Encryption is used to hide communications from everyone except those you choose. File sharing is used EXPOSE communications to everyone except those you choose (ie, the RIAA).
The new generation of encrypted private networks (ala WASTE) sacrifice connectivity for anonymity. The killer app of p2p wasn't file sharing, it was search - the ability for anybody (friend or foe) to find what you had.
You cannot implement a blacklist and whitelist policy at the same time - you have to pick one. unfortunately, while whitelisting will help keep you lawyer-safe, it kills the massive network effect that made p2p file sharing the phenomena that it was (is?).
So let me get this straight; If I use Kazaa to copy music for others, it's infringing, but if I use Kazaa to let others copy music for themselves, it's legal, even though they haven't bought a license to it?
The problem with fines is that they end up being looked at as the cost of doing business. We need more appropriate penalties for corporations. Corporate death penalty, anyone? What would be analogous to imprisonment for a publically-traded company?
Having to read application forms is a feature, not a bug. There's no way I'm not going to look at every single piece of data some psychotic institution requires me to tell them. If auto-fill becomes customary, Forms will become as bad as ten-page EULAs - thus, no one will read them, and unscrupulous parties will start putting unusual and unnecessary fields in their forms to harvest data they don't need.
You don't realize I agree with you. "Super-human intellectual capacities" does not imply independent machine intelligence. At present, I also have more confidence in intelligence augmentation and mind uploading than in babysitting for neural networks.
That said, if we've been trying for fifty years, we might as well give up, I suppose. The entire ability of life to progress must rely on our ability to hit ship dates.
The Singularity does not assume AI, nor does it assume any kind of blissful perfection. The Singularity is not a Utopia.
By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.
The checks and balances are still there - their roles are simply filled by other things. Instead of scarce information, we now have scarce attention. Instead of scarce software, we have scarce expertise.
Enterprises are still viable - they simply require re-tooling around the benefit of providing the new scarce resources.
With (far) less than a hundred years until super-human intellectual capacities are available in pure computing substrates, how anyone can believe that meat-as-we-know-it will even get out of the solar system is beyond me. By the time life has the resources to expand beyond Sol, it will have assumed bodily forms that weren't specifically evolved to terrestrial living for a billion years. Even tourists like you or I will probably have to have our minds transferred into an aritificial substrate in our entirety before we shove of on our interplanetary honeymoons.
The trouble with copying brains is not the fidelity of the resulting mind, but the uncertainty inherent in preparing for the procedure.
When you're considering getting a brain copy (for whatever purpose), you ask the doc what's going to happen to you. He says you'll either wake up as the new copy at it's activiation time, or you'll just come back up on the operating table, like nothing happened. He can't say which.
If the copying process is digital (and would we trust anything less?), it can be a perfect copy, made a potentially infinite number of times. There is nothing technical that prohibits your mind from being copied and activiated any number of times, possibly into scenarios beyond your control. Certainty about the potential outcome becomes very difficult to acquire. Sure, you could guard your backups religiously, but what if they are overcome? If civilization dies, you could be resurrected by alien archaeologists - do you want to trust them?
Sure, you could ask the doc to erase the original, but since the procedure does not of necessity effect the original, that is tantamount to murder. From a technical standpoint, it would be just as well to leave the original in place.
The solution is to utilize procedures that are transformative rather than duplicative. The way to accomplish this is pretty well laid out by Hans Moravec. The Moravec procedure involves a gradual process that replaces individual neurons over time, rather than a whole brain at once. If you copied a whole brain, you have two people, but people lose brain cells all the time without missing a beat. Murder is appropriate for killing people, but damaging parts is more akin to assault. Gradually declining severities for bodily harm mean that trivial harm is trivially illegal, and the consensual nature of the operation (think body piercing) should clean up the remaining ambiguity.
The procedure then mimics one neuron at a time, cutting each one out of the loop individually, replacing it's connections with other neurons in a seamless manner. The result is a singular and whole "uploaded" person, who is drastically transformed, but not duplicated.
Using a Moravec procedure, no nasty questions arise about the fate of the subject prior to the procedure, or about the "true" identity of the results of the operation. The procedure can be slowed down to any rate suitable to show that one and only one person exists at all times. With sufficiently good implementations, it may even be unnecessary to have a noticeable "surgery" - if the procedure replaces neurons precisely enough, the subject shouldn't even notice that it's occurring.
The problem then becomes one of technique, and not metaphysics...
The interesting thing about the TCG's technologies is that it COULD be specified in such a way as to allow PC owners to choose exactly whom to trust, and whom not to trust. The only thing the Manufacturer's TPM signature would attest to is that the TPM complies to the standard, providing features that can attest to the integrity of any software running on the machine, so long as it is signed by any key both parties explicitly trust.
In order to be useful, there's no need to hard-wire the roots of trust into the TPM.
Now, that said, we can certainly expect the TCG members to insinuate themselves into the Roots of Trust by default. THIS is the potential problem with both the TCG and the Hollings Bill (CBDTPA/Son-of-SSSCA).
I have never *had* an easier time applying security patches than on Linux. Stick apt-get update/upgrade in a cron job. It may not be easier than Windows Update, (although with three branches, Debian is easier to fix should a patch break something), but the argument that it's more difficult doesn't hold water.
Now, as to the inaccessibility of the rest of Linux, you may have a point. That will require the time and effort of a few more vendors in the desktop OS market segment to fix. I understand Lindows has been making progress in this area...
If that is the case, then go down and file your frivolous infringment with the court today!
It doesn't have to be accurate. Just make up a URL and and stick it on the form, and tell them it was some story you wrote!
If there's really no perjury penalties for such "good faith allegations", then the flood of paperwork will highlight exactly how stupid this capability is.
First of all, it's the DMCA. Secondly, it only applies to copyrighted works and the technologies used to "control access" to them.
How you use and license digital information has been hotly debated in recent years, but the use of physical goods has never come into question (the recent XBox controversy notwithstanding).
So long as you're disposing of your property properly, there's not likely to be any sane law dictating whether or not you can destroy it.
A corporation has no power but that which a government has given it.
Originally, perhaps, but with today's focus on the economy, government can no longer credibly threaten to neuter industry.
The problem does not lie in what amount to irrelevant nuances of organizational structure (govt vs corp), but in the concentration of wealth and authority both types of group possess.
There is a "substantial non-infringing use" to guns that are only capable of maiming and killing: self defense. Killing is legally justifiable if it can be reasonably demonstrated that the killing was necessary to preserve life.
The hardware will not require DRM: the applications and digital media (movies, music, emails, documents, etc) will.
No active DRM processor? Sorry, no data. There won't be any reason for hardware makers to require the TPM to be active, and so no reason for them not to include it in whatever they crank out.
The critical question is whether system owners will be permitted to feed trusted keys of their own choosing to the system. If we're not limited to using the trusted hardware with software and media rubberstamped by the Powers That Be, then the "illegal" "DarkNets" will be possible, and so will things like trusted GNU/Linux, trusted peer to peer networks, etc...
Let's not forget Lindows, which, for all it's commercial character (which is really the only way to get Joe User the support he needs), is both Debian based and pointed at Joe User desktops.
Trying to characerize various distributions as mutually exclusive is short sighted. Building technologies upon others is a real strength of open source. If the core of Debian remains focused on "expert-friendly" implementations, there's no reason others cannot focus on building usability on top of it. And they do.
If the author wanted to hand his hypothetical newbie a Debian CD, he could just hand him Knoppix. I've done it lots of times. It's fantastic.
now, combine motion sensitivity with the pointing technology mentioned a few days back (why can I never find these things again?) and a camera, and you get augmented reality.
The question is one of whether to trusted hardware components will refuse to perform their attestation functions based upon what certifying authority is signing the operating system or application software.
If the Fritz chip just says "Authority X certifies this software, do you trust them? y/n:" then The paper has a point, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If only Microsoft or TCPA^H^H^H^H TCG certifications are attested to by the hardware, then we're screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Encryption is used to hide communications from everyone except those you choose. File sharing is used EXPOSE communications to everyone except those you choose (ie, the RIAA).
The new generation of encrypted private networks (ala WASTE) sacrifice connectivity for anonymity. The killer app of p2p wasn't file sharing, it was search - the ability for anybody (friend or foe) to find what you had.
You cannot implement a blacklist and whitelist policy at the same time - you have to pick one. unfortunately, while whitelisting will help keep you lawyer-safe, it kills the massive network effect that made p2p file sharing the phenomena that it was (is?).
Owning a copy of Linux doesn't give you the right to distribute binary only copies of it.
Sure it does. Source isn't required unless someone asks for it.
So let me get this straight; If I use Kazaa to copy music for others, it's infringing, but if I use Kazaa to let others copy music for themselves, it's legal, even though they haven't bought a license to it?
How do you make the differencce clear?
Havenco and Sealand have long since parted ways
Advertising is not a company that sells service to a customer. It's a service that sells a customer to a company.
Traditional advertising steals your attention without your consent and sells it to an organization whose only motive is to profit.
The problem with fines is that they end up being looked at as the cost of doing business. We need more appropriate penalties for corporations. Corporate death penalty, anyone? What would be analogous to imprisonment for a publically-traded company?
Having to read application forms is a feature, not a bug. There's no way I'm not going to look at every single piece of data some psychotic institution requires me to tell them. If auto-fill becomes customary, Forms will become as bad as ten-page EULAs - thus, no one will read them, and unscrupulous parties will start putting unusual and unnecessary fields in their forms to harvest data they don't need.
You don't realize I agree with you. "Super-human intellectual capacities" does not imply independent machine intelligence. At present, I also have more confidence in intelligence augmentation and mind uploading than in babysitting for neural networks.
That said, if we've been trying for fifty years, we might as well give up, I suppose. The entire ability of life to progress must rely on our ability to hit ship dates.
The Singularity does not assume AI, nor does it assume any kind of blissful perfection. The Singularity is not a Utopia.
By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.
The checks and balances are still there - their roles are simply filled by other things. Instead of scarce information, we now have scarce attention. Instead of scarce software, we have scarce expertise.
Enterprises are still viable - they simply require re-tooling around the benefit of providing the new scarce resources.
With (far) less than a hundred years until super-human intellectual capacities are available in pure computing substrates, how anyone can believe that meat-as-we-know-it will even get out of the solar system is beyond me. By the time life has the resources to expand beyond Sol, it will have assumed bodily forms that weren't specifically evolved to terrestrial living for a billion years. Even tourists like you or I will probably have to have our minds transferred into an aritificial substrate in our entirety before we shove of on our interplanetary honeymoons.
Why are we so hung up on "men" into space?
The law is artificial. The question is not about the qualities of machines, but whether we will allow them certain legal protections.
The trouble with copying brains is not the fidelity of the resulting mind, but the uncertainty inherent in preparing for the procedure.
When you're considering getting a brain copy (for whatever purpose), you ask the doc what's going to happen to you. He says you'll either wake up as the new copy at it's activiation time, or you'll just come back up on the operating table, like nothing happened. He can't say which.
If the copying process is digital (and would we trust anything less?), it can be a perfect copy, made a potentially infinite number of times. There is nothing technical that prohibits your mind from being copied and activiated any number of times, possibly into scenarios beyond your control. Certainty about the potential outcome becomes very difficult to acquire. Sure, you could guard your backups religiously, but what if they are overcome? If civilization dies, you could be resurrected by alien archaeologists - do you want to trust them?
Sure, you could ask the doc to erase the original, but since the procedure does not of necessity effect the original, that is tantamount to murder. From a technical standpoint, it would be just as well to leave the original in place.
The solution is to utilize procedures that are transformative rather than duplicative. The way to accomplish this is pretty well laid out by Hans Moravec. The Moravec procedure involves a gradual process that replaces individual neurons over time, rather than a whole brain at once. If you copied a whole brain, you have two people, but people lose brain cells all the time without missing a beat. Murder is appropriate for killing people, but damaging parts is more akin to assault. Gradually declining severities for bodily harm mean that trivial harm is trivially illegal, and the consensual nature of the operation (think body piercing) should clean up the remaining ambiguity.
The procedure then mimics one neuron at a time, cutting each one out of the loop individually, replacing it's connections with other neurons in a seamless manner. The result is a singular and whole "uploaded" person, who is drastically transformed, but not duplicated.
Using a Moravec procedure, no nasty questions arise about the fate of the subject prior to the procedure, or about the "true" identity of the results of the operation. The procedure can be slowed down to any rate suitable to show that one and only one person exists at all times. With sufficiently good implementations, it may even be unnecessary to have a noticeable "surgery" - if the procedure replaces neurons precisely enough, the subject shouldn't even notice that it's occurring.
The problem then becomes one of technique, and not metaphysics...
The interesting thing about the TCG's technologies is that it COULD be specified in such a way as to allow PC owners to choose exactly whom to trust, and whom not to trust. The only thing the Manufacturer's TPM signature would attest to is that the TPM complies to the standard, providing features that can attest to the integrity of any software running on the machine, so long as it is signed by any key both parties explicitly trust.
In order to be useful, there's no need to hard-wire the roots of trust into the TPM.
Now, that said, we can certainly expect the TCG members to insinuate themselves into the Roots of Trust by default. THIS is the potential problem with both the TCG and the Hollings Bill (CBDTPA/Son-of-SSSCA).
"government-sanctioned vigilantism"
is an oxymoron.
I have never *had* an easier time applying security patches than on Linux. Stick apt-get update/upgrade in a cron job. It may not be easier than Windows Update, (although with three branches, Debian is easier to fix should a patch break something), but the argument that it's more difficult doesn't hold water.
Now, as to the inaccessibility of the rest of Linux, you may have a point. That will require the time and effort of a few more vendors in the desktop OS market segment to fix. I understand Lindows has been making progress in this area...
If that is the case, then go down and file your frivolous infringment with the court today!
It doesn't have to be accurate. Just make up a URL and and stick it on the form, and tell them it was some story you wrote!
If there's really no perjury penalties for such "good faith allegations", then the flood of paperwork will highlight exactly how stupid this capability is.
First of all, it's the DMCA. Secondly, it only applies to copyrighted works and the technologies used to "control access" to them.
How you use and license digital information has been hotly debated in recent years, but the use of physical goods has never come into question (the recent XBox controversy notwithstanding).
So long as you're disposing of your property properly, there's not likely to be any sane law dictating whether or not you can destroy it.
A corporation has no power but that which a government has given it.
Originally, perhaps, but with today's focus on the economy, government can no longer credibly threaten to neuter industry.
The problem does not lie in what amount to irrelevant nuances of organizational structure (govt vs corp), but in the concentration of wealth and authority both types of group possess.
There is a "substantial non-infringing use" to guns that are only capable of maiming and killing: self defense. Killing is legally justifiable if it can be reasonably demonstrated that the killing was necessary to preserve life.
Wouldn't a machine-readable vulnerability database allow for a worm that could keep up to date with the latest vulnerabilities by itself?
Miniature?
The hardware will not require DRM: the applications and digital media (movies, music, emails, documents, etc) will.
No active DRM processor? Sorry, no data. There won't be any reason for hardware makers to require the TPM to be active, and so no reason for them not to include it in whatever they crank out.
The critical question is whether system owners will be permitted to feed trusted keys of their own choosing to the system. If we're not limited to using the trusted hardware with software and media rubberstamped by the Powers That Be, then the "illegal" "DarkNets" will be possible, and so will things like trusted GNU/Linux, trusted peer to peer networks, etc...
Let's not forget Lindows, which, for all it's commercial character (which is really the only way to get Joe User the support he needs), is both Debian based and pointed at Joe User desktops.
Trying to characerize various distributions as mutually exclusive is short sighted. Building technologies upon others is a real strength of open source. If the core of Debian remains focused on "expert-friendly" implementations, there's no reason others cannot focus on building usability on top of it. And they do.
If the author wanted to hand his hypothetical newbie a Debian CD, he could just hand him Knoppix. I've done it lots of times. It's fantastic.
now, combine motion sensitivity with the pointing technology mentioned a few days back (why can I never find these things again?) and a camera, and you get augmented reality.
nice combination.
The question is one of whether to trusted hardware components will refuse to perform their attestation functions based upon what certifying authority is signing the operating system or application software.
If the Fritz chip just says "Authority X certifies this software, do you trust them? y/n:" then The paper has a point, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If only Microsoft or TCPA^H^H^H^H TCG certifications are attested to by the hardware, then we're screwed.