Every type of measurement has an intrinsic error rate. E-voting is no exception.
And the cause of error is not necessarily programming error or malice. It could be that he simply made a mistake when voting, and didn't operate the machine properly.
We can't know what the error rate is from a single example like this. You would need to look at a larger set of statistics. Generally, I believe e-voting is considered to have a lower error rate than most older technologies. Remember Florida's pregnant chads!
Oregon casts 100% of its ballots by mail. In this election over 45% of California's ballots will be cast by mail, a substantial increase from a few years ago. Many other states are getting on the bandwagon. In fact the criticism of e-voting systems is if anything accelerating this trend as more and more people want to leave a written record of their vote.
Isn't the whole e-voting argument becoming irrelevant, fighting over a soon to be obsolete voting method where people get out and travel to the polls to vote?
Everyone always says this when people propose this simple and logical scheme. "You can't do that because people could buy votes." Well, you know what? People buy votes already. You can look at almost any election and you'll see that the party that spends more, wins. It's not a perfect correlation but it's very close.
And how about voting by mail? Anybody can watch you vote and pay you for what you do. Or eliminate the middleman and just hand over your signed, blank ballot for cash, to let them fill in and mail for you. Did you know that over 45% of California's votes this election will be by mail? Did you know that 100% of Oregon's votes are by mail? How could that be legal, if as you say the Constitution requires perfect anonymity?
It's time to recognize that vote selling is not something that can be forbidden by technological means. Old fashioned detective work, sting operations, and the like can be used to keep it under control. Eliminating this boogeyman from the discussion will allow voting systems to be created that are far simpler, easier to use, and more reliable than anything we have had so far.
The article misquotes the current license text regarding reassignment. Here's what the article claims the license says in Clause 15:
a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device."
But here's what the license actually says (Home Basic version):
a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. You may uninstall the software and install it on another device for your use. You may not do so to share this license between devices.
See the difference? The language has changed completely. There's no more reference to this being allowed only "one time".
Does this represent Microsoft loosening the license terms in response to criticism? That seems newsworthy!
Looks like I was right. Good catch to the moderators, they moderated me all the way up to... er, well, 2. Which is exactly what I posted at. Oh, well...
The article misquotes the current license text regarding reassignment. Here's what the article claims the license says in Clause 15:
a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device."
But here's what the license actually says (Home Basic version):
a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. You may uninstall the software and install it on another device for your use. You may not do so to share this license between devices.
See the difference? The language has changed completely. There's no more reference to this being allowed only "one time".
Does this represent Microsoft loosening the license terms in response to criticism? That seems newsworthy!
Bird flu is a bird disease. Although there are cases where people have managed to catch it from birds, they are extremely rare, only a few hundred in the whole world. Worry more about shark attacks.
Ideally, for the layperson you would simply explain that each pricinct's votes are stored in a small database, and that it can simply be edited with a piece of software commonly included in Microsoft's popular Office suite.
This database server, the GEMS machine, is at the central office of the county registrar, the elected official who is running the election. Voters know they have to trust this person, and furthermore there are multiple people in that office, watching each other. Yes, they could all conspire to steal the election, but voters have always known this, and they elect county officials they can trust.
Now, you can argue that hackers can break into the machine, but usually the registrar will claim that he has up to date protections against that. And hopefully he does.
I wouldn't say that SL is "overrun" by furries, although they are certainly more common than in real life... But they're not all that common. I probably see robots and other exotic avatars about as much.
What there definitely are a LOT of in SL is women. Much more than 50% of the avatars are female, although I don't know how many of them are really women. And most of the shopping stores are oriented towards women's fashions. In many ways the game is designed to appeal more to women than men, so I would suspect that they are at least 50% of the players.
Any computational system which is fertile for infection will eventually attract viruses. It's like a law of nature.
If this initiative is successful, Linux could become the most widely used operating system in the world, and would therefore be the biggest target for infection. Virus writers would turn their attentions from Windows to Linux. Our experience with Firefox has shown the falsehood of confident expectation that open sourced software would be immune to malware, and it's only got 10% of the market. Any system with the infection potential of these machines is going to be targeted and exploited.
Imagine a 0day exploit for the wireless driver like we saw a few weeks ago. These things hook up into mesh networks. You could start with a single point of infection which would spread from machine to machine, cover a whole city and then a whole continent within hours. The virus potential is extremely serious and deserves careful attention in the software design.
Emails I sent a few days ago have now appeared on the SF.NET mailing lists, as of this morning! So it appears that the problem is fixed, or at least that one of the many workarounds that have been suggested have been applied (like temporarily disabling callbacks).
This problem has been going on for a whole week, and now the very morning that this complaint appears on slashdot is the same morning that the problem is fixed. Coincidence? Or is it that the impending publicity motivated someone to reprioritize this problem and do something about it? It's shameful that Sourceforge allowed a communications failure to persist for so long from what is undoubtedly one of their biggest email sources.
In any case I'm very happy that it seems to be working again. Are other gmail users seeing similar improvements?
It's neither sourceforge's fault not google's fault. It's the enduser's fault. You must send/receive email through google's gmail system.
That's not the case here. I use gmail solely through the web interface, nothing fancy going on at all. I'm subscribed to my SF.NET mailing lists at the same address I'm sending from. But my mail is bouncing. And this has been going on for a week now, since last Wednesday.
If it is an SPF problem, then one of the two of them is implementing it wrong, because all gmail users are affected, including ones like me who use gmail as a simple webmail account.
DMCA, not DRM is the problem
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Seems like a lot of the problems people have with DRM aren't problems with DRM per se, they're problems with the DMCA and similar legislation to criminalize attempts to circumvent DRM. I agree, and so we should have a day against DMCA, not a day against DRM.
There are those who claim that DRM cannot work without legislation, but I don't think that's completely true. Yes, for music and video content you can work around DRM, but it is often difficult and the quality of the result may be inferior. And for games and software, DRM can work in theory. The new proposals for Trusted Computing could also strengthen DRM without requiring legislation.
We should work to oppose this kind of legislation as it expands into more countries, and eventually work to roll it back in the places where it has been passed. Perhaps more technically effective DRM will make it easier to remove the legislative crutch.
In practice, DRM implementations usually make it difficult to play/view/... the content, except with proprietary and secret tools, while doing nothing to stop copying the content without authorization (unlawful use).
So basically you're saying that DRM is ineffective and that copyright owners are harming themselves by using it - they don't get the supposed benefit and they reduce the value of their goods to legitimate users by making them harder to use.
If so, won't this be a self-correcting problem? If copyright owners are hitting themselves on the head with hammers, sooner or later they'll stop, won't they? Why do we need a day against hammer-heading?
Here's the problem: copyrights are a limited monopoly offered by the government as one half of a bargain with creators. The other half of the bargain lies in the creator's agreement that the protected content will become available to the public domain when the copyright term expires.
But how serious is this? Copyright doesn't expire for like 100 years. What is the likelihood that today's DRM will still be effective then, and that the DMCA and similar laws will be unchanged? Being opposed to DRM because it may cause bad consequences 100 years from now is not a very good reason to worry. I guarantee that we will have a lot more serious problems to face over the next 100 years than that.
Re:Would some one please explain...
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You cannot technically DRM protect content in a way which will allow legal fair use for the purchaser of the product.....period.
This is probably true, but the example you gave is not a good one. Being able to play content on multiple different players is not fair use. See for example:
"In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner."
You see the kind of thing that is covered by fair use: being able to "comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work". It means things that are educational and/or political.
It certainly does not mean having more fun with the copyrighted work than the owner wanted to allow you! If he says you can only play it on a certain device, that is his right. That is fully protected by copyright. You do not have a fair use right to expand on that just for your own enjoyment and pleasure.
So ironically you have made a correct statement but for totally incorrect reasons. The real problem with DRM is that it makes excerpting for commentary, criticism and scholarly or political analysis extremely difficult. If a teacher wants to play a few bars from a pop song and demonstrate that the melody or rhythm is based on tribal or classical influences, he may be thwarted by DRM. If someone wants to capture a frame of a movie and use it for parody purposes, DRM could make that difficult. These are protected, fair uses and DRM gets in the way.
But being able to play content in different ways than the copyright owner wanted you to? No way is that fair use. He has every right to be able to charge you extra for that right, just as with other ways of enjoying his work.
Globalization is not "decimating" US I.T. jobs. Decimating means destroying nine out of ten ("decimate" like in the decimal system). Losing 17.4% is a far cry from losing 90%. Let's try to restrain the hyperbole.
One point is being missed here: how did they find these 0days? It's easy - they just study the source code and find flaws.
This is the other side of the "many eyes make bugs shallow" coin: many eyes make exploits shallow too. If your bad guys are more motivated than your good guys to find exploitable bugs (and why not, if they're worth $10K each!), open source can be inherently less secure than closed source.
It's just good that Firefox has only 10% of the market. If it ever goes over 50% we're in for a security nightmare.
I keep going over and over this, and I still can't figure out why Linus would want Linux to be able to be Tivo-ized, but not want it BSD-licensed. Can you explain to me what it is about these specific loopholes that makes them so much more desirable than people taking your code wholesale and making it into a proprietary program?
With GPLv2, people who take your code and alter it have to publish the alterations. This adds to the store of knowledge generally available to the human race. Good ideas that improve your code can be incorporated into your own project or into others. This doesn't happen with a BSD license.
Does GPLv3 require hardware manufacturers to provide users a way to alter the hardware/firmware and incorporate altered code? Suppose a hardware design does not use any flash ROM, just old-fashioned unflashable ROM that can't be reprogrammed, in a chip that is surface mounted, or even burned into the CPU chip itself (as sometimes is done with embedded designs). Is this forbidden to use GPLv3 code? Does the hardware manufacturer have to provide a user-accessible port to reprogram the device?
I don't think so. In that case I don't see what is the point of this whole aspect of the license. Or am I wrong, and this whole class of devices (non-reprogrammable firmware) is off-limits to GPLv3?
There's an interesting DRM angle to the "fashion designer who quit" story. She was a popular designer but had bought a "skin" from someone else. A skin is like clothing but an inner layer - it has facial makeup, tatoos, body shading, coloring, etc. Anyway she liked the skin but didn't like the face makeup, so she wanted to change it. But she couldn't.
Here's where the DRM comes in. The item was sold "no modify" (as many or most clothing items are) meaning you can't edit it, you can't change it. However, we all know that DRM is often easy to work around. In this case there are plugins which will capture the data going to the graphics card drivers and save it as an image file. So she was able to save her "skin" as a file on her disk. Then she loads it into Photoshop or whatever and edits the face makeup to be more to her liking. She uploads it to the game and wears it.
Now, she wasn't selling the modification, she was just wearing it. This was for her personal use. But still, she had made a "derivative work" in copyright law terminology, without the permission of the original designer. And had violated the game's Terms of Service as well.
So, she got caught and people really came down hard on her, so she quit the game. She had been a popular designer herself but didn't want to put up with the criticism.
So, a couple of lessons:
1. This kind of DRM doesn't work
but
2. If you make a derivative work anyway and wear it out in public, you'll probably get caught.
So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
Makes sense. Of course, at present there's no way for Google to know when you receive a purchase. But in the future, that won't be the case, because of Google's payment system.
We could get to the point where you get a big discount on your ads if you accept Google payments to pay for them, and you only get charged when ad clicks turn into purchases. In other words, integrate the payment and advertising services. This should produce huge efficiency gains and allow both Google and advertisers to come out ahead.
There is a type of "Good DRM" that many people are not familiar with. Actually it is not DRM, but rather it is exactly what is forbidden by the license, namely a system in which people who modify their code do not get exactly the same rights, privileges and abilities as people who run unmodified code.
The idea is what is sometimes called a "transparent server". It uses Trusted Computing technology to allow any client, any third party, to verify the software configuration that is running. Maybe it is an anonymity server, for example; a discussion board that is supposed to protect people's identities. By publishing its source code and using the TC technology, third parties can verify what software is running and make sure that it does in fact behave as specified.
This is the same basic technology that could potentially be used for DRM, and which GPLv3 wants to stop. In that usage, a commercial music or movie server could check what software configuration you are running, and refuse to download content if you're not running their official and approved software version.
But in the trusted server example, the tables are turned and it is the clients who judge whether the server is running software that they find acceptable. And the server is happy with this, it wants to assure the clients that it can be trusted. It (or its owner, more accurately) willingly and voluntarily publishes the data necessary to let potential clients see that the software is clean and reliable.
Yet if the server changes its software, perhaps to put in a feature to log the identities of clients, or misbehave in some other way, it will not be able to get the same access and same abilities as a server that doesn't make this change. Clients will shun a server which has made such a change.
This is precisely what is forbidden by GPLv3: software where, if you change it, you're not able to do all the same things and run in the same way. In effect, GPLv3 mandates opaque software. It forbids the ability to voluntarily reveal your software/hardware configuration in such a way that third parties can decide whether to trust you or not.
The GPLv3 authors have presumably made a personal judgement call that transparent servers are either not going to exist, or else their existence does not outweigh the potential negatives of the "bad" DRM uses which are always discussed. But is that the kind of judgement call they should be making? Should they forbid an entire class of potentially useful software, transparent servers, merely because of their belief that the technology these servers would rely on could also be used for ill?
That doesn't seem fair to people who would like to develop this technology and see if it could be used to enhance privacy and freedom on the net. We are not in a position now to know how much or whether this technology will be useful, and taking steps to hinder its development appears highly premature if not downright infringing on user freedom.
The key idea here would be to start gradually. One good thing about sulphur dioxide is that it is cleared from the atmosphere quickly, so if something bad starts happening you can reverse what you are doing and things will clear up.
I saw a proposal from Greg Benford that the arctic would be a good test bed. Concentrate the SO2 emissions over the arctic during the summer and see if we can reduce the rate of shrinkage of the northern ice cap. It's much less expensive than trying to do the whole earth and should provide immediate benefit. Plus you only have to do it during the summer since the arctic gets little sunlight in winter. So each season you can adjust the amount and see what effects it has on temperatures, precipitation, etc. It's a good natural laboratory to start getting experience with the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Every type of measurement has an intrinsic error rate. E-voting is no exception.
And the cause of error is not necessarily programming error or malice. It could be that he simply made a mistake when voting, and didn't operate the machine properly.
We can't know what the error rate is from a single example like this. You would need to look at a larger set of statistics. Generally, I believe e-voting is considered to have a lower error rate than most older technologies. Remember Florida's pregnant chads!
Oregon casts 100% of its ballots by mail. In this election over 45% of California's ballots will be cast by mail, a substantial increase from a few years ago. Many other states are getting on the bandwagon. In fact the criticism of e-voting systems is if anything accelerating this trend as more and more people want to leave a written record of their vote.
Isn't the whole e-voting argument becoming irrelevant, fighting over a soon to be obsolete voting method where people get out and travel to the polls to vote?
Everyone always says this when people propose this simple and logical scheme. "You can't do that because people could buy votes." Well, you know what? People buy votes already. You can look at almost any election and you'll see that the party that spends more, wins. It's not a perfect correlation but it's very close.
And how about voting by mail? Anybody can watch you vote and pay you for what you do. Or eliminate the middleman and just hand over your signed, blank ballot for cash, to let them fill in and mail for you. Did you know that over 45% of California's votes this election will be by mail? Did you know that 100% of Oregon's votes are by mail? How could that be legal, if as you say the Constitution requires perfect anonymity?
It's time to recognize that vote selling is not something that can be forbidden by technological means. Old fashioned detective work, sting operations, and the like can be used to keep it under control. Eliminating this boogeyman from the discussion will allow voting systems to be created that are far simpler, easier to use, and more reliable than anything we have had so far.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=204291&cid=16
Looks like I was right. Good catch to the moderators, they moderated me all the way up to... er, well, 2. Which is exactly what I posted at. Oh, well...
But here's what the license actually says (Home Basic version):
See the difference? The language has changed completely. There's no more reference to this being allowed only "one time".
Does this represent Microsoft loosening the license terms in response to criticism? That seems newsworthy!
Bird flu is a bird disease. Although there are cases where people have managed to catch it from birds, they are extremely rare, only a few hundred in the whole world. Worry more about shark attacks.
Ideally, for the layperson you would simply explain that each pricinct's votes are stored in a small database, and that it can simply be edited with a piece of software commonly included in Microsoft's popular Office suite.
This database server, the GEMS machine, is at the central office of the county registrar, the elected official who is running the election. Voters know they have to trust this person, and furthermore there are multiple people in that office, watching each other. Yes, they could all conspire to steal the election, but voters have always known this, and they elect county officials they can trust.
Now, you can argue that hackers can break into the machine, but usually the registrar will claim that he has up to date protections against that. And hopefully he does.
I wouldn't say that SL is "overrun" by furries, although they are certainly more common than in real life... But they're not all that common. I probably see robots and other exotic avatars about as much.
What there definitely are a LOT of in SL is women. Much more than 50% of the avatars are female, although I don't know how many of them are really women. And most of the shopping stores are oriented towards women's fashions. In many ways the game is designed to appeal more to women than men, so I would suspect that they are at least 50% of the players.
So where is this build, in Second Life? Anybody got an address?
Any computational system which is fertile for infection will eventually attract viruses. It's like a law of nature.
If this initiative is successful, Linux could become the most widely used operating system in the world, and would therefore be the biggest target for infection. Virus writers would turn their attentions from Windows to Linux. Our experience with Firefox has shown the falsehood of confident expectation that open sourced software would be immune to malware, and it's only got 10% of the market. Any system with the infection potential of these machines is going to be targeted and exploited.
Imagine a 0day exploit for the wireless driver like we saw a few weeks ago. These things hook up into mesh networks. You could start with a single point of infection which would spread from machine to machine, cover a whole city and then a whole continent within hours. The virus potential is extremely serious and deserves careful attention in the software design.
Emails I sent a few days ago have now appeared on the SF.NET mailing lists, as of this morning! So it appears that the problem is fixed, or at least that one of the many workarounds that have been suggested have been applied (like temporarily disabling callbacks).
This problem has been going on for a whole week, and now the very morning that this complaint appears on slashdot is the same morning that the problem is fixed. Coincidence? Or is it that the impending publicity motivated someone to reprioritize this problem and do something about it? It's shameful that Sourceforge allowed a communications failure to persist for so long from what is undoubtedly one of their biggest email sources.
In any case I'm very happy that it seems to be working again. Are other gmail users seeing similar improvements?
It's neither sourceforge's fault not google's fault. It's the enduser's fault. You must send/receive email through google's gmail system.
That's not the case here. I use gmail solely through the web interface, nothing fancy going on at all. I'm subscribed to my SF.NET mailing lists at the same address I'm sending from. But my mail is bouncing. And this has been going on for a week now, since last Wednesday.
If it is an SPF problem, then one of the two of them is implementing it wrong, because all gmail users are affected, including ones like me who use gmail as a simple webmail account.
Seems like a lot of the problems people have with DRM aren't problems with DRM per se, they're problems with the DMCA and similar legislation to criminalize attempts to circumvent DRM. I agree, and so we should have a day against DMCA, not a day against DRM.
There are those who claim that DRM cannot work without legislation, but I don't think that's completely true. Yes, for music and video content you can work around DRM, but it is often difficult and the quality of the result may be inferior. And for games and software, DRM can work in theory. The new proposals for Trusted Computing could also strengthen DRM without requiring legislation.
We should work to oppose this kind of legislation as it expands into more countries, and eventually work to roll it back in the places where it has been passed. Perhaps more technically effective DRM will make it easier to remove the legislative crutch.
In practice, DRM implementations usually make it difficult to play/view/... the content, except with proprietary and secret tools, while doing nothing to stop copying the content without authorization (unlawful use).
So basically you're saying that DRM is ineffective and that copyright owners are harming themselves by using it - they don't get the supposed benefit and they reduce the value of their goods to legitimate users by making them harder to use.
If so, won't this be a self-correcting problem? If copyright owners are hitting themselves on the head with hammers, sooner or later they'll stop, won't they? Why do we need a day against hammer-heading?
Here's the problem: copyrights are a limited monopoly offered by the government as one half of a bargain with creators. The other half of the bargain lies in the creator's agreement that the protected content will become available to the public domain when the copyright term expires.
But how serious is this? Copyright doesn't expire for like 100 years. What is the likelihood that today's DRM will still be effective then, and that the DMCA and similar laws will be unchanged? Being opposed to DRM because it may cause bad consequences 100 years from now is not a very good reason to worry. I guarantee that we will have a lot more serious problems to face over the next 100 years than that.
You cannot technically DRM protect content in a way which will allow legal fair use for the purchaser of the product.....period.
e _Overview/chapter9/9-a.html
This is probably true, but the example you gave is not a good one. Being able to play content on multiple different players is not fair use. See for example:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Us
"In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner."
You see the kind of thing that is covered by fair use: being able to "comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work". It means things that are educational and/or political.
It certainly does not mean having more fun with the copyrighted work than the owner wanted to allow you! If he says you can only play it on a certain device, that is his right. That is fully protected by copyright. You do not have a fair use right to expand on that just for your own enjoyment and pleasure.
So ironically you have made a correct statement but for totally incorrect reasons. The real problem with DRM is that it makes excerpting for commentary, criticism and scholarly or political analysis extremely difficult. If a teacher wants to play a few bars from a pop song and demonstrate that the melody or rhythm is based on tribal or classical influences, he may be thwarted by DRM. If someone wants to capture a frame of a movie and use it for parody purposes, DRM could make that difficult. These are protected, fair uses and DRM gets in the way.
But being able to play content in different ways than the copyright owner wanted you to? No way is that fair use. He has every right to be able to charge you extra for that right, just as with other ways of enjoying his work.
Globalization is not "decimating" US I.T. jobs. Decimating means destroying nine out of ten ("decimate" like in the decimal system). Losing 17.4% is a far cry from losing 90%. Let's try to restrain the hyperbole.
One point is being missed here: how did they find these 0days? It's easy - they just study the source code and find flaws.
This is the other side of the "many eyes make bugs shallow" coin: many eyes make exploits shallow too. If your bad guys are more motivated than your good guys to find exploitable bugs (and why not, if they're worth $10K each!), open source can be inherently less secure than closed source.
It's just good that Firefox has only 10% of the market. If it ever goes over 50% we're in for a security nightmare.
I keep going over and over this, and I still can't figure out why Linus would want Linux to be able to be Tivo-ized, but not want it BSD-licensed. Can you explain to me what it is about these specific loopholes that makes them so much more desirable than people taking your code wholesale and making it into a proprietary program?
With GPLv2, people who take your code and alter it have to publish the alterations. This adds to the store of knowledge generally available to the human race. Good ideas that improve your code can be incorporated into your own project or into others. This doesn't happen with a BSD license.
Does GPLv3 require hardware manufacturers to provide users a way to alter the hardware/firmware and incorporate altered code? Suppose a hardware design does not use any flash ROM, just old-fashioned unflashable ROM that can't be reprogrammed, in a chip that is surface mounted, or even burned into the CPU chip itself (as sometimes is done with embedded designs). Is this forbidden to use GPLv3 code? Does the hardware manufacturer have to provide a user-accessible port to reprogram the device?
I don't think so. In that case I don't see what is the point of this whole aspect of the license. Or am I wrong, and this whole class of devices (non-reprogrammable firmware) is off-limits to GPLv3?
There's an interesting DRM angle to the "fashion designer who quit" story. She was a popular designer but had bought a "skin" from someone else. A skin is like clothing but an inner layer - it has facial makeup, tatoos, body shading, coloring, etc. Anyway she liked the skin but didn't like the face makeup, so she wanted to change it. But she couldn't.
Here's where the DRM comes in. The item was sold "no modify" (as many or most clothing items are) meaning you can't edit it, you can't change it. However, we all know that DRM is often easy to work around. In this case there are plugins which will capture the data going to the graphics card drivers and save it as an image file. So she was able to save her "skin" as a file on her disk. Then she loads it into Photoshop or whatever and edits the face makeup to be more to her liking. She uploads it to the game and wears it.
Now, she wasn't selling the modification, she was just wearing it. This was for her personal use. But still, she had made a "derivative work" in copyright law terminology, without the permission of the original designer. And had violated the game's Terms of Service as well.
So, she got caught and people really came down hard on her, so she quit the game. She had been a popular designer herself but didn't want to put up with the criticism.
So, a couple of lessons:
1. This kind of DRM doesn't work
but
2. If you make a derivative work anyway and wear it out in public, you'll probably get caught.
So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
Makes sense. Of course, at present there's no way for Google to know when you receive a purchase. But in the future, that won't be the case, because of Google's payment system.
We could get to the point where you get a big discount on your ads if you accept Google payments to pay for them, and you only get charged when ad clicks turn into purchases. In other words, integrate the payment and advertising services. This should produce huge efficiency gains and allow both Google and advertisers to come out ahead.
There is a type of "Good DRM" that many people are not familiar with. Actually it is not DRM, but rather it is exactly what is forbidden by the license, namely a system in which people who modify their code do not get exactly the same rights, privileges and abilities as people who run unmodified code.
The idea is what is sometimes called a "transparent server". It uses Trusted Computing technology to allow any client, any third party, to verify the software configuration that is running. Maybe it is an anonymity server, for example; a discussion board that is supposed to protect people's identities. By publishing its source code and using the TC technology, third parties can verify what software is running and make sure that it does in fact behave as specified.
This is the same basic technology that could potentially be used for DRM, and which GPLv3 wants to stop. In that usage, a commercial music or movie server could check what software configuration you are running, and refuse to download content if you're not running their official and approved software version.
But in the trusted server example, the tables are turned and it is the clients who judge whether the server is running software that they find acceptable. And the server is happy with this, it wants to assure the clients that it can be trusted. It (or its owner, more accurately) willingly and voluntarily publishes the data necessary to let potential clients see that the software is clean and reliable.
Yet if the server changes its software, perhaps to put in a feature to log the identities of clients, or misbehave in some other way, it will not be able to get the same access and same abilities as a server that doesn't make this change. Clients will shun a server which has made such a change.
This is precisely what is forbidden by GPLv3: software where, if you change it, you're not able to do all the same things and run in the same way. In effect, GPLv3 mandates opaque software. It forbids the ability to voluntarily reveal your software/hardware configuration in such a way that third parties can decide whether to trust you or not.
The GPLv3 authors have presumably made a personal judgement call that transparent servers are either not going to exist, or else their existence does not outweigh the potential negatives of the "bad" DRM uses which are always discussed. But is that the kind of judgement call they should be making? Should they forbid an entire class of potentially useful software, transparent servers, merely because of their belief that the technology these servers would rely on could also be used for ill?
That doesn't seem fair to people who would like to develop this technology and see if it could be used to enhance privacy and freedom on the net. We are not in a position now to know how much or whether this technology will be useful, and taking steps to hinder its development appears highly premature if not downright infringing on user freedom.
I urge everyone to request absentee ballots early. I don't want my vote disappearing in a Diebold machine.
Plus, you can sell them. Just sign the ballot and hand it over to whichever local precinct boss offers the most. Many advantages to absentee ballots!
The key idea here would be to start gradually. One good thing about sulphur dioxide is that it is cleared from the atmosphere quickly, so if something bad starts happening you can reverse what you are doing and things will clear up.
I saw a proposal from Greg Benford that the arctic would be a good test bed. Concentrate the SO2 emissions over the arctic during the summer and see if we can reduce the rate of shrinkage of the northern ice cap. It's much less expensive than trying to do the whole earth and should provide immediate benefit. Plus you only have to do it during the summer since the arctic gets little sunlight in winter. So each season you can adjust the amount and see what effects it has on temperatures, precipitation, etc. It's a good natural laboratory to start getting experience with the technology.