Many of the early Net philosophers gathered around the now-corporatized Wired magazine
Please! If Katz had referred to Usenet before the Great Renaming, or the WELL, he might have some credibility with this statement, but even in its pre-corporatized days, Wired was a jonny-come-lately to the Net. I'm sorry, but the Net didn't begin when Katz et al stumbled across the World Wide Web.
why should his diary be exempt from the search warrant?
Except there was no search warrant issued. The Senate "Ethics" Committee and the Justice department issued subpoenas, and there's a significant difference between the two. While they may have the same purpose, to obtain evidence, with a search warrant the government has to locate the evidence. In the case of a subponea, the recipient is required to provide the evidence, even when the evidence could incriminate the recipient. Get a search warrant, serve the search warrant, go after the person for obstruction of justice if you need to, and I'll be in your corner, but if a subponea can be used to require a person to produce evidence of their own possibly illegal conduct, why don't we just serve every murder suspect with a subponea to produce the murder weapon, and jail them for contempt of court when they fail to comply?
Am I the only one thinking that SOMEBODY -- be it the PGP people, the Free Software Foundation, or Microsoft for that matter -- should figure out a TRULY easy, TRULY fast, TRULY seamless means for the common email user to encrypt a message?
As much as I am loathe to say something nice about it, Lotus Notes does that. I can configure Notes to automatically encrypt all email I send from it, or can have an individual message encrypted with three mouse clicks. It sucks planetoids through buckytubes when it comes to following RFC822, and you can only encrypt email sent to other Notes users, but they've got the easy/fast/seamless parts down.
The whole purpose of this law is to prevent things like Nixon's 18.5 minute gap from being used to deceive the public.
That was wrong, but the result of that has not been more openness, but less. Presidents starting with, I beleive, Eisenhower had their Oval Office conversations taped, but no President after Nixon has done so (openly, at least). The ongoing release of the Johnson tapes is helping to provide a more complete picture of his administration, but we won't have that with Ford, Carter, Reagan,..., and the increasing legal "openness" is instead reducing our knowledge of the internal workings of the Presidencies to below that of pre-electronic times.
For the same reason that the government can tell its employees not to browse porn on government computers, Prince George cannot expect to send private email through government network.
It's not just email sent (or processed) on government computers, and it's not just the President. Ever since Sen. Tower had his personal diaries made public, government officials at all levels have been increasingly reluctant to put their private thoughts into writing, because of the danger that they might become public. As a result you can expect that few, if any, of the memoirs from the Clinton Administration to be based upon contemporaneous diaries kept by the persons involved. Instead, most of them will be based upon the recollections of the parties involved five, ten, twenty years after the fact, and, regardless of your opinion as to the character of the persons involved, I would hope that we can agree that this will not lead to accurate memoirs.
It's not just government, either. If you spend any amount of time in a corporate environment you learn what to say, and what not to say, in email or voice mail. This isn't just a matter of external legal action, but internal personnel actions. I'll admit to being both being called on the carpet about unprofessional voice mail, and complaining about unprofessional email. In the former case, I accepted the blame, and in the latter I share part of the responsibility for the tone of the conversation, but the fact in both cases is that once your words are recorded, it becomes difficult to explain the context they were made in when they are being held against you.
You see, contrary to what the typical, self-centered pseudo-anarchist pirate-citizen believes, it is NOT beneficial for music and other forms of art to be freely stolen.
Neither is it beneficial for it to be inacessible once the technology needed to access it is obsolete. Would be be better off if the works of Shakespeare (or Bacon), Bach, Dickens and Whistler were lost because the means of accessing it were no longer manufactured? That's the world that copy protection systems will create, because once it's no longer commercially profitable to re-release a work in the latest format, it will become lost as the equipment needed to access the earlier formats breaks down and cannot be repaired or replaced. At the rate we're going, there will be no enduring classics from the 21st century, not because deserving works will not be created, but because future generations won't be able to access them.
In any case, it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to read the above statement from the US Constitution and see that Orrin Hatch's proposal is unconstitutional, since it deprives the artist of exclusive rights.
The US Constitution says (Article I Section 8) that The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;. That is not a requirement that they exercise the power. Beyond that, "until release" is a limited time, so even if this clause was a requirement, Senator Hatch's proposal does not violate the clause.
To say SSH is dirty for waiting is like saying that the recent DirectTV tactic of letting everyone clone their chips over and over without a word, and then destroying them all in one genious swoop, was dirty.
DirecTV didn't. If you actually read any of the articles about the DirecTV situation, they note that this has been an ongoing battle between DirecTV and the hackers. SSH laid an ambush for the OpenSSH project, and US trademark law, at least, doesn't allow for that.
As the article states there are several other SSH(TM)implementations out there
with SSH in the product name
that aren't being hassled over this.
Sorry, but he's actively assisted the development of other SSH products with SSH in the product name. If he asked that the OpenSSH documentation contain a trademark notice, that would have been reasonable. Demanding that the project change its name, at this point, is not.
I wonder, how would we all feel if it were Linus sending out a C&D for someone misusing the term Linux.
You are aware of why Linus holds a registered trademark on the term Linux (as applied to computer operating systems), right?
Would we still be on the side of trademarks are bad?
Who is on the side of "trademarks are bad"? We're on the side of "selective enforcement of trademarks are bad, and most likely invalid".
There is no doubt a lot of confusion here, it's not that hard to rename it
No, it isn't, and had Ylönen requested that the OpenSSH project change its name near the beginning, and been requiring that other SSH impementations that he knew of change their names, I at least wouldn't be objecting to this. By singling out OpenSSH for this treatment, springing this upon them (apparently) more than a year after OpenSSH was started (with much controversy over the domain names, if you will recall - this wasn't a stealth project), and assisting with the development of other SSH implementations without requiring that their names be changed, he created this situation.
Maybe because Ylönen is actually in the same boat as Bezos, et. al. He submitted ssh as an open standard, which was upstanding of him. Then he turned around and tried to trademark the name of the open standard. Now he's decided that OpenSSH is taking too much of his business, and he's trying to shut them down by preventing them from using the name of the protocol in their program name.
More similarly, he's in the same boat as Sun, but without the forthrightness. At least Sun established a trademark, and actively enforced it, before they submitted it to multiple standards bodies as an 'open' standard. Even then, the standards bodies balked at allowing a major company like Sun to hold a trademark on, and control of, a standard which they issued. I'm not sure why Ylönen thinks that the IETF is going to swallow his company sandbagging them like this.
Only people with a mental deficiency (the inability to recognize even the most blatantly obvious heavy-handed satire as such unless they literally read the words "this is satire") are fooled by such things.
We're talking about even more mentally deficient induhviduals here, since the page does include the words Articles and items appearing in our "Recent Spin" are satirical, and they still didn't understand that this was satire.
As an Australian, I am impressed that the FCC is interested in listening to what the American public think of their proposed laws.
I think you may have misunderstood. First, this isn't a proposed law, but the regulations to implement an already passed law. Second, they don't really care to listen (shown by the 15 day "fast track" approach), they're just required to solicit and accept public comments. That doesn't mean that they actually have to take them into account.
For Libraries, this would be not in the side room, but in the main hall where every passer by can see. This being a public space, maybe the illusion of "privacy" in this very public space should be dispensed with. This thought has problems both ways tho.
Yes it certainly does. For starters, I wouldn't want my borrowing history to be broadcast to everyone.
Your "borrowing history" wouldn't be broadcast to everyone, just what you are reading in the library while you are reading it (and probably after it, since I doubt that many libraries set their systems up to flush the disk cache and clear the browser history lists after each patron). It's no different than reading a book in the library rather than checking it out - other people can see what book you are reading. And even the act of checking out a book isn't private - you set a stack of books on the check-out desk, and anyone close enough can see what you are checking out.
One example. What if I'm too poor, too old, too backwards to own a computer (maybe I just like to read paperbacks when I'm at home), but my wife comes down with breast cancer. So, being the caring guy that I am, I treck down to the library and want to do some research so we can ask good questions of the oncologist during the course of treatment.
Let's remove the computer from the picture. First you have to find the book on the shelf, so any passerby can see what section of the library you are in. Then you get the book and take it to the reading area. Again, any passerby can see what book(s) you are carrying. Then you sit down and read for a while, with the book on display for anyone who cares to look. Finally, you decide to check it out, again in full view.
You probably have more "privacy" with a computer in a common area, since there is a narrower field of view for others to see what you are reading, they certainly would need to be closer to read the URL than they need to see the title on most book covers, and you aren't carrying a URL from the shelves at one end of the library to the reading room or check-out desk at the other end. Even it that wasn't the case, there aren't any "privacy rights" being violated by placing the computer in a common area that exist in the absence of the computer, and the presence of the computer doesn't confer additional "privacy rights".
The weird position some techies get into with the "scum-bucket" companies is the schizophrenic nature of some of these big companies. [...] I still haven't figured out whether I should feel bad about working for them because they're a "bad guy", or good about working for them because they're a "good guy".
This just emphasizes that, while companies may be legal "persons", the reality is that they are made up of human beings. Given that individual humans can hold arguably contradictory positions (say, being pro-life and pro-death penalty), it shouldn't be surprising that the larger the company, the more likely it is that different humans in different parts of the company will be able to have public positions that are at cross purposes to each other.
This isn't meant to minimize your dilemma. I think what you need to consider is whether the work you're doing contributes (more) to the good items, or the bad items. If you're contributing to the positive efforts, and they are more successful for the company than the negative efforts, then the people who backed the positive efforts tend to gain influence, and are able to back more positive efforts.
It's a satellite dish! Everyone's getting the exact same signal. It's not like they can say "Okay, this guy paid for our premium service, so we need to beam 1080i to his house and 480i to everyone else's house. Everyone gets the same feed from the satellite, the receiver determines what to do with it.
And, as I understand it, the receiver has to call in periodically and get its marching orders. Disabling 1080i for one customer and enabling it for another is really no different than disabling Showtime for one customer and enabling it for another. To be honest, I wouldn't have (as much of) an objection to it if they were to do something like that - charging customers for increased levels of service seems to me to be a legitimate business practice. Unfortunately, that isn't the way this article makes it sound like it will be. Instead, it's more along the lines of "Our customers are lousy stinking thieves who can't be trusted, so we're not going to permit them to view what we're charging them for, regardless of how much they're willing to pay.". That strikes me as not just bad karma, but bad business.
They can also cut off your service in general. That is how it works, you pay them for service, they give you service.
Except this is "You pay them for service, and they still cut off your service.". I wish that we could look forward to the day where Hollywood would cry wolf too many times, but they have practically the perfect division of politics there - the executives are predominantly Republicans, while the producers, directors, and actors are predominantly Democrats, so no matter who is holding the reigns of power, there are like-minded Hollywood types with money to claim that the masses are only a recorder away from rampant illegal copying which will End Western Civilization As We Know It, if not for the valiant anti-piracy efforts of Hollywood.
If you're willing to experiment with using the wrong tool for the job, why not take a shot using the right, but used, tool? With a little bit of looking, you can find things like a 7/14GB tape drive for far less than a DV camera.
The problem is that Postscript is *executable*, so it is potentially hardware dependent, but more importantly, the results of printing are due to running a Postscript program.
This makes it extremely hard to do things like "extract page 10", because you have to run the program until it outputs 9 pages, somehow defeating the actual output, wait for it to request output for the 10th time, capture the raster memory, then kill the program.
Like many things, that depends. In a properly written PostScript program, pages are independent of each other, and can be rearranged and extracted at will. Naturally, most programs that produce PostScript do not produce properly written PostScript.
Where I work, people who are on-call get a 10% bonus, plus $180 ($60 for Saturday and $120 for Sunday) for the week. If they're actually called, and end up spending a significant amount of time on it, they can get comp time as well. That said, we charge for 24x7 support, so what the on-call personnel are being paid is a small fraction of what is being brought in by providing it.
While I agree with those who are suggesting that it would be better to have the cards professionally printed, if you really want to print your own cards, PostScript is the way to go. There's a script to take a EPS image and put it on a business card at http://www.chena.net/~jkirving/pub/;. If you use that as the basis, you should be able to add what you need to put the text you need on the cards as well.
The ZDNet story mentions that the code is licensed under the GPL and the Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL). They stated that compliance to both licenses is necessary. They may be smoking crack and completely off (I haven't checked - there wasn't anything obvious at openoffice.org), but if not there are problems with this.
I wondered about this as well, but there is something obvious at openoffice.org: the Licenses link right on the front page. The first sentence there is OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code.. So, like Perl and GhostScript, OpenOffice is dual licensed. No problems there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just government, either. If you spend any amount of time in a corporate environment you learn what to say, and what not to say, in email or voice mail. This isn't just a matter of external legal action, but internal personnel actions. I'll admit to being both being called on the carpet about unprofessional voice mail, and complaining about unprofessional email. In the former case, I accepted the blame, and in the latter I share part of the responsibility for the tone of the conversation, but the fact in both cases is that once your words are recorded, it becomes difficult to explain the context they were made in when they are being held against you.
Who is on the side of "trademarks are bad"? We're on the side of "selective enforcement of trademarks are bad, and most likely invalid".
No, it isn't, and had Ylönen requested that the OpenSSH project change its name near the beginning, and been requiring that other SSH impementations that he knew of change their names, I at least wouldn't be objecting to this. By singling out OpenSSH for this treatment, springing this upon them (apparently) more than a year after OpenSSH was started (with much controversy over the domain names, if you will recall - this wasn't a stealth project), and assisting with the development of other SSH implementations without requiring that their names be changed, he created this situation.
Let's remove the computer from the picture. First you have to find the book on the shelf, so any passerby can see what section of the library you are in. Then you get the book and take it to the reading area. Again, any passerby can see what book(s) you are carrying. Then you sit down and read for a while, with the book on display for anyone who cares to look. Finally, you decide to check it out, again in full view.
You probably have more "privacy" with a computer in a common area, since there is a narrower field of view for others to see what you are reading, they certainly would need to be closer to read the URL than they need to see the title on most book covers, and you aren't carrying a URL from the shelves at one end of the library to the reading room or check-out desk at the other end. Even it that wasn't the case, there aren't any "privacy rights" being violated by placing the computer in a common area that exist in the absence of the computer, and the presence of the computer doesn't confer additional "privacy rights".
This isn't meant to minimize your dilemma. I think what you need to consider is whether the work you're doing contributes (more) to the good items, or the bad items. If you're contributing to the positive efforts, and they are more successful for the company than the negative efforts, then the people who backed the positive efforts tend to gain influence, and are able to back more positive efforts.
If you're willing to experiment with using the wrong tool for the job, why not take a shot using the right, but used, tool? With a little bit of looking, you can find things like a 7/14GB tape drive for far less than a DV camera.
Where I work, people who are on-call get a 10% bonus, plus $180 ($60 for Saturday and $120 for Sunday) for the week. If they're actually called, and end up spending a significant amount of time on it, they can get comp time as well. That said, we charge for 24x7 support, so what the on-call personnel are being paid is a small fraction of what is being brought in by providing it.
While I agree with those who are suggesting that it would be better to have the cards professionally printed, if you really want to print your own cards, PostScript is the way to go. There's a script to take a EPS image and put it on a business card at http://www.chena.net/~jkirving/pub/ ;. If you use that as the basis, you should be able to add what you need to put the text you need on the cards as well.