I don't hear them admitting that they are trying to quell dissidents and keep their totalitarian power, in fact, if you read the article you will see they even deny they have the firewall at all, though it is well known, and obvious, that they do (remind of you of a certain Echelon, anybody?)
When forums were closed on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they were said to be down to "improve the system and services." The forum censors are known as "Web masters" (I'm sure this will make all the real webmasters here happy). The reason that news from outside China can't be posted is because it is "harmful and illegal". People who post to critical sites are marked as "attempting to overthrow the state". These are not example of being "honest".
And you are an idiot if you buy the propaganda that it is good to keep porn illegal so government can attack "rapists and child molesters". Any unenforced, generally disobeyed laws undermine a democracy because they provide a point where the government can, at will, attack most any citizen (sure, you have never heard of such a person, but they can claim that you are actually a rapist - after all they only have to prove that you looked at porn to lock you up). There are reasons why we have a heavy burden of proof even, or especially, for the most deplorable crimes...
- 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 a coder for The Freenet Project, but I can't speak for everyone else involved.)
1: While this sort of attack is an issue, Freenet does deal with it. Because Requests and Inserts are randomly spread over the entire network, in order for such an attack to be successful you have to have greater capacity then the rest of the entire network put together. Also, as long as all your inserts and requests are targeted at a limited number of nodes, those nodes will "float" toward one another in the routing (that's a vague statement, for a better reply you have to understand the system), until your attack is only hurting the nodes you are targeting directly (in which case you might as well DoS them conventionally).
2: This is true, Freenet is not ideal for copying wide arrays of large media. That is the cost of freedom and anonymity. Freenet does allow for a large amount of parallelism however, and specs for how to split files into smaller chunks that can be requested simulataneously are being worked on. Also, the size of a 5 meg file is shrinking rapidly (Freenet will not be ready for mainstream use for some time).
I encourage everyone to give our project a little more thought before deciding that it doesn't work. I'm not convinced that it works either, but so far nothing has convinced me that it doesn't (and I have been looking for a reason for the last nine months), which justifies going for it in my book.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Finally, as for "mainstream media" being in the pocket of corporations, as much as Noam Chomsky would delight in hearing you say that, it is only partly accurate. Consider this: where do you actually hear all the bad things you have heard about corporations? From - surprise! - mainstream news media. The corporations report about and criticize one another. Power is not simply "wrested" (as you say) from individuals by big, evil corporations; it is give-and-take, and consumers (despite your lamentations) are willing participants - not helpless, powerless, victims as you would caricature them. That's why TV shows fail, movies flop and new musical genres develop - because we are in a system that encourages interaction and market exchange, instead of stifling it.
I have yet to see any DMCA critical articles or coverage in ANY mainstream media. And of all the articles I read about the DeCSS affair, ALL of them had a pro-"let's keep the gun in their mouths" slant. Were I dependent on mainstream media to gain understanding of the existing power structures desperate struggle for survival at the cost of our freedom, I would probably be as ignorant to gravity of the situation as you are (though you speak eloquently and a lot - right at home in Washington I guess).
Oh, and the situation is _simple_. Enforced copyrights and freedom cannot coexist in cyberspace. Period.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Percentages are ratios, so it is 99.999% of whatever period you choose (in other words, the machine will only be broken one hundred-thousandth of any period of time).
This guy chose one year, which is why he wrote "5 minutes per year". How did he he get to it, well:
60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365.25 days per year = 525960 minutes in every year.
The High Availablity Linux box will be broken one out of every 100,000 of those minutes, or 5 and quarter minutes per year.
I sort of hope for your sake that you are in third grade...
- 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 it is. You sir you are the one that wants to destroy freedom you are the danger not Sony. Free Trade is the backbone of a free society by limiting it you are limiting MY freedom.
Let's see, could you point to where exactly I said I wanted to ban or forbid the PS2?
Get rid of the copyright laws that Sony needs to pull this shit off an I will stop whining right now. I don't want to ban anything, but how much are you willing to bet against that Sony will want to ban the first program that cracks the PS2s copyprotection schemes? (please make it a large amout of money and contact me asap).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
So, I am a consumer who wants access to the Internet for the purposes of playing cutting-edge massively-multiplayer games, chatting, checking my e-mail, browsing the web, and engaging in on-line forums. I buy a box like the PS2 which does all of these things conveniently, cheaply, and easily, and this box _isn't_ for me, or consumers like me? I am a victim of Sony and other companies who make these non-consumer products?
Please, victimize me more!
Yes, you are a victim. You are a victim because you are being played as pawn in Sony's game for a future where they and their kin control the very freedom and integrity of your online existance. You are a victim because you are mindlessly giving up freedoms in cyberspace which you would not have dreamed for a second of compromising in the world which you are used to.
Indeed there are many people who need a simpler device than a PC for their Internet access, and those people should have such a device. But this is not what the PS2 is about, the PS2 is about being the troyan horse into peoples homes that Sony needs to make sure that it can provide customers with information without granting them freedom. It is about giving the mega-corps back the power that the Internet and the PC has threatened, a hundred times over. Read between the lines of the corporate doublespeak of Sony's talk of a "platform for digital content delivery", and this is exactly you will see.
This is not about being anti-capitalistic, or luddite, or not wanting to give newbies a chance to go online. This is about a cancer to capitalist society that has gone to far, and that is threatening the very freedom that capitalism exists ONLY to support. This is about the DMCA, the UCITA, the arrest of sixteen year old for nothing but protecting fair use, and the continued growth of corporations abusing laws meant to encourage "creative effort" to be parasites to this very process in every way.
It is a shame that people are not yet aware enough of the importance of electronic freedom to realize that they MUST reject the intrusion of electronics into their homes that is serving somebody else's agenda rather than theirs.
It is a shame, but it is understandable.
It is not understandable that people like you defend this process.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Like everyone here, I can't help but drool over the technical specs to this machine, and what Sony has managed to squeeze into the price. It is obviously a damn fine piece of technology, and I salute Sony's developers for this achievement.
But, on the other hand, there is a side to this that I can't help worrying about, and choices made for which I do not salute Sony (aka a leading member of both the RIAA and MPAA). These machines are the most propietary of the proprietary, and include copyprotection schemes that make CSS look childish. And Sony's goal with the PS2 is not just to push another console onto the market, but to start chipping into the things which PCs are used for today, making there machines the standard way to access the Internet.
The PS2 is not a machine designed as an instrument for the consumer, it is designed as an instrument for Sony to drive consumers into buying more games, more movies, and more of whatever other services they plan to offer. Inviting a PS2 into your living room is not buying a piece of electronics to serve _your_ agenda, it is opening the door to a piece of robotics maticulously designed to use you, granting you as little freedom as possible ("lets see, what Sony licensed proprietary title shall we play today") in the process.
The personal computer will always be more than just a piece of electronics, because it is a tool designed for you, and only for you. The PC is a statement of integrity and freedom. It serves your agenda, when you want it to, and, with a little knowledge, in whatever way you want it to. It is the PC that povided the basis for the developement of Linux, and it is freedom of PC usage that has shaped most of our ideas about electronic freedom.
The bad things that Microsoft do with their control of the PC desktop are nothing compared to the bad things that companies like Sony will do if the PC is replaced by closed machines like the PS2 as the primary tool for accessing the Internet. Do you think there will ever be a Napster client for the PS2? Or an SDMI-free mp3 player? Or the ability to save and store information on your terms?
The proliferation of the PS2 is a further step into a future where corporations control every aspect of your electronic life. A world where the machines that should be our tools are instead turned against us, meant only to ensure the continued cashflow toward existing capital, where large money will not hesitate to fuck you over at any point.
Oh happy day!
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Among other things, Zoid did a lot of the porting and developement of Quake on Linux and the other Unix platforms. I guess they will need to find a Linux programmer to take his job now...
Is that the sound of a thousand Slashdot readers printing their CVs I hear?
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Do you even read posts before you pick out one line an reply to them?
The point is not to worry about whether kids see porn or not (I watched plenty of porn as a kid, I'm none the worse for it), but whether the community or school should be paying for it.
No one is trying to control the information that kids have access to, they can walk into a CyberCafe down the street from the library and surf whatever the fuck they want, or go home and connect from where they can commit their dirty deeds in privacy. Try to enact this sort of thing into LAW, and I'll be against it to the last, but libraries have no obligation to provide access to all information.
You people are just as manic as the other side for gods sake. Stop for one second and consider WHY a library is supposed to provide a public wank booth...
- 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 have been following these posts about this anti-filter in libraries campaign, and I really have to wonder why this is a big deal.
I would like to ask: what are Libraries doing offering Internet access at all? The Internet is not just a way to access information, it is entertainment, it is commerce, it is discussion, it is communication, and it, too, is pornography.
You probably don't require your library to carry porn in print. Nor do you expect it to carry the latest Sears or Victorias Secret catalog (together with a phone to make those 1-800 calls to order), or a bunch of video games, or to show the latest Arnold movie, or to provide a place for you and your friends to party, or even to send your letters too your grandmother. I cannot understand why it should suddenly be expected to offer all these things on the Internet.
I believe in free speach online, in fact I have been doing my best to make concrete efforts towards guaranteeing it. I think that the AFA and co. are a bunch of idiots, but in this issue you are just as wrong.
I think much of the problem comes from libraries not wanting to bother with the digital future, and hoping they can get away with throwing up a few PCs with Internet access. They shouldn't be doing this at all, instead they should be building their own, seperate, network, LibraryNet. LibraryNet should be to the Internet exactly what libraries are to the rest of the world, and should offer quality, but yes, moderated information. LibraryNet should concentrate on getting rare books online in digital form so that even small Libraries can get them, it should concentrate on mirroring web content selectively the way that libraries offer periodicals today, and should provide contact with information specialists, the way you can get human contact with a librarian today.
Censorship sucks. Telling people what they can and can't see is stupid, but we need to look at what we are attacking. If people want to look at free information on the Internet, they are free to get themselves connected in other ways, this is not the libraries responsibility. Shame on you for smearing our crusade with this ridiculous nihility.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The harshest rating something can get (besides being censored, which they apparently haven't done since they cut out the torture scene from Casino) is 15+, but unlike America that is an absolute rating, having a parent or a guardian with you won't help.
What gets it? A lot of movies. Examples of movies running right now that got it are "The Green Mile", "The Bone Collector", and "The Messenger" (all of these were rated R in America, but I'm sure one could find plenty of examples where America was less strict).
In Sweden, you are also allowed to say "fuck" on the radio...
- 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 it is more or less clear by now that Metcalf has a beef with the whole open source concept and ideals. It seems strange for someone who is, or at least was, a brilliant inventor, but when you consider his personal history it does make some sort of sense. Metcalfe made a brilliant invention, started a company around it, was forced out of the company by the resident corporate baffoons, and has since been marginalized to a nothing collumist in some god forsaken magazine where he can only get attention by trolling away.
Given that, one can understand why he carries a grudge against the open source ideals of giving away you inventions rather than trying to capitalize on them, and people like Linus in particular. Linus (and the likes of Tim Bereners Lee) is a living reminder that he could have chosen another route for his invention, one where he would not have been forced out by a bunch of idiot beaurocrats, and could still be a respected senior hacker rather than a senile Anonymous Coward wannabee.
That said, I do think he has a point about this. He seems to forget that Torvalds works at Transmeta but doesn't own it (just like the rest of the press, really), and his statement that Transmeta shouldn't hype Windows performance is ludicrous. They have to sell the damn chip, and they obviously prefer Linux to Windows or they would have worked with MS to get CE on Crusoe portals (oops, I mean make them Windows Powered). But, I would still like to hear Linus' opinion on the fact that Transmeta, cool product or not, obviously don't endorse openness at all. They are keeping the code to their chip completely closed, and they have even patented the software.
Personally, I would think long and hard before working for a company like that if I could pick and choose like Linus can. The fact that it doesn't seem to bother Linus at all _is_ a thorn in the side of the honesty and clarity of his motives, as much as I hate to say it. I would never raise myself to the level of judging Linus, there are few people alive today for whom I have as much respect, but I have to admit that I can't help but wonder what makes the two legged house dwellers at Transmeta different from those and Sun and Microsoft.
- 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 posting this story, even though we've been over this ground before, primarily so that we don't get accused of bias by not posting it.
You can't force yourself to be impartial, and in the end, if the/. article writers are always worrying about not seeming biased, it will be just as bad as if you blatently were. You can't post every article that is negative about VA, but whenever you don't, I can promise people will jump on you for it.
Having a communal site like Slashdot owned by strong corporate interests is simply a bad idea, and I just don't think it can work out in the long run. There is an element of trust in the fact that community is willing to let a couple of people decide over what topics will be discussed here, and that trust is human, not corporate. I think the reason there is so much antagonism against Jon Katz here is that many of us feel he is abusing that trust, using Slashdot as a pulpit for his own preachings rather than choosing stories for us.
Having Slashdot owned by Andover was one thing, because Andover was a web company based on the idea of selling banner ads, and therefore had the very clear of objective of getting as many readers to return here as often as possible. With VA it is a lot more fuzzy. VA obviously do not have banner adds as their main source of income, so they have other agendas for wanting to own (even if you keep claiming they have no control over) the backbones of the community.
The relationship between the Slashdot community and VA Linux is somewhere between mutualistic and parasitic, and I share many peoples concern that it is leaning toward the latter. I guess it should come as a bucket of cold water to those who keep claiming that the influences of corporations and money will not harm the open source community, that they started by grabbing our favorite node for discussion right from our grasp...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While I don't think the article delt with it all, the person outlined, while I agree with many of her ideas, seemed more like a coffee-shop radical than a hacker, I do think their is a link between drug culture and hackers. While everyone has there definition of what hacker means, to me it is "a free-thinker with a compiler" (or maybe more generally "A free-thinking pragmatic").
To me, being a hacker means rejecting all Dogma, be it corporate, religious, or state sponsored. And since the amorility of those drugs that have been marked "bad" by society is just dogma, a hacker faced with drug culture is more likely then others to come out for it.
It is very easy, from the outside, to reject drug users as criminals by prejudice, the way that many people outside the hacker community reject us as criminals. But one cannot forget that just like we have our brilliant free thinking hacker geniuses (you know the names), recent history has been littered by genius free thinking drug users (Aldous Huxely, Carl Sagan,,,).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Can a person or organisation (or society) ever have the right to with threat of violence expropriate your information?
Noop. But as soon as violence is no longer needed, they have all the right to do so in the world. Unlike the current society, especially the American regime, that DOES want to force you by violence not to protect your data from expropriation by means of mathematics (cryptography), I consider this a right. In fact, the right to secrecy and the freedom of information go hand in hand in the information age, but neither needs to be enforced by violence as God (through mathematics) has already provided.
By the same token, if the MPAA or RIAA did manage to make a copyprotection system that actually worked, I would not attack them.
My thoughs are information. Are they free too? Am I a bad guy when I choose to keep some of them for myself?
Of course you have a right to keep your thoughts to yourself, but as soon as you discuss them in public they are no longer exclusively your own, and you cannot claim any ownership of them.
Hobbex, you have made many good posts, but I think you are going a bit far here. The purpose of copyright *is* to protect the artist or innovator.
I see this as very bad critisism since the statement you quoted is at the heart of my entire philosophy of information. If you are an enemy of the freedom of information, I would hope that you disliked all my posts.
The artist is in his/her full right to give up their rights, either by GPL-ing (or similar) or by selling out to a distributor. The problem is that there are not enough "good" distributors to tackle the megacorps.
Yes, Stallman is a genius and the GPL is a silent revolution that could come from below and drive copyrights right out of existance just because, when it comes down to it, regardless of how much we have been taught to think otherwise, the freedom of information does make sense to us. I do hope that there is room in the world for the screaming revolutionaries like myself though.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
DeCSS is not the only program to come under attack by the forces of copyright protection lately. What about, for example, Napster.
Even if we rid ourselves of the DMCA copyprotection laws, you have not delt with programs like Napster or other system that are even more obviously meant to be used for what is, in corporate doublespeak, known as "piracy".
You can make examples of all the "pirates" you want, and start executing them on the spot when caught, but as long as bandwidth keeps increasing and programs like Napster are easily available, you will not be able to keep "piracy" under control. So, copyprotection or not, you have to attack people writing such programs to protect the economic interests of the copyright, and that is exactly equivalent to attacking someone for writing a DeCSS program.
If you want to preserve copyrights you have to attack freedom. I can't make your choices for you.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
You are completely and entirely wrong and you haven't even thought through what you are saying. Sometimes I wish that Slashdot moderators would actually read the posts rather than marking anything that is long and well worded up.
This not a matter of equally wrong sides bickering. There is an ethical choice here: Can a person or organisation ever have the right to with threat of violence control the spread of information?
If you answered yes, you can say goodbye to Freedom in the information age.
The MPAA president had it right when he said in his LA Times collumn that "you cannot own something that you cannot controle." And that pretty much sums their side. They want to maintain controle, and hence ownership, of information at any cost to the consumer. We are infringing on their economic interests to protect our freedom, they are infringing on our freedom to protect their economic interests. If you think that both sides are equally justified, you need to _seriously_ re-evaluate your personal ethics.
The idea IS to reject our current copyright system, because it works only to the benefit of the creators of thought and art to a small degree of what it works to benefite large multinational coroporations that couldn't care less about rights or innovation or art. The idea IS to reject our current copyright system because it based on the idea that infromation is not free, and an information society can NEVER be free if information is not.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Asimov really had it all down, didn't he. Protecting yourself against your big neighbors by making them dependant on your technological exports is straight out The Foundation's traders period.
OK, it's not all that novel an idea, but it struck me in this context for some reason.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
a) Stay down. Barring your own vanity, releasing something anonymously on the Internet is not that difficult. Put everything together nicely, and then send it to a mailing list or newsgroup on the subject through a Mixmaster or Cypherpunk mailing list. Leave spreading it to the power of the masses and of the Internet, by just creating it you have done enough.
This means major paranoia though, possibly you are not careful enough even when submitting this Slashdot. How sure are you that Rob and Andover are _really_ wiping the logs?
Yes, it sucks to have to be anonymous to speak freely, but such is the nature of living in a non-free society (and I won't even dignify anyone who says we do with a reply). Possibly you could sign the message with a public key, so that when (if) freedom comes you can take credit for your work. Consider that possesion of the private key would be very incriminating however.
b) Make a matyr of yourself. Contact a lawyer, and maybe a charity that is ready to help you first. Then just go out and tell the truth, ready to be the case that gets taken to the supreme court. It's a risky strategy, but it is a lot more glamorous then the first, so some people may still prefer it (being a pompous asshole myself, I think I might). And at least in this case you have a better chance of the data actually becoming legal, so that using it is not thoughtcrime...
- 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
Honest?
I don't hear them admitting that they are trying to quell dissidents and keep their totalitarian power, in fact, if you read the article you will see they even deny they have the firewall at all, though it is well known, and obvious, that they do (remind of you of a certain Echelon, anybody?)
When forums were closed on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they were said to be down to "improve the system and services." The forum censors are known as "Web masters" (I'm sure this will make all the real webmasters here happy). The reason that news from outside China can't be posted is because it is "harmful and illegal". People who post to critical sites are marked as "attempting to overthrow the state". These are not example of being "honest".
And you are an idiot if you buy the propaganda that it is good to keep porn illegal so government can attack "rapists and child molesters". Any unenforced, generally disobeyed laws undermine a democracy because they provide a point where the government can, at will, attack most any citizen (sure, you have never heard of such a person, but they can claim that you are actually a rapist - after all they only have to prove that you looked at porn to lock you up). There are reasons why we have a heavy burden of proof even, or especially, for the most deplorable crimes...
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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.
And that site also contains the true reason why they shouldn't get this patent...
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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 a coder for The Freenet Project, but I can't speak for everyone else involved.)
1: While this sort of attack is an issue, Freenet does deal with it. Because Requests and Inserts are randomly spread over the entire network, in order for such an attack to be successful you have to have greater capacity then the rest of the entire network put together. Also, as long as all your inserts and requests are targeted at a limited number of nodes, those nodes will "float" toward one another in the routing (that's a vague statement, for a better reply you have to understand the system), until your attack is only hurting the nodes you are targeting directly (in which case you might as well DoS them conventionally).
2: This is true, Freenet is not ideal for copying wide arrays of large media. That is the cost of freedom and anonymity. Freenet does allow for a large amount of parallelism however, and specs for how to split files into smaller chunks that can be requested simulataneously are being worked on. Also, the size of a 5 meg file is shrinking rapidly (Freenet will not be ready for mainstream use for some time).
I encourage everyone to give our project a little more thought before deciding that it doesn't work. I'm not convinced that it works either, but so far nothing has convinced me that it doesn't (and I have been looking for a reason for the last nine months), which justifies going for it in my book.
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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.
Finally, as for "mainstream media" being in the pocket of corporations, as much as Noam Chomsky would delight in hearing you say that, it is only partly accurate. Consider this: where do you actually hear all the bad things you have heard about corporations? From - surprise! - mainstream news media. The corporations report about and criticize one another. Power is not simply "wrested" (as you say) from individuals by big, evil corporations; it is give-and-take, and consumers (despite your lamentations) are willing participants - not helpless, powerless, victims as you would caricature them. That's why TV shows fail, movies flop and new musical genres develop - because we are in a system that encourages interaction and market exchange, instead of stifling it.
I have yet to see any DMCA critical articles or coverage in ANY mainstream media. And of all the articles I read about the DeCSS affair, ALL of them had a pro-"let's keep the gun in their mouths" slant. Were I dependent on mainstream media to gain understanding of the existing power structures desperate struggle for survival at the cost of our freedom, I would probably be as ignorant to gravity of the situation as you are (though you speak eloquently and a lot - right at home in Washington I guess).
Oh, and the situation is _simple_. Enforced copyrights and freedom cannot coexist in cyberspace. Period.
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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.
Percentages are ratios, so it is 99.999% of whatever period you choose (in other words, the machine will only be broken one hundred-thousandth of any period of time).
This guy chose one year, which is why he wrote "5 minutes per year". How did he he get to it, well:
60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365.25 days per year = 525960 minutes in every year.
The High Availablity Linux box will be broken one out of every 100,000 of those minutes, or 5 and quarter minutes per year.
I sort of hope for your sake that you are in third grade...
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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 it is. You sir you are the one that wants to destroy freedom you are the danger not Sony. Free Trade is the backbone of a free society by limiting it you are limiting MY freedom.
Let's see, could you point to where exactly I said I wanted to ban or forbid the PS2?
Get rid of the copyright laws that Sony needs to pull this shit off an I will stop whining right now. I don't want to ban anything, but how much are you willing to bet against that Sony will want to ban the first program that cracks the PS2s copyprotection schemes? (please make it a large amout of money and contact me asap).
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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.
think linux...
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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.
So, I am a consumer who wants access to the Internet for the purposes of playing cutting-edge massively-multiplayer games, chatting, checking my e-mail, browsing the web, and engaging in on-line forums. I buy a box like the PS2 which does all of these things conveniently, cheaply, and easily, and this box _isn't_ for me, or consumers like me? I am a victim of Sony and other companies who make these non-consumer products?
Please, victimize me more!
Yes, you are a victim. You are a victim because you are being played as pawn in Sony's game for a future where they and their kin control the very freedom and integrity of your online existance. You are a victim because you are mindlessly giving up freedoms in cyberspace which you would not have dreamed for a second of compromising in the world which you are used to.
Indeed there are many people who need a simpler device than a PC for their Internet access, and those people should have such a device. But this is not what the PS2 is about, the PS2 is about being the troyan horse into peoples homes that Sony needs to make sure that it can provide customers with information without granting them freedom. It is about giving the mega-corps back the power that the Internet and the PC has threatened, a hundred times over. Read between the lines of the corporate doublespeak of Sony's talk of a "platform for digital content delivery", and this is exactly you will see.
This is not about being anti-capitalistic, or luddite, or not wanting to give newbies a chance to go online. This is about a cancer to capitalist society that has gone to far, and that is threatening the very freedom that capitalism exists ONLY to support. This is about the DMCA, the UCITA, the arrest of sixteen year old for nothing but protecting fair use, and the continued growth of corporations abusing laws meant to encourage "creative effort" to be parasites to this very process in every way.
It is a shame that people are not yet aware enough of the importance of electronic freedom to realize that they MUST reject the intrusion of electronics into their homes that is serving somebody else's agenda rather than theirs.
It is a shame, but it is understandable.
It is not understandable that people like you defend this process.
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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.
Like everyone here, I can't help but drool over the technical specs to this machine, and what Sony has managed to squeeze into the price. It is obviously a damn fine piece of technology, and I salute Sony's developers for this achievement.
But, on the other hand, there is a side to this that I can't help worrying about, and choices made for which I do not salute Sony (aka a leading member of both the RIAA and MPAA). These machines are the most propietary of the proprietary, and include copyprotection schemes that make CSS look childish. And Sony's goal with the PS2 is not just to push another console onto the market, but to start chipping into the things which PCs are used for today, making there machines the standard way to access the Internet.
The PS2 is not a machine designed as an instrument for the consumer, it is designed as an instrument for Sony to drive consumers into buying more games, more movies, and more of whatever other services they plan to offer. Inviting a PS2 into your living room is not buying a piece of electronics to serve _your_ agenda, it is opening the door to a piece of robotics maticulously designed to use you, granting you as little freedom as possible ("lets see, what Sony licensed proprietary title shall we play today") in the process.
The personal computer will always be more than just a piece of electronics, because it is a tool designed for you, and only for you. The PC is a statement of integrity and freedom. It serves your agenda, when you want it to, and, with a little knowledge, in whatever way you want it to. It is the PC that povided the basis for the developement of Linux, and it is freedom of PC usage that has shaped most of our ideas about electronic freedom.
The bad things that Microsoft do with their control of the PC desktop are nothing compared to the bad things that companies like Sony will do if the PC is replaced by closed machines like the PS2 as the primary tool for accessing the Internet. Do you think there will ever be a Napster client for the PS2? Or an SDMI-free mp3 player? Or the ability to save and store information on your terms?
The proliferation of the PS2 is a further step into a future where corporations control every aspect of your electronic life. A world where the machines that should be our tools are instead turned against us, meant only to ensure the continued cashflow toward existing capital, where large money will not hesitate to fuck you over at any point.
Oh happy day!
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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 the fact that Doubleclick had to back down on this shows that standards aren't necessary.
Isn't it great to have the irony of fate on our side for once.
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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.
Among other things, Zoid did a lot of the porting and developement of Quake on Linux and the other Unix platforms. I guess they will need to find a Linux programmer to take his job now...
Is that the sound of a thousand Slashdot readers printing their CVs I hear?
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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.
Do you even read posts before you pick out one line an reply to them?
The point is not to worry about whether kids see porn or not (I watched plenty of porn as a kid, I'm none the worse for it), but whether the community or school should be paying for it.
No one is trying to control the information that kids have access to, they can walk into a CyberCafe down the street from the library and surf whatever the fuck they want, or go home and connect from where they can commit their dirty deeds in privacy. Try to enact this sort of thing into LAW, and I'll be against it to the last, but libraries have no obligation to provide access to all information.
You people are just as manic as the other side for gods sake. Stop for one second and consider WHY a library is supposed to provide a public wank booth...
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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 have been following these posts about this anti-filter in libraries campaign, and I really have to wonder why this is a big deal.
I would like to ask: what are Libraries doing offering Internet access at all? The Internet is not just a way to access information, it is entertainment, it is commerce, it is discussion, it is communication, and it, too, is pornography.
You probably don't require your library to carry porn in print. Nor do you expect it to carry the latest Sears or Victorias Secret catalog (together with a phone to make those 1-800 calls to order), or a bunch of video games, or to show the latest Arnold movie, or to provide a place for you and your friends to party, or even to send your letters too your grandmother. I cannot understand why it should suddenly be expected to offer all these things on the Internet.
I believe in free speach online, in fact I have been doing my best to make concrete efforts towards guaranteeing it. I think that the AFA and co. are a bunch of idiots, but in this issue you are just as wrong.
I think much of the problem comes from libraries not wanting to bother with the digital future, and hoping they can get away with throwing up a few PCs with Internet access. They shouldn't be doing this at all, instead they should be building their own, seperate, network, LibraryNet. LibraryNet should be to the Internet exactly what libraries are to the rest of the world, and should offer quality, but yes, moderated information. LibraryNet should concentrate on getting rare books online in digital form so that even small Libraries can get them, it should concentrate on mirroring web content selectively the way that libraries offer periodicals today, and should provide contact with information specialists, the way you can get human contact with a librarian today.
Censorship sucks. Telling people what they can and can't see is stupid, but we need to look at what we are attacking. If people want to look at free information on the Internet, they are free to get themselves connected in other ways, this is not the libraries responsibility. Shame on you for smearing our crusade with this ridiculous nihility.
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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.
The harshest rating something can get (besides being censored, which they apparently haven't done since they cut out the torture scene from Casino) is 15+, but unlike America that is an absolute rating, having a parent or a guardian with you won't help.
What gets it? A lot of movies. Examples of movies running right now that got it are "The Green Mile", "The Bone Collector", and "The Messenger" (all of these were rated R in America, but I'm sure one could find plenty of examples where America was less strict).
In Sweden, you are also allowed to say "fuck" on the radio...
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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 it is more or less clear by now that Metcalf has a beef with the whole open source concept and ideals. It seems strange for someone who is, or at least was, a brilliant inventor, but when you consider his personal history it does make some sort of sense. Metcalfe made a brilliant invention, started a company around it, was forced out of the company by the resident corporate baffoons, and has since been marginalized to a nothing collumist in some god forsaken magazine where he can only get attention by trolling away.
Given that, one can understand why he carries a grudge against the open source ideals of giving away you inventions rather than trying to capitalize on them, and people like Linus in particular. Linus (and the likes of Tim Bereners Lee) is a living reminder that he could have chosen another route for his invention, one where he would not have been forced out by a bunch of idiot beaurocrats, and could still be a respected senior hacker rather than a senile Anonymous Coward wannabee.
That said, I do think he has a point about this. He seems to forget that Torvalds works at Transmeta but doesn't own it (just like the rest of the press, really), and his statement that Transmeta shouldn't hype Windows performance is ludicrous. They have to sell the damn chip, and they obviously prefer Linux to Windows or they would have worked with MS to get CE on Crusoe portals (oops, I mean make them Windows Powered). But, I would still like to hear Linus' opinion on the fact that Transmeta, cool product or not, obviously don't endorse openness at all. They are keeping the code to their chip completely closed, and they have even patented the software.
Personally, I would think long and hard before working for a company like that if I could pick and choose like Linus can. The fact that it doesn't seem to bother Linus at all _is_ a thorn in the side of the honesty and clarity of his motives, as much as I hate to say it. I would never raise myself to the level of judging Linus, there are few people alive today for whom I have as much respect, but I have to admit that I can't help but wonder what makes the two legged house dwellers at Transmeta different from those and Sun and Microsoft.
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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.
You mean since when you run Netscape on Linux, it _never_ crashes when trying to load a java applet?
(for the clueless, let me teach you a game called "spot the sarcasm").
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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 posting this story, even though we've been over this ground before, primarily so that we don't get accused of bias by not posting it.
/. article writers are always worrying about not seeming biased, it will be just as bad as if you blatently were. You can't post every article that is negative about VA, but whenever you don't, I can promise people will jump on you for it.
You can't force yourself to be impartial, and in the end, if the
Having a communal site like Slashdot owned by strong corporate interests is simply a bad idea, and I just don't think it can work out in the long run. There is an element of trust in the fact that community is willing to let a couple of people decide over what topics will be discussed here, and that trust is human, not corporate. I think the reason there is so much antagonism against Jon Katz here is that many of us feel he is abusing that trust, using Slashdot as a pulpit for his own preachings rather than choosing stories for us.
Having Slashdot owned by Andover was one thing, because Andover was a web company based on the idea of selling banner ads, and therefore had the very clear of objective of getting as many readers to return here as often as possible. With VA it is a lot more fuzzy. VA obviously do not have banner adds as their main source of income, so they have other agendas for wanting to own (even if you keep claiming they have no control over) the backbones of the community.
The relationship between the Slashdot community and VA Linux is somewhere between mutualistic and parasitic, and I share many peoples concern that it is leaning toward the latter. I guess it should come as a bucket of cold water to those who keep claiming that the influences of corporations and money will not harm the open source community, that they started by grabbing our favorite node for discussion right from our grasp...
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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.
While I don't think the article delt with it all, the person outlined, while I agree with many of her ideas, seemed more like a coffee-shop radical than a hacker, I do think their is a link between drug culture and hackers. While everyone has there definition of what hacker means, to me it is "a free-thinker with a compiler" (or maybe more generally "A free-thinking pragmatic").
To me, being a hacker means rejecting all Dogma, be it corporate, religious, or state sponsored. And since the amorility of those drugs that have been marked "bad" by society is just dogma, a hacker faced with drug culture is more likely then others to come out for it.
It is very easy, from the outside, to reject drug users as criminals by prejudice, the way that many people outside the hacker community reject us as criminals. But one cannot forget that just like we have our brilliant free thinking hacker geniuses (you know the names), recent history has been littered by genius free thinking drug users (Aldous Huxely, Carl Sagan,,,).
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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.
Can a person or organisation (or society) ever have the right to with threat of violence expropriate your information?
Noop. But as soon as violence is no longer needed, they have all the right to do so in the world. Unlike the current society, especially the American regime, that DOES want to force you by violence not to protect your data from expropriation by means of mathematics (cryptography), I consider this a right. In fact, the right to secrecy and the freedom of information go hand in hand in the information age, but neither needs to be enforced by violence as God (through mathematics) has already provided.
By the same token, if the MPAA or RIAA did manage to make a copyprotection system that actually worked, I would not attack them.
My thoughs are information. Are they free too? Am I a bad guy when I choose to keep some of them for myself?
Of course you have a right to keep your thoughts to yourself, but as soon as you discuss them in public they are no longer exclusively your own, and you cannot claim any ownership of them.
Hobbex, you have made many good posts, but I think you are going a bit far here. The purpose of copyright *is* to protect the artist or innovator.
I see this as very bad critisism since the statement you quoted is at the heart of my entire philosophy of information. If you are an enemy of the freedom of information, I would hope that you disliked all my posts.
The artist is in his/her full right to give up their rights, either by GPL-ing (or similar) or by selling out to a distributor. The problem is that there are not enough "good" distributors to tackle the megacorps.
Yes, Stallman is a genius and the GPL is a silent revolution that could come from below and drive copyrights right out of existance just because, when it comes down to it, regardless of how much we have been taught to think otherwise, the freedom of information does make sense to us. I do hope that there is room in the world for the screaming revolutionaries like myself though.
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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.
DeCSS is not the only program to come under attack by the forces of copyright protection lately. What about, for example, Napster.
Even if we rid ourselves of the DMCA copyprotection laws, you have not delt with programs like Napster or other system that are even more obviously meant to be used for what is, in corporate doublespeak, known as "piracy".
You can make examples of all the "pirates" you want, and start executing them on the spot when caught, but as long as bandwidth keeps increasing and programs like Napster are easily available, you will not be able to keep "piracy" under control. So, copyprotection or not, you have to attack people writing such programs to protect the economic interests of the copyright, and that is exactly equivalent to attacking someone for writing a DeCSS program.
If you want to preserve copyrights you have to attack freedom. I can't make your choices for you.
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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.
You are completely and entirely wrong and you haven't even thought through what you are saying. Sometimes I wish that Slashdot moderators would actually read the posts rather than marking anything that is long and well worded up.
This not a matter of equally wrong sides bickering. There is an ethical choice here: Can a person or organisation ever have the right to with threat of violence control the spread of information?
If you answered yes, you can say goodbye to Freedom in the information age.
The MPAA president had it right when he said in his LA Times collumn that "you cannot own something that you cannot controle." And that pretty much sums their side. They want to maintain controle, and hence ownership, of information at any cost to the consumer. We are infringing on their economic interests to protect our freedom, they are infringing on our freedom to protect their economic interests. If you think that both sides are equally justified, you need to _seriously_ re-evaluate your personal ethics.
The idea IS to reject our current copyright system, because it works only to the benefit of the creators of thought and art to a small degree of what it works to benefite large multinational coroporations that couldn't care less about rights or innovation or art. The idea IS to reject our current copyright system because it based on the idea that infromation is not free, and an information society can NEVER be free if information is not.
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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.
You have to teach me how to play with one hand...
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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.
Asimov really had it all down, didn't he. Protecting yourself against your big neighbors by making them dependant on your technological exports is straight out The Foundation's traders period.
OK, it's not all that novel an idea, but it struck me in this context for some reason.
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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.
Congratulations, you have just discovered obscurity.
Search for Mixmaster on google to learn about security, generally considered a lot smarter.
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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.
IANAL, but this seems more or less clear:
a) Stay down. Barring your own vanity, releasing something anonymously on the Internet is not that difficult. Put everything together nicely, and then send it to a mailing list or newsgroup on the subject through a Mixmaster or Cypherpunk mailing list. Leave spreading it to the power of the masses and of the Internet, by just creating it you have done enough.
This means major paranoia though, possibly you are not careful enough even when submitting this Slashdot. How sure are you that Rob and Andover are _really_ wiping the logs?
Yes, it sucks to have to be anonymous to speak freely, but such is the nature of living in a non-free society (and I won't even dignify anyone who says we do with a reply). Possibly you could sign the message with a public key, so that when (if) freedom comes you can take credit for your work. Consider that possesion of the private key would be very incriminating however.
b) Make a matyr of yourself. Contact a lawyer, and maybe a charity that is ready to help you first. Then just go out and tell the truth, ready to be the case that gets taken to the supreme court. It's a risky strategy, but it is a lot more glamorous then the first, so some people may still prefer it (being a pompous asshole myself, I think I might). And at least in this case you have a better chance of the data actually becoming legal, so that using it is not thoughtcrime...
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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.