Start with two machines: a "Tivo" with proprietary firmware, connected via LAN to a PC with a Trusted Computing TPM and a GPLv3 OS image signed by the "Tivo"'s vendor.
The OS can be altered and recompiled on the PC at will, staying well within the provisions of the hardware/software definitions as used in the GPLv3 license.
But when streaming video from the PC to the Tivo, remote attestation is used to verify the signature of the OS image booted on the PC. If the bootstrap signature is not provided, or doesn't match, the Tivo refuses to play the provided stream.
Got it? Good. Now all you need to do is re-imagine the PC in this model as a virtual machine run inside the Tivo itself, and you get the idea.
There might be a problem with this end-run, however. It all depends on whether the GPLv3 has to say specifically about what functionality is locked out without a bootstrap signature from the VM. If there's some language about insuring "complete", "full", or "all" functionality to modified versions, then it may not matter whether there's a hypervisor in the way or not (although the original network example I gave above is still legit).
I'm intersted to hear what the lawyers have to say.
Go on vacation without replacements, and measure how much money the company loses. Hey, the bottom line is the bottom line.
Admins are like firemen (or firewomen) - they prevent and recover from damage more than they contribute directly to production. They spin plates.
This is not to say that their task isn't vital; Just look at how much the rest of the company could produce without admins. It gets this way because everyone wants, needs, and uses them to the fullest possible capacity, making business without admins uncompetitive.
Does anyone else enjoy the irony of ground-breaking use of "green" engines in vehicles that are likely to be deployed in missions to secure more fossil fuels to burn?
Why would I want to block perfectly good paying customers who don't have ad block installed, just because they're using the same browser as some who do?
I don't know what you're selling, but you must not be selling much of it if the bandwidth costs for not serving blocked ads (er... yeah, how's that work, exactly?) outweighs your sales revenue, or those of your ad customers.
Never mind the ludicrousness of this from the user perspective; this doesn't even make sense from a business perspective.
Are there any ad blockers for MSIE? Maybe he can block that too - on this site. We won't miss you, and yes, we'll keep making money, unlike you.
The only way you're going to keep control of the listening experience is by renting users their devices and using DRM to keep them from compressing it....um, on second thought, that's not going to work either, is it?
This reminds me of Michael Moore's rather novel objections to the Sicko leak. His problem wasn't that piracy would effect his bottom line, but that he intended the film to be seen in a theatre, and not on an mobile media player.
Well, guess what, buddy - if I paid for the thing fair and square, I don't care what you think (not that I'd care even if I didn't pay for it, but that's just me). I'm going to make my own decisions about how I enjoy my copy of the music you created.
Try being a little less of a tightwad and control freak about my life.
I'd much rather Microsoft and it's "ecosystem" make louder fun of GNU. They could do with a sense of humor.
Respect and ridicule are not mutually exclusive by any means. In some instances, "we kid because we love". Criticism is critical to progress, and wit is critical to criticism. Why do you think kings tolerated court jesters?
You don't see FOSS communities clamoring for "respect", or whinig "stop making fun of me! Respect mah authori-tie!" Grow a damn spine, and quit pouting.
The idea of an "open social network" is being badly misinterpreted.
the idea isn't that you don't have control of the privacy of your data from other users. Yes, privacy controls are good, whether from the public, or even from people you know. The only exception is that you just plain can't keep your data private from the social network itself. Which means they can sell you out to anyone from unscrupulous advertisers to corrupt public institutions.
As if that weren't bad enough, The problem with closed social networks is not just whether others have access to my data - it's whether *I* even have access to it. Yeah, sure, I can look at anything I publish - but if I want to search it, index, download, archive, or back it up, I'm out of luck. If my provider bungles a crash or turns evil, I'm screwed. And all the things that others have seen fit to give me access to, and our important in terms of my history and life online - private though it may be - are forever out of reach, except in the narrow, cramped contexts in which the network provider dictates.
More worrying is the fact that publicly licensed code doesn't actually solve the problem. Livejournal has been publicly licensed for many years, but if you actually want to add a feature to the site everyone//uses//, it won't do you any good to patch it, because users don't actually use the software on hardware they control.
In a way, web services are the opposite side of the coin DRM is on. DRM seeks to restrict your freedom by limiting the software you can use on hardware you own; web services solves this problem far more elegantly and effectively by limiting the software you can use on hardware THEY own.
Preventing competition
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ed Felten took a whack at this question a while back that stuck with me in the context of HDCP DRM.
First: Why is the weak system worth spending 10,000 gates for? The answer doesn't lie in platitudes about speedbumps or raising the bar -- any technical bumps or bars will be obliterated when the master secrets are published....
So temporary piracy prevention doesn't seem like a good explanation.
A much more plausible answer is that HDCP encryption exists only as a hook on which to hang lawsuits. For example, if somebody makes unlicensed displays or format converters, copyright owners could try to sue them under the DMCA for circumventing the encryption."
Because if there's anything a tech mogul hates worse than his own customers, it's his competition.
"We will be posting the complete, current codebase as soon as possible, here on Grub.org"
Presuming this includes the server code, this isn't as bad as it sounds. Yes, Wikia is for profit, but so are IBM and Red Hat. So long as there is a public license on the code, they're at least significantly lowering the barriers to entry and empowering users to revolt if they can't trust Wikia, which is more than you can say for Google. Even if users don't revolt and go elsewhere, the pressure exerted on Wikia to stay in tune with users is significant (Imagine MS Windows or Mac OS in a market without GNU).
Don't get me wrong, though. Just because you open source your codebase doesn't mean there's nothing to be desired. Livejournal has open code (and Second Life is getting there, too), but that doesn't mean they don't bottleneck the DATA they have (and not always for legitimate reasons of privacy). Just because the grub userbase generates the index doesn't mean the grub search interface will make it available in useful ways. And this obstruction remains possible despite a public license. Yes, you can fork, if you want, but that won't change the code any particular party deploys if they don't want to.
So the release will definitely be a step in the right direction (toward public desires), but isn't perfect.
The whole point of decentralizing isn't to make power networks "off the grid", its to make the existing grid more robust. The more generating sources you have on it, the more flexible it is. It's a network effect, like any other.
I'm no primitivist, and I was BORN in the seventies.;p
it's nice that thought and work are being put in to solar, and all, but putting solar collectors in space is missing out on the other major feature of solar that nuclear can't produce: decentralized generation.
If anyone can generate their own electricity, it makes for a system which is much more robust from infrastructure failure. People can be independent and recover better from disasters, becoming more//resilient//. If you put a solar platform in orbit, then either it or the receiving stations become expensive, centralized facilities that are vulnerable single points of failure to either intentional attack or accidental failure.
Furthermore, they foster dependency among energy consumers, making them vulnerable to abuse by monopolies in the energy industry. Enron, Dick Cheney, California... you get the idea. Of course, if you happen to BE one of these industrial monopolists, the idea of centralized production is exactly what you want - a "good thing" - for//you//. But, as usual, "consumers" have different priorities.
Let's get solar (and perhaps wind, which shares these properties) working on Earth first.
Hard buttons - and usually their effects - can't be broken by malware.
webcam covers, volume and mute buttons, wifi and bluetooth antenna cutoffs.
Plus, I've been pissed off by slow machines for so long, I don't trust software controls to react in time. Sometimes, systems break due to bugs, not just malware.
At first, hearing this pissed me off. Now it just makes me nervous, after reviewing some of the old and new information (neither of which amounts to much, given Parakey's stealth mode).
The number one thing that encouraged me about Parakey was that not only was it open source, it didn't fork over it's users control over to web services companies. Sure, Livejournal, for example) has its code released under a public license - but that doesn't stop LJ from locking in user data. Alternate instances of of LJ code son't interoperate, and I still can't make complete archives of all my posts, comments, and interactions on any social networking site. This is my life, we're talking about - I don't want some company to have better access to it than I do.
Parakey, insofar as it was described in the Spectrum article, did the right thing here by making the user's desktop the central archive (using open code, and open formats, of course). My life would remain mine, and web services would simply syndicate it from its origin under my control.
From what I've been able to discover about the Facebook platform, it's not nearly as useful as the web interface is - there's tons of crap I've been bombarded with on the web pages after logging in, only a tiny fraction of which is actually accessible through the API. Given FB's dependency upon an advertising model, it doesn't surprise me at all that they want to hold my own social life hostage as a carrot to get me to use the web interface. Unfortunately, I'm not biting.
So my concern is, has Parakey bailed on the user-centered model in favor of the service-provider-centered model? It would be a shame.
I can't believe people are still dragging out this tired old argument.
Bruce Perens [[http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html answered this question]].
Programmers get paid for programming. Salaried, hourly, it's the same thing. The business model surrounding//distribution// of the code is not the same as the business model surrounding the//creation// of the software.
The difference with free software is the distribution model - either you use a copyright-dependent exclusionary/proprietary model ("retail", as Perens says), or you use another one.
In fact, Perens shows that the retail distribution model isn't even the biggest one. Free Software isn't the biggest one either - it's in-house and contract development for unreleased software, something I don't sense even RMS objects to. So asking how this guy pays the bills "by releasing free software" misses the point - even if we overlook the myriad ways people have found to make money doing that, there still remain plenty of ways to make money//without// releasing//non-free// software (in the libre sense).
Coders don't have to worry about "getting paid". It's distributors. It's the same with books, movies, music, and software. Creators and innovators are not in danger. And even in the case of distributors, both new and old freedom-compatible business models for distribution have existed and are emerging to support them just fine, thank you.
Although, if you haven't looked at the damn marketplace to find out what they are, you might be a little late getting into them *cough*.
He didn't say it was impossible; he said it would be REALLY, really hard and expensive. For mortal meat, like "us".
But I can sum up the question of this century in about two words: "Who's we?" Do bots and probes count? AI? Human brain emulations? It's a lot easier (and safer) to send infomorphs than the kind of people we think "we" are today.
We're probably going to be adding some new kinds of "person" to the family in the coming century - some of which could be far better adapted to interstellar travel than we are.
If the idea of a generation ship is that you create a completely sustainable human habitat in order to get to other stars, then why even bother going somewhere, except possibly a few places it would take to create the appropriate redundancy?
If only our government hasn't had it's reputation soiled by crying wolf all the time, perhaps we could trust it when it tries to warn us about national security threats.
In legal matters, The Free Software Foundation [[http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041419.ph p doesn't want money; they want compliance]]. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't want compliance; they want money. It should be no surprise, then that they are not interested in helping the FOSS community to come back into compliance with their patents; any violation could mean revenue.
Of course, "could" is just a possibility. If they actually ever went to court, software patents might be overturned in general, particular patents could be invalidated specifically, claims made with valid patents could be found non-infringing, the community would likely recode the claims found infringing to steer clear of the patent, AND Microsoft would still have to deal patent infringement countersuits launched in retaliation.
It is far better for them attempt to profit from vague fear than vague fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with two machines: a "Tivo" with proprietary firmware, connected via LAN to a PC with a Trusted Computing TPM and a GPLv3 OS image signed by the "Tivo"'s vendor.
The OS can be altered and recompiled on the PC at will, staying well within the provisions of the hardware/software definitions as used in the GPLv3 license.
But when streaming video from the PC to the Tivo, remote attestation is used to verify the signature of the OS image booted on the PC. If the bootstrap signature is not provided, or doesn't match, the Tivo refuses to play the provided stream.
Got it? Good. Now all you need to do is re-imagine the PC in this model as a virtual machine run inside the Tivo itself, and you get the idea.
There might be a problem with this end-run, however. It all depends on whether the GPLv3 has to say specifically about what functionality is locked out without a bootstrap signature from the VM. If there's some language about insuring "complete", "full", or "all" functionality to modified versions, then it may not matter whether there's a hypervisor in the way or not (although the original network example I gave above is still legit).
I'm intersted to hear what the lawyers have to say.
Go on vacation without replacements, and measure how much money the company loses. Hey, the bottom line is the bottom line.
Admins are like firemen (or firewomen) - they prevent and recover from damage more than they contribute directly to production. They spin plates.
This is not to say that their task isn't vital; Just look at how much the rest of the company could produce without admins. It gets this way because everyone wants, needs, and uses them to the fullest possible capacity, making business without admins uncompetitive.
Of COURSE it makes no sense. That's why we shouldn't do it (in part).
Do the guys who start these wars seem "slightly intelligent" to you?
Does anyone else enjoy the irony of ground-breaking use of "green" engines in vehicles that are likely to be deployed in missions to secure more fossil fuels to burn?
Why would I want to block perfectly good paying customers who don't have ad block installed, just because they're using the same browser as some who do?
I don't know what you're selling, but you must not be selling much of it if the bandwidth costs for not serving blocked ads (er... yeah, how's that work, exactly?) outweighs your sales revenue, or those of your ad customers.
Never mind the ludicrousness of this from the user perspective; this doesn't even make sense from a business perspective.
Are there any ad blockers for MSIE? Maybe he can block that too - on this site. We won't miss you, and yes, we'll keep making money, unlike you.
Sheesh, learn to do business.
Vampire paper batteries!
They're flexible, biocompatible, can be embedded in paper, and can be powered by human blood, sweat, or urine.
Last to one to write up a treatment for a horror story about rogue book/bot/bats who suck blood out of papercuts is a rotten egg.
"Vlad the impaper" mwahaha!
"Vampaper!"
"Vampire Bat-teries!" (oh!)
Thanks, I'll be here all week!
What is this, whiner's week?
...um, on second thought, that's not going to work either, is it?
The only way you're going to keep control of the listening experience is by renting users their devices and using DRM to keep them from compressing it.
This reminds me of Michael Moore's rather novel objections to the Sicko leak. His problem wasn't that piracy would effect his bottom line, but that he intended the film to be seen in a theatre, and not on an mobile media player.
Well, guess what, buddy - if I paid for the thing fair and square, I don't care what you think (not that I'd care even if I didn't pay for it, but that's just me). I'm going to make my own decisions about how I enjoy my copy of the music you created.
Try being a little less of a tightwad and control freak about my life.
http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy
Who's "we"?
Another notch for this entry...
Aside from that, though, I don't get it. What's inconsistent about praising moves toward openness and criticizing moves away from it?
You're kidding me.
I'd much rather Microsoft and it's "ecosystem" make louder fun of GNU. They could do with a sense of humor.
Respect and ridicule are not mutually exclusive by any means. In some instances, "we kid because we love". Criticism is critical to progress, and wit is critical to criticism. Why do you think kings tolerated court jesters?
You don't see FOSS communities clamoring for "respect", or whinig "stop making fun of me! Respect mah authori-tie!" Grow a damn spine, and quit pouting.
The idea of an "open social network" is being badly misinterpreted.
//uses//, it won't do you any good to patch it, because users don't actually use the software on hardware they control.
the idea isn't that you don't have control of the privacy of your data from other users. Yes, privacy controls are good, whether from the public, or even from people you know. The only exception is that you just plain can't keep your data private from the social network itself. Which means they can sell you out to anyone from unscrupulous advertisers to corrupt public institutions.
As if that weren't bad enough, The problem with closed social networks is not just whether others have access to my data - it's whether *I* even have access to it. Yeah, sure, I can look at anything I publish - but if I want to search it, index, download, archive, or back it up, I'm out of luck. If my provider bungles a crash or turns evil, I'm screwed. And all the things that others have seen fit to give me access to, and our important in terms of my history and life online - private though it may be - are forever out of reach, except in the narrow, cramped contexts in which the network provider dictates.
More worrying is the fact that publicly licensed code doesn't actually solve the problem. Livejournal has been publicly licensed for many years, but if you actually want to add a feature to the site everyone
In a way, web services are the opposite side of the coin DRM is on. DRM seeks to restrict your freedom by limiting the software you can use on hardware you own; web services solves this problem far more elegantly and effectively by limiting the software you can use on hardware THEY own.
Ed Felten took a whack at this question a while back that stuck with me in the context of HDCP DRM.
...
First: Why is the weak system worth spending 10,000 gates for? The answer doesn't lie in platitudes about speedbumps or raising the bar -- any technical bumps or bars will be obliterated when the master secrets are published.
So temporary piracy prevention doesn't seem like a good explanation.
A much more plausible answer is that HDCP encryption exists only as a hook on which to hang lawsuits. For example, if somebody makes unlicensed displays or format converters, copyright owners could try to sue them under the DMCA for circumventing the encryption."
Because if there's anything a tech mogul hates worse than his own customers, it's his competition.
DRM in a Nutshell:
An encryption system is a way to deliver information securely, even through the hands of the thieves.
A DRM system is a way to cut out the middleman, and deliver information securely into the hands of thieves directly.
See the problem?
Confusing the thief for the customer is why DRM can never work.
Confusing the customer for the thief is why DRM can never sell.
"We will be posting the complete, current codebase as soon as possible, here on Grub.org"
Presuming this includes the server code, this isn't as bad as it sounds. Yes, Wikia is for profit, but so are IBM and Red Hat. So long as there is a public license on the code, they're at least significantly lowering the barriers to entry and empowering users to revolt if they can't trust Wikia, which is more than you can say for Google. Even if users don't revolt and go elsewhere, the pressure exerted on Wikia to stay in tune with users is significant (Imagine MS Windows or Mac OS in a market without GNU).
Don't get me wrong, though. Just because you open source your codebase doesn't mean there's nothing to be desired. Livejournal has open code (and Second Life is getting there, too), but that doesn't mean they don't bottleneck the DATA they have (and not always for legitimate reasons of privacy). Just because the grub userbase generates the index doesn't mean the grub search interface will make it available in useful ways. And this obstruction remains possible despite a public license. Yes, you can fork, if you want, but that won't change the code any particular party deploys if they don't want to.
So the release will definitely be a step in the right direction (toward public desires), but isn't perfect.
I think you're mischaracterizing me, here.
;p
The whole point of decentralizing isn't to make power networks "off the grid", its to make the existing grid more robust. The more generating sources you have on it, the more flexible it is. It's a network effect, like any other.
I'm no primitivist, and I was BORN in the seventies.
it's nice that thought and work are being put in to solar, and all, but putting solar collectors in space is missing out on the other major feature of solar that nuclear can't produce: decentralized generation.
//resilient//. If you put a solar platform in orbit, then either it or the receiving stations become expensive, centralized facilities that are vulnerable single points of failure to either intentional attack or accidental failure.
//you//. But, as usual, "consumers" have different priorities.
If anyone can generate their own electricity, it makes for a system which is much more robust from infrastructure failure. People can be independent and recover better from disasters, becoming more
Furthermore, they foster dependency among energy consumers, making them vulnerable to abuse by monopolies in the energy industry. Enron, Dick Cheney, California... you get the idea. Of course, if you happen to BE one of these industrial monopolists, the idea of centralized production is exactly what you want - a "good thing" - for
Let's get solar (and perhaps wind, which shares these properties) working on Earth first.
Hard buttons - and usually their effects - can't be broken by malware.
webcam covers, volume and mute buttons, wifi and bluetooth antenna cutoffs.
Plus, I've been pissed off by slow machines for so long, I don't trust software controls to react in time. Sometimes, systems break due to bugs, not just malware.
Britannica is better than Wikipedia for one reason:
...
When some makes an error in Britannica, almost nobody finds out.
See the problem here? You have to be an author, and not a user, for this to be considered a "feature".
At first, hearing this pissed me off. Now it just makes me nervous, after reviewing some of the old and new information (neither of which amounts to much, given Parakey's stealth mode).
The number one thing that encouraged me about Parakey was that not only was it open source, it didn't fork over it's users control over to web services companies. Sure, Livejournal, for example) has its code released under a public license - but that doesn't stop LJ from locking in user data. Alternate instances of of LJ code son't interoperate, and I still can't make complete archives of all my posts, comments, and interactions on any social networking site. This is my life, we're talking about - I don't want some company to have better access to it than I do.
Parakey, insofar as it was described in the Spectrum article, did the right thing here by making the user's desktop the central archive (using open code, and open formats, of course). My life would remain mine, and web services would simply syndicate it from its origin under my control.
From what I've been able to discover about the Facebook platform, it's not nearly as useful as the web interface is - there's tons of crap I've been bombarded with on the web pages after logging in, only a tiny fraction of which is actually accessible through the API. Given FB's dependency upon an advertising model, it doesn't surprise me at all that they want to hold my own social life hostage as a carrot to get me to use the web interface. Unfortunately, I'm not biting.
So my concern is, has Parakey bailed on the user-centered model in favor of the service-provider-centered model? It would be a shame.
I can't believe people are still dragging out this tired old argument.
//distribution// of the code is not the same as the business model surrounding the //creation// of the software.
//without// releasing //non-free// software (in the libre sense).
Bruce Perens [[http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html answered this question]].
Programmers get paid for programming. Salaried, hourly, it's the same thing. The business model surrounding
The difference with free software is the distribution model - either you use a copyright-dependent exclusionary/proprietary model ("retail", as Perens says), or you use another one.
In fact, Perens shows that the retail distribution model isn't even the biggest one. Free Software isn't the biggest one either - it's in-house and contract development for unreleased software, something I don't sense even RMS objects to. So asking how this guy pays the bills "by releasing free software" misses the point - even if we overlook the myriad ways people have found to make money doing that, there still remain plenty of ways to make money
Coders don't have to worry about "getting paid". It's distributors. It's the same with books, movies, music, and software. Creators and innovators are not in danger. And even in the case of distributors, both new and old freedom-compatible business models for distribution have existed and are emerging to support them just fine, thank you.
Although, if you haven't looked at the damn marketplace to find out what they are, you might be a little late getting into them *cough*.
He didn't say it was impossible; he said it would be REALLY, really hard and expensive. For mortal meat, like "us".
But I can sum up the question of this century in about two words: "Who's we?" Do bots and probes count? AI? Human brain emulations? It's a lot easier (and safer) to send infomorphs than the kind of people we think "we" are today.
We're probably going to be adding some new kinds of "person" to the family in the coming century - some of which could be far better adapted to interstellar travel than we are.
If the idea of a generation ship is that you create a completely sustainable human habitat in order to get to other stars, then why even bother going somewhere, except possibly a few places it would take to create the appropriate redundancy?
Exactly!
;p
That's not a "decent profit".
That's an indecent profit.
Sounds like the subject of Robert Newman's History of Oil
If only our government hasn't had it's reputation soiled by crying wolf all the time, perhaps we could trust it when it tries to warn us about national security threats.
I can't believe no one has said Digital Rights Management (and not been modded to at least +4).
What better example is there of a bug being shilled as a feature?
Software patents are like a virus that attaches itself, in an intellectual property sense, to anything it touches.
In legal matters, The Free Software Foundation [[http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041419.ph p doesn't want money; they want compliance]]. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't want compliance; they want money. It should be no surprise, then that they are not interested in helping the FOSS community to come back into compliance with their patents; any violation could mean revenue.
Of course, "could" is just a possibility. If they actually ever went to court, software patents might be overturned in general, particular patents could be invalidated specifically, claims made with valid patents could be found non-infringing, the community would likely recode the claims found infringing to steer clear of the patent, AND Microsoft would still have to deal patent infringement countersuits launched in retaliation.
It is far better for them attempt to profit from vague fear than vague fact.