It still boggles my mind that writing one's own instructions for a device (DVD player) and sharing them with the world can be called "illegal" in the first place.
There was no instance of "trade secrets" being compromised, if there were and insider of one of the licensed vendors or the consortium would have been on trial instead of Eric aka Emmanuel and 2600 magazine.
There was no instance of copyright infringement, DeCSS is origonal work not a copy.
Calling DeCSS "illegal" is nonsense, just as saying that a "licensed" program is "legal".
If the MPAA can find a pirated and cracked copy of it's own software then they have a point, but until then they are just blowing crap (along with that Amish* judge that they rented).
*no offense to any Amish folk reading or hearing about this post;-)
Then there's Metricom's "Ricochet" system. That's more aimed at mobile users. Uses little,
shoe-box-sized repeaters mounted on utility poles all over the place.
I live in the DC metro area and actually contacting Metricom here is quite a chore.
The last time I looked at their website (several weeks ago) there were no prices for service listed. When I called, I sat on VM hold for AGES and was never able to speak with a human to find out how much they want per month (their system told me to call back later and hung up).
They are still at 28.8 kbps in this area and have been promising 128 "soon" for about 3 years, still not here.
I was going to use 2 or 3 channels for a vehicle project, but TDB now, they will not get my business nor will they be a sponsor.
Yet another example of a great theory that did not survive contact with reality.
Maybe
this will mark the real beginning of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age."
Well, maybe yes and maybe no. We have to wait until next year for the 2001: A Space Oddessy prediction to come true, then in 2010 Jupiter explodes and becomes a star.
But wait, don't get too confused, at the end of 2033(isn't that the last of the trilogy?) we discover that DeBeers has been keeping all of the diamond matter a big secret.
Anyway, we have to wait until we have enough diamond to build all the stuff Clark wrote about first and then Stephenson piled on.
Perhaps you need to investigate the premises of your various theories a little more.
1. Check this thread http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/12/12422 13&cid=19 first. There is a link to a Security Geeks story that has info on hacking an AirPort (now, I am told, useable on Linux and Mac) base station to 128bit encryption.
2. The HAM radio encryption limit is not anything like what you say. It is a legeslated restriction. You are not "allowed" to encrypt on amature frequencies by law, not by physics.
You can easily use any encryption method you like across a TNC (terminal node controller) packet connection. As long as you do not mind breaking the law. If you use public key encryption it will work just fine (well, as fine as TNC gets anyway). The radio can care less if the bursts are gibberish or human readable.
However, you can signal hop and use any method you like for that, so long as the data is not encrypted. Check some of the Off the Hook archives for this info, bernieS gave a nice brief outline of this method on a show from last year or so.
3. Several news stories recently have covered breakthroughs in laser networking. However, moving your house to a line-of sight path to the hub may not be practical.
If dirt world communities behaved like online communities, or even if the HAM "spirit" would spread a bit, we could have wireless networks all across the countryside.
This securitygeeks story covers how to setup a very basic AirPort wireless network that can communicate at great distances as well as 128 bit encryption.
As far as I know you still have to use a Mac to use the AirPort base station, but it does not look like it would be impossible to hack for UNIX use (perhaps it already has been and I just missed the news).
Anyway, the point is that the hardware and the software is already here, all we need to do is band together and use it.
Part of my relief is that they are leaving the dorms connected at all, instead of forcing the students to use only connections from the library when they feel like having the labs manned.
At least erring on the side of doing almost nothing is better than the overreaction other schools have been doing.
My motto for government is "don't just do something, stand there".
Well, it just sounds great. I had a bunch of goofy questions at the onset but a little thinking through eliminated them (won't sharing them choke bandwidth, most monitors will not show a difference, etc.).
The bandwidth for sharing would not be a problem in web applications because the cluefull site builder will serve the version that fits the bandwidth for quick loading, i.e., measure the connection speed and send a lower resolution version to the client.
So with monitor resolution, people that have lower res monitors or printers will still get the same image quality that they are used to having, but they can see images in much better quality when they upgrade their equipment (assuming that they have the maximum quality file to begin with).
However, it seems that the number of pix that can be stored on whatever media is contained in the camera (portables) would have to decrease. Maybe this will be an excellent excuse for Sony to add larger CD-R disks to their cameras?
Idunno, I just think anything in this area is way cool and wish I had the spare bucks to snatch a few more items like this up when they are brand new!
I certainly agree with you on your point. Perhaps they will be doing something like that in the future.
When I worked there in '93/'94, UT was trying to get itself fully fiber connected. The entire infrastructure is now fiber within the university (well, not all the way to the machines, but everyplace else pretty much).
Anyway, I hope that they work a bandwidth limit solution (limit bandwidth, not content) so that the students doing real work may have access to the resources that they are paying for.
While on a recent vacation, I stopped in and spoke with some of my old network and computer lab bosses and they filled me in on the UT practice and plans for the future.
Note, I have not seen the written policy, this is what several very knowledgable people told me that they do and are planning on doing.
First, neither Napster, nor anything else, is blocked. Free speech is king, so no filtering is done by the school.
They have had a problem with the dorms eating up so much of the total bandwidth, slowing down staff and administration along with the dorms themselves. So, the plan is to put the dorms on a seperate network and seperate gateway from the rest of the school. Quoting a friend "if the students want to gring their network to a hault trading music and videos, let them, it's fine with us."
I am not sure if Metallica has heard of this yet, but if they decide to force censorship on that university (with 20,000+ students) they will probably have a fight on their hands.
This is just stupid. Politicians have no sense pf economics.
I think that CA has both an income tax and a retirement tax. They get a chunk of every paycheck cut for a worker living in CA for the life of the worker.
Now they want to drive all of the employers of those taxable paychecks away to Reston/Herndon VA. UGH! more screwballs that ask "what kind of mixed drinks do you have" at Paolo's in the Towne Center, oh joy.
Anyway, CA makes a fortune off of the backs of it's workers, even after the worker has moved and retired. Piling this on top is just beurocratic greed.
If the businesses affected had a financial brain (and they do) they will just pull up stakes and move to SeaLand.
Prior art and first use are excellent items for disputing patent claims.
The "antipatent" system seems a bit cumbersome, since registering something obvious is counterintuitive to most of us, but patenting something obvious seems to be what the patent office thrives on.
It just seems unworkable on a basic level. That being that the patent office does not seem to do much checking on prior art anyway and neither do these courts that keep handing out insane rulings.
I wish I could be more optomistic, but having a differently worded older patent or even documentation of inventing something before a current patent awardee was born does not seem to matter much these days.
As long as they are not stealing content, you really do not have a complaint in my eyes.
I always thought these "look and feel" cases heald about as much water as a sieve patent. Yhey might, but they shouldn't.
Hell, even complaining that another site has the same "look" as yours (yes, even if it is a clone with different content) is about as genuine as an Apple vs. whomever lawsuit. Yes, I *think* Apple won something along those lines, but did you support that decision then?
This: So the cost of segmentation, a users guide/manual, QA, and everything else that go into a
DII COE segment are free? Unfortunately, we have to go through this far too often.
A well supported segment takes three months (full time) to get it in. If someone has a
problem or you don't have someone to push the segment through for you? Now you're
looking at more like six months or longer. is not the real point. The real point is that he can probably do what he needs to do with Linux or anything else that is not on the "certified" list.
Now, if you wan to get something else onto the list you CAN do it yourself and there are about a zillion ways to get a charge number for this and work it into the existing appropriation and/or contract.
Looks like we have another case of the stupids on our hands.
I can't wait until Burger King starts handing out free toys and then sends cease and decist letters to anybody using it for propping a wobbly table leg.
For crying out loud, this stupid instance will probably make it into court soon just like the stupid DeCSS case.
Why on earth do courts (yes, I know it is not in court yet, I am just proving that I am psychic;-) even bother to hear cases based on this crap?
Secondly, if you think that an undertaking like Linux (or
any OS for that matter) would only cost a few hundred dollars, then you are only looking at
the cost of procuring the OS itself. While Linux may be freely distributed, coding the
Military's very specific pieces of hardware would require a huge undertaking employing
numerous engineers many man hours.
Incorrect. He has a specific project, the information on how to make a secure install of Linux is out there, the spec he wants to follow (however, he probably does not have to follow it like he thinks he does, if you read my whole post) is out there.
I don't know what DoD related job you ever heald, but in the 21+ years of military service plus years with contractors I have not been on any platform listed. As you will see by scrolling through the other posts of folks that are actually familiar with the DoD drumbeat, from experience, this guy has a much smaller problem than he thinks he has as far as getting his system up.
I am a program manager for a very small program in the US Air Force and
would like to be able to use Linux as a possible platform for my standard systems.
However, I cannot because regulations require me to use only operating systems that are
DII/COE compliant.
I see nothing at all preventing YOU from submitting the platform/krenel combination that you want to use.
I hope it is not something pesky like "government money is too precious to be wasted on this", since it should not cost over a couple hundred bucks and that is for a system that you are going to end up using anyway.
BTW, I hope that you are using ONLY the 2 platforms on that compliance list in your shop. If you have anything legally running Win95 then this is just a bunch of nonsense that you may ignore just as everybody else does.
I thought this method worked at 3 Kelvin. Isn't that cold enough?
Anyway, you are restating my point. Massive amounts of energy from "classic" uncontrolled fusion are lost as heat and light.
Example: Thermonuclear bomb is used to dig a hole where a city sits now. However, so much energy "leaks" out that the hole is much smaller than if all of the energy was used for hole blasting (even if the bomb is buried really deep).
Theoretical example: old-school plasma type thermonuclear furnace is created for production of electricity and hi temp. product fabrication. However, heat is lost that is not used to spin a terbine or melt exotic materials and must be carried away to the cooling towers.
So, my question is more along the lines of: are we going to see more energy per reaction going into the intended purpose of the facility, or is it going to be just as lossy as plants are now?
Persuasion and trickery is usually preferred over force (by me anyway).
Would this method also be less "lossy" as far as being able to channel a higer percentage of the resulting energy into work, instead of loosing it as heat or (pick an energy type)?
If I distributed an HTML document which had references to images or other objects on
some website, every user opening that HTML document would cause an access to that
web site.
And if you read *any* document with a ref to an outside object (like a one pixel.jpg) with *anything* that is web aware the exact same thing will happen.
However, if you read the document in Wordpad or some other text only program you can avoid the effect. Makes for some pesky reading around markup and junk, but you will see the refrences to the web too.
I have heard of the DeCSS.pl file, but that is a little different than what I was thinking.
Just an empty file or even better, an empty directory, nothing else.
If I lived in a convenient location to Judge Kaplan's courtroom, I would even post my address on the site so the MPAA can have me answer to the Judge.
"Your Honor, it is just an empty directory, not even a program. It does absoutely nothing except take up space on my drive. Tried to tell these guys that several times, but they keep threatening and harassing me. Is there any way that you can get them to leave me alone?"
I have been thinking about this one for a while, guess it is time to try it.
Step 1. Post a web page named DeCSS, with DeCSS in the URL and some general information on the page that explains in great detail that the DeCSS code does not exist on that page. Also, no links to the DeCSS program on the page either.
Step 2. Sit back an wait to see how long the MPAA clueless train takes to fire off a letter.
Modified hack, have a link on the page to an empty file. Explain that it is an empty file. Goto Step 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for seeing the real issue, Eric.
;-)
It still boggles my mind that writing one's own instructions for a device (DVD player) and sharing them with the world can be called "illegal" in the first place.
There was no instance of "trade secrets" being compromised, if there were and insider of one of the licensed vendors or the consortium would have been on trial instead of Eric aka Emmanuel and 2600 magazine.
There was no instance of copyright infringement, DeCSS is origonal work not a copy.
Calling DeCSS "illegal" is nonsense, just as saying that a "licensed" program is "legal".
If the MPAA can find a pirated and cracked copy of it's own software then they have a point, but until then they are just blowing crap (along with that Amish* judge that they rented).
*no offense to any Amish folk reading or hearing about this post
Visit DC2600
Then there's Metricom's "Ricochet" system. That's more aimed at mobile users. Uses little, shoe-box-sized repeaters mounted on utility poles all over the place.
I live in the DC metro area and actually contacting Metricom here is quite a chore.
The last time I looked at their website (several weeks ago) there were no prices for service listed. When I called, I sat on VM hold for AGES and was never able to speak with a human to find out how much they want per month (their system told me to call back later and hung up).
They are still at 28.8 kbps in this area and have been promising 128 "soon" for about 3 years, still not here.
I was going to use 2 or 3 channels for a vehicle project, but TDB now, they will not get my business nor will they be a sponsor.
Yet another example of a great theory that did not survive contact with reality.
Visit DC2600
Maybe
this will mark the real beginning of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age."
Well, maybe yes and maybe no. We have to wait until next year for the 2001: A Space Oddessy prediction to come true, then in 2010 Jupiter explodes and becomes a star.
But wait, don't get too confused, at the end of 2033(isn't that the last of the trilogy?) we discover that DeBeers has been keeping all of the diamond matter a big secret.
Anyway, we have to wait until we have enough diamond to build all the stuff Clark wrote about first and then Stephenson piled on.
Visit DC2600
Perhaps you need to investigate the premises of your various theories a little more.
2 13&cid=19 first. There is a link to a Security Geeks story that has info on hacking an AirPort (now, I am told, useable on Linux and Mac) base station to 128bit encryption.
1. Check this thread http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/12/1242
2. The HAM radio encryption limit is not anything like what you say. It is a legeslated restriction. You are not "allowed" to encrypt on amature frequencies by law, not by physics.
You can easily use any encryption method you like across a TNC (terminal node controller) packet connection. As long as you do not mind breaking the law. If you use public key encryption it will work just fine (well, as fine as TNC gets anyway). The radio can care less if the bursts are gibberish or human readable.
However, you can signal hop and use any method you like for that, so long as the data is not encrypted. Check some of the Off the Hook archives for this info, bernieS gave a nice brief outline of this method on a show from last year or so.
3. Several news stories recently have covered breakthroughs in laser networking. However, moving your house to a line-of sight path to the hub may not be practical.
Visit DC2600
If dirt world communities behaved like online communities, or even if the HAM "spirit" would spread a bit, we could have wireless networks all across the countryside.
This securitygeeks story covers how to setup a very basic AirPort wireless network that can communicate at great distances as well as 128 bit encryption.
As far as I know you still have to use a Mac to use the AirPort base station, but it does not look like it would be impossible to hack for UNIX use (perhaps it already has been and I just missed the news).
Anyway, the point is that the hardware and the software is already here, all we need to do is band together and use it.
Visit DC2600
Actually, I do know how messed up it is.
Part of my relief is that they are leaving the dorms connected at all, instead of forcing the students to use only connections from the library when they feel like having the labs manned.
At least erring on the side of doing almost nothing is better than the overreaction other schools have been doing.
My motto for government is "don't just do something, stand there".
Visit DC2600
Well, it just sounds great. I had a bunch of goofy questions at the onset but a little thinking through eliminated them (won't sharing them choke bandwidth, most monitors will not show a difference, etc.).
The bandwidth for sharing would not be a problem in web applications because the cluefull site builder will serve the version that fits the bandwidth for quick loading, i.e., measure the connection speed and send a lower resolution version to the client.
So with monitor resolution, people that have lower res monitors or printers will still get the same image quality that they are used to having, but they can see images in much better quality when they upgrade their equipment (assuming that they have the maximum quality file to begin with).
However, it seems that the number of pix that can be stored on whatever media is contained in the camera (portables) would have to decrease. Maybe this will be an excellent excuse for Sony to add larger CD-R disks to their cameras?
Idunno, I just think anything in this area is way cool and wish I had the spare bucks to snatch a few more items like this up when they are brand new!
Visit DC2600
Well, that is what I meant to say, but you said it a lot better. Thank you.
Visit DC2600
I certainly agree with you on your point. Perhaps they will be doing something like that in the future.
When I worked there in '93/'94, UT was trying to get itself fully fiber connected. The entire infrastructure is now fiber within the university (well, not all the way to the machines, but everyplace else pretty much).
Anyway, I hope that they work a bandwidth limit solution (limit bandwidth, not content) so that the students doing real work may have access to the resources that they are paying for.
Visit DC2600
While on a recent vacation, I stopped in and spoke with some of my old network and computer lab bosses and they filled me in on the UT practice and plans for the future.
Note, I have not seen the written policy, this is what several very knowledgable people told me that they do and are planning on doing.
First, neither Napster, nor anything else, is blocked. Free speech is king, so no filtering is done by the school.
They have had a problem with the dorms eating up so much of the total bandwidth, slowing down staff and administration along with the dorms themselves. So, the plan is to put the dorms on a seperate network and seperate gateway from the rest of the school. Quoting a friend "if the students want to gring their network to a hault trading music and videos, let them, it's fine with us."
I am not sure if Metallica has heard of this yet, but if they decide to force censorship on that university (with 20,000+ students) they will probably have a fight on their hands.
Visit DC2600
This is just stupid. Politicians have no sense pf economics.
I think that CA has both an income tax and a retirement tax. They get a chunk of every paycheck cut for a worker living in CA for the life of the worker.
Now they want to drive all of the employers of those taxable paychecks away to Reston/Herndon VA. UGH! more screwballs that ask "what kind of mixed drinks do you have" at Paolo's in the Towne Center, oh joy.
Anyway, CA makes a fortune off of the backs of it's workers, even after the worker has moved and retired. Piling this on top is just beurocratic greed.
If the businesses affected had a financial brain (and they do) they will just pull up stakes and move to SeaLand.
Visit DC2600
Prior art and first use are excellent items for disputing patent claims.
The "antipatent" system seems a bit cumbersome, since registering something obvious is counterintuitive to most of us, but patenting something obvious seems to be what the patent office thrives on.
It just seems unworkable on a basic level. That being that the patent office does not seem to do much checking on prior art anyway and neither do these courts that keep handing out insane rulings.
I wish I could be more optomistic, but having a differently worded older patent or even documentation of inventing something before a current patent awardee was born does not seem to matter much these days.
Visit DC2600
As long as they are not stealing content, you really do not have a complaint in my eyes.
I always thought these "look and feel" cases heald about as much water as a sieve patent. Yhey might, but they shouldn't.
Hell, even complaining that another site has the same "look" as yours (yes, even if it is a clone with different content) is about as genuine as an Apple vs. whomever lawsuit. Yes, I *think* Apple won something along those lines, but did you support that decision then?
This is the same thing.
Visit DC2600
This:
So the cost of segmentation, a users guide/manual, QA, and everything else that go into a DII COE segment are free? Unfortunately, we have to go through this far too often. A well supported segment takes three months (full time) to get it in. If someone has a problem or you don't have someone to push the segment through for you? Now you're looking at more like six months or longer.
is not the real point. The real point is that he can probably do what he needs to do with Linux or anything else that is not on the "certified" list.
Now, if you wan to get something else onto the list you CAN do it yourself and there are about a zillion ways to get a charge number for this and work it into the existing appropriation and/or contract.
Visit DC2600
Looks like we have another case of the stupids on our hands.
I can't wait until Burger King starts handing out free toys and then sends cease and decist letters to anybody using it for propping a wobbly table leg.
For crying out loud, this stupid instance will probably make it into court soon just like the stupid DeCSS case.
Why on earth do courts (yes, I know it is not in court yet, I am just proving that I am psychic;-) even bother to hear cases based on this crap?
Visit DC2600
Secondly, if you think that an undertaking like Linux (or any OS for that matter) would only cost a few hundred dollars, then you are only looking at the cost of procuring the OS itself. While Linux may be freely distributed, coding the Military's very specific pieces of hardware would require a huge undertaking employing numerous engineers many man hours.
Incorrect. He has a specific project, the information on how to make a secure install of Linux is out there, the spec he wants to follow (however, he probably does not have to follow it like he thinks he does, if you read my whole post) is out there.
I don't know what DoD related job you ever heald, but in the 21+ years of military service plus years with contractors I have not been on any platform listed. As you will see by scrolling through the other posts of folks that are actually familiar with the DoD drumbeat, from experience, this guy has a much smaller problem than he thinks he has as far as getting his system up.
Visit DC2600
I am a program manager for a very small program in the US Air Force and
would like to be able to use Linux as a possible platform for my standard systems.
However, I cannot because regulations require me to use only operating systems that are
DII/COE compliant.
I see nothing at all preventing YOU from submitting the platform/krenel combination that you want to use.
I hope it is not something pesky like "government money is too precious to be wasted on this", since it should not cost over a couple hundred bucks and that is for a system that you are going to end up using anyway.
BTW, I hope that you are using ONLY the 2 platforms on that compliance list in your shop. If you have anything legally running Win95 then this is just a bunch of nonsense that you may ignore just as everybody else does.
Visit DC2600
Yes, the fusion is cool. But the energy produced isn't, right? So how do we contain the energy and use it, other than using a turbine system.
Hummm... I don't know. AIGGGHHHHHHH (bridge troll throws me into the valley of eternal doom or whatever it was in Monty Python)
Would be interested in knowing that too.
Visit DC2600
I thought this method worked at 3 Kelvin. Isn't that cold enough?
Anyway, you are restating my point. Massive amounts of energy from "classic" uncontrolled fusion are lost as heat and light.
Example: Thermonuclear bomb is used to dig a hole where a city sits now. However, so much energy "leaks" out that the hole is much smaller than if all of the energy was used for hole blasting (even if the bomb is buried really deep).
Theoretical example: old-school plasma type thermonuclear furnace is created for production of electricity and hi temp. product fabrication. However, heat is lost that is not used to spin a terbine or melt exotic materials and must be carried away to the cooling towers.
So, my question is more along the lines of: are we going to see more energy per reaction going into the intended purpose of the facility, or is it going to be just as lossy as plants are now?
Visit DC2600
Persuasion and trickery is usually preferred over force (by me anyway).
Would this method also be less "lossy" as far as being able to channel a higer percentage of the resulting energy into work, instead of loosing it as heat or (pick an energy type)?
Visit DC2600
Very kewell! Let us know if the MPAA starts bugging you. Hope you get some good karma, your post is very interesting and "informative".
Visit DC2600
If I distributed an HTML document which had references to images or other objects on some website, every user opening that HTML document would cause an access to that web site.
.jpg) with *anything* that is web aware the exact same thing will happen.
And if you read *any* document with a ref to an outside object (like a one pixel
However, if you read the document in Wordpad or some other text only program you can avoid the effect. Makes for some pesky reading around markup and junk, but you will see the refrences to the web too.
Visit DC2600
I have heard of the DeCSS.pl file, but that is a little different than what I was thinking.
;-)
Just an empty file or even better, an empty directory, nothing else.
If I lived in a convenient location to Judge Kaplan's courtroom, I would even post my address on the site so the MPAA can have me answer to the Judge.
"Your Honor, it is just an empty directory, not even a program. It does absoutely nothing except take up space on my drive. Tried to tell these guys that several times, but they keep threatening and harassing me. Is there any way that you can get them to leave me alone?"
You know, something like that
Visit DC2600
I have been thinking about this one for a while, guess it is time to try it.
Step 1. Post a web page named DeCSS, with DeCSS in the URL and some general information on the page that explains in great detail that the DeCSS code does not exist on that page. Also, no links to the DeCSS program on the page either.
Step 2. Sit back an wait to see how long the MPAA clueless train takes to fire off a letter.
Modified hack, have a link on the page to an empty file. Explain that it is an empty file. Goto Step 2.
Visit DC2600
try http://www.2600.net
some filters miss that one
Visit DC2600