Their plan is to include a data track on the disks with the music in some proprietary encrypted format that can only be played with user hostile hardware and software. I don't have any explicite quote to back this up, but it's quite obvious by their comments that that is what they want.
The reason we aren't seeing this yet is that there hasn't been a single user hostile music system that hasn't been completely masacred by the good guys. CSS, Microsoft DRM, Adbobe DRM, SDMI, etc have all been cracked wide open, and new systems will continue to be so as long as they are implemented in software.
The logical step would be to convince Creative to start puting user hostile features that decrypt these music files on their cards - and if Creative are any different from the rest of technology industry don't expect to see any resistance there.
What is wrong with profiteering? Why is profit a bad thing? Profit is a great thing. It's people getting what they deserve for using their mind to create something useful.
There is nothing wrong with profiteering, but as a society we are not compelled to, and should not, bend over backwards and abandon our freedoms just so that people can profit more. The abolition of slavory stopped plantation owners and slave traders from profiteering - not because it was wrong for them to make a profit, but because it is wrong to keep people as slaves. Likewise copyright should be abolished, not because it is wrong to profit, but because it is wrong for one person to execute control over what another person says or writes.
If somebody writes something, that's theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take that away from them.
That depends what you mean by the pronoun "that" in the above sentences. If you are refering to the information itself, so that it would read:
If somebody writes something, the information is theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take the information away from them.
I could not agree more: it's a completely heinous crime when a government tells someone they are not allowed to have, and thus must destroy, a piece of information they have written (say a program that decrypts DVDs for example). If you have written some information you should get to keep it for as long as you want - certainly nobody on this side of copyright debate have argued otherwise.
If you however meant something else by "that", which it seems you did by the context though maybe without being aware of it, that changes things. It seems you meant:
If somebody writes something, the power to censor it is theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take the power to censor it away from them.
which is complete bullshit. As the previous poster stated, any such ability is a power (not a right, as Stallman likes to note) artificially granted to the author by society at great cost to freedom. It is justifiable only by those economic utilitarian arguments which bare a uncanny resemblance to those used against the aforementioned abolition of human slavory.
It IS morally wrong for a government to tell an individual how long or how much they are allowed to profit from their work. This is most definately a MORAL issue. Any kind of limitation put on how much a person can profit from his/her work is one thing: thievery.
And if my "work" is kidnapping people, torturing them, and using them as forced labour?
Actually nowhere do people have as much change in their pockets all the time as in the US, because merchants in America set their prices without adding VAT, so you are always paying prices like $1.08 because the advertised price was rounded to $1, wheeras elsewhere the prices are rounded off with the VAT already added. Compared to that, the move from dollar notes to coins is negligable.
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
Contrary to popular belief, ritalin is not some magic drug, it works almost exactly like amphetamine. If your friend had been addicted to speed for the last ten years, would you be surprised that he was a wreck when off it? There are alcoholics that can seem completely functional for long periods of time as long as they stay drunk, but break down completely if they do not get a drink - same thing goes with most drugs.
OK, so you mean that if I happen to break it as an algorithm, this is okay, but if I happen to break its implementation as the new killerdvd format, then I may end up in a similar cell as Dmitri Sklyarov's ?
Yes, pretty much.
So this once again makes me wonder whether there is or not a bug in the DMCA :
If some technologies are based upon some free algorithm which get broken, (*breathe here*) why should the happy-genious-hacker be sued as he just pointed out some flaw in a "public" technology?
Don't try to apply logic to law, it will lead you nowhere. The reason the happy-genious-hacker gets sued is because he is a convenient target, who can easily be painted as a villian in the eyes of courts, politicians, and the public.
Actually, as he'll make the technology improve and thus get rid of the given flaw, it'd rather be the fault of the suing organization as they accepted to use a flawed1 algorithm...
You are missing a vital point that a lot of technologists seem to miss, but that has not been lost on the international media cartels. It is this: there is no non-flawed implementation of UHT.
Because UHT relies on your computer controlling you (what "user hostile" means) and in at least some sense your computer is always actually under your control, regardless of implementation it will always be possible to crack it. Hackers like Sklyarov and Beale Screamer are not helping improve the UHT technology because whatever is done it will always stay vulnerable, and the vulnerablilities they exposed were undoubtably known by the implementors. If you support the existance of UHT (or copyright law, with doubtlessly requires UHT to be enforced) then the DMCA is not only a justified, but a necessary law. In fact, the DMCA does not go nearly far enough, which is why laws like the 'SS'SCA are very necessary as well.
I guess the DMCA seriously sucks because of its lack of consistance :
They should rather not use any protection at all than inventing some stupid placebo and whining it's been broken into by some clever hacker.
The DMCA provides the international media cartels with a weapon to harrass technologists who want to use computers freely as they see fit rather than under the control of the cartels' authority. It may not be too helpful against software hackers, though it has certainly slowed down many projects, but it certainly works for other purposes (consider why you will never see a CD-ROM drive that by default ignores the broken error-correction codes on those new "copy-proof" CDs).
1 : though this argumentation is purely 100% hypothetical, I assume there are flaws until one mathematically demonstrates there aren't...
Unfortunately that puts you in a quite a bad place, as to my knowledge there are no(*) current ciphers that are mathematically proven to be uncrackable. There are a couple of, at least hypothetical, asymmetric ciphers that have been shown to be "NP-complete" meaning, roughly, that if they can be cracked then a whole class of problems nobody has found any answers to yet can be solved as well (you may have heard of the N != NP conjecture), but the common ones (RSA, DSA, ElGamal) are not even that. Newly designed ciphers like Rijndael/AES (which is a symmetric cipher, so should not be confused with those mentioned before) are not proved to be mathematically secure, but simply engineered to be secure against all currently known attack vectors.
(*) In order to avoid the obligatory lamer responding with ("There is a provably secure cipher, it's called One Time Tap"), I digress that there is a provably secure cipher called a one time pad, which uses keys as large as the messages that can only be used once. OTP can only be used as a type of secrecy delay - if you have a secure channel between two parties at one point in time, they can exchange random key data that will allow them to securely communicate the exact same amount of data securely over an insecure channel later. There is also the algorithm that I believe came from a student of Adi Shamir last year which hid the data in a stream of random data so large there would be no way to cache it long enough to crack the cyrpto (in theory anyways).
Now, if I happen to successfully develop an AES "decryptor", may I publish its source code without infringing the DMCA [tompox.com] ?
The inventors of Rijndael, who seem to be exceptionally intelligent and sane people, would probably be more than happy to be challenged with a real attack on the algorithm. Unless you have a PHD in Mathematics specializing cryptoanalysis you probably needn't waste your breath though.
Of course, if the media industry has had time to implement AES in one of their ridiculous UHT (User Hostile Tech) schemes, you may well end up under legal attack, as could, very possibly, the authors of the algorithm themselves should they find a flaw. It has been noted that the media industries will probably not go after "academics" in the short term considering how the Felten affair blew up on them (Russian's apparently don't count).
Just because the enemy has usurped the term "secure" for their UHT does not mean that you should confuse all encryption with DMCA etc. These algorithms really are secure, based on real math that most people agree not even the NSA can break, and do not rely on stupid "gun in mouth" schemes to keep people from breaking them as UHT invariably does.
Now that copying records has moved into the digital age with MP3s, it is about time that bootlegging conserts did as well. Forget the DAT recorder, all you'll need is an iPaq with wavelan.
I do get it, but if you go look at exactly what they have, and read the papers they have published, you will find that the simple interfaces are the only thing they have. There are no new algorithms for achieving emergent behavior presented - the only implementation they seem to have made is a simulation of a Freenet based system. It is the correct approach, but not really newsworthy until they have something to show for it.
To my knowledge, there is one software project currently in actual use that takes advantage of emergent behavior, and I wrote a large part of it. I'm quite sure that I do get it.
They have the right idea when it comes to studying large distributed networks. Network emergent properties is absolutely the most interesting thing in that field, and I strongly believe that it is a much better model for trying to handle highly dynamic networks than trying to route within a rigid structure as lot of object location networks have been designed to do.
That said, peer to peer network simulators and frameworks are a dime a dozen - anybody who was at the last O'Reilly "P2P" conference would have noticed that everybody, their mother, and their great-aunt Petrunella seems to have one. Setting up a bunch of java interfaces is not that hard, and calling a Node a "Nest" and giving it the following methods:
What is really needed are more examples of analytical work regarding the emergence of and utility of routing properties in the known algorithms, as well as other radically new routing schemes besides Freenet. I'm glad that these people have their framework in place, but it really isn't news until they have something to show for it.
That is a malicious attack on the network. There is nothing wrong with that, Freenet clearly needs to be able to handle such malicious attacks if it is to survive, but it is malicious attack all the same...
I don't think I ever described it as a "natural right". I'm pointing out that copyright serves a very valuable purpose in society.
I took the term "natural right" from your earlier claim that '"natural market forces" do support [proprietary software]'. Since you thus included copyright as a natural market force, I don't think it was a leap to assume you claimed it as a natural right. I also did not claim that Freedom of speech was natural right. I usually refer to it as a fundamental liberty.
Actually, selling proprietary software doesn't even need copyright - just contracts (you do support contracts, right?).
A contract giving up your right to life would not hold up legally - you cannot sign a document allowing somebody to kill you, especially not for money or services in return. Nor can you sign a contract selling yourself in slavory, regardless of whether you want to or not.
If you cannot sign away you right to life, or your freedom of self determination, is it such a big leap to say you should not be allowed to sign away your freedom of speech either? I don't see any difference.
The only piece that copyright adds is that it prevents you from laundering away the contract via intermediary (i.e. a third party who didn't sign the contract that somehow got ahold of it would be able to copy it without limitation were it not for copyright).
That's a pretty big "only", don't you think? In fact it is a huge difference - if I sign a document, then I have considered it and made a choice. But I am never given a choice about copyrighted material - much as I try, you cannot live today without being constantly exposed to copyrighted information, and thus without being given any choice I am filled with information that law restricts me from communicating freely.
If you cannot see the gag, it is only because you are wearing the blindfold as well.
Sandwich spreads seems to be something that is very prone to aquired tastes. Almost every culture seems to have it's own spread that nobody else understands.
Aussies have vegemite, Americans have peanut butter, the Dutch have Nutella and other kinds of chocolate, here in Scandinavia they have a nasty tubed paste made from cod roe, and for the British I don't know about paste but they put whole Anchovies on their sandwiches. I'm sure there are others (Italians have pesto, but you would have to be nuts to not understand that.)
The fact is that copyright enables a whole class of work to be produced that otherwise would not have been because it would not be economically viable.
A moment ago it was a natural right, and now you are back to utilitarianism. Is it so hard to understand that we do not think that utilitarianism can EVER justify such a massive infringement on our individual liberty and integrity (and it IS massive, you cannot support copyright and be against laws like the DMCA and "SS"SCA, they are not only justified but necessary if preserving copyright is the goal).
"Everyone get's paid for information they create" is a nice ideal, as is "from each according to ability, to each according to need" but I can accept neither given the cost to my freedom that either entails.
Furthermore, copyright is precisely what enables Free (as in speech) software. Without copyright, I could take a piece of Free software, modify it, and then distribute the binary without redistributing the source. The thing that stops me doing it is the license agreement. So if you support Free software, then you already, by implication, support the idea of software licensing. The only question is which software licenses do you allow. I would argue that developers should be free to choose whatever license they want and let the market decide which licenses people find attractive.
It depends what form of Free software you support. The GPL includes ONE restriction that would not work without copyright, that is the requirement that derivative versions be released with source code. It is absolutely true that Stallman saying, "I need source code so I can hack it" is no different from Bill Gate's saying: "I need money so I can get richer."
So anybody who does not recognize the concept of "copyright" cannot support the GPLs source code requirement, but everything else about it, including the much attacked Copyleft, is not the slightest bit at odds with reality. There is nothing to indicate the free software model could not survive without the source code requirement.
It would be impossible for a bunch of programmers to get together and support themselves by developing great software. They'd have to find some other thing they could sell along with it. But suppose they didn't want to do that. Suppose they just wanted to write software - they're screwed. Those people are no longer free to just write software!
Can you believe this: It is impossible for a bunch of nose pickers to get together and support themselves by picking their noses. They'd have to find some other they could sell along with that. Suppose they just wanted to pick their noses - they're screwed. Those people are no longer free to just pick their noses!
Repeat after me: You DO NOT have a right to get paid for something just because you happen to enjoy doing it. That is not the way the world works, that is not the way the world has ever worked, and nor will it ever work that way. I can't believe that this discussion is full of people calling those who do not believe in proprietary information communists, while people like you argue otherwise on the grounds that people have some a basic right to a sallary even when the natural market forces do not support it. You cannot get much more socialist then that notion.
And because I know you people cannot keep your arguments apart and will respond with something like,
"You cannot compare programers with people who pick their noses, computer programs are important to soceity," I ask you to consider what that means. YOU are motivating the taking of peoples freedom (telling me I cannot communicate a piece of data IS taking my freedom) by the value of the software written. It is YOU, NOT STALLMAN who is arguing against peoples individual freedom with vague arguments about society.
The bullshit in this forum knows no bounds lately...
Part of the SDMI spec (what we have seen) has been that the devices should be timebomb activated, meaning that the really audacious limitations could just pop up one morning when the RIAA feels you are sufficiently in the trap. It could also make that windows software you are trusting update the player firmware to whatever ridiculous scheme they have invented that day without even warning you.
Trusting that the the company is only playing lip service to the enemy is a gamble, and not one I would recommend people taking.
This shows the real problem we are in for: the enemy controls the hardware. We can always make our own software solutions, but as long as making hardware requires large scale investments we can be sure that it will be under their control. Hardware MP3 players are not the only place where you can see this, another example are the new CDs which cannot be read correctly by CD-ROMs - making a CD drive that ignores the broken error correction codes would be completely possible, but as futile as laws like the DMCA are against us, as well they seem to work (if they are even necessary) against hardware makers.
This is why having hardware specific for each task, which is often discussed as something good, must be something we cannot allow to happen. Instead, we have to continue to ensure the existance of systems like PCs where things are done in software, which WE can control. We even have to look into moving more PC functionality into software, now that we have processors strong enough for it, as I worry that things like graphic accelerators and sound cards will be future platforms for entertainment industry UHT (User Hostile Technology). The more that is done in software, the more freedom is had by all.
In the short term, it might still be possible to find dedicated MP3 players that are not UHT (such as the burned CD ones), but in the longer term I think handhelds with strong general purpose CPUs running Linux (preferably decoding OGG of course) is the only real choice. In the longest term, there is a real risk (see for example the "SS"SCA), that general purpose programmable hardware will simply not be allowed, and we will have to hope that an illegal underground market for hardware that is not user hostile will appear...
No, you are the one that needs to understand. The basis of our society is not compensating anybody, it is individual freedom. That is the concept that you need to understand. That is the freedom for people to communicate without being told what they can and cannot send, that is the freedom to have a library, in a book shelf or on your harddisk, and not be told that some of the information is illegal and must be burned, and that is freedom to use the computer that modern life depends upon without being forced into using software that is written to control rather than to aid you.
You are the one that needs to start asking yourself. Think if it is better in a world where you can talk to your friends without every bit of information being scanned to see if it was illegal for you communicate that idea. Then think if it is better for you to tell your computer what to do, or for you're computer to tell you what you can and cannot do on behalf of government and bussiness cartels. Think whether you care more about your integrity as an individual and the promise of free communication, or some lousy economic argument advocated loudest unsurprisingly by those who are rich and stand to get richer.
We have freedom for a reason, and we do not tear it down for unsupported unnecessary utilitarianism. UNDERSTAND THIS.
Oh really, I didn't know Macromedia released a free software flash player. Could you give me a heads up on where the freely distributable and modifiable source code is?
Games are one of those things that even RMS expects to be proprietary - the real work in a gmae is not usually the engine, but the level design, plot, artwork, etc.
I don't see why this should necessarily be true, I remember some wonderful and freely released TCs (Total Conversions) for Doom and Quake, as well as seemingly endless amounts of levels. The quality of the user made levels and artwork varies, of course, but it's not like that can't be said about Free software.
I think you have differentiate between replayable and non-replayable games. In replayable games, what you see is that a couple of models (like Civilization, and multiplayer Deathmatch) have been stumbled upon that except for technical updates have remained much the same for the last ten years. In Civilization we have seen a free implementation of the concept grow up quite well, and with Deathmatch JC of course GPLed a lot of the code himself - though I am unaware of any attempts to combine the GPLed code with user levels and artwork to make a totally free Quake.
I think that that the real reason that we have not seen a lot of Free games developed is that decent proprietary versions have been around. We have seen time and time again that there aren't often enough coders who are motivated by ethics for free software to thrive when there are propreitary programs available to do the same thing (cf the lack of a free RA decoder, and the bad state of the free Flash player (and Flash is even documented!))
For non-replayable games, the kind that people play through in 10-12 hours and then don't look back to, I might agree that free development might be difficult, at least not for the same amount as come out today. I think the world can do without them.
Mailing lists. Almost all free software projects revolve around their mailing lists, just join, lurk for a while (listen to the tone, learn the basics) and then start producing sounds.
A thing to consider is that free software projects do not usually have any real management, and posts like "I am really good, how do I join?" or other attempts to offer your services will often be ignored or given a very lukewarm response. In a free software project you need to be self managed, and the only thing that will buy you status in the project is work. So simply start off by finding a set of sounds that are not very good, make new ones, put them on the web, and post about it to the mailing list. If people see that you are actually producing results on your own, you will get accepted very fast.
I think there is little doubt that industrial-size piracy does hurt the legitimate recording business and the artists. Those illegal records may be sold to totally unsuspecting stores and consumers.
Is there really any evidence that this goes on on a large scale? I spent considerable time in Indonesia during the last decade, and if you knew where to look (which wasn't that hard) you could find industrially made unlicensed copies of every piece of computer software ever written, as well as VCD (mpeg1) disks with just about any movie (telesyncs, cams, screeners, or just copied from video or original VCD), and even whole stores selling photocopied books, but until disks full of MP3s started popping up around 98-99 it was practicly impossible to find music disks...
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Their plan is to include a data track on the disks with the music in some proprietary encrypted format that can only be played with user hostile hardware and software. I don't have any explicite quote to back this up, but it's quite obvious by their comments that that is what they want.
The reason we aren't seeing this yet is that there hasn't been a single user hostile music system that hasn't been completely masacred by the good guys. CSS, Microsoft DRM, Adbobe DRM, SDMI, etc have all been cracked wide open, and new systems will continue to be so as long as they are implemented in software.
The logical step would be to convince Creative to start puting user hostile features that decrypt these music files on their cards - and if Creative are any different from the rest of technology industry don't expect to see any resistance there.
What is wrong with profiteering? Why is profit a bad thing? Profit is a great thing. It's people getting what they deserve for using their mind to create something useful.
There is nothing wrong with profiteering, but as a society we are not compelled to, and should not, bend over backwards and abandon our freedoms just so that people can profit more. The abolition of slavory stopped plantation owners and slave traders from profiteering - not because it was wrong for them to make a profit, but because it is wrong to keep people as slaves. Likewise copyright should be abolished, not because it is wrong to profit, but because it is wrong for one person to execute control over what another person says or writes.
If somebody writes something, that's theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take that away from them.
That depends what you mean by the pronoun "that" in the above sentences. If you are refering to the information itself, so that it would read:
If somebody writes something, the information is theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take the information away from them.
I could not agree more: it's a completely heinous crime when a government tells someone they are not allowed to have, and thus must destroy, a piece of information they have written (say a program that decrypts DVDs for example). If you have written some information you should get to keep it for as long as you want - certainly nobody on this side of copyright debate have argued otherwise.
If you however meant something else by "that", which it seems you did by the context though maybe without being aware of it, that changes things. It seems you meant:
If somebody writes something, the power to censor it is theirs. It IS morally wrong for any government to take the power to censor it away from them.
which is complete bullshit. As the previous poster stated, any such ability is a power (not a right, as Stallman likes to note) artificially granted to the author by society at great cost to freedom. It is justifiable only by those economic utilitarian arguments which bare a uncanny resemblance to those used against the aforementioned abolition of human slavory.
It IS morally wrong for a government to tell an individual how long or how much they are allowed to profit from their work. This is most definately a MORAL issue. Any kind of limitation put on how much a person can profit from his/her work is one thing: thievery.
And if my "work" is kidnapping people, torturing them, and using them as forced labour?
Yeah, I wonder why anybody does math with infix notation. Why can't they teach clearly more intuitive formulas like:
0 1 e i Pi * ^ + =
or:
u v * ' u ' v * v ' u * + =
in school....
Actually nowhere do people have as much change in their pockets all the time as in the US, because merchants in America set their prices without adding VAT, so you are always paying prices like $1.08 because the advertised price was rounded to $1, wheeras elsewhere the prices are rounded off with the VAT already added. Compared to that, the move from dollar notes to coins is negligable.
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
Let us not forget that evil wears many faces.
Contrary to popular belief, ritalin is not some magic drug, it works almost exactly like amphetamine. If your friend had been addicted to speed for the last ten years, would you be surprised that he was a wreck when off it? There are alcoholics that can seem completely functional for long periods of time as long as they stay drunk, but break down completely if they do not get a drink - same thing goes with most drugs.
OK, so you mean that if I happen to break it as an algorithm, this is okay, but if I happen to break its implementation as the new killerdvd format, then I may end up in a similar cell as Dmitri Sklyarov's ?
Yes, pretty much.
So this once again makes me wonder whether there is or not a bug in the DMCA :
If some technologies are based upon some free algorithm which get broken, (*breathe here*) why should the happy-genious-hacker be sued as he just pointed out some flaw in a "public" technology?
Don't try to apply logic to law, it will lead you nowhere. The reason the happy-genious-hacker gets sued is because he is a convenient target, who can easily be painted as a villian in the eyes of courts, politicians, and the public.
Actually, as he'll make the technology improve and thus get rid of the given flaw, it'd rather be the fault of the suing organization as they accepted to use a flawed1 algorithm...
You are missing a vital point that a lot of technologists seem to miss, but that has not been lost on the international media cartels. It is this: there is no non-flawed implementation of UHT.
Because UHT relies on your computer controlling you (what "user hostile" means) and in at least some sense your computer is always actually under your control, regardless of implementation it will always be possible to crack it. Hackers like Sklyarov and Beale Screamer are not helping improve the UHT technology because whatever is done it will always stay vulnerable, and the vulnerablilities they exposed were undoubtably known by the implementors. If you support the existance of UHT (or copyright law, with doubtlessly requires UHT to be enforced) then the DMCA is not only a justified, but a necessary law. In fact, the DMCA does not go nearly far enough, which is why laws like the 'SS'SCA are very necessary as well.
I guess the DMCA seriously sucks because of its lack of consistance :
They should rather not use any protection at all than inventing some stupid placebo and whining it's been broken into by some clever hacker.
The DMCA provides the international media cartels with a weapon to harrass technologists who want to use computers freely as they see fit rather than under the control of the cartels' authority. It may not be too helpful against software hackers, though it has certainly slowed down many projects, but it certainly works for other purposes (consider why you will never see a CD-ROM drive that by default ignores the broken error-correction codes on those new "copy-proof" CDs).
1 : though this argumentation is purely 100% hypothetical, I assume there are flaws until one mathematically demonstrates there aren't...
Unfortunately that puts you in a quite a bad place, as to my knowledge there are no(*) current ciphers that are mathematically proven to be uncrackable. There are a couple of, at least hypothetical, asymmetric ciphers that have been shown to be "NP-complete" meaning, roughly, that if they can be cracked then a whole class of problems nobody has found any answers to yet can be solved as well (you may have heard of the N != NP conjecture), but the common ones (RSA, DSA, ElGamal) are not even that. Newly designed ciphers like Rijndael/AES (which is a symmetric cipher, so should not be confused with those mentioned before) are not proved to be mathematically secure, but simply engineered to be secure against all currently known attack vectors.
(*) In order to avoid the obligatory lamer responding with ("There is a provably secure cipher, it's called One Time Tap"), I digress that there is a provably secure cipher called a one time pad, which uses keys as large as the messages that can only be used once. OTP can only be used as a type of secrecy delay - if you have a secure channel between two parties at one point in time, they can exchange random key data that will allow them to securely communicate the exact same amount of data securely over an insecure channel later. There is also the algorithm that I believe came from a student of Adi Shamir last year which hid the data in a stream of random data so large there would be no way to cache it long enough to crack the cyrpto (in theory anyways).
Now, if I happen to successfully develop an AES "decryptor", may I publish its source code without infringing the DMCA [tompox.com] ?
The inventors of Rijndael, who seem to be exceptionally intelligent and sane people, would probably be more than happy to be challenged with a real attack on the algorithm. Unless you have a PHD in Mathematics specializing cryptoanalysis you probably needn't waste your breath though.
Of course, if the media industry has had time to implement AES in one of their ridiculous UHT (User Hostile Tech) schemes, you may well end up under legal attack, as could, very possibly, the authors of the algorithm themselves should they find a flaw. It has been noted that the media industries will probably not go after "academics" in the short term considering how the Felten affair blew up on them (Russian's apparently don't count).
Just because the enemy has usurped the term "secure" for their UHT does not mean that you should confuse all encryption with DMCA etc. These algorithms really are secure, based on real math that most people agree not even the NSA can break, and do not rely on stupid "gun in mouth" schemes to keep people from breaking them as UHT invariably does.
Now that copying records has moved into the digital age with MP3s, it is about time that bootlegging conserts did as well. Forget the DAT recorder, all you'll need is an iPaq with wavelan.
I do get it, but if you go look at exactly what they have, and read the papers they have published, you will find that the simple interfaces are the only thing they have. There are no new algorithms for achieving emergent behavior presented - the only implementation they seem to have made is a simulation of a Freenet based system. It is the correct approach, but not really newsworthy until they have something to show for it.
To my knowledge, there is one software project currently in actual use that takes advantage of emergent behavior, and I wrote a large part of it. I'm quite sure that I do get it.
They have the right idea when it comes to studying large distributed networks. Network emergent properties is absolutely the most interesting thing in that field, and I strongly believe that it is a much better model for trying to handle highly dynamic networks than trying to route within a rigid structure as lot of object location networks have been designed to do.
That said, peer to peer network simulators and frameworks are a dime a dozen - anybody who was at the last O'Reilly "P2P" conference would have noticed that everybody, their mother, and their great-aunt Petrunella seems to have one. Setting up a bunch of java interfaces is not that hard, and calling a Node a "Nest" and giving it the following methods:
public interface Nest {
void request(Request request,
ReplyListener listener);
void addService(AntFactory factory);
void addNeighbor(NestId nid);
void removeNeighbor(NestId nid);
NestId[] getNeighbors();
}
is not exactly a radical new design.
What is really needed are more examples of analytical work regarding the emergence of and utility of routing properties in the known algorithms, as well as other radically new routing schemes besides Freenet. I'm glad that these people have their framework in place, but it really isn't news until they have something to show for it.
That is a malicious attack on the network. There is nothing wrong with that, Freenet clearly needs to be able to handle such malicious attacks if it is to survive, but it is malicious attack all the same...
I don't think I ever described it as a "natural right". I'm pointing out that copyright serves a very valuable purpose in society.
I took the term "natural right" from your earlier claim that '"natural market forces" do support [proprietary software]'. Since you thus included copyright as a natural market force, I don't think it was a leap to assume you claimed it as a natural right. I also did not claim that Freedom of speech was natural right. I usually refer to it as a fundamental liberty.
Actually, selling proprietary software doesn't even need copyright - just contracts (you do support contracts, right?).
A contract giving up your right to life would not hold up legally - you cannot sign a document allowing somebody to kill you, especially not for money or services in return. Nor can you sign a contract selling yourself in slavory, regardless of whether you want to or not.
If you cannot sign away you right to life, or your freedom of self determination, is it such a big leap to say you should not be allowed to sign away your freedom of speech either? I don't see any difference.
The only piece that copyright adds is that it prevents you from laundering away the contract via intermediary (i.e. a third party who didn't sign the contract that somehow got ahold of it would be able to copy it without limitation were it not for copyright).
That's a pretty big "only", don't you think? In fact it is a huge difference - if I sign a document, then I have considered it and made a choice. But I am never given a choice about copyrighted material - much as I try, you cannot live today without being constantly exposed to copyrighted information, and thus without being given any choice I am filled with information that law restricts me from communicating freely.
If you cannot see the gag, it is only because you are wearing the blindfold as well.
Sandwich spreads seems to be something that is very prone to aquired tastes. Almost every culture seems to have it's own spread that nobody else understands.
Aussies have vegemite, Americans have peanut butter, the Dutch have Nutella and other kinds of chocolate, here in Scandinavia they have a nasty tubed paste made from cod roe, and for the British I don't know about paste but they put whole Anchovies on their sandwiches. I'm sure there are others (Italians have pesto, but you would have to be nuts to not understand that.)
I said (nt)
The fact is that copyright enables a whole class of work to be produced that otherwise would not have been because it would not be economically viable.
A moment ago it was a natural right, and now you are back to utilitarianism. Is it so hard to understand that we do not think that utilitarianism can EVER justify such a massive infringement on our individual liberty and integrity (and it IS massive, you cannot support copyright and be against laws like the DMCA and "SS"SCA, they are not only justified but necessary if preserving copyright is the goal).
"Everyone get's paid for information they create" is a nice ideal, as is "from each according to ability, to each according to need" but I can accept neither given the cost to my freedom that either entails.
Furthermore, copyright is precisely what enables Free (as in speech) software. Without copyright, I could take a piece of Free software, modify it, and then distribute the binary without redistributing the source. The thing that stops me doing it is the license agreement. So if you support Free software, then you already, by implication, support the idea of software licensing. The only question is which software licenses do you allow. I would argue that developers should be free to choose whatever license they want and let the market decide which licenses people find attractive.
It depends what form of Free software you support. The GPL includes ONE restriction that would not work without copyright, that is the requirement that derivative versions be released with source code. It is absolutely true that Stallman saying, "I need source code so I can hack it" is no different from Bill Gate's saying: "I need money so I can get richer."
So anybody who does not recognize the concept of "copyright" cannot support the GPLs source code requirement, but everything else about it, including the much attacked Copyleft, is not the slightest bit at odds with reality. There is nothing to indicate the free software model could not survive without the source code requirement.
They can ban it, they probably could not get rid of it, but they could certainly ban it. Think drugs...
It would be impossible for a bunch of programmers to get together and support themselves by developing great software. They'd have to find some other thing they could sell along with it. But suppose they didn't want to do that. Suppose they just wanted to write software - they're screwed. Those people are no longer free to just write software!
Can you believe this: It is impossible for a bunch of nose pickers to get together and support themselves by picking their noses. They'd have to find some other they could sell along with that. Suppose they just wanted to pick their noses - they're screwed. Those people are no longer free to just pick their noses!
Repeat after me: You DO NOT have a right to get paid for something just because you happen to enjoy doing it. That is not the way the world works, that is not the way the world has ever worked, and nor will it ever work that way. I can't believe that this discussion is full of people calling those who do not believe in proprietary information communists, while people like you argue otherwise on the grounds that people have some a basic right to a sallary even when the natural market forces do not support it. You cannot get much more socialist then that notion.
And because I know you people cannot keep your arguments apart and will respond with something like,
"You cannot compare programers with people who pick their noses, computer programs are important to soceity," I ask you to consider what that means. YOU are motivating the taking of peoples freedom (telling me I cannot communicate a piece of data IS taking my freedom) by the value of the software written. It is YOU, NOT STALLMAN who is arguing against peoples individual freedom with vague arguments about society.
The bullshit in this forum knows no bounds lately...
Part of the SDMI spec (what we have seen) has been that the devices should be timebomb activated, meaning that the really audacious limitations could just pop up one morning when the RIAA feels you are sufficiently in the trap. It could also make that windows software you are trusting update the player firmware to whatever ridiculous scheme they have invented that day without even warning you.
Trusting that the the company is only playing lip service to the enemy is a gamble, and not one I would recommend people taking.
This shows the real problem we are in for: the enemy controls the hardware. We can always make our own software solutions, but as long as making hardware requires large scale investments we can be sure that it will be under their control. Hardware MP3 players are not the only place where you can see this, another example are the new CDs which cannot be read correctly by CD-ROMs - making a CD drive that ignores the broken error correction codes would be completely possible, but as futile as laws like the DMCA are against us, as well they seem to work (if they are even necessary) against hardware makers.
This is why having hardware specific for each task, which is often discussed as something good, must be something we cannot allow to happen. Instead, we have to continue to ensure the existance of systems like PCs where things are done in software, which WE can control. We even have to look into moving more PC functionality into software, now that we have processors strong enough for it, as I worry that things like graphic accelerators and sound cards will be future platforms for entertainment industry UHT (User Hostile Technology). The more that is done in software, the more freedom is had by all.
In the short term, it might still be possible to find dedicated MP3 players that are not UHT (such as the burned CD ones), but in the longer term I think handhelds with strong general purpose CPUs running Linux (preferably decoding OGG of course) is the only real choice. In the longest term, there is a real risk (see for example the "SS"SCA), that general purpose programmable hardware will simply not be allowed, and we will have to hope that an illegal underground market for hardware that is not user hostile will appear...
No, you are the one that needs to understand. The basis of our society is not compensating anybody, it is individual freedom. That is the concept that you need to understand. That is the freedom for people to communicate without being told what they can and cannot send, that is the freedom to have a library, in a book shelf or on your harddisk, and not be told that some of the information is illegal and must be burned, and that is freedom to use the computer that modern life depends upon without being forced into using software that is written to control rather than to aid you.
You are the one that needs to start asking yourself. Think if it is better in a world where you can talk to your friends without every bit of information being scanned to see if it was illegal for you communicate that idea. Then think if it is better for you to tell your computer what to do, or for you're computer to tell you what you can and cannot do on behalf of government and bussiness cartels. Think whether you care more about your integrity as an individual and the promise of free communication, or some lousy economic argument advocated loudest unsurprisingly by those who are rich and stand to get richer.
We have freedom for a reason, and we do not tear it down for unsupported unnecessary utilitarianism. UNDERSTAND THIS.
Oh really, I didn't know Macromedia released a free software flash player. Could you give me a heads up on where the freely distributable and modifiable source code is?
Games are one of those things that even RMS expects to be proprietary - the real work in a gmae is not usually the engine, but the level design, plot, artwork, etc.
I don't see why this should necessarily be true, I remember some wonderful and freely released TCs (Total Conversions) for Doom and Quake, as well as seemingly endless amounts of levels. The quality of the user made levels and artwork varies, of course, but it's not like that can't be said about Free software.
I think you have differentiate between replayable and non-replayable games. In replayable games, what you see is that a couple of models (like Civilization, and multiplayer Deathmatch) have been stumbled upon that except for technical updates have remained much the same for the last ten years. In Civilization we have seen a free implementation of the concept grow up quite well, and with Deathmatch JC of course GPLed a lot of the code himself - though I am unaware of any attempts to combine the GPLed code with user levels and artwork to make a totally free Quake.
I think that that the real reason that we have not seen a lot of Free games developed is that decent proprietary versions have been around. We have seen time and time again that there aren't often enough coders who are motivated by ethics for free software to thrive when there are propreitary programs available to do the same thing (cf the lack of a free RA decoder, and the bad state of the free Flash player (and Flash is even documented!))
For non-replayable games, the kind that people play through in 10-12 hours and then don't look back to, I might agree that free development might be difficult, at least not for the same amount as come out today. I think the world can do without them.
Mailing lists. Almost all free software projects revolve around their mailing lists, just join, lurk for a while (listen to the tone, learn the basics) and then start producing sounds.
A thing to consider is that free software projects do not usually have any real management, and posts like "I am really good, how do I join?" or other attempts to offer your services will often be ignored or given a very lukewarm response. In a free software project you need to be self managed, and the only thing that will buy you status in the project is work. So simply start off by finding a set of sounds that are not very good, make new ones, put them on the web, and post about it to the mailing list. If people see that you are actually producing results on your own, you will get accepted very fast.
I think there is little doubt that industrial-size piracy does hurt the legitimate recording business and the artists. Those illegal records may be sold to totally unsuspecting stores and consumers.
Is there really any evidence that this goes on on a large scale? I spent considerable time in Indonesia during the last decade, and if you knew where to look (which wasn't that hard) you could find industrially made unlicensed copies of every piece of computer software ever written, as well as VCD (mpeg1) disks with just about any movie (telesyncs, cams, screeners, or just copied from video or original VCD), and even whole stores selling photocopied books, but until disks full of MP3s started popping up around 98-99 it was practicly impossible to find music disks...