I was at a Microsoft briefing on Win2K where this came up. It seems that MS are probibited from:
Exporting strong cryptographic modules.
Exporting the SDK for developing cryptographic modules
Signing any modules that happen to be created in spite of these restrictions in order to make Win2K accept them as secure.
This stinks.
However, much as I dislike MS, bear in mind that if MS decided to break these rules then it is Bill Gates personally who gets up to 20 years in the slammer. I really don't think we can blame him for not doing this.
(Of course, if he was put in a privatised prison he could just buy the prison).
Sure, I dont believe it's 'fusion' myself either, but I would never dissmiss it offhand, nor discredit people who study CF just because it doesn't snap in nicely with my understanding of the universe.
Science stands upon both theory and experiment. We test theories with experiments, and when the experiments prove the theories are wrong then its the theory that gets thrown away.
Unfortunately we also have to deal with experimental error. Scientists are only human, and humans make mistakes. So here we have two possibilities:
Our current theories of nuclear fusion and QM are completely up the creek. These theories have correctly predicted just about every phenomena observed in High Energy Physics over the last 50 years, from the atomic bomb to the transistor. Never mind, its all wrong.
A scientist doing some calorimetry made a mistake. Calorimeters are tricky things. You have to budget for all the energy that goes in, and all that comes out. Cold fusion cells store energy in funny ways, so you have to do this accurately over long periods of time to be sure that you are not seeing the release of energy that you put in yourself a day or two previously. Its tricky stuff.
I think that the second is more likely. Of course I can't rule out the first, but life is short and so is research funding. There are other ideas which are more likely to pan out.
Seriously, I havent seen T1 prices change very much lately.
Take a look at Band X. They act as a trading BBS for buyers and sellers of long-haul and international voice and data bandwidth, and are moving into providing a settlement mechanism whereby a voice or data switch does the routing once a contract is made. They also produce a number of market indices which show that world-wide comms prices are halving every 12 months, and within Europe they are halving every 6 months.
Of course the telcos are not passing on this saving yet, but they will have to, otherwise ISPs and start-up companies will do it for them.
The problem is not with Demon, nor with Demon's lawyers. The problem is with UK libel law.
In the past Demon have stood up to legal threats. They did so with the French Letter (about alt.sex.*), they have done so with encryption (the next version of Turnpike will have PGP built in), and they tried to do so on this occasion. When Lawrence Godfrey first demanded that they remove the post in question Demon refused. LG sued, and Demon fought it. Unfortunately it looks very much like they are going to lose.
Given this, they need to avoid anything that stacks up damages. I don't know how they are working things out, but if a Judge decided that each article for which they were liable was worth £100 to LG then Demon could wind up with substantial damages very fast, just because lots of people are discussing it on uk.legal.
The business with the links, BTW, is down to another legal decision somewhere else. It was decided, reasonably in that case, that telling someone where to find a libellous text (not electronic) was equivalent to publishing it yourself. This has set a precedent.
I think I can safely point out that everything gets archived on DejaNews. However if I provide any specific parameters that would help someone narrow down the article in question then I am guilty of publishing the libel.
Incidentally, I don't think that the US First Amendment saves Americans from this mess. They also have a libel law. Its just luck that brought this problem up in the UK before anywhere else.
This is very true. In the UK the Vice Squad (police department in charge of gambling and commercial sex) tried to tell the UK Internet industry to ban alt.sex.* and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* or face prosecution under our obscenity laws. An Inspector French sent out a letter to all ISPs listing the group names. This became ironically known as the "French Letter". A search on DejaNews should pick it up, or you can ask Demon, a UK ISP, directly.
ISTR that in Germany a couple of Compuserve execs were actually convicted of distributing child porn because they were running a news server.
Also, on Demon's web site you can find out about the libel suit brought by one Dr. Lawrence Godfrey. Someone posted a newsgroup posting libelling LG. Demon refused to delete it when asked, and LG is now sueing Demon for propogating the libel. The law appears to be against Demon, but the problem is that it effectively requires ISPs to remove articles from their News spools on demand.
Before he moved on to exposing Echelon, DC had a go at the UK ISPs and the police.
He wrote a piece for a UK newspaper saying that the ISP Association (ISPA) and the police were holding secret meetings to allow the police to inspect the logs of all UK Net users activity (news pages read/written, Web pages browsed etc). The ISPs were supposedly agreeing to keep logs specially for police use and allow them free access.
Demon (a UK ISP) responded that these meetings were not secret (any one could attend at £60/day), and were primarily concerned with formalising the limits of what the police could ask for, and the evidence that had to be submitted to the ISPs along with the request. A request would have to include prima-facie evidence of a crime, plus supporting details of when and where the electronic side took place. These details would have to match the ISPs logs before any information would be released. The police had asked for wider access, but the ISPs turned them down, citing UK privacy law which makes the ISPs liable for releasing private information to the police without good reason. Many of the police requests (e.g. web browsing logs) were technically infeasible anyway.
Now its possible that Duncan Cambell was right and Demon are spinning a line here. But Demon were the pioneers in the ISP business, and have firmly resisted attempts at censorship (e.g. blocking the porn groups) in the past. And the legal argument about liability checks out. So I'm strongly inclined to trust Demon on this one.
Now DC has moved on to bigger things. He claims there is a whole big sigint organisation dedicated to listening to you. In the referenced article he takes a few quotes from an Australian politician as evidence that he is right. But go back and look at that article. Note what was quoted, and what was written by DC. Big difference.
And the report for the European parliment was... also written by Duncan Cambell.
Meanwhile a new law to require european ISPs to provide the police with a dedicated line into their systems was passed earlier this week, rammed through the EU Parliament after 10 minutes debate. Fortunately its not binding (the EU Parliament has comparitively little power), but its still worrying. Where is Duncan Cambell when you need him? Quoting Australian politicians in an attempt to play Fox Mulder!
What will be traded is, essentially, the right to ship bits between a small number of fixed points (e.g. 1 per city). This is right is valuable. There are people with capacity to sell, and people who want to use it. The most efficient way of allocating the supply between users, and of encouraging the right amount of supply to be built in the future, is to have an open market where everyone can see what the "going rate" is.
Remember that this is a wholesale commodoties market. When you want some copper wire you don't go down to the Chicago Board of Trade and bid for it on the metals trading floor. But the people who run the copper wire factories certainly do.
See Band X for a more primitive example of this kind of thing. They have led the way here with voice telephone calls. Basically you connect your trunk line to their switch and you can then set up bulk deals for minutes of connection time between the switch and the other ends of whatever cables are connected to it.
Anyone who tries to corner the market in a commodity in order to screw a competitor is going to hear from the SEC very shortly afterwards. If you are any kind of commercial organisation that thought is enough to chill your bones.
This does not solve the bandwidth problem. These people slice up the available spectrum time-wise instead of frequency-wise, but that does not make it possible to send more data than you could before. Information Theory has not been repealed, and attempts to get around it are, if anything, even more impractical than perpetual motion machines.
The net effect of using time-based division in this way is to raise the noise floor for many channels in the frequency domain, hence reducing the amount of data that can be sent over them. A single such transmitter is un-noticeable, but using lots of them is another matter.
Given that copyright law relates to when one is allowed to copy something, attempting to restrict someone's use of a program once they have legally obtained a copy is not something that you can do with a copyright based software license (AFAIK).
I went and had a look at the law. Thanks for the reference. I'm not a lawyer either, still less a US copyright lawyer.
However I don't see anything in here that prevents a license to own which terminates unless certain fees are paid. You can only run the program if you own a legal copy. If you run it without paying the fees then your ownership becomes illegal and you can no longer run it.
The bit about Gnome being an OS caused a few twinges, but I can see how they might state it that way to get the point across in 25 words or less.
I read an article about the history of MS. It said that the MS engineers originally wanted to call their product "Interface Manager", and sell it as a user-friendly front-end to DOS. Gates hired a marketeer who knew the difference between a $1 and a $100 jar of moisturiser (i.e. the label), and he said that it had to be called "Windows" and sold as a complete product. He won, and so did Windows.
This article is aimed at the average Joe. All Joe sees is the front end interface. The front end here is GNOME. As far as Joe is concerned the interface is the operating system.
Its not just the BBC that has to think like this. Whenever you talk to someone about Linux, remember that what they will see is either GNOME or KDE.
You might want to consider Liberal Source Software as a licensing model. We haven't produced an actual license yet, but its in the works. See here for details.
Briefly, the idea is to distribute software with source code and a license that allows experimental use, modification, and the distribution of modified copies, but requires payment for any kind of "real use", for whatever value of "real" is appropriate to the software. In most cases that would be commercial use, but for example with a game it would mean actually playing the game. A key part of the scheme is that the revenue is shared amongst the developers in proportion to their contributions.
This was extensively discussed on Slashdot a while ago, under the heading "Commercial Open Source Software". Some people thought it was a good idea, others did not like it. Since then I've added some more explanations and clarifications based on the comments I received.
In sum, COSS is a good idea. Giving contribution points in exchange for contributions probably isn't a good idea. However, some other mechanism of contribution might work, and might be necessary to develop a large body of programmers working on the project.
I'm not entirely happy with my contribution points idea either, and I'd welcome improvements. But it was the best solution I could come up with given the constraints that such a system would have to work under. How would you suggest it be improved?
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.
According to the rationale this was aimed at preventing license traps that stop commercial use. COSS does not prevent commercial use. It also doesn't prevent use for free, provided that the user is not gaining value from using the software.
Slashdot Mirror
This stinks.
However, much as I dislike MS, bear in mind that if MS decided to break these rules then it is Bill Gates personally who gets up to 20 years in the slammer. I really don't think we can blame him for not doing this.
(Of course, if he was put in a privatised prison he could just buy the prison).
Paul.
Science stands upon both theory and experiment. We test theories with experiments, and when the experiments prove the theories are wrong then its the theory that gets thrown away.
Unfortunately we also have to deal with experimental error. Scientists are only human, and humans make mistakes. So here we have two possibilities:
- Our current theories of nuclear fusion and QM are completely up the creek. These theories have correctly predicted just about every phenomena observed in High Energy Physics over the last 50 years, from the atomic bomb to the transistor. Never mind, its all wrong.
- A scientist doing some calorimetry made a mistake. Calorimeters are tricky things. You have to budget for all the energy that goes in, and all that comes out. Cold fusion cells store energy in funny ways, so you have to do this accurately over long periods of time to be sure that you are not seeing the release of energy that you put in yourself a day or two previously. Its tricky stuff.
I think that the second is more likely. Of course I can't rule out the first, but life is short and so is research funding. There are other ideas which are more likely to pan out.Paul.
Take a look at Band X. They act as a trading BBS for buyers and sellers of long-haul and international voice and data bandwidth, and are moving into providing a settlement mechanism whereby a voice or data switch does the routing once a contract is made. They also produce a number of market indices which show that world-wide comms prices are halving every 12 months, and within Europe they are halving every 6 months.
Of course the telcos are not passing on this saving yet, but they will have to, otherwise ISPs and start-up companies will do it for them.
Paul.
In the past Demon have stood up to legal threats. They did so with the French Letter (about alt.sex.*), they have done so with encryption (the next version of Turnpike will have PGP built in), and they tried to do so on this occasion. When Lawrence Godfrey first demanded that they remove the post in question Demon refused. LG sued, and Demon fought it. Unfortunately it looks very much like they are going to lose.
Given this, they need to avoid anything that stacks up damages. I don't know how they are working things out, but if a Judge decided that each article for which they were liable was worth £100 to LG then Demon could wind up with substantial damages very fast, just because lots of people are discussing it on uk.legal.
The business with the links, BTW, is down to another legal decision somewhere else. It was decided, reasonably in that case, that telling someone where to find a libellous text (not electronic) was equivalent to publishing it yourself. This has set a precedent.
I think I can safely point out that everything gets archived on DejaNews. However if I provide any specific parameters that would help someone narrow down the article in question then I am guilty of publishing the libel.
Incidentally, I don't think that the US First Amendment saves Americans from this mess. They also have a libel law. Its just luck that brought this problem up in the UK before anywhere else.
Paul.
ISTR that in Germany a couple of Compuserve execs were actually convicted of distributing child porn because they were running a news server.
Also, on Demon's web site you can find out about the libel suit brought by one Dr. Lawrence Godfrey. Someone posted a newsgroup posting libelling LG. Demon refused to delete it when asked, and LG is now sueing Demon for propogating the libel. The law appears to be against Demon, but the problem is that it effectively requires ISPs to remove articles from their News spools on demand.
Good luck with the paper.
Paul.
He wrote a piece for a UK newspaper saying that the ISP Association (ISPA) and the police were holding secret meetings to allow the police to inspect the logs of all UK Net users activity (news pages read/written, Web pages browsed etc). The ISPs were supposedly agreeing to keep logs specially for police use and allow them free access.
Demon (a UK ISP) responded that these meetings were not secret (any one could attend at £60/day), and were primarily concerned with formalising the limits of what the police could ask for, and the evidence that had to be submitted to the ISPs along with the request. A request would have to include prima-facie evidence of a crime, plus supporting details of when and where the electronic side took place. These details would have to match the ISPs logs before any information would be released. The police had asked for wider access, but the ISPs turned them down, citing UK privacy law which makes the ISPs liable for releasing private information to the police without good reason. Many of the police requests (e.g. web browsing logs) were technically infeasible anyway.
Now its possible that Duncan Cambell was right and Demon are spinning a line here. But Demon were the pioneers in the ISP business, and have firmly resisted attempts at censorship (e.g. blocking the porn groups) in the past. And the legal argument about liability checks out. So I'm strongly inclined to trust Demon on this one.
Now DC has moved on to bigger things. He claims there is a whole big sigint organisation dedicated to listening to you. In the referenced article he takes a few quotes from an Australian politician as evidence that he is right. But go back and look at that article. Note what was quoted, and what was written by DC. Big difference.
And the report for the European parliment was ... also written by Duncan Cambell.
Meanwhile a new law to require european ISPs to provide the police with a dedicated line into their systems was passed earlier this week, rammed through the EU Parliament after 10 minutes debate. Fortunately its not binding (the EU Parliament has comparitively little power), but its still worrying. Where is Duncan Cambell when you need him? Quoting Australian politicians in an attempt to play Fox Mulder!
Paul.
Remember that this is a wholesale commodoties market. When you want some copper wire you don't go down to the Chicago Board of Trade and bid for it on the metals trading floor. But the people who run the copper wire factories certainly do.
See Band X for a more primitive example of this kind of thing. They have led the way here with voice telephone calls. Basically you connect your trunk line to their switch and you can then set up bulk deals for minutes of connection time between the switch and the other ends of whatever cables are connected to it.
Paul.
Anyone who tries to corner the market in a commodity in order to screw a competitor is going to hear from the SEC very shortly afterwards. If you are any kind of commercial organisation that thought is enough to chill your bones.
Paul.
The net effect of using time-based division in this way is to raise the noise floor for many channels in the frequency domain, hence reducing the amount of data that can be sent over them. A single such transmitter is un-noticeable, but using lots of them is another matter.
Paul.
I went and had a look at the law. Thanks for the reference. I'm not a lawyer either, still less a US copyright lawyer.
However I don't see anything in here that prevents a license to own which terminates unless certain fees are paid. You can only run the program if you own a legal copy. If you run it without paying the fees then your ownership becomes illegal and you can no longer run it.
Is Dan Bernsein a lawyer?
Paul.
I read an article about the history of MS. It said that the MS engineers originally wanted to call their product "Interface Manager", and sell it as a user-friendly front-end to DOS. Gates hired a marketeer who knew the difference between a $1 and a $100 jar of moisturiser (i.e. the label), and he said that it had to be called "Windows" and sold as a complete product. He won, and so did Windows.
This article is aimed at the average Joe. All Joe sees is the front end interface. The front end here is GNOME. As far as Joe is concerned the interface is the operating system.
Its not just the BBC that has to think like this. Whenever you talk to someone about Linux, remember that what they will see is either GNOME or KDE.
Paul.
You might want to consider Liberal Source Software as a licensing model. We haven't produced an actual license yet, but its in the works. See here for details.
Briefly, the idea is to distribute software with source code and a license that allows experimental use, modification, and the distribution of modified copies, but requires payment for any kind of "real use", for whatever value of "real" is appropriate to the software. In most cases that would be commercial use, but for example with a game it would mean actually playing the game. A key part of the scheme is that the revenue is shared amongst the developers in proportion to their contributions.
This was extensively discussed on Slashdot a while ago, under the heading "Commercial Open Source Software". Some people thought it was a good idea, others did not like it. Since then I've added some more explanations and clarifications based on the comments I received.
Paul.
Anyone capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy
In sum, COSS is a good idea. Giving contribution points in exchange for contributions probably
isn't a good idea. However, some other mechanism of contribution might work, and might be
necessary to develop a large body of programmers working on the project.
I'm not entirely happy with my contribution points idea either, and I'd welcome improvements. But it was the best solution I could come up with given the constraints that such a system would have to work under. How would you suggest it be improved?
Paul.
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific
field of endeavor.
According to the rationale this was aimed at preventing license traps that stop commercial use. COSS does not prevent commercial use. It also doesn't prevent use for free, provided that the user is not gaining value from using the software.
Paul.