outside Slashdot where interested people could continue discussions once the Slashdot forum has been superceded by more recent news. I am unaware of such a site, if it exists.
I find Mr. Katz article very interesting and I feel distressed by the fact that the discussion it could spark will be dead tomorrow and so will be mostly fruitless. The most distressing part is that this will happen due to the nature of this Web site, and not because the issue is not worth more comment.
The reason is simple: Americans want cheap prices, Europeans want quality. That's why there are waaaay more VCRs in use in Amercia than in Europe. The PAL system might be better than NTSC, but it is more expensive.
I plan to do as much as I can. I wish I could do more. If I had a website I would post the code there...wait a moment...
Bruce, you have a website. You can post the code in your website to challenge the big powers. You are in the US and could get legal help from the EFF more easily. And, you said there was nothing illegal there. So, just do it!
Linux well done, not "lite"
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 5
What is really needed is a good distro that takes care of installing everything properly. Most distros are just focusing on showing nice installation menus and all that crap. The current trend seems to have forgotten what's important and what's not. Distros are sending new users the wrong message: it seems to be more important to have a flashy and colorful desktop than a robust and secure box.
While I understand they do it to attract Windows users it is becoming a very dangerous game. The solution is not going even further the Windows way, as the article suggests. The only real solution is that the distributions stop focusing on copying Windows styles, looks, feels, sounds, etc. and start focusing on these points:
Good comprehensive documentation, including overviews and guides to the software they distribute. Besides all generic documentation which comes with a package there is a need for each distribution to explain what is included and why, how the packages included will help the user, and which packages should a user install to accomplish what she needs.
An installation system which educates the user at the same time it installs the packages. It should guide users so that they choose the installation which best fits their needs, avoiding the current install everything approach.
A good admintool which takes care of all the tedious system administration tasks in an unobtrusive way. It should perform all necessary security checks and monitor the system periodically.
Of course, these are the ultimate goals and it would take time to reach them. However, while some distros are at least partially working on similar projects, most are not. If new Linux boxes are insecure it is the distros fault. No doubt about it.
I am sending you this email because I opened the fridge and noticed we've run out of milk. I tried to buy it from http://www.peapod.com/ but their server was down. Or maybe our browser in the fridge is not working since I stepped on the Ethernet cable when I was preparing coffee.
People usually complain about the ugliness of X. That has little to do with X itself. It's mostly due to the primitive toolkits used in X programs. However, that is changing thanks to efforts like GNOME and KDE. The really unique feature of X is its ability to work through a network. That is its main asset, and no other GUI system can do it, although some third party proprietary systems try to do it in the Windows world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be better if the user does not get the token back. Instead, the machine writes the vote into the card and keeps it in some storage area inside. That way, a manual count is still possible...
Assume a nation of 60 people, 38 white and 22 black, which is divided into 3 districts: A (20 white), B (11 black, 9 white) and C (11 black, 9 white). This nation would elect Mr. Black as president because he would win in 2 districts, even though the popular vote would be 22 versus 38.
This example illustrates that the voting power of a black elector and the voting power of a white elector may differ hugely. A good mathematical model must not focus on the average voting power as a good measure, but on the fairness of the election, which is more related to the standard deviation of the voting power than to the average. (Note: I used black and white, as in chess. Please use red and blue if you prefer.)
For example, I saw this post yesterday lost in the more than thousand replies to the Microsoft threat:
Dear Mr. Weston:
I certainly do not appreciate Microsoft's attempt to use existing laws to censor unfavorable comments made in a public forum. From all the postings that Microsoft asked to be removed, there is only one which might have infringed Microsoft's copyrights. I believe Microsoft took advantage of just one post to try to suppress lawful and valid critique, and I am very unhappy about that kind of disrespect to the Constitution and the laws of this country. I would also like to warn you that you made some claims under penalty of perjury that are unmistakenly deceiving and suggest a retraction by Microsoft of some of those false claims.
Sincerely,
....... your name here ......
Dear Mr Klein:
I would like to inform you of a new antitrust practice of Microsoft Corporation regarding its new Windows 2000 operating system.
Microsoft Corporation has purposefully broken interoperability with preexisting secure networking standards in an attempt to grab the portion of the server market currently held by Unix (TM) and Linux operating systems. To this goal, Microsoft has implemented an extension to the widely used Kerberos protocol that is incompatible with all existing implementations and keeps the specifications as a trade secret.
Recently, Microsoft made a restricted release of the specifications of their proprietary extension that requires the licensee to agree to use the information only for security auditing and not for implementing interoperable Unix protocols. However, when this information was leaked to the public Web forum known as Slashdot, Microsoft began an attempt to not only suppress possibly copyrighted information but also criticism and explanations of how the protocol works.
It may be of your interest to investigate this new demonstration of antitrust behavior by Microsoft Corporation.
Dear Mr/Ms ....
I am writing you to inform you about some portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that are clearly being used for a purpose that I am sure is not what Congress intended when it enacted it. I would like you to consider an amendment to this Act to clarify some points.
In particular, Microsoft Corporation is attempting to use the DMCA to suppress free speech in the public Web forum known as Slashdot. While there was a leak of copyrighted information posted to that forum, Microsoft Corporation is using the DMCA to try to also suppress criticism and technical advice offered by some posters. While that technical advice might be unwelcome to Microsoft because it concerns proprietary protocols that Microsoft is unwilling to publicly discuss, this by no means is a copyright infringement, just a possibly unqualified opinion.
I am sure the intention of the DMCA was to prevent and punish illegal acts on the Internet, and not to be used as a vehicle to suppress criticism or dissenting opinions.
Thank you,
The new attempt of Microsoft Corporation to suppress public criticism and dissenting viewpoints in the forum Slashdot shows that Microsoft is continuing its monopolistic practice without regard to the current antitrust trial in which it is involved.
It seems that a breakup of Microsoft Corporation is fully justified, given that in the current situation Microsoft is big enough to just ignore the United States government and judiciary and disrespect the United States Constitution.
The new embrace and extend tactic is using proprietary extensions to a widely used secure networking protocol in order to grab the Unix server market. When the protocol was made public, thus allowing Unix and Linux servers to interoperate with Windows 2000 machines, Microsoft claimed copyright infringement and is attempting to erase the information (and with it also some criticism and technical explanations) by threatening with lawsuits. The basis of its claims is the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was enacted to fight pirates, not to suppress freedom of the press. This outrageous demonstration of contempt must be stopped now.
> hoped that ISPs are common carriers. I don't believe it has been tried in court, yet. Please tell
> me if it has.
In the US, ISPs are protected from such abuses by one of our all favorite laws: the Digital Milenium Copyright Act. Oh, paradoxes of destiny!
This is simply not true.
There are very few codecs of a quality and compression ratio comparable to MP3, and all of them except MP3 are strictly non-proprietary.
Read the FAQ in the Xiph... site.
This program is licensed under the GPL
That's all you need.
> opening the fridge happens to be illegal. No, nobody is trying to keep you from drinking that
> beer, no, no, you have full rights to this beer, it's all yours -- you just can't open the fridge.
That would be considered unlawful seizure of your property, which I think is protected in the US by the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.
By analogy, it seems that the DMCA might not only violate the 1st amendment, but also the 4th one.
As you can see, the DMCA is the result of a World treaty on intellectual property. It is not an only-American thing. It's just that America implemented it first, but soon everybody in the World will be hit by it.
Be prepared, and don't laugh at Americans.
If the owner of the copyright wants to give licenses away which allow distribution and modification of his work under certain circumstances he is free to do so.
If he later sells his rights to the work, then it may be the case that since licenses were not sold, but given, licensees lose their rights. That is why the article mentions assigning copyright to the Free Software Foundation is the best way to keep the software free forever.
Moreover, the news seem to refer to Skala handing down his rights to Mattel, but they do not talk about Jansson. It could therefore be inferred that it is still legal to distribute Jansson's work alone in its own package, which could be called something like cphack-jansson.
I do not know whether cphack-jansson would be useful or not by itself, but it could be used as the foundation for an overhauled totally legal package.
> and bite these programmers in the ass. Basically, they can "give" Mattel the rights to the
> program, but anyone who had already downloaded cphack and accepted the GPL owns the
> rights to their copy of the software and they are free to distribute and modify it however
> they choose.
> Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Yes! License the program under the GPL and assign the copyright to the Free Software Foundation
Now, isn't it that a true free market model of music distribution?
This system could also work for software or books. It allows authors to make money before releasing their work to the public domain.
Thanks in advance for your patience.
You are assuming that the target of UCITA is the business to business market. Make no mistake. The target is the consumer market, where defense against those kinds of EULA is much more difficult because each consumer must risk his own money to challenge the agreement in court. Software will come in two flavors: an expensive but unrestricted business edition and a cheap but restricted home consumer edition. It is a win-win game for big software firms: they will charge more to business for the priviledge and will make consumers powerless against them.
I could not find the code in Altavista site. I guess the code is not open in the sense of the Open Source Definition. If you need to sign an agreement with Altavista to get the code, then it has a somewhat liberal license but not enough to be called open. I hope I am wrong and this is not just another company trying to capitalize on a trendy term without honoring it.
We need to organize quick. We need to open a legal
fund for the defense of the cases involved, and
even for a possible countersuit. We need to open
a fund to maintain an open Web site somewhere
where it still is legal to disseminate information
about the cases. Being just a loose bunch of geeks
is not going to work. We are doomed to lose unless
we organize and put the money where our words are.
Sometimes I have something that I believe worthwhile to say but I am too busy to spend time posting it the day the Slashdot article appears. When I finally have the time, maybe a few hours later, the forum is already dead and it is not worth wasting time posting something that nobody is going to read. I am sure many other readers have had similary experiences and many good ideas have been lost due to the short lifespan of Slashdot forums.
I think one solution could be to have Slashdot to break into two services: a fast-paced one mainly for posting and commenting news and a slower-paced one with the same structure but with weekly postings instead of daily postings so that people can discuss more about issues not so attached to a specific date but more important in the long term.
Another solution would be to have a good site outside Slashdot where interested people could continue discussions once the Slashdot forum has been superceded by more recent news. I am unaware of such a site, if it exists.
I find Mr. Katz article very interesting and I feel distressed by the fact that the discussion it could spark will be dead tomorrow and so will be mostly fruitless. The most distressing part is that this will happen due to the nature of this Web site, and not because the issue is not worth more comment.
It is always that way, isn't it?
Marketing power and convenience to end users always win: Microsoft, Intel, VHS, DVD...
The reason is simple: Americans want cheap prices, Europeans want quality. That's why there are waaaay more VCRs in use in Amercia than in Europe. The PAL system might be better than NTSC, but it is more expensive.
Bruce, you have a website. You can post the code in your website to challenge the big powers. You are in the US and could get legal help from the EFF more easily. And, you said there was nothing illegal there. So, just do it!
(Sorry, I am slightly brainwashed by /. banners)
While I understand they do it to attract Windows users it is becoming a very dangerous game. The solution is not going even further the Windows way, as the article suggests. The only real solution is that the distributions stop focusing on copying Windows styles, looks, feels, sounds, etc. and start focusing on these points:
- Good comprehensive documentation, including overviews and guides to the software they distribute. Besides all generic documentation which comes with a package there is a need for each distribution to explain what is included and why, how the packages included will help the user, and which packages should a user install to accomplish what she needs.
- An installation system which educates the user at the same time it installs the packages. It should guide users so that they choose the installation which best fits their needs, avoiding the current install everything approach.
- A good admintool which takes care of all the tedious system administration tasks in an unobtrusive way. It should perform all necessary security checks and monitor the system periodically.
Of course, these are the ultimate goals and it would take time to reach them. However, while some distros are at least partially working on similar projects, most are not. If new Linux boxes are insecure it is the distros fault. No doubt about it.Dear Honey,
I am sending you this email because I opened the
fridge and noticed we've run out of milk. I tried
to buy it from http://www.peapod.com/ but their
server was down. Or maybe our browser in the
fridge is not working since I stepped on the
Ethernet cable when I was preparing coffee.
People usually complain about the ugliness of X.
That has little to do with X itself. It's mostly
due to the primitive toolkits used in X programs.
However, that is changing thanks to efforts like
GNOME and KDE.
The really unique feature of X is its ability to
work through a network. That is its main asset,
and no other GUI system can do it, although some
third party proprietary systems try to do it in
the Windows world.