The United States, for example, has had to find ways to cut into political speech because it is possible to hijack it with access to media. That is, rich and poor were all allowed to speak, but the rich seemed to speak louder.
(The poor sometimes got together to form "unions" to speak with a loud, united voice, but that, too, got hijacked by corrupt people, which cast an unpleasant pall over the entire concept, even when it's still executed well.)
It appears that laws are never able to make a truly level, fair playing field, and therefore any democracy is going to be slanted one way or the other. The fact is you're still allowed to say whatever you want, but the louder you speak, the more likely it is the law will intervene. The laws are an unpleasant compromise.
No offense, buddy. You're at CMU, which presumably means you're pretty smart. (I have friends who graduated CMU, and they're some of the brightest I've ever met.)
Not all freshman are novices, of course. I was programming for several years, professionally, before I went to college. I'm sure plenty of other people were, too.
But in general, it would take a hell of a software engineering environment to allow freshman programmers to contribute more than they cost. (CMU is the home of the Software Engineering Institute; maybe this was treated as a Level 4 project?)
I did some work in college for a company that tried to make software with undergrads, often freshmen. (Theoretically they were testing management techniques.) Time and again, I would track down a "bug" to a piece of code, and find that fixing it wouldn't solve the bug, only to discover that that piece of code had been copied-and-pasted to a hundred different locations, each slightly different (rather than parameterizing a function or refactoring).
My main contribution that year was to eliminate 3/4 of their code base. The fact that this software was tracking uranium for the DoE didn't make me feel any better.
Hey, if CMU can take freshmen and make productive programmers out of 'em, more power to 'em.
Yeah, I believe that. It seems to me that to properly handle matrix math you'd really want to build it right into the language anyway. Not just operator overloading, but really build it in, so that the optimizer can really bash the heck out of it.
Autoboxing yes, but I don't believe that they have operator overloading in mind. I've heard Gosling say that it adds a lot of complexity to interpreting a program while adding relatively little expressive power.
I'm definitely looking forward to autoboxing and the new printf-style methods. (Maybe variable-argument methods were what you had in mind?)
Re:The philosophers are right.
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The hijackers on September 11th supposedly used box cutters, cheap little disposable knives. If you tried to stab anybody the blade would snap, but you can cut somebody's throat pretty effectively. But you can do more damage with a SAK than a box cutter, and apparently they were pretty effective with the box cutters.
So I wouldn't discount what you can do with a SAK on a plane. Things have changed and an attack of this kind again is extremely unlikely. But an attack of a different kind is not just likely but inevitable, and the law enforcement authorities are trying to cut off as many possible avenues of attack as they can. Often stupidly and ineffectively (you can't do any damange with toenail clippers that you can't do with your teeth), but they have good reason to be paranoid of tiny potential weapons.
I haven't looked at all of the graphs yet, but I don't think that their algorithm is working correctly.
In the Henry V graph, for example, Canterbury and Pistol should be connected to Henry V.
(Pistol and Henry were actually close friends, but that's from a previous play. Still, they do have one conversation in Henry V).
In general, the plays they're looking at have fairly small graphs. Shakespeare's tragedies are comparatively small productions. If you want to do something useful, graph out the really big histories: Henry IV or Henry VI. Or better yet, take Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3, along with Richard III, and graph out the entire War of the Roses, according to Shakespeare.
Actually, I have no idea if they say la loi est la loi or not. My French n'est pas tres bien, or something like that. But if they don't say it, they should.
It seems pretty clear-cut: a levy of 20 euros times 20,000 French ipods = 400,000 euros, about US$500,000.
I'm not sure how they derive the 20 euros apiece. The levy is placed on the hard disk, but I don't know if it's based on capacity, or price (the iPod has a pricey hard disk inside which stores no more music than a cheap IDE, just more conveniently), or what. But la loi est la loi, as they say. It seems to me that Apple should probably just cough up a "measly" half-mill.
wtf? How is this going to benefit the people who're running the machines?
It doesn't. It benefits Comcast: they spend less time dealing with the nastygrams they get from the recipients of the spam relayed through these machines.
It also benefits you. Of the 437 spam emails you received today, how many of them came from an infected machine inside Comcast?
As for the people? Well, I guess they take it in the shorts. Actually, they've already taken it in the shorts: they're infected with a worm. It'll cost 'em $50 to buy NAV or similar and they'll be permitted to rejoin polite society.
That's a lot easier than joining a new ISP. The real benefit to these users is that it's an unpleasant but apparently necessary wakeup call. I don't think they've been reading the ISP bulletins. Or the news.
I'd be curious to see if there's a measurable drop in spam due to this. There's always been a strong suspicion that much of the world's spam comes through relays installed by worms. Comcast is only one of several very large ISPs, but one can imagine cutting Comcast's relays as making a noticeable dent.
So it supports various hardware in the BIOS rather than the OS. But unless it's got the rest of an OS on it, you're either putting some OS on top of it (which can be simpler than other OSes, but the fact is that those OSes have already been written and removing support would be more work) or you can write code on the bare metal.
I'd hate to give up all the things that an OS supports for me, but I suppose that many of them (memory management, processes, libraries, windowing, keyboard, filesystem) aren't necessary on an embedded system. As long as there's a cross-compiler for it and a way to get that stuff on, you may well be able to work with just the BIOS.
Oh, and I tried to RTFA, which would presumably answer my question, but it's slashdotted, so I'm really aiming my question at the embedded software developers out there.
I'm glad somebody remembers this, because I don't. The door-to-door encyclopedia salesman is a cliche now, but a cliche without a referent in my lifetime, like scales that give your fortune and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen.
I actually do, vaguely, recall there being a milkman when I was very young. (I'm 34 now.)
Unfortunately, the CAN-SPAM act does not, by itself, specify how the snail-mail addresses have to be specified. I have heard (though I have not seen myself) "legitimate" spam which includes the snail-mail addresses as an image.
Similarly, the CAN-SPAM act requires UCE to be marked, but doesn't specify how, which makes filtering hard.
But it's not over. The FCC has the authority to enforce CAN-SPAM, and they are (supposedly) working on standards. Of course, any slashdotter could have come up with a workable proposal and gotten it implemented months ago, but this is proceeding at the usual pace of government.
Which means that pro-spam lobbyists are probably demanding hearings, public input, etc. to slow down implementation. But I have hope that sooner or later the FCC will finish what the CAN-SPAM act started. It won't be perfect, but it will be a start.
Presumably your PDA wouldn't have its own SMTP server. It would connect to your wired SMTP server which would have more compute cycles. It would be trusted in some fashion, e.g. passwords, the way your mail client presumably does (unless you connect to an open relay, or your own internal mail server behind a firewall).
The same, presumably, applies to the P133 I mentioned. You don't do the computation yourself; your mail server does it. It just means you can't reliably run a mail server on your old P133 anymore. At least not quickly.
There's a difference between your connection to your SMTP server and everybody else's. Your SMTP server gets to talk to everybody in the world, and it's hard to establish trust in that environment. Whitelists and blacklists are poor substitutes.
But your mail server trusts you, since it knows you better. At least, you have a closer relationship. So you can do tricky things, like key distribution. That is, passwords.
NP = New Postage?
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The famous thing about the NP-complete problems is that they're hard to solve, but easy to check. That's presumably what's going on here. You can parcel out a rather large traveling salesman problem. But it doesn't take me 10 seconds to check it; it takes me far less than one second, even if I didn't know the answer beforehand.
I think that's kind of neat, actually.
So Johnny Badass can't bluff his way through; his work will be checked.
There are many other problems with this technique (a problem that takes 10 seconds on a 4 GHZ Pentium takes several minutes on a still-useful P133; non-upgraded computers get treated like criminals; patent terms could suddenly turn onerous) but the idea that a computer could bluff it out isn't one of them.
Thing is, this is just from the "non-fraudulent" sales. The DMA doesn't really go for the penis enlargers. They're the "legitimate" spam: people actually trying to sell real products.
They're the ones who supported snail-mail addresses in email and genuine (rather than fake) unsubscribe addresses (though they don't want to make it easy for you to filter it out based on them).
They're really the guys who send you junk snail mail. They have stuff to sell, and they hate the fraudsters because that makes it hard to sell actual stuff. In other words, they wrote the CAN-SPAM act so that they can, profitably, spam, away from all the losers taking up their marketing space.
Now, the $11 billion figure is almost certainly spin. I'm sure it's the most aggressive figure they can put on it, and the true figure is probably half that amount, or less.
But the number doesn't include the penis enlargement pills or the herbal viagra.
I don't think it's as gloomy as all that. The techniques you apply to IM (keeping your "true name" secret except to people you trust) apply equally well to email.
The difference between email and IM is one of modes of communication, and they're both valuable modes. IM has immediacy; email has time-shifting. One does not entirely substitute for the other.
You're right that the spammers will not stop. They will shift to wherever the money is. If they find that they can no longer send email for free, then they will shift to IM, until that route is protected, too.
They're already starting to explore other domains. Spam comments have started showing up in people's web logs, and I'm sure there's a lot of it in Slashdot, too. We don't see much of it because it's mostly moderated down or rejected by the lameness filters, but when attention is turned to it, the war will escalate on that front.
The simplest solution, in all cases, is to accept only messages (whether IMs, slash postings, or emails) from known people. But email has a strong tradition of anonymity, and a valuable one. ACs in Slashdot can be anonymous informants inside a company. Or, far more likely, they're assholes. It's hard to tell without reading.
A friend of mine strongly believes that if it's worth saying, it's worth sticking your name on, and your neck out. She's never lived in China, or Afghanistan, so I can't say if she's right in the general case. But most of the time, she's right, and people afraid to communicate publicly are far more likely to be assholes than hidden geniuses.
Spammers can establish a short-term identity, but such identities can be, uh, identified. When receiving a message from, say, yahoo.com, ask the server how long this person has had the account, and whether its past behavior is spam-like. Does it receive emails? Does it reply to them?
Obviously it's not fully worked out, and even more importantly, it will take a long time for such things to filter through the entire Internet.
But I predict that in ten years, we'll have eliminated most forms of anonymity in email, and spam will be rejected at the server rather than filtered out. (I also predict that a lot of the burden of mass mail will be moved to RSS rather than email, but that's another story.)
Anonymity, sadly, will fall by the wayside. It'll still be there, but the anonymous informants will be ignored. It sucks to be inside the sort of tyrrany that make anonymity necessary, and I hate to pay the price of keeping them down, but I hope mechanisms will evolve (say, a chain of authentication) that will allow a form of anonymity without the downsides.
Meantime, get yourself a bunch of accounts, and give different accounts to different people, based on relationship and level of trust. In the future, your identity (and identities) will be one of the most valuable things you own.
I've gotten this one to two of my domains. It's actually comparatively persuasive. I went so far as to open the zip file, though I certainly didn't run the.exe. Mine accuses me of sending spam from my mail server, which I suppose isn't entirely impossible, since I've been accused of sending spam before once or twice. (I send out announcements to a small set of people, and on occasion people who have fallen out of the group get irate when I haven't removed their names.)
It came directly to my mail server; it hadn't been relayed. That makes sense: anybody may contact my mail server to send mail, as long as it's to me.
But this makes a lousy worm, since most people don't own their own domains. This will 0wn only a fairly limited set of computers, compared to the bazillions of zombies you can get by fooling people who use a major ISP but don't own their own domains.
This one doesn't even really require worm-ness. It goes out only to registered mail servers, which is small enough to connect to individually by one or two dedicated computers with broadband connections.
I wasn't in the mood to trace down who was responsible for it,but I hope somebody does.
P2P networks aren't very interesting until they get big. The fewer users, the less likely it is to have something good. Why participate if you're not getting stuff off of it?
And the bigger you are, the more likely it is you'll attract attention. Most P2P networks have some sort of central hookup point where you go to find other P2P users. That's where the RIAA or the government will go to shut you down. Or they'll find you, the writer/maintainer of the software. The more it's shared, the more they care, the more likely it is they find you.
If you're just sharing a song with your friends via your own home-grown P2P software, the RIAA is going to pretty much ignore you. It doesn't make it legal, but it does make it beneath their notice.
According to 4(a), you don't really own the facts in the database. What you own is the database itself. If I can gather the same facts some other way, I'm entitled to that. I'm only forbidden from accessing your database and using it myself.
"This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."
That seems fair to me, actually. The goal overall of this bill is to say that if you put forth effort to gather a bunch of data, the effort of gathering it is worth money. The information is free, but the actual gathering of it is an artifact.
It makes a database like a book. Even if you eliminated copyrights, it would still be illegal for you to steal an actual book from me. Obviously the usual arguments that a database is not an artifact apply. I'm not going to argue them here; I'm just pointing out what the bill says.
Section 3(a)(1) requires that "generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time".
"Substantial", of course, is undefined, but I wonder if this means that a company's catalogs would be included, or not. While it would take me great effort to suck in Wal Mart's entire pricing structure, they presumably get it pretty easily.
And the actual bill is 22 pages long, not 5. It only takes 5 pages to award a Congressional gold medal, but 22 whole pages to introduce a brand new form of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
True. But true democracies are rare.
The United States, for example, has had to find ways to cut into political speech because it is possible to hijack it with access to media. That is, rich and poor were all allowed to speak, but the rich seemed to speak louder.
(The poor sometimes got together to form "unions" to speak with a loud, united voice, but that, too, got hijacked by corrupt people, which cast an unpleasant pall over the entire concept, even when it's still executed well.)
It appears that laws are never able to make a truly level, fair playing field, and therefore any democracy is going to be slanted one way or the other. The fact is you're still allowed to say whatever you want, but the louder you speak, the more likely it is the law will intervene. The laws are an unpleasant compromise.
Oh, goody. Freshman programmers.
No offense, buddy. You're at CMU, which presumably means you're pretty smart. (I have friends who graduated CMU, and they're some of the brightest I've ever met.)
Not all freshman are novices, of course. I was programming for several years, professionally, before I went to college. I'm sure plenty of other people were, too.
But in general, it would take a hell of a software engineering environment to allow freshman programmers to contribute more than they cost. (CMU is the home of the Software Engineering Institute; maybe this was treated as a Level 4 project?)
I did some work in college for a company that tried to make software with undergrads, often freshmen. (Theoretically they were testing management techniques.) Time and again, I would track down a "bug" to a piece of code, and find that fixing it wouldn't solve the bug, only to discover that that piece of code had been copied-and-pasted to a hundred different locations, each slightly different (rather than parameterizing a function or refactoring).
My main contribution that year was to eliminate 3/4 of their code base. The fact that this software was tracking uranium for the DoE didn't make me feel any better.
Hey, if CMU can take freshmen and make productive programmers out of 'em, more power to 'em.
Yeah, I believe that. It seems to me that to properly handle matrix math you'd really want to build it right into the language anyway. Not just operator overloading, but really build it in, so that the optimizer can really bash the heck out of it.
Wasn't JavaGrande working on that?
Autoboxing yes, but I don't believe that they have operator overloading in mind. I've heard Gosling say that it adds a lot of complexity to interpreting a program while adding relatively little expressive power.
(A picture of Gosling standing in front of a slide explaining what's wrong with operator overloading).
I'm definitely looking forward to autoboxing and the new printf-style methods. (Maybe variable-argument methods were what you had in mind?)
The hijackers on September 11th supposedly used box cutters, cheap little disposable knives. If you tried to stab anybody the blade would snap, but you can cut somebody's throat pretty effectively. But you can do more damage with a SAK than a box cutter, and apparently they were pretty effective with the box cutters.
So I wouldn't discount what you can do with a SAK on a plane. Things have changed and an attack of this kind again is extremely unlikely. But an attack of a different kind is not just likely but inevitable, and the law enforcement authorities are trying to cut off as many possible avenues of attack as they can. Often stupidly and ineffectively (you can't do any damange with toenail clippers that you can't do with your teeth), but they have good reason to be paranoid of tiny potential weapons.
I haven't looked at all of the graphs yet, but I don't think that their algorithm is working correctly.
In the Henry V graph, for example, Canterbury and Pistol should be connected to Henry V.
(Pistol and Henry were actually close friends, but that's from a previous play. Still, they do have one conversation in Henry V).
In general, the plays they're looking at have fairly small graphs. Shakespeare's tragedies are comparatively small productions. If you want to do something useful, graph out the really big histories: Henry IV or Henry VI. Or better yet, take Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3, along with Richard III, and graph out the entire War of the Roses, according to Shakespeare.
Merci.
Uh, no. But I suspect you may be able to get the tax back by filling out the appropriate form. At least that's true of the Value Added Tax.
Actually, Google reports that at least 674 people have actually said it. Goody for me.
Actually, I have no idea if they say la loi est la loi or not. My French n'est pas tres bien, or something like that. But if they don't say it, they should.
It seems pretty clear-cut: a levy of 20 euros times 20,000 French ipods = 400,000 euros, about US$500,000.
I'm not sure how they derive the 20 euros apiece. The levy is placed on the hard disk, but I don't know if it's based on capacity, or price (the iPod has a pricey hard disk inside which stores no more music than a cheap IDE, just more conveniently), or what. But la loi est la loi, as they say. It seems to me that Apple should probably just cough up a "measly" half-mill.
wtf? How is this going to benefit the people who're running the machines?
It doesn't. It benefits Comcast: they spend less time dealing with the nastygrams they get from the recipients of the spam relayed through these machines.
It also benefits you. Of the 437 spam emails you received today, how many of them came from an infected machine inside Comcast?
As for the people? Well, I guess they take it in the shorts. Actually, they've already taken it in the shorts: they're infected with a worm. It'll cost 'em $50 to buy NAV or similar and they'll be permitted to rejoin polite society.
That's a lot easier than joining a new ISP. The real benefit to these users is that it's an unpleasant but apparently necessary wakeup call. I don't think they've been reading the ISP bulletins. Or the news.
I'd be curious to see if there's a measurable drop in spam due to this. There's always been a strong suspicion that much of the world's spam comes through relays installed by worms. Comcast is only one of several very large ISPs, but one can imagine cutting Comcast's relays as making a noticeable dent.
I'll never get billions of light-years away, but frankly it depresses me even more that I'll probably never even get as high up as the Hubble.
So it supports various hardware in the BIOS rather than the OS. But unless it's got the rest of an OS on it, you're either putting some OS on top of it (which can be simpler than other OSes, but the fact is that those OSes have already been written and removing support would be more work) or you can write code on the bare metal.
I'd hate to give up all the things that an OS supports for me, but I suppose that many of them (memory management, processes, libraries, windowing, keyboard, filesystem) aren't necessary on an embedded system. As long as there's a cross-compiler for it and a way to get that stuff on, you may well be able to work with just the BIOS.
Oh, and I tried to RTFA, which would presumably answer my question, but it's slashdotted, so I'm really aiming my question at the embedded software developers out there.
I'm glad somebody remembers this, because I don't. The door-to-door encyclopedia salesman is a cliche now, but a cliche without a referent in my lifetime, like scales that give your fortune and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen.
I actually do, vaguely, recall there being a milkman when I was very young. (I'm 34 now.)
Unfortunately, the CAN-SPAM act does not, by itself, specify how the snail-mail addresses have to be specified. I have heard (though I have not seen myself) "legitimate" spam which includes the snail-mail addresses as an image.
Similarly, the CAN-SPAM act requires UCE to be marked, but doesn't specify how, which makes filtering hard.
But it's not over. The FCC has the authority to enforce CAN-SPAM, and they are (supposedly) working on standards. Of course, any slashdotter could have come up with a workable proposal and gotten it implemented months ago, but this is proceeding at the usual pace of government.
Which means that pro-spam lobbyists are probably demanding hearings, public input, etc. to slow down implementation. But I have hope that sooner or later the FCC will finish what the CAN-SPAM act started. It won't be perfect, but it will be a start.
Presumably your PDA wouldn't have its own SMTP server. It would connect to your wired SMTP server which would have more compute cycles. It would be trusted in some fashion, e.g. passwords, the way your mail client presumably does (unless you connect to an open relay, or your own internal mail server behind a firewall).
The same, presumably, applies to the P133 I mentioned. You don't do the computation yourself; your mail server does it. It just means you can't reliably run a mail server on your old P133 anymore. At least not quickly.
There's a difference between your connection to your SMTP server and everybody else's. Your SMTP server gets to talk to everybody in the world, and it's hard to establish trust in that environment. Whitelists and blacklists are poor substitutes.
But your mail server trusts you, since it knows you better. At least, you have a closer relationship. So you can do tricky things, like key distribution. That is, passwords.
The famous thing about the NP-complete problems is that they're hard to solve, but easy to check. That's presumably what's going on here. You can parcel out a rather large traveling salesman problem. But it doesn't take me 10 seconds to check it; it takes me far less than one second, even if I didn't know the answer beforehand.
I think that's kind of neat, actually.
So Johnny Badass can't bluff his way through; his work will be checked.
There are many other problems with this technique (a problem that takes 10 seconds on a 4 GHZ Pentium takes several minutes on a still-useful P133; non-upgraded computers get treated like criminals; patent terms could suddenly turn onerous) but the idea that a computer could bluff it out isn't one of them.
Thing is, this is just from the "non-fraudulent" sales. The DMA doesn't really go for the penis enlargers. They're the "legitimate" spam: people actually trying to sell real products.
They're the ones who supported snail-mail addresses in email and genuine (rather than fake) unsubscribe addresses (though they don't want to make it easy for you to filter it out based on them).
They're really the guys who send you junk snail mail. They have stuff to sell, and they hate the fraudsters because that makes it hard to sell actual stuff. In other words, they wrote the CAN-SPAM act so that they can, profitably, spam, away from all the losers taking up their marketing space.
Now, the $11 billion figure is almost certainly spin. I'm sure it's the most aggressive figure they can put on it, and the true figure is probably half that amount, or less.
But the number doesn't include the penis enlargement pills or the herbal viagra.
I don't think it's as gloomy as all that. The techniques you apply to IM (keeping your "true name" secret except to people you trust) apply equally well to email.
The difference between email and IM is one of modes of communication, and they're both valuable modes. IM has immediacy; email has time-shifting. One does not entirely substitute for the other.
You're right that the spammers will not stop. They will shift to wherever the money is. If they find that they can no longer send email for free, then they will shift to IM, until that route is protected, too.
They're already starting to explore other domains. Spam comments have started showing up in people's web logs, and I'm sure there's a lot of it in Slashdot, too. We don't see much of it because it's mostly moderated down or rejected by the lameness filters, but when attention is turned to it, the war will escalate on that front.
The simplest solution, in all cases, is to accept only messages (whether IMs, slash postings, or emails) from known people. But email has a strong tradition of anonymity, and a valuable one. ACs in Slashdot can be anonymous informants inside a company. Or, far more likely, they're assholes. It's hard to tell without reading.
A friend of mine strongly believes that if it's worth saying, it's worth sticking your name on, and your neck out. She's never lived in China, or Afghanistan, so I can't say if she's right in the general case. But most of the time, she's right, and people afraid to communicate publicly are far more likely to be assholes than hidden geniuses.
Spammers can establish a short-term identity, but such identities can be, uh, identified. When receiving a message from, say, yahoo.com, ask the server how long this person has had the account, and whether its past behavior is spam-like. Does it receive emails? Does it reply to them?
Obviously it's not fully worked out, and even more importantly, it will take a long time for such things to filter through the entire Internet.
But I predict that in ten years, we'll have eliminated most forms of anonymity in email, and spam will be rejected at the server rather than filtered out. (I also predict that a lot of the burden of mass mail will be moved to RSS rather than email, but that's another story.)
Anonymity, sadly, will fall by the wayside. It'll still be there, but the anonymous informants will be ignored. It sucks to be inside the sort of tyrrany that make anonymity necessary, and I hate to pay the price of keeping them down, but I hope mechanisms will evolve (say, a chain of authentication) that will allow a form of anonymity without the downsides.
Meantime, get yourself a bunch of accounts, and give different accounts to different people, based on relationship and level of trust. In the future, your identity (and identities) will be one of the most valuable things you own.
I've gotten this one to two of my domains. It's actually comparatively persuasive. I went so far as to open the zip file, though I certainly didn't run the .exe. Mine accuses me of sending spam from my mail server, which I suppose isn't entirely impossible, since I've been accused of sending spam before once or twice. (I send out announcements to a small set of people, and on occasion people who have fallen out of the group get irate when I haven't removed their names.)
It came directly to my mail server; it hadn't been relayed. That makes sense: anybody may contact my mail server to send mail, as long as it's to me.
But this makes a lousy worm, since most people don't own their own domains. This will 0wn only a fairly limited set of computers, compared to the bazillions of zombies you can get by fooling people who use a major ISP but don't own their own domains.
This one doesn't even really require worm-ness. It goes out only to registered mail servers, which is small enough to connect to individually by one or two dedicated computers with broadband connections.
I wasn't in the mood to trace down who was responsible for it,but I hope somebody does.
P2P networks aren't very interesting until they get big. The fewer users, the less likely it is to have something good. Why participate if you're not getting stuff off of it?
And the bigger you are, the more likely it is you'll attract attention. Most P2P networks have some sort of central hookup point where you go to find other P2P users. That's where the RIAA or the government will go to shut you down. Or they'll find you, the writer/maintainer of the software. The more it's shared, the more they care, the more likely it is they find you.
If you're just sharing a song with your friends via your own home-grown P2P software, the RIAA is going to pretty much ignore you. It doesn't make it legal, but it does make it beneath their notice.
According to 4(a), you don't really own the facts in the database. What you own is the database itself. If I can gather the same facts some other way, I'm entitled to that. I'm only forbidden from accessing your database and using it myself.
"This Act shall not restrict any person from
independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."
That seems fair to me, actually. The goal overall of this bill is to say that if you put forth effort to gather a bunch of data, the effort of gathering it is worth money. The information is free, but the actual gathering of it is an artifact.
It makes a database like a book. Even if you eliminated copyrights, it would still be illegal for you to steal an actual book from me. Obviously the usual arguments that a database is not an artifact apply. I'm not going to argue them here; I'm just pointing out what the bill says.
Section 3(a)(1) requires that "generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time".
"Substantial", of course, is undefined, but I wonder if this means that a company's catalogs would be included, or not. While it would take me great effort to suck in Wal Mart's entire pricing structure, they presumably get it pretty easily.
And the actual bill is 22 pages long, not 5. It only takes 5 pages to award a Congressional gold medal, but 22 whole pages to introduce a brand new form of copyright.