It seems to me that the only chance that a small console company has in the fight with the two biggest and badest boys on the block is to do exactly what they will never do, and make the it a Free (as in speech) and open platform that caters to the users rather than to corporate interests and profite motives of control.
Yet, from what I read of the audio interview transcripts the other day, you seem to be taking the opposite approach, and are going to play the same game of attempting to control and enslave the console user as they do. Certainly going out of your way to lock off the ability of hackers to tweak and change the machine is a step in that direction, and the quote that could only be interpreted as that you would not allow certain kinds of applications (Napster type) on your platform would seem to be a confirmation.
Openess and the ability to run those incredibly popular applications that Microsoft and Sony, being in bed with the "intellectual property" maffia, will never allow on their closed platforms would be fantastic. A machine that is not only a console, but that works for the users and not against them (like the MS and Sony machines will in many ways) could be something major, while another attempt to build a PC with Freedom and Openess removed is doomed to soon be forgotten.
Which road are you taking, and if you truly intend to criple your machine and it's users to suit the desires of the music and movie industries, how do you defend that to us as potential customers?
Good work Slash, I used a less than sign and it cut out half my post (litterally cut it off too, it's not in the source).
I also to note that the only thing you can do in a broadcast model is to try to make Tu much smaller than Cu. This can be done by using a lean binary protocol (which Gnutella does) and using a lean transport like UDP (which Gnutella doesn't IMHO). But in the end you cannot beat the mathematics, a*N^2 will always catch up b*N regardless of the values of a and b. It's like how you can only optimize code that much if the underlying algorithm sucks.
From what I have read about Gnutella they also "scale by seperation", meaning that messages do not actually reach the entire network, but only to some Nn number of nodes (this what they refer to as the horizon). Optimally, you would want to choose Nn so that you get equality in the equations from my last port. That may work, but as soon as you have hit Nn number users, you loose the network effect as new users joining will no longer bring any additional value to other users - which defeats the entire purpose IMHO.
Gnutella was a nice hack, but I don't believe it has a future.
Yes, I simplified it, and things are never the same in reality as they are on paper. But the basic observation that traffic grows quadratically (or close to quadratically) while capacity only grows linearly does hold. It is a little like ordo calculations for algorithms - running Quicksort will not take exactly n*log(n) operations and a program will running it will never be ideal, but that does not change the fact that there is always an n for which it is faster than any implementation of an O(n^2) sorting.
I can't understand why this is news to anyone. Those of us who spend time thinking about these things said it right away when Gnutella was released, and we had discussed and rejected the broadcast model for routing several times before that (see the Freenet development list archives if you don't believe me).
The Math behind it is simple:
- Every user that that adds Cu amount of capacity to the network (on average).
- Every user also adds Tu amount of traffic (also on average). However, because of the broadcast nature that traffic is sent to all users, so with N users, each user generates Tu*N amount of traffic.
This means that the total capacity of the network is:
C = Cu*N
(Capacity per user times the number of users). The total traffic on the other hand is:
T = Tu * N * N = Tu * N^2.
For the network to work C needs to be greater than T, if T C. You simple cannot win using a broadcat model.
On the Freenet-dev list we have a standing rule that two words are indecent and offensive: "centralize" and "broadcast". We think we can pull it off without them, but it makes everything 1000% more difficult, which is the simple answer to why Freenet is developing more slowly then the one hundred million Napster and Gnutella variants outthere. That, and the fact that you are not helping us...
"They say they're working on it, so when they do get that done, then I'll be more likely to go and play. "
No we aren't. We are working on updates, but the updates will be non-destructive, ie the act of uploading a new version will not make the old version go away. Self censorship will not be allowed.
Re:You haven't defended Free Speech until...
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
I wasn't flaming him, I was simply alluding to my opinion that Freedom of Speech is an all or nothing thing - either you support the proliferation of any thought or idea, or you are against it. As far as freedom of speech is concerned, there is no difference between a Nazi and a person who tries to shut one up.
That is not to say I do not hate a Nazi. One of things that drives me is the thought that if there had been a system doing what we are tyring to achieve in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, the Nazi's would never have been able to silence the voice of dissent the way they did. Is letting them talk such a large price for the goal of never letting them making reality of their words again?
I understand the ideal of dissociating the protocol from the implementation, and why it is good, but it is simply a luxury that we cannot afford. The current implementation is an experiment - it is based on a concept that has never been tried before, and an observation about data topology that has never been proved beyond a few controlled simulations.
There is simply no way we can draft a protocol today for the features that are still pending inclusion in Freenet, or for the changes we will doubtlessly have to make in order for the current features to work smoothly, because we have no clue what it will have to look like. And nor does, to my knowledge, anybody else.
This is the reason why Freenet appears to progress slowly - we are experimenting with what works and what doesn't with every step into the darkness. I do not know any other way to go about this.
(And no, I'm not being defensive at all. I'm sure you want only the best, most people do, but I feel you are jumping to conclusions without insight into the situation.)
Re:How can I assert my own ethics on FreeNet?
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 3
The simple answer is that we have written Freenet for people whose ethics include the freedom of speech - even that speech which they do not like.
Since yours obviously do not, the way you can assert your ethics is simply not to run a Freenet node, and maybe by sending some money to one of the organisations who are on your side (MPAA, AFA, the Chinese communist government, etc).
You have misunderstood what Freenet keys are. Internally they are cryptologically derived arrays of bytes - nothing that can be described via URNs, URIs or whatever.
We have sketched up a standard for describing keys of the different types as URIs. If somebody wants to make one for describing them as URNs, go ahead - it does not effect the network, only the clients that need to turn them into keys.
I have not spent much time in corporate environments, but enough that the concept for a "working group" sends chills down my spine. No beuracracy here please....
We will of course write an RFC, but we need to to know how we want the protocol to work ourselves before that - and we are still far from that.
Not going to work if the MPAA takes it seriously. Because of American pressure, the Swedish government passed (without hardly telling the people) a change to the Freedom of Information laws in the constitution in order to make Co$ happy.
I would get a link but the blurbs in the press were so tiny I doubt they even made it online...
This must be hundreth time that somebody who posted leeks "anonymously" got caught because Yahoo turned over their personal identification. One would have had to live with one's head under a rock not to know that Yahoo can't be trusted for shit. So why do these idiots keep doing it so that they can get caught??
There are ways of staying more or less anonymous on the web, or at least making things dificult for would be censors. This ranges from submitting to a site that at least has a good track record (such as Slashdot) to going through a rewebber like Anonymizer, to using a true Anonymity service like ZKS Freedom or posting to the Usenet via a Mixmaster remailer.
It's hard to feel sorry for somebody so stupid that they thought not having their name on the post was enough to stay anonymous...
Easy enough, simply put an "effective" access control on the book preventing more then one person from reading it, and then get them on "circumvention".
Since the DeCSS trial has showed us how relative the word "effective" is (to the surprise of those of us who though it had something to do with working as advertised), a pair of those "secret spy glasses" toys for kids is probably enough.
As I understand it, the reason that they were not able to find any buyers for the network is that it is built so specifically for telephone coverage that it cannot be used for anything else. It can't be used for Internet (at least not at decent speeds), it can't be used for any kind of broadcasting, it can't be partially deorbited to only provide partial coverage, etc etc.
So the really amazing thing is not that the business plan they had failed, because most business plans fail, but the fact that they spent billions and billions of dollars putting up a network of sattelites, so sure of their own brilliance that they didn't make it the slightest bit flexible. Apparently Motorola is full of yes-men, and nobody even stopped to say "What if we can't sell phone service?".
It is like orbiting Playstations when they should have put up Linux loaded PCs.
Well, theres that and the whole "let's give missile technology to dictatorial China so they can launch our sattelites (which we will then burn up)" thing too. I'm not even going to say "conspiracy"...
I was able to load www.sex.com in babelfish, and the domain i still www.babelfish.altavista.com but the porn is there in all it's glory. Sure the text is is in German, but that isn't what most people are going to be after....
Or does censorware already block Babelfish? I mean being able to read what those french and german damn foreign perverts have to say can only corrupt America's youth anyways!
And I who thought that good techies were hard to find for companies. Certainly if companies are so desperate they are willing to give out cars as signing bonuses, they ought to be able to afford treating applicants with an inch of dignity and respect.
Shouldn't it be you out asking the company to sign an NDA not to reveal any personal information they might learn about you during the interview? I hate to sound like the socialist, but maybe the new generation of tech workers are finding out that those stupid union things they have been laughing at have a purpose after all.
No, I guess this European has missed the whole American dream thing again. After all, who needs integrity when you can have an expensive car?
Limiting the file size to 100kB will drastically hurt this systems ability to support the freedom of speech. Unlike the days of the original Publius and the Federalist papers, not all speech today is, or can be, in the form of text.
Next time Will Smith gets a video of the NSA killing a Senator he will be able to upload it to Freenet. Will he be able to place it on Publius?
Does it say something about the sick influence of money in our world that they are willing to tolerate the usage of the system by child pornographers, but not by people who don't feel like giving money to the RIAA?
As one of the head programmers of Freenet, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for making it possible. If we had not had your programming language, Java, and your editor, vi, I doubt we would ever have been able to get an implementation of Freenet working. You made it happen.
Since you must have known that people would one day use your programs to write programs that people could use to avoid censorship laws, you would obviously not have written them if that is not what you wanted, and I'm glad you take responsiblity for it. I hope we will have plenty of time to discuss how the people should be controlled so that they don't learn how to do bad things while in our shared jail cell.
Sincerely, Oskar Sandberg.
(And since you asked CmdrTaco, no I'm not scared. Are we men or are we mice people?)
Of course we don't like this. The system is nothing more then a slightly glorified CSS. It still requires that the decrypting and playing/displaying be in a controlled environment following the agenda of somebody other then the user. You think you'll ever see an open source player for this? Think they are going to be happy when somebody reverse engineers it and makes a tool that write the raw data to disk rather then hardware?
The idea of controlling information is just wrong. It doesn't matter how good the system is, by defenition it has to mean that you are infringing on the freedom of viewer and somehow controlling his actions. You may LIKE that, but I sure as hell don't. - We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
IANAC but from what I can see this is really just another public key algorithm. Now, considering that there are not that many different variants of pkc, that might be an accomplishment in itself (if it is actually any good), but can anybody see what makes this better for doing the *AA's dirty work then any other cipher?
I would almost be inclined to guess that these guys are intentionally putting the "Copyright protection" spin on the system for monetary reasons. Everybody knows that the content industries are willing to cover in gold anybody who can give them the instruments the they need to keep and solidify their control of our lives. Since these guys are obviously not in it for altruistic reasons (software patent and all), I would guess this has to do with selective marketing at the most desperate and stupid customer.
However, what the *AAs fail to see is that this is not a question of mathematics, but one of logic. I cannot listen to a song and not have access to the information - at least not until the install a chip in my brain. No new cipher is ever going to change that.
As to Michael's comment, laws to try to ensure that technology doesn't infringe on fair use are just as ridiculous as laws that try to make sure that it does (aka DMCA). Are we going to start forcing people to decrypt information under certain conditions? Put laws on how software media players can be designed? Mandate that people reveal their code even if they don't want to? I don't care about the intentions, that is not a mandate I want to give the government.
The fact is that the system proposed, like every other such systems, relies of closed hardware and software keeping you from having control of your own computer to work. And the vote against that is not something that we should do politically, it is something we should do capitalisticly. Listen to what Stallman has to say about why Free software is an issue of consumer freedom and democracy, and stop inviting corporate controlled judasware into your house.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
By the same token, a true limerick (AFAIK) is supposed to start with there "There was a man" (or woman, whatever).
So something like
There was a poster called Eleven, who though karma could get you to heaven, but little did he know, up there ACs run the show, so down is where he will be headen'.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yupp, 55% of all coders are addicted to coke...
The other 45% prefer Mountain Dew...
Um, the cipher they selected for DES was originally called Lucifer...
It seems to me that the only chance that a small console company has in the fight with the two biggest and badest boys on the block is to do exactly what they will never do, and make the it a Free (as in speech) and open platform that caters to the users rather than to corporate interests and profite motives of control.
Yet, from what I read of the audio interview transcripts the other day, you seem to be taking the opposite approach, and are going to play the same game of attempting to control and enslave the console user as they do. Certainly going out of your way to lock off the ability of hackers to tweak and change the machine is a step in that direction, and the quote that could only be interpreted as that you would not allow certain kinds of applications (Napster type) on your platform would seem to be a confirmation.
Openess and the ability to run those incredibly popular applications that Microsoft and Sony, being in bed with the "intellectual property" maffia, will never allow on their closed platforms would be fantastic. A machine that is not only a console, but that works for the users and not against them (like the MS and Sony machines will in many ways) could be something major, while another attempt to build a PC with Freedom and Openess removed is doomed to soon be forgotten.
Which road are you taking, and if you truly intend to criple your machine and it's users to suit the desires of the music and movie industries, how do you defend that to us as potential customers?
Good work Slash, I used a less than sign and it cut out half my post (litterally cut it off too, it's not in the source).
I also to note that the only thing you can do in a broadcast model is to try to make Tu much smaller than Cu. This can be done by using a lean binary protocol (which Gnutella does) and using a lean transport like UDP (which Gnutella doesn't IMHO). But in the end you cannot beat the mathematics, a*N^2 will always catch up b*N regardless of the values of a and b. It's like how you can only optimize code that much if the underlying algorithm sucks.
From what I have read about Gnutella they also "scale by seperation", meaning that messages do not actually reach the entire network, but only to some Nn number of nodes (this what they refer to as the horizon). Optimally, you would want to choose Nn so that you get equality in the equations from my last port. That may work, but as soon as you have hit Nn number users, you loose the network effect as new users joining will no longer bring any additional value to other users - which defeats the entire purpose IMHO.
Gnutella was a nice hack, but I don't believe it has a future.
Yes, I simplified it, and things are never the same in reality as they are on paper. But the basic observation that traffic grows quadratically (or close to quadratically) while capacity only grows linearly does hold. It is a little like ordo calculations for algorithms - running Quicksort will not take exactly n*log(n) operations and a program will running it will never be ideal, but that does not change the fact that there is always an n for which it is faster than any implementation of an O(n^2) sorting.
I can't understand why this is news to anyone. Those of us who spend time thinking about these things said it right away when Gnutella was released, and we had discussed and rejected the broadcast model for routing several times before that (see the Freenet development list archives if you don't believe me).
The Math behind it is simple:
- Every user that that adds Cu amount of capacity to the network (on average).
- Every user also adds Tu amount of traffic (also on average). However, because of the broadcast nature that traffic is sent to all users, so with N users, each user generates Tu*N amount of traffic.
This means that the total capacity of the network is:
C = Cu*N
(Capacity per user times the number of users). The total traffic on the other hand is:
T = Tu * N * N = Tu * N^2.
For the network to work C needs to be greater than T, if T C. You simple cannot win using a broadcat model.
On the Freenet-dev list we have a standing rule that two words are indecent and offensive: "centralize" and "broadcast". We think we can pull it off without them, but it makes everything 1000% more difficult, which is the simple answer to why Freenet is developing more slowly then the one hundred million Napster and Gnutella variants outthere. That, and the fact that you are not helping us...
"They say they're working on it, so when they do get that done, then I'll be more likely to go and play. "
No we aren't. We are working on updates, but the updates will be non-destructive, ie the act of uploading a new version will not make the old version go away. Self censorship will not be allowed.
I wasn't flaming him, I was simply alluding to my opinion that Freedom of Speech is an all or nothing thing - either you support the proliferation of any thought or idea, or you are against it. As far as freedom of speech is concerned, there is no difference between a Nazi and a person who tries to shut one up.
That is not to say I do not hate a Nazi. One of things that drives me is the thought that if there had been a system doing what we are tyring to achieve in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, the Nazi's would never have been able to silence the voice of dissent the way they did. Is letting them talk such a large price for the goal of never letting them making reality of their words again?
I understand the ideal of dissociating the protocol from the implementation, and why it is good, but it is simply a luxury that we cannot afford. The current implementation is an experiment - it is based on a concept that has never been tried before, and an observation about data topology that has never been proved beyond a few controlled simulations.
There is simply no way we can draft a protocol today for the features that are still pending inclusion in Freenet, or for the changes we will doubtlessly have to make in order for the current features to work smoothly, because we have no clue what it will have to look like. And nor does, to my knowledge, anybody else.
This is the reason why Freenet appears to progress slowly - we are experimenting with what works and what doesn't with every step into the darkness. I do not know any other way to go about this.
(And no, I'm not being defensive at all. I'm sure you want only the best, most people do, but I feel you are jumping to conclusions without insight into the situation.)
The simple answer is that we have written Freenet for people whose ethics include the freedom of speech - even that speech which they do not like.
Since yours obviously do not, the way you can assert your ethics is simply not to run a Freenet node, and maybe by sending some money to one of the organisations who are on your side (MPAA, AFA, the Chinese communist government, etc).
You have misunderstood what Freenet keys are. Internally they are cryptologically derived arrays of bytes - nothing that can be described via URNs, URIs or whatever.
We have sketched up a standard for describing keys of the different types as URIs. If somebody wants to make one for describing them as URNs, go ahead - it does not effect the network, only the clients that need to turn them into keys.
I have not spent much time in corporate environments, but enough that the concept for a "working group" sends chills down my spine. No beuracracy here please....
We will of course write an RFC, but we need to to know how we want the protocol to work ourselves before that - and we are still far from that.
Not going to work if the MPAA takes it seriously. Because of American pressure, the Swedish government passed (without hardly telling the people) a change to the Freedom of Information laws in the constitution in order to make Co$ happy.
I would get a link but the blurbs in the press were so tiny I doubt they even made it online...
This must be hundreth time that somebody who posted leeks "anonymously" got caught because Yahoo turned over their personal identification. One would have had to live with one's head under a rock not to know that Yahoo can't be trusted for shit. So why do these idiots keep doing it so that they can get caught??
There are ways of staying more or less anonymous on the web, or at least making things dificult for would be censors. This ranges from submitting to a site that at least has a good track record (such as Slashdot) to going through a rewebber like Anonymizer, to using a true Anonymity service like ZKS Freedom or posting to the Usenet via a Mixmaster remailer.
It's hard to feel sorry for somebody so stupid that they thought not having their name on the post was enough to stay anonymous...
How does this work?
Easy enough, simply put an "effective" access control on the book preventing more then one person from reading it, and then get them on "circumvention".
Since the DeCSS trial has showed us how relative the word "effective" is (to the surprise of those of us who though it had something to do with working as advertised), a pair of those "secret spy glasses" toys for kids is probably enough.
As I understand it, the reason that they were not able to find any buyers for the network is that it is built so specifically for telephone coverage that it cannot be used for anything else. It can't be used for Internet (at least not at decent speeds), it can't be used for any kind of broadcasting, it can't be partially deorbited to only provide partial coverage, etc etc.
So the really amazing thing is not that the business plan they had failed, because most business plans fail, but the fact that they spent billions and billions of dollars putting up a network of sattelites, so sure of their own brilliance that they didn't make it the slightest bit flexible. Apparently Motorola is full of yes-men, and nobody even stopped to say "What if we can't sell phone service?".
It is like orbiting Playstations when they should have put up Linux loaded PCs.
Well, theres that and the whole "let's give missile technology to dictatorial China so they can launch our sattelites (which we will then burn up)" thing too. I'm not even going to say "conspiracy"...
I was able to load www.sex.com in babelfish, and the domain i still www.babelfish.altavista.com but the porn is there in all it's glory. Sure the text is is in German, but that isn't what most people are going to be after....
Or does censorware already block Babelfish? I mean being able to read what those french and german damn foreign perverts have to say can only corrupt America's youth anyways!
And I who thought that good techies were hard to find for companies. Certainly if companies are so desperate they are willing to give out cars as signing bonuses, they ought to be able to afford treating applicants with an inch of dignity and respect.
Shouldn't it be you out asking the company to sign an NDA not to reveal any personal information they might learn about you during the interview? I hate to sound like the socialist, but maybe the new generation of tech workers are finding out that those stupid union things they have been laughing at have a purpose after all.
No, I guess this European has missed the whole American dream thing again. After all, who needs integrity when you can have an expensive car?
It's called an Information Dispersal Algorithm, or IDA.
See: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/jacm/1
Limiting the file size to 100kB will drastically hurt this systems ability to support the freedom of speech. Unlike the days of the original Publius and the Federalist papers, not all speech today is, or can be, in the form of text.
Next time Will Smith gets a video of the NSA killing a Senator he will be able to upload it to Freenet. Will he be able to place it on Publius?
Does it say something about the sick influence of money in our world that they are willing to tolerate the usage of the system by child pornographers, but not by people who don't feel like giving money to the RIAA?
Dear Bill Joy,
As one of the head programmers of Freenet, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for making it possible. If we had not had your programming language, Java, and your editor, vi, I doubt we would ever have been able to get an implementation of Freenet working. You made it happen.
Since you must have known that people would one day use your programs to write programs that people could use to avoid censorship laws, you would obviously not have written them if that is not what you wanted, and I'm glad you take responsiblity for it. I hope we will have plenty of time to discuss how the people should be controlled so that they don't learn how to do bad things while in our shared jail cell.
Sincerely, Oskar Sandberg.
(And since you asked CmdrTaco, no I'm not scared. Are we men or are we mice people?)
Of course we don't like this. The system is nothing more then a slightly glorified CSS. It still requires that the decrypting and playing/displaying be in a controlled environment following the agenda of somebody other then the user. You think you'll ever see an open source player for this? Think they are going to be happy when somebody reverse engineers it and makes a tool that write the raw data to disk rather then hardware?
The idea of controlling information is just wrong. It doesn't matter how good the system is, by defenition it has to mean that you are infringing on the freedom of viewer and somehow controlling his actions. You may LIKE that, but I sure as hell don't.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
IANAC but from what I can see this is really just another public key algorithm. Now, considering that there are not that many different variants of pkc, that might be an accomplishment in itself (if it is actually any good), but can anybody see what makes this better for doing the *AA's dirty work then any other cipher?
I would almost be inclined to guess that these guys are intentionally putting the "Copyright protection" spin on the system for monetary reasons. Everybody knows that the content industries are willing to cover in gold anybody who can give them the instruments the they need to keep and solidify their control of our lives. Since these guys are obviously not in it for altruistic reasons (software patent and all), I would guess this has to do with selective marketing at the most desperate and stupid customer.
However, what the *AAs fail to see is that this is not a question of mathematics, but one of logic. I cannot listen to a song and not have access to the information - at least not until the install a chip in my brain. No new cipher is ever going to change that.
As to Michael's comment, laws to try to ensure that technology doesn't infringe on fair use are just as ridiculous as laws that try to make sure that it does (aka DMCA). Are we going to start forcing people to decrypt information under certain conditions? Put laws on how software media players can be designed? Mandate that people reveal their code even if they don't want to? I don't care about the intentions, that is not a mandate I want to give the government.
The fact is that the system proposed, like every other such systems, relies of closed hardware and software keeping you from having control of your own computer to work. And the vote against that is not something that we should do politically, it is something we should do capitalisticly. Listen to what Stallman has to say about why Free software is an issue of consumer freedom and democracy, and stop inviting corporate controlled judasware into your house.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
and I meant to post that at 1. I think I need to stop using Slashdot in the morning...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Umm, I must have hit the wrong button when I moderated this... maybe if I post here my moderation will be undone.
Sorry Booker.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
By the same token, a true limerick (AFAIK) is supposed to start with there "There was a man" (or woman, whatever).
So something like
There was a poster called Eleven,
who though karma could get you to heaven,
but little did he know,
up there ACs run the show,
so down is where he will be headen'.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.