"Information wants to be free". So, we were wrong to ever create copyright law? The GPL is a joke and shouldn't be enforcable? How about a little basic consistency here.
In my opinion, yes. And, I have yet to hear Stallman or anyone attack us for the fact binary code based on GPLed code that is uploaded cannot be removed from Freenet. Does anybody here truly believe that distributed data networks pose a serious threat to free software because people will use them to distribute mods without source? If you do, lay off the crack pipe for a second.
Why do we need a music industry? Because, as a species, we're a bunch of cheap-ass fucks who would not, in fact, pay for art if we didn't have to.
Well maybe then, as a species, we don't deserve any music. I'll tell you what price I, as an individual who regularly buys CDs without complaining about the price, is to cheap to pay for music - and that is my freedom.
Anyway, if we, as a society, have given artists control, then yes, it's wrong for us, as a bunch of computer geeks, to ignore that decision. Laws can be changed, and if the law is so obviously wrong as all that, we can probably get it changed. As soon as we offer a better alternative...
It is neither right nor wrong since is not our doing. Nobody in particular invented the freedom of information, it is a fundamental law of cyberspace. If you want to point fingers about it, point them up - the fact that information cannot be contained without censoring people is a fact of mathematics, and that _cannot_ be changed.
It may be that you, personally, just disagree with Lars. That's cool; your opinions are probably just as well researched as his, or mine, or anyone else's. What bugs me is the people who are using his non-techie nature as justification for trashing his beliefs. You see, he's thought about these issues too. He may have come to different conclusions than I have, or than you have, but that doesn't mean he's wrong, it just means the debate's still going.
I did not see Ulrich once questioning his position that he has an a priori right to control the information. He just takes that opinion and bases all of his arguments on it. He is wrong about this, and that is neither my wish nor my opinion, but a simple fact of how the universe works.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is not about Lars being wrong because he is a non-techie - this is about Lars being wrong because he is wrong.
For an example of a non-techie who is getting a lot of respect in a related case, look at Martin Garbus in the DeCSS trial. He is a lawyer (already that should make us hate him if the stereotypes were true), he admits to knowing very little about technology, and he has litigated a lot of cases where he was defending peoples copyrights. But in this case, he gets it. I haven't heard anybody trashing him because he isn't a coder.
Lars is wrong because he claims that artists have a right to control the spread of their work. They do not - information wants to be free, and nobody has the right or should have the ability to control it. As a society, it is in our interest to compensate artists and innovators so they can work on enriching the world without starving, and in the industrial age this has been done by giving them legal control of the information they produce, but the issues of control and compensation are actually unrelated.
ps, I don't know shit about the music industry. I don't care to. I don't see why we need a music "industry", I sort of wish there was music artistry instead...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is a prime example (along with things like etoy, and the suing of clan MacDonald), of why trademark law is just as rotten as its "Intellectual property" cousins patent law and copyright law. The simple fact is that, regardless of their intentions, the final result of ALL of these things is censorship.
People claim that Trademark law is around to protect customers from falsely branded products, which sounds noble enough, until you consider that nobody ever bothered to ask the individual consumer whether he wanted to be protected or not. Somebody just decided that the poor stupid consumer needed this protection, and so it should be forced on everyone.
In my case, I don't want to be protected against confusing other books with IDG's "For Dummies" series, just like I don't want to be protected from confusing art collectives with toy stores or family trees with hamburgers. But society has decided that I should be just the same.
It is completely doable today, using OCR and Digital Signatures, to create a product that scans webpages and images for trademarks and checks meta-data for the trademark owners signature. No law would be necessary, and the user could himself decide what level of protection he wanted from confusion (none, a small warning text, full suppression) and which trademarks he cared about being protected from otherpeople using. But how many people here think that if such a product came out tomorrow, the companies that today tell you that Trademark law is "for your protection [naive little inferior person]" would be OK with abandoning it on the web?
Not one, because like patents and copyrights, trademarks are no longer about protecting comsumers or society. They are about protecting the interests and power of the capitocratic society, and keeping the individuals as the dumb consuming machines the corporations need us to be.
I say screw them.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I wouldn't normally do that, but here are too many moderating points going around Slashdot currently. Look at the number of 5s in this thread, even a very good post drowns completely.
Rob has to either decrease the number of points in circulation, or raise the highest number that will reflect on a the sorting (my question now has an actual score of +10).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Ignoring for now the moral arguments, do you not think that you are facing a sisyphus task in attempting to stop the people from copying information when that is exactly what the information society is all about? Perhaps you can manage to stop Napster, but that will not stop the 330,000 people who you claim have been copying Metallica songs using their service, they will simply have to find another medium to do it in, and as long they are connected to the Internet they will find one.
The reason that you will find much hostility in this forum against your actions is not that we care a lot about copying music. Most of the people here are programmers and system adminstrators, we make decent livings and can afford to buy the albums we want. But we are also people who live on and love the Internet and the freedom of speech it brings and we fear that the same arguments you use for arguing the end of Napster could be used to force shut any forum where information can be spread openly and freely. We fear that efforts like yours will lead an authoritarian cyberspace, where individual freedom means nothing in the face of corporations and states who decide what we can say, what we can do, what we can watch, and to a large extent who we are. A world where information creator and consumer alike are puppets to the same masters pulling all the strings.
Those of us who are endeavouring to build the networks of tomorrow have no malicious intent against you, we want for future society to reward and encourage art and innovation just as much as you do. But there is something we love more then art and music, and it is Freedom. If your idea of how to solve the issues that artists face in the information age is to deprive us of that Freedom, you will not be successful.
As the world turns, technology changes, and society changes with it. What made sense yesterday no longer makes sense tomorrow, and going back is not an option. We do not need to be enemies in this matter, for we have the same goals. So why not call back the lawyers, the litigators, and the guns, and instead turn your efforts to trying to build a tomorrow that promotes both innovation and freedom, creation and integrity? For that is the only way that anyone stands to gain.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Even one of the head developers of FreeNet has said your post was BS and still you defend it.
He has also said, as of right now, that your posts are the truly pointless and stupid ones. - We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Except that we share the philosophy in the name of this program, it really is something completely different from what we are doing. There are other systems that I believe attempt to combine the "LOCKSS" idea and permanent storage with anonymity, "The eternity service" is a name one hears a lot but that to my knowledge has never been implemented. The threat models of trying to protect data from being lost with time, and those of keeping it safe from censorship, are largely different.
I have to say for once I agree with the moderator bashing ACs. This post was not particularly well informed.
And, "guaranteed anonymity" is pushing it (there are no guarantees in life). See the FAQ. - We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I thought that it was a very good article, and that the author put his finger on many of the important issues, and why privacy IS important. However, he goes completely off the track at the end when he starts babbeling stuff like this:
"Moreover, many people seem happy to waive their privacy rights in exchange for free stuff. There is now a cottage industry of companies with names like Free PC, Dash.com and Gator.com that offer their users product discounts, giveaways or even cash in exchange for permission to track, record and profile every move they make, and to bombard them with targeted ads on the basis of their proclivities. This is about as rational as allowing a camera into your bedroom in exchange for a free toaster. But as Monica Lewinsky discovered, it's easy to forget why privacy is important until information you care about is taken out of context, and by that point, it's usually too late."
With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies. You can't, and shouldn't, save sane adults from themselves. If somebody wants to screw up there life by selling their privacy and integrity for a free buck, they should be allowed to do so.
I am not a rightwing conservative (I consider myself a pragmatic radical), but if this writer thinks that the way to save society for the future is to further dilute the individuals freedom and responsibility to make his own descisions, then I couldn't disagree more. It is only by learning to protect our own privacy and freedom that we can find a future where we are not the food to governments and corporations.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Well, Freenet runs on a generic port, and communications between nodes will be encrypted, so it is not as simple as just blocking it with firewalls - but of course it can't be impossible to block or detect it's traffic, only highly inpractical.
However, as much as I am glad that people are recognizing and putting faith in our work, there is that proverb about many eggs and a single basket. We are doing our best, but there is no such thing as a miracle, and while I wish for it to be true, I am a little worried by the "Freenet solves all" attitude. All efforts to promote freedom in cyberspace are valuable, and just because we have set our goals high does not mean that other efforts should be abandoned.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In the same chapter of Applied Crptography, BS goes on to calculate some theoretical maximum values for how fast a computer could perform a brute force crack, using thermodynanics to calculate the minimum energy necessary to change one bit.
According to his calculation, a perfect computer kept at background temperature, powered by the energy from a perfect Dyson sphere around our Sun, could do 2^187 bit operations in a year.
All the energy from a supernova could power such a computer to do 2^219 operations.
10^120 = 2^398 is 8*10^53 Supernovas, or the annual output of 3*10^63 Sun sized stars. Something tells me that we can have as many quantum and DNA computers as we want, chess will hold out.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, this will not be a tasty product. This will be the same integrity infringing, laugh in the face of the freedom, SDMI POS that the existing Sony memorystick music players are. It will be tasty if you love having your prorietary products spoonfed into you, served with a scrumptious load of warnings and legal threats should dream of trying to make it do what you want it to do - rather then what Sony wants it do to in order to make the most out of you as a consumer.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Slashdot keeps hyping these products, when Sony has shown very clearly that they are never going to make a music player that has even heard of the idea that it should be open to the user. I would think that of all places, a site born out of the free software movement would not support machines designed based on the principle that they should control the user to largest extent possible.
Sigh...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think the fact that they have gotten a patent for this is great, because it means that in twenty years direct mental input will begin taking off. Sort of like how great it was that they patented PK cryptography in the early 80s so that it could take off around now.
Of course, one might question why those 20 extra years are necessary, but, haha, how silly of one...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Just because someone says something different, does not mean that there is wisdom behind it. It is not the Free Software movement that wishes to disposses anybody the ability to own thoughts in cyberspace the way they can own mass in meatspace, it is the the very nature of mathematics and cyberspace itself.
I am not "dispossessed" of software that I release under the GPL - I have every bit as much ownership of it as I did when it was just sitting on my harddisk. I am, however, dispossessed of something every time someone tells me, under new economic censorship legislation or old, that a thought inside my head does not belong to me, and that I do not have the right to do what I wish with it.
You are right that it is wise to strive for moderation. But it is also wise to always look forwards, rather then backwards, as we attempt to adapt to a world that is constantly heading off into waters we have never sailed before. Perhaps it is natural for a man who has spent his career trying to make computers think like humans to think he can make cyberspace act like meatspace in regards to ownership - but let us not be fooled, his idea is every bit as futile, illogical, and destructive as what our friends in the record and movie indsutries are pushing for.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
But look at where things are headed. You can already be arrested for posting code to allow you to watch DVDs in whatever way you want, or to unveil the list of sites censored by a certain by a peice of software. You already have a web where people are trying to make it illegal to LINK between documents without permission, and where the little guy is dependent on corporate ISPs for hosting that are ready to throw him out at even the hint of legal trouble. We already have a world where content companies and next to forcing machines into your home with the expressed pupose of controlling you, and where it is illegal to work around those controls.
Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does? How long until something you want said pisses off some corporation and your ISP kicks you out. How long until you no longer want a Web covered in corporate plastic and littegation - a place controlled completely by the corporate interests, meant only to pump information into you without ever letting you have access to it. Things have gotten rapidly worse on the Web over the last year, and nothing seems to indicate that this has turned around.
And, if not for anything else, then a lot of (very normal) people are already trying to get around economic censorship (I'd bet even you are: have you paid your "existance of huge international recording conglomerate" fee for all your MP3s?) I'm not to happy about this being the main use of Freenet, because it is so bandwidth intensive, but the freedom of information is the freedom of information, no matter what the size is.
Freenet implements freedom. The sort of people who will fight Freenet are also the ones who are fighting freedom on the Web - where it is still possible without fighting the Web itself. If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Second, consider your threat model. A lot of people are saying "well, that's not worse than the 'net in general". I don't think that's going to be good enough. There are two cruicial differences. The first one is scale. If Freenet becomes huge, a lot of its DOS problems will become easier. On the other hand, if it remains (relatively) small, DOSing it will not be hard. The second difference (as I pointed out in another post) is that Freenet is designed to make some people, corporations and government very unhappy. In a sense, one measure of success will be something like AOL trying to shut Freenet down.
If your attacker has a total capacity greater than the entire network and is persistant in his attack, then any network can be taken down. It is true that much of our resistance rests on the hope that we can reach a critical size, but this is true for more then just floods (a Freenet of only a 3 Nodes won't do much anonymity either). And (which is suppose is your point) with that kind of force one could take down any public network.
In this sense, I think that Eric Scheirers question about ordinary people would use Freenet for has more merit then Ian does. I do believe we will need a killer app (though, in some sense it is beginning to look like the freedom of speech on web will soon be so impeeded that it will be enough to drive everybody to Freenet - I certainly hope not however). But I also believe that seperating Cyberspace from meatspace by another layer is the natural next step of the information age - so I think the killer app will come.
The other option is a network that attempts to hide, using limited points of entry, uses cryptographic authenication for all node-node communication, and PGP type web-of-trust systems for allowing new nodes onto the network. This has been discussed as well, and Freenet's heart, the routing, could still be used on such a network, so even if this is what it has to come to, our current work would not be without value. I guess this is what you believe a network which allows the Freedom of speech has to look like - so I would be most interested in seeing the code you have written on it.
It ain't that easy. Making unique tags for each chunk of info is simple. But consider a different problem: how do I find the information I need? Crypto hashes of contents do not help at all. Again, to repeat another post, if I want to find out how many bowling balls can Clinton suck through a garden hose, and all keys like/us/politics/ClintonSucks,../ClintonSucksBowlingBalls, etc. are press releases from White House, how do I get my information?
How do you find information on the Web? You certainly didn't come to Slashdot looking for slashes and dots. You could have used a search engine, but a search engine is no more reliable then a descriptive Freenet key. Most probably, somebody told you about Slashdot, or you got saw a hypertext link from somewhere - both of which are equally possible on Freenet.
Oh, it'll work -- for some time. The real question is robustness. Consider that you are likely to find yourself on the front lines of active information warfare. In this case the relevant question is not "does it work?", but rather "how quickly/easily can it be killed?".
To me the same questions are one and the same (something like boolean question1(){return question2() == never}).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It takes little more than one person to flood out a Usenet channel. The force necessary to take a document off Freenet would be more like if they had attempted to flood the whole Usenet out of existance to stop that one group, and even so Freenet is better (data on Usenet is sent everywhere, Data on Freenet is sorted to only a small nodes unless their is wide, distributed, demand for it).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, no. Not random. I am talking active hostile information warfare. The point of Freenet is to publish information that makes certain people, corporations and government very, very unhappy. Put 2 and 2 together yourself.
Actually, Freenet's goals go far beyond this. Freenet is a further refinement of cyberspace, another step towards the further seperation of it and the world of physical reality. The most obvious consquence is that one of the basic laws of cyberspace, "Information wants to be free", is a lot stronger on Freenet then it is on the Internet (as it is stronger on the Internet then it when information was carried in books and minds only), but it is far from the only consequence.
Pissing people off is not a goal within itself. The fact is that those people who would be pissed off by Freenet are those who do not want any Freedom in Cyberspace - and that are already threatening it on the web.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Java is not ideal for writing daemons by a long shot (try sig-trapping), but it is a nice language for writing experimental code that is constantly changing. Unless a miracle occurs in the world of Java VMs soon, we will probably want to write a real Unix server in another language when/if we get things together correctly, but for now I'm glad we are using Java.
BTWx1, It will work with Kaffe, for those of you who don't want to use proprietary software.
BTWx2, I originally wrote the perl client because the text based protocol made it very easy. Perl's thread handling would probably make writing a Node with even a chance at being cross platform very difficult.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I already wrote a little bit about this in the Freenet FAQ as Ian noted above. I'm not going to say that we are not worried about flooding attacks, because that would be dangerously vain, but on the other hand, we do have a system that is designed from the ground up to withstand them as well as possible. How well only time will tell, but I do believe that we are better off in this department then any other equivalent system.
Regarding the non-uniqueness of keys, that can be solved, at the loss of some convenience. The most simple solution is simply to index documents that you want to be able to have a unique address of with a hash of their contents as the key, and have the Freenet nodes enforce this relationship (there is a more complicated variant of this that uses digital signatures instead and would support updating data). Obviously, this sort of key could not be guessed, but it could be used in a link, or in an email, which is exactly the situation where it is important that the key be unique. The consensus among the developers is that we want to support both the current free type of key and this kind of key in the future.
We are aware of the technical problems that our network will face, and of course we cannot be sure that it will work. But nothing I have seen so far has convinced me, as pessimistic as I am, that it _won't_ work, which makes it worth trying in my book.
/Oskar Sandberg (The Freenet Project)
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Neal Stephenson ought to spend six months living in Singapore, so that he can experience first hand how great it is to live in country where you can be sure the regime doesn't worry about silly abstract things like privacy and freedom, but where you never have to worry about stray bullets, pronography, or drug trading.
Everybody who talks about the importance of such things over freedom ought to go and live in what William Gibson called "Disneyland with the death penalty", so they can eat their words...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.
These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our indentity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.
Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern then individual freedom?
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Posts such as this, masking news in some twisted, somewhat racially slurred (it can be read into it), is vioPosts such as this, masking news in some twisted, somewhat racially slurred (it can be read into it), is violating a primary rule of communication: Communicate, damnit, or shutup. (Specifically it violates Paul Grice's {philosopher} Rule of Manner:) lating a primary rule of communication: Communicate, damnit, or shutup. (Specifically it violates Paul Grice's {philosopher} Rule of Manner:)
I couldn't agree more. Being Swedish myself, I find the whole Swedish Chef concept insulting, prejudice, and demeaning. I am preparing a multi billion dollar class action law suit, against not only Slashdot but the Jim Henson company as well, on behalf of my nine million irreparably harmed Swedish brothers and sisters.
Or I might just go after Timothy with a wooden spatula...:-)
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Not to flame you or anything, but the simple problem was it wasn't funny enough. You have to be more over the top then that to get funny points. I'm not funny either, so I'm not in a position to put you down, but anyways...
- 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
"Information wants to be free". So, we were wrong to ever create copyright law? The GPL is a joke and shouldn't be enforcable? How about a little basic consistency here.
In my opinion, yes. And, I have yet to hear Stallman or anyone attack us for the fact binary code based on GPLed code that is uploaded cannot be removed from Freenet. Does anybody here truly believe that distributed data networks pose a serious threat to free software because people will use them to distribute mods without source? If you do, lay off the crack pipe for a second.
Why do we need a music industry? Because, as a species, we're a bunch of cheap-ass fucks who would not, in fact, pay for art if we didn't have to.
Well maybe then, as a species, we don't deserve any music. I'll tell you what price I, as an individual who regularly buys CDs without complaining about the price, is to cheap to pay for music - and that is my freedom.
Anyway, if we, as a society, have given artists control, then yes, it's wrong for us, as a bunch of computer geeks, to ignore that decision. Laws can be changed, and if the law is so obviously wrong as all that, we can probably get it changed. As soon as we offer a better alternative...
It is neither right nor wrong since is not our doing. Nobody in particular invented the freedom of information, it is a fundamental law of cyberspace. If you want to point fingers about it, point them up - the fact that information cannot be contained without censoring people is a fact of mathematics, and that _cannot_ be changed.
It may be that you, personally, just disagree with Lars. That's cool; your opinions are probably just as well researched as his, or mine, or anyone else's. What bugs me is the people who are using his non-techie nature as justification for trashing his beliefs. You see, he's thought about these issues too. He may have come to different conclusions than I have, or than you have, but that doesn't mean he's wrong, it just means the debate's still going.
I did not see Ulrich once questioning his position that he has an a priori right to control the information. He just takes that opinion and bases all of his arguments on it. He is wrong about this, and that is neither my wish nor my opinion, but a simple fact of how the universe works.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is not about Lars being wrong because he is a non-techie - this is about Lars being wrong because he is wrong.
For an example of a non-techie who is getting a lot of respect in a related case, look at Martin Garbus in the DeCSS trial. He is a lawyer (already that should make us hate him if the stereotypes were true), he admits to knowing very little about technology, and he has litigated a lot of cases where he was defending peoples copyrights. But in this case, he gets it. I haven't heard anybody trashing him because he isn't a coder.
Lars is wrong because he claims that artists have a right to control the spread of their work. They do not - information wants to be free, and nobody has the right or should have the ability to control it. As a society, it is in our interest to compensate artists and innovators so they can work on enriching the world without starving, and in the industrial age this has been done by giving them legal control of the information they produce, but the issues of control and compensation are actually unrelated.
ps, I don't know shit about the music industry. I don't care to. I don't see why we need a music "industry", I sort of wish there was music artistry instead...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is a prime example (along with things like etoy, and the suing of clan MacDonald), of why trademark law is just as rotten as its "Intellectual property" cousins patent law and copyright law. The simple fact is that, regardless of their intentions, the final result of ALL of these things is censorship.
People claim that Trademark law is around to protect customers from falsely branded products, which sounds noble enough, until you consider that nobody ever bothered to ask the individual consumer whether he wanted to be protected or not. Somebody just decided that the poor stupid consumer needed this protection, and so it should be forced on everyone.
In my case, I don't want to be protected against confusing other books with IDG's "For Dummies" series, just like I don't want to be protected from confusing art collectives with toy stores or family trees with hamburgers. But society has decided that I should be just the same.
It is completely doable today, using OCR and Digital Signatures, to create a product that scans webpages and images for trademarks and checks meta-data for the trademark owners signature. No law would be necessary, and the user could himself decide what level of protection he wanted from confusion (none, a small warning text, full suppression) and which trademarks he cared about being protected from otherpeople using. But how many people here think that if such a product came out tomorrow, the companies that today tell you that Trademark law is "for your protection [naive little inferior person]" would be OK with abandoning it on the web?
Not one, because like patents and copyrights, trademarks are no longer about protecting comsumers or society. They are about protecting the interests and power of the capitocratic society, and keeping the individuals as the dumb consuming machines the corporations need us to be.
I say screw them.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I wouldn't normally do that, but here are too many moderating points going around Slashdot currently. Look at the number of 5s in this thread, even a very good post drowns completely.
Rob has to either decrease the number of points in circulation, or raise the highest number that will reflect on a the sorting (my question now has an actual score of +10).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Ignoring for now the moral arguments, do you not think that you are facing a sisyphus task in attempting to stop the people from copying information when that is exactly what the information society is all about? Perhaps you can manage to stop Napster, but that will not stop the 330,000 people who you claim have been copying Metallica songs using their service, they will simply have to find another medium to do it in, and as long they are connected to the Internet they will find one.
The reason that you will find much hostility in this forum against your actions is not that we care a lot about copying music. Most of the people here are programmers and system adminstrators, we make decent livings and can afford to buy the albums we want. But we are also people who live on and love the Internet and the freedom of speech it brings and we fear that the same arguments you use for arguing the end of Napster could be used to force shut any forum where information can be spread openly and freely. We fear that efforts like yours will lead an authoritarian cyberspace, where individual freedom means nothing in the face of corporations and states who decide what we can say, what we can do, what we can watch, and to a large extent who we are. A world where information creator and consumer alike are puppets to the same masters pulling all the strings.
Those of us who are endeavouring to build the networks of tomorrow have no malicious intent against you, we want for future society to reward and encourage art and innovation just as much as you do. But there is something we love more then art and music, and it is Freedom. If your idea of how to solve the issues that artists face in the information age is to deprive us of that Freedom, you will not be successful.
As the world turns, technology changes, and society changes with it. What made sense yesterday no longer makes sense tomorrow, and going back is not an option. We do not need to be enemies in this matter, for we have the same goals. So why not call back the lawyers, the litigators, and the guns, and instead turn your efforts to trying to build a tomorrow that promotes both innovation and freedom, creation and integrity? For that is the only way that anyone stands to gain.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Even one of the head developers of FreeNet has said your post was BS and still you defend it.
He has also said, as of right now, that your posts are the truly pointless and stupid ones.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
(yes, I am one of the head Freenet developers)
Except that we share the philosophy in the name of this program, it really is something completely different from what we are doing. There are other systems that I believe attempt to combine the "LOCKSS" idea and permanent storage with anonymity, "The eternity service" is a name one hears a lot but that to my knowledge has never been implemented. The threat models of trying to protect data from being lost with time, and those of keeping it safe from censorship, are largely different.
I have to say for once I agree with the moderator bashing ACs. This post was not particularly well informed.
And, "guaranteed anonymity" is pushing it (there are no guarantees in life). See the FAQ.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not sure if an icecast type package is even necessary. I stream mp3s here between two computers by simply doing:
cat lala.mp3 | nc yy.yy.yy.yy xxxx
on one, and
nc -lp xxxx | mpg123 -
on the other. And nc can do udp, so you could probably just use a local multicast or something for more then one player.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I thought that it was a very good article, and that the author put his finger on many of the important issues, and why privacy IS important. However, he goes completely off the track at the end when he starts babbeling stuff like this:
"Moreover, many people seem happy to waive their privacy rights in exchange for free stuff. There is now a cottage industry of companies with names like Free PC, Dash.com and Gator.com that offer their users product discounts, giveaways or even cash in exchange for permission to track, record and profile every move they make, and to bombard them with targeted ads on the basis of their proclivities. This is about as rational as allowing a camera into your bedroom in exchange for a free toaster. But as Monica Lewinsky discovered, it's easy to forget why privacy is important until information you care about is taken out of context, and by that point, it's usually too late."
With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies. You can't, and shouldn't, save sane adults from themselves. If somebody wants to screw up there life by selling their privacy and integrity for a free buck, they should be allowed to do so.
I am not a rightwing conservative (I consider myself a pragmatic radical), but if this writer thinks that the way to save society for the future is to further dilute the individuals freedom and responsibility to make his own descisions, then I couldn't disagree more. It is only by learning to protect our own privacy and freedom that we can find a future where we are not the food to governments and corporations.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Well, Freenet runs on a generic port, and communications between nodes will be encrypted, so it is not as simple as just blocking it with firewalls - but of course it can't be impossible to block or detect it's traffic, only highly inpractical.
However, as much as I am glad that people are recognizing and putting faith in our work, there is that proverb about many eggs and a single basket. We are doing our best, but there is no such thing as a miracle, and while I wish for it to be true, I am a little worried by the "Freenet solves all" attitude. All efforts to promote freedom in cyberspace are valuable, and just because we have set our goals high does not mean that other efforts should be abandoned.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In the same chapter of Applied Crptography, BS goes on to calculate some theoretical maximum values for how fast a computer could perform a brute force crack, using thermodynanics to calculate the minimum energy necessary to change one bit.
According to his calculation, a perfect computer kept at background temperature, powered by the energy from a perfect Dyson sphere around our Sun, could do 2^187 bit operations in a year.
All the energy from a supernova could power such a computer to do 2^219 operations.
10^120 = 2^398 is 8*10^53 Supernovas, or the annual output of 3*10^63 Sun sized stars. Something tells me that we can have as many quantum and DNA computers as we want, chess will hold out.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, this will not be a tasty product. This will be the same integrity infringing, laugh in the face of the freedom, SDMI POS that the existing Sony memorystick music players are. It will be tasty if you love having your prorietary products spoonfed into you, served with a scrumptious load of warnings and legal threats should dream of trying to make it do what you want it to do - rather then what Sony wants it do to in order to make the most out of you as a consumer.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Slashdot keeps hyping these products, when Sony has shown very clearly that they are never going to make a music player that has even heard of the idea that it should be open to the user. I would think that of all places, a site born out of the free software movement would not support machines designed based on the principle that they should control the user to largest extent possible.
Sigh...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think the fact that they have gotten a patent for this is great, because it means that in twenty years direct mental input will begin taking off. Sort of like how great it was that they patented PK cryptography in the early 80s so that it could take off around now.
Of course, one might question why those 20 extra years are necessary, but, haha, how silly of one...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Just because someone says something different, does not mean that there is wisdom behind it. It is not the Free Software movement that wishes to disposses anybody the ability to own thoughts in cyberspace the way they can own mass in meatspace, it is the the very nature of mathematics and cyberspace itself.
I am not "dispossessed" of software that I release under the GPL - I have every bit as much ownership of it as I did when it was just sitting on my harddisk. I am, however, dispossessed of something every time someone tells me, under new economic censorship legislation or old, that a thought inside my head does not belong to me, and that I do not have the right to do what I wish with it.
You are right that it is wise to strive for moderation. But it is also wise to always look forwards, rather then backwards, as we attempt to adapt to a world that is constantly heading off into waters we have never sailed before. Perhaps it is natural for a man who has spent his career trying to make computers think like humans to think he can make cyberspace act like meatspace in regards to ownership - but let us not be fooled, his idea is every bit as futile, illogical, and destructive as what our friends in the record and movie indsutries are pushing for.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
But look at where things are headed. You can already be arrested for posting code to allow you to watch DVDs in whatever way you want, or to unveil the list of sites censored by a certain by a peice of software. You already have a web where people are trying to make it illegal to LINK between documents without permission, and where the little guy is dependent on corporate ISPs for hosting that are ready to throw him out at even the hint of legal trouble. We already have a world where content companies and next to forcing machines into your home with the expressed pupose of controlling you, and where it is illegal to work around those controls.
Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does? How long until something you want said pisses off some corporation and your ISP kicks you out. How long until you no longer want a Web covered in corporate plastic and littegation
- a place controlled completely by the corporate interests, meant only to pump information into you without ever letting you have access to it. Things have gotten rapidly worse on the Web over the last year, and nothing seems to indicate that this has turned around.
And, if not for anything else, then a lot of (very normal) people are already trying to get around economic censorship (I'd bet even you are: have you paid your "existance of huge international recording conglomerate" fee for all your MP3s?) I'm not to happy about this being the main use of Freenet, because it is so bandwidth intensive, but the freedom of information is the freedom of information, no matter what the size is.
Freenet implements freedom. The sort of people who will fight Freenet are also the ones who are fighting freedom on the Web - where it is still possible without fighting the Web itself. If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Second, consider your threat model. A lot of people are saying "well, that's not worse than the 'net in general". I don't think that's going to be good enough. There are two cruicial differences. The first one is scale. If Freenet becomes huge, a lot of its DOS problems will become easier. On the other hand, if it remains (relatively) small, DOSing it will not be hard. The second difference (as I pointed out in another post) is that Freenet is designed to make some people, corporations and government very unhappy. In a sense, one measure of success will be something like AOL trying to shut Freenet down.
/us/politics/ClintonSucks, ../ClintonSucksBowlingBalls, etc. are press releases from White House, how do I get my information?
If your attacker has a total capacity greater than the entire network and is persistant in his attack, then any network can be taken down. It is true that much of our resistance rests on the hope that we can reach a critical size, but this is true for more then just floods (a Freenet of only a 3 Nodes won't do much anonymity either). And (which is suppose is your point) with that kind of force one could take down any public network.
In this sense, I think that Eric Scheirers question about ordinary people would use Freenet for has more merit then Ian does. I do believe we will need a killer app (though, in some sense it is beginning to look like the freedom of speech on web will soon be so impeeded that it will be enough to drive everybody to Freenet - I certainly hope not however). But I also believe that seperating Cyberspace from meatspace by another layer is the natural next step of the information age - so I think the killer app will come.
The other option is a network that attempts to hide, using limited points of entry, uses cryptographic authenication for all node-node communication, and PGP type web-of-trust systems for allowing new nodes onto the network. This has been discussed as well, and Freenet's heart, the routing, could still be used on such a network, so even if this is what it has to come to, our current work would not be without value. I guess this is what you believe a network which allows the Freedom of speech has to look like - so I would be most interested in seeing the code you have written on it.
It ain't that easy. Making unique tags for each chunk of info is simple. But consider a different problem: how do I find the information I need? Crypto hashes of contents do not help at all. Again, to repeat another post, if I want to find out how many bowling balls can Clinton suck through a garden hose, and all keys like
How do you find information on the Web? You certainly didn't come to Slashdot looking for slashes and dots. You could have used a search engine, but a search engine is no more reliable then a descriptive Freenet key. Most probably, somebody told you about Slashdot, or you got saw a hypertext link from somewhere - both of which are equally possible on Freenet.
Oh, it'll work -- for some time. The real question is robustness. Consider that you are likely to find yourself on the front lines of active information warfare. In this case the relevant question is not "does it work?", but rather "how quickly/easily can it be killed?".
To me the same questions are one and the same (something like boolean question1(){return question2() == never}).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It takes little more than one person to flood out a Usenet channel. The force necessary to take a document off Freenet would be more like if they had attempted to flood the whole Usenet out of existance to stop that one group, and even so Freenet is better (data on Usenet is sent everywhere, Data on Freenet is sorted to only a small nodes unless their is wide, distributed, demand for it).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, no. Not random. I am talking active hostile information warfare. The point of Freenet is to publish information that makes certain people, corporations and government very, very unhappy. Put 2 and 2 together yourself.
Actually, Freenet's goals go far beyond this. Freenet is a further refinement of cyberspace, another step towards the further seperation of it and the world of physical reality. The most obvious consquence is that one of the basic laws of cyberspace, "Information wants to be free", is a lot stronger on Freenet then it is on the Internet (as it is stronger on the Internet then it when information was carried in books and minds only), but it is far from the only consequence.
Pissing people off is not a goal within itself. The fact is that those people who would be pissed off by Freenet are those who do not want any Freedom in Cyberspace - and that are already threatening it on the web.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Java is not ideal for writing daemons by a long shot (try sig-trapping), but it is a nice language for writing experimental code that is constantly changing. Unless a miracle occurs in the world of Java VMs soon, we will probably want to write a real Unix server in another language when/if we get things together correctly, but for now I'm glad we are using Java.
BTWx1, It will work with Kaffe, for those of you who don't want to use proprietary software.
BTWx2, I originally wrote the perl client because the text based protocol made it very easy. Perl's thread handling would probably make writing a Node with even a chance at being cross platform very difficult.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I already wrote a little bit about this in the Freenet FAQ as Ian noted above. I'm not going to say that we are not worried about flooding attacks, because that would be dangerously vain, but on the other hand, we do have a system that is designed from the ground up to withstand them as well as possible. How well only time will tell, but I do believe that we are better off in this department then any other equivalent system.
Regarding the non-uniqueness of keys, that can be solved, at the loss of some convenience. The most simple solution is simply to index documents that you want to be able to have a unique address of with a hash of their contents as the key, and have the Freenet nodes enforce this relationship (there is a more complicated variant of this that uses digital signatures instead and would support updating data). Obviously, this sort of key could not be guessed, but it could be used in a link, or in an email, which is exactly the situation where it is important that the key be unique. The consensus among the developers is that we want to support both the current free type of key and this kind of key in the future.
We are aware of the technical problems that our network will face, and of course we cannot be sure that it will work. But nothing I have seen so far has convinced me, as pessimistic as I am, that it _won't_ work, which makes it worth trying in my book.
/Oskar Sandberg (The Freenet Project)
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Neal Stephenson ought to spend six months living in Singapore, so that he can experience first hand how great it is to live in country where you can be sure the regime doesn't worry about silly abstract things like privacy and freedom, but where you never have to worry about stray bullets, pronography, or drug trading.
Everybody who talks about the importance of such things over freedom ought to go and live in what William Gibson called "Disneyland with the death penalty", so they can eat their words...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Mr. Pollack,
I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.
These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our indentity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.
Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern then individual freedom?
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Posts such as this, masking news in some twisted, somewhat racially slurred (it can be read into it), is vioPosts such as this, masking news in some twisted, somewhat racially slurred (it can be read into it), is violating a primary rule of communication: Communicate, damnit, or shutup. (Specifically it violates Paul Grice's {philosopher} Rule of Manner:) lating a primary rule of communication: Communicate, damnit, or shutup. (Specifically it violates Paul Grice's {philosopher} Rule of Manner:)
:-)
I couldn't agree more. Being Swedish myself, I find the whole Swedish Chef concept insulting, prejudice, and demeaning. I am preparing a multi billion dollar class action law suit, against not only Slashdot but the Jim Henson company as well, on behalf of my nine million irreparably harmed Swedish brothers and sisters.
Or I might just go after Timothy with a wooden spatula...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Not to flame you or anything, but the simple problem was it wasn't funny enough. You have to be more over the top then that to get funny points. I'm not funny either, so I'm not in a position to put you down, but anyways...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Brilliant. Get that in a book, and you will be bigger than Joyce!
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.