It depends what you count under the "DRM" umbrella. Does unskippable content at the start of a DVD count? Because I know plenty of people who now outright avoid buying any DVDs from brands who have taken this too far. Seriously, why do I need to sit through 30 seconds of US-based copyright warning that doesn't even apply to me here, and a load of disclaimers about interview content when there are no interviews on the DVD?
I even know people who have taken DVDs back to the shop in extreme cases and demanded a refund on the basis that the weren't fit for purpose. The shops usually point at some policy that says they don't refund opened DVDs etc. Without exception when my friends have started talking about the Sale of Goods Act and asked to speak to the manager, a refund has quickly been forthcoming, though, which gives you some idea of how much the managers think their disclaimers are worth.
It's also worth remembering that more ISPs are throttling our bandwidth based upon the type of traffic. We may win a battle and still get creamed in the war.
I doubt that. If the ISP industry moves to general bandwidth throttling and not allowing their customers to use what they're paying for, they will keep profits up for a little while, and then ultimately lose for exactly the same reasons Big Media's DRM-based strategy is doomed.
There are trivial technical ways to circumvent bandwidth shaping, just as there are trivial ways to circumvent DRM. If most ISPs impose restrictions then those who continue to provide what customers actually want at a realistic price will have a competitive advantage, just as is the case with DRM. It will start slow may get bad before it gets better, but eventually large numbers of people will understand how they're being screwed, just as with DRM.
The only major difference is that providing high bandwidth really does have a significant marginal cost for the ISPs, so people who think paying 20 quid a month for "up to 8MB" broadband and effectively unlimited bandwidth is realistic are in for a nasty shock. It won't be economic to support that service at that price when everyone starts wanting to use it for real, and no amount of consumer whining will make commercial ISPs offer a service long-term when that service is loss-making. I expect that we'll see some stratification in the offerings from the ISP industry, with providers offering packages for light, moderate and heavy use, but with prices to match.
We might also see a return to metered charging, though obviously at much lower rates than in the old modem days. That in turn would lead to pressure for ISPs to do more about the spam problem and malware so people's allowance wasn't wasted, which would be no bad thing either.
Anyway, the bottom line is that for this sort of issue, the market is mightier than the courts. Consumers will always win this sort of battle for as long as necessary, because ultimately they control the purse strings (and no amount of ISP lobbying is going to get governments who want to be re-elected to impose obviously punitive taxation policies on their electorate for very long).
Which IMHO is really the wrong approach. Far better to make the kind of information involved of little value to anyone else.
It might sound revolutionary, but couldn't we just... not collect the data at all?
The discs that were lost should never have existed. Even where different parts of the government had a legitimate need to access some of it, it wasn't necessary to "dump all the columns in the database" like this; indeed, some sources are saying the National Audit Office (the intended recipients) had explicitly asked for only certain parts of each record. Even if it was necessary to collect the whole data set, there should have been strict controls on who could do it, and where they could put the data. The fact that those discs existed betrays failings on so many levels that holding the guy who tried to take a short-cut culpable is kinda missing the point.
At least now that fully half the country is ****ing themselves over whether they personally will get damaged by this, people might finally start to realise that a surveillance society and a One Big Database government policy are exactly what you shouldn't try to do. Even if different official organisations need certain data about people for certain legitimate purposes, that doesn't mean you have to let everyone access all the data from anywhere for any purpose!
It's kinda strange. Anyone who's worked in corporate IT knows about firewalls, layered defences, social engineering attacks, the risks from insiders, and so on. Yet the government, who want to spend bazillions of pounds of taxpayers' money on things like the National Identity Register and the new NHS database, apparently haven't even read the Idiot's Guide.
(I commented earlier on possible alternatives where it is necessary to control access effectively.)
The solution isn't more government regulation, it's not tying the concept of identity to a couple commonly known pieces of information like date of birth or SSN.
Oh, no, I think heavy regulation is still in order. Regardless of what personal information is being kept about you, anyone with legitimate access to it has a responsibility to keep it safe.
The problem with your argument is that people simply can't remember lots of unique, strong passwords, which is why despite all these secret words and "memorable" numbers all the financial services use, they'll still talk to you when you've forgotten yours as long as you know a handful of obvious (to you) facts that it's unlikely someone else would guess all at once.
One topical alternative is biometrics, but these have two pretty much unavoidable problems themselves. Firstly, while they inhibit casual abuse, the serious guys will get hold of the data soon enough, and then you can't change your fingerprint or iris scan like you change a password. Secondly, this implies the creation of something like the National Identity Register, which in itself constitutes a far bigger threat to people's safety and quality of life than any individual identity theft or similar criminal hackery.
Personally, I think the future lies in simple measures that combine something you know with some physical object you have. Consider the success of "Chip 'n' Pin" card payments, which have dramatically reduced card fraud. The technology exists to use some sort of smart login to bank systems based on some device where the user enters a simple PIN or password and the device generates a one-time key that the bank can validate; IIRC, some banks have started trials of such technology as a way to make their on-line banking facilities more secure, reasoning that the cost of providing all customers with a physical key generator is less than the ongoing cost of the electronic fraud. The beauty of such systems is that they can use simple, memorable details that people won't just write down, because they form only part of the key and the other part is very strong.
It's not as black and white as that in most places where there is a so-called loser pays culture. It's simply that judges can award costs as well as whatever damages might be appropriate.
Moreover, in your entirely emotionally neutral example, if the large corporation really wronged your Grandma, why did she lose the court case? There's a lot of whining on Slashdot about armies of lawyers (unless they're Good Guys like the FSF, of course). Sure, a good, well-funded legal team may make a better case for their client than a poor and inadequately funded lawyer. However, no matter how good a lawyer is, they still can't actually change the law.
Meanwhile, why should a business have to bear the cost of defending themselves against any Tom, Dick or Harry who chooses to sue them without a decent case? Just because they're a business, their money doesn't grow on trees. If they have to spend a lot of money defending lawsuits, that is money that isn't going to their shareholders. And lest we forget, those shareholders aren't just filthy rich executive types. Typically, they also include your pension fund and perhaps your best friend's personal savings.
Ignorance as a defence is invalid because it's impossible to disprove it; anyone couldclaim not to know murder's illegal.
I understand why the legal system adopts the position it does. It is, like much in law, a pragmatic concession. That doesn't make the principle right, though.
As I said, if you want to adopt such a position, it is only fair to institute educational policies such that people can reasonably be expected not to be ignorant. It's interesting that you say in one paragraph that "everyone knows shoplifting is illegal", yet in the next that "anyone could claim not to know murder's illegal". Sorry, but you can't have it both ways!
I would argue that it is reasonable not to allow ignorance as a defence for things like shoplifting or murder, because these ideas are commonly understood by the age of criminal responsibility. You get into much more dubious territory when you consider issues where the popular understanding of the law is wrong. In this case, a fair solution is educating the population about what the law says and why. Another fair solution is changing the law to reflect the popular perception.
Politics aside, there are good reasons that those who have considered an issue deeply may propose laws that do not match the man in the street's idea of ethics or justice. An example that comes immediately to mind is making evidence inadmissible if it is improperly collected, and thus potentially forcing a court to let a guilty person go free even though they know they are guilty. The outcome is clearly unjust in that case, but it is necessary to prevent the entire system becoming corrupt in all cases. Refusal to negotiate with hostage takers is another example that follows a similar principle.
However, where these issues affect the average person and the law is counter-intuitive, I think it is fundamentally unfair to expect people to obey the law when it is unrealistic to assume they understand what is expected of them. Copyright infringement is a topical example, where there is a reasonable argument for the law saying what it does, but many people when asked do not understand the principle and think common behaviours are legal when in fact they are not. (I'm not getting into whether copyright is the best approach, merely contending that the current legal position is credible but widely misunderstood.)
That was all rather long and winding, but in short, if your law is too complicated or counter-intuitive for your citizens to understand, respect and obey, then your law is broken. You either need to inform people about the reasons behind it so that those conditions no longer apply, or you need to change the law itself. Doing neither, and then relying on the "ignorance is no defence" argument, is not in the interests of justice and ultimately harms the credibility of the entire legal system.
Government is not some nebulous entity. The instant you starting thinking of it as nothing but a body corporate with crown immunity, it becomes legally and ethically invulnerable. No-one can be held accountable for anything any more, and thus there is no need to fix anything that is broken.
In reality, governments are composed of large numbers of real people, each with their own role to play and responsibility for it. It is not acceptable for senior figures who produce foolish laws to pass the buck to the little guy who implements them. However, neither should a little guy who chooses to work for an unethical employer and to follow their unethical practices be wholly exempt from responsibility. Each person involved should be held responsible for their part in any unethical action, to the extent that they were or reasonably should have been aware of it, that they could reasonably do anything about it (including leaving the employment), and that they contributed to any adverse consequences. These are the rules for everyone else, and the fact that this case happens to involve the government makes no difference to the ethics of the situation.
That's a neat-sounding argument, except that only a tiny amount of the tax we pay goes into the kind of protection you're talking about, and they're not particularly effective as physical protection even then.
Why are we not holding banks liable for having a system that encourages identity theft by making it as easy as stealing a laptop? Or holding wallet makers responsible for not securing wallets with anything stronger than a clasp? The reason is because we realize that there are limits to the abilities of these companies that can't be stretched much further. Government employees are mentally stretched to their breaking points. How dare we threaten them with jail time when we can't expect any more from them in the first place?
Perhaps they should have thought of that before legally compelling me to disclose sensitive private data that could be used to ruin my life if it was abused or fell into the wrong hands?
If the situation is reversed, and a member of the public fails to follow procedures that have been shown to be too complicated for the average citizen to get right, the government has no trouble with imposing instant fines instead of allowing people to fix honest mistakes.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the government here. They make the rules. No-one is forcing them to make laws like this, and no-one is forcing anyone to work for departments with lax security. If you make a pact with the devil, expect to go to hell.
In practice the big four have been quite careful, and have tended to use fairly good encryption: it's no accident that the former building societies have found things harder
Sorry, I'm not sure I follow you. Pretty much all of the big names have been caught with their pants down failing to follow even basic security procedures, such as shredding documents before chucking them in a waste bag out the back of the office or restricting employee access to privileged personal data about customers. These failings have been repeatedly highlighted by consumer advocacy groups and critical media. I'm not aware that any groups within the financial sector have a particularly good record here. What makes you think the big four have been "quite careful"?
The problem with the whole "ignorance is not a defence" argument is that, as convenient a sound-bite as it makes, it's still an unreasonable cop-out.
No-one knows what every law in the country that applies to them says. Even if they did, many people could not understand the legalese without assistance. There have been demonstrations that show that even MPs who approve our legislation can't complete their own tax return correctly. Our own government frequently fails to follow its own laws because some official didn't know what some other official was doing — and that's their full-time job!
It may be a legal convenience to say that ignorance is not a defence, but ethically it is a very dubious principle if it isn't matched with an effective education policy that makes it a reasonable assumption that everyone should know and understand all the laws that apply to them. If you construct a system where no-one can know it, and then say that not knowing it is no defence, then you are simply criminalising arbitrarily, and that is universally the mark of a legal system gone too far.
I'm sorry, but comments like yours are why openness gets a bad name among real people.
Here is an interesting document. It's published in a format pretty much everyone can read, using fonts that produce a pleasant appearance. It serves its job perfectly well, and your only complaint is that some of the technology involved is not "open", according to some arbitrary definition of the word. Why is that a problem, other than some personal prejudice?
Ironically, TeX is one of the few programs ever written where it's a good bet that it isn't buggy. Esoteric? Sure. Somewhat outdated in modern terms? Of course. But buggy? It's not likely, and Knuth quite literally puts his money where his mouth is on that one.
(Yes, I did realise you were joking. But I think it's an interesting observation all the same.)
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
Fair enough.
The thing that always gets me about the concept of a mathematical proof is that it seems to be turtles all the way down. Sure, if you're proving, say, a simple result in group theory derived trivially from axioms, then the proof can be quite convincing. But recent proofs for some famous results run to many pages, and as experience shows, a "proof" can turn out to be completely undermined by a simple flaw in the logic that the person presenting the proof missed. Even if you break the steps down logically, as any substantial proof surely will, you ultimately rely on the logic being correct. Even if you employ some sort of automated theorem proving approach, how do you know that is operating correctly, and that whatever rules of logic or axioms it applies are themselves self-consistent and won't be undermined by some devious paradox discovered tomorrow?
I wouldn't be surprised to find that very clever people have long since worked out how to avoid these issues, but throughout my formal academic studies in the field, no-one ever really showed me a satisfactory explanation.
It's an old saying, but no less truthful for it. Modern technology makes communication, data storage and research into effectively free commodities. These things can be used for many constructive purposes, but a natural side effect is a loss of privacy.
The thing is, society has adopted privacy as an accepted cultural value for good reasons. Society also typically frowns on vigilantism for good reasons. No-one is perfect, and if you tend towards a system where there is some dirt to dig up on everyone and if you choose to share it then you can bring down disproportionate consequences on anyone you don't like, then no-one is ever safe from the screwed up people.
In a way, this is no different to any other criminal behaviour. You can't systematically prevent it, any more than you can systematically prevent someone from driving their car at reckless speeds and causing an accident, or from betraying the confidence of an ex-partner they no longer get on with to her friends or new partner, or from beating up a smaller kid in school when the teachers aren't looking. But these things are all the actions of someone deeply unpleasant, and society frowns on them, tries to prevent them as much as possible, and punishes them when it can.
What is different is simply that this whole context is new. A lot of people — particularly, it must be said, a lot of young people — are enjoying a kind of freedom and collective power that previous generations have not, but they don't yet understand the responsibility that comes with that freedom. Because it's so new, it's an alien concept to the adults responsible for teaching them, and mistakes are made. (There is an obvious parallel here with big businesses getting away with things because privacy laws haven't yet caught up.)
In time, I hope this will pass, and society will come to frown on invasion of privacy and sharing information without due respect in the same way that we frown on violence or blackmail today. But I'm afraid we're going to take a few years learning some hard lessons, and there are likely to be an unfortunately large number of relatively innocent victims along the way. As with any form of growing up, the road to maturity is sometimes a painful one. At least when you get there, you usually find others have walked the same path and can forgive youthful indiscretions.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I fear you and/or the AMS are giving too much credit to the big names in mathematical software. Sure, they have some bright people and they do some useful research in their own right, but they're still only human. They make mistakes, their software has bugs, and they don't know lots of deep secrets that the rest of academia don't. In fact, the development practices at certain high profile mathematical software companies leave a lot to be desired; they tend to hire PhD types, who know a lot about mathematics but may or may not know jack about how to write good software. I rather doubt they're about to kidnap all the leading edge research and make it disappear from everyone not working for them.
Disclosure: I work for a mathematical software firm well known in its industry, and I've encountered some of the others in a professional context. I am speaking personally and not on behalf of anyone else here.
Yes, I did say all of that, and I stand by it. Neither the most well-known article about Vista/DRM performance degradations, nor the pro-Microsoft ZDNet article you cited, really presents much evidence of anything. However, to anyone with any understanding of what DRM is and how it operates, it is clear that the results I listed are necessary consequences and the only question is how well Microsoft has minimised the effects. Do you deny that output quality for protected content may be degraded on Vista under some circumstances? Or that the DRM scheme favoured by Windows Media Player's native formats results in a delay before playing protected music? Or that Vista's own product registration/activation system includes the possibility of remotely disabling a computer?
However, I thought we were talking more generally at this point — as a result of your own reply to the post of mine you cited, actually — and my comments about Vista's poor performance in our test suite were made in that context. I am not claiming that the measured poor performance is necessarily a result of the DRM, or any other specific cause for that matter, because I do not have the necessary information to draw such conclusions. The only thing I can say with certainty is that in a controlled experiment, Vista was significantly slower than XP SP2, and therefore the criticism of Vista for having poorer performance than its predecessor is not just FUD.
I didn't say anything about DRM. The only thing I said is that the figures on two otherwise identical machines differed by a few percent with one running XP SP2 and one running Vista. I don't really care whether the performance drop is due to DRM issues, immature drivers, or someone writing a random Sleep(10) call in the kernel for that matter.
The software concerned is for mathematical modelling, and the suite concerned is our in-house unit tests, which take several minutes to run on the hardware concerned. I'm speaking personally and not on behalf of my employer, so I'm afraid that's as much detail as you're going to get.
For one thing, the measured performance of our test suite is several percent lower on a system running Vista than on an identically specified system running XP SP2.
That's one possible outcome. Another is that it will lead to virtualisation technology becoming mainstream rather than the plaything of technical folks, and better implementation techniques with much more acceptable overheads will be developed along the way. I'm not saying this has to happen, but hey, a lot of programmers still think co-ordinating multiple threads has to be slow, while the Erlang folks try to politely hide their laughter. They get the equivalent effects in a different way, and sidestep the problems by being smart about how they implement things.
Any DRM system necessarily comes with some performance penalty by its nature. In this case, that means not only speed but also reliability, vulnerability to security flaws, and degraded output if you have the "wrong" software running, where "wrong" means not having jumped through Microsoft's and their partners' technical and financial hoops.
If you haven't read reviews citing numerous specific examples of this confirmed in labs then I don't know where you've been for the past couple of years, but in any case, you're as capable as the rest of us of using a search engine to find them. The fact that you apparently choose not to do so is not our problem.
You're missing the point. To run your typical office PC with XP today costs... nothing, because you've already got it.
To get Vista to run acceptably, you not only have to buy Vista, you also have to buy all the hardware at the prices you mentioned, which gains you... nothing, if the application you use to do real work all run at the same speed anyway.
When the leading business apps (not just word processors, but accounting packages, customer management, and so on) start getting the same release dates for Linux as for Windows, businesses will be looking at moving. When the leading games and multimedia formats start running at all on Linux without jumping through hoops and emulation layers, home users will be looking at moving. When Linux starts getting killer apps that aren't available on Windows, or aren't as good/early if they are, then average people will actually move.
Basically, you can predict accurately whether next year will be the year of any operating system on the desktop simply by looking at the application support.
The early versions of Linux were definitely for the tech savvy only. Driver support was lousy and you usually spent a lot of time on the command line getting yourself going. That's not something Joe Schmoe is going to want to do on his own.
It's not just tech savvy. It's tech savvy and masochistic. Just because I have plenty of experience editing configuration files, compiling code or writing/debugging device drivers from the hardware spec, that doesn't mean I want to spend my valuable free time doing it just to be able to use basic applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Few people really care about DRM on DVDs.
It depends what you count under the "DRM" umbrella. Does unskippable content at the start of a DVD count? Because I know plenty of people who now outright avoid buying any DVDs from brands who have taken this too far. Seriously, why do I need to sit through 30 seconds of US-based copyright warning that doesn't even apply to me here, and a load of disclaimers about interview content when there are no interviews on the DVD?
I even know people who have taken DVDs back to the shop in extreme cases and demanded a refund on the basis that the weren't fit for purpose. The shops usually point at some policy that says they don't refund opened DVDs etc. Without exception when my friends have started talking about the Sale of Goods Act and asked to speak to the manager, a refund has quickly been forthcoming, though, which gives you some idea of how much the managers think their disclaimers are worth.
It's also worth remembering that more ISPs are throttling our bandwidth based upon the type of traffic. We may win a battle and still get creamed in the war.
I doubt that. If the ISP industry moves to general bandwidth throttling and not allowing their customers to use what they're paying for, they will keep profits up for a little while, and then ultimately lose for exactly the same reasons Big Media's DRM-based strategy is doomed.
There are trivial technical ways to circumvent bandwidth shaping, just as there are trivial ways to circumvent DRM. If most ISPs impose restrictions then those who continue to provide what customers actually want at a realistic price will have a competitive advantage, just as is the case with DRM. It will start slow may get bad before it gets better, but eventually large numbers of people will understand how they're being screwed, just as with DRM.
The only major difference is that providing high bandwidth really does have a significant marginal cost for the ISPs, so people who think paying 20 quid a month for "up to 8MB" broadband and effectively unlimited bandwidth is realistic are in for a nasty shock. It won't be economic to support that service at that price when everyone starts wanting to use it for real, and no amount of consumer whining will make commercial ISPs offer a service long-term when that service is loss-making. I expect that we'll see some stratification in the offerings from the ISP industry, with providers offering packages for light, moderate and heavy use, but with prices to match.
We might also see a return to metered charging, though obviously at much lower rates than in the old modem days. That in turn would lead to pressure for ISPs to do more about the spam problem and malware so people's allowance wasn't wasted, which would be no bad thing either.
Anyway, the bottom line is that for this sort of issue, the market is mightier than the courts. Consumers will always win this sort of battle for as long as necessary, because ultimately they control the purse strings (and no amount of ISP lobbying is going to get governments who want to be re-elected to impose obviously punitive taxation policies on their electorate for very long).
Which IMHO is really the wrong approach. Far better to make the kind of information involved of little value to anyone else.
It might sound revolutionary, but couldn't we just... not collect the data at all?
The discs that were lost should never have existed. Even where different parts of the government had a legitimate need to access some of it, it wasn't necessary to "dump all the columns in the database" like this; indeed, some sources are saying the National Audit Office (the intended recipients) had explicitly asked for only certain parts of each record. Even if it was necessary to collect the whole data set, there should have been strict controls on who could do it, and where they could put the data. The fact that those discs existed betrays failings on so many levels that holding the guy who tried to take a short-cut culpable is kinda missing the point.
At least now that fully half the country is ****ing themselves over whether they personally will get damaged by this, people might finally start to realise that a surveillance society and a One Big Database government policy are exactly what you shouldn't try to do. Even if different official organisations need certain data about people for certain legitimate purposes, that doesn't mean you have to let everyone access all the data from anywhere for any purpose!
It's kinda strange. Anyone who's worked in corporate IT knows about firewalls, layered defences, social engineering attacks, the risks from insiders, and so on. Yet the government, who want to spend bazillions of pounds of taxpayers' money on things like the National Identity Register and the new NHS database, apparently haven't even read the Idiot's Guide.
(I commented earlier on possible alternatives where it is necessary to control access effectively.)
The solution isn't more government regulation, it's not tying the concept of identity to a couple commonly known pieces of information like date of birth or SSN.
Oh, no, I think heavy regulation is still in order. Regardless of what personal information is being kept about you, anyone with legitimate access to it has a responsibility to keep it safe.
The problem with your argument is that people simply can't remember lots of unique, strong passwords, which is why despite all these secret words and "memorable" numbers all the financial services use, they'll still talk to you when you've forgotten yours as long as you know a handful of obvious (to you) facts that it's unlikely someone else would guess all at once.
One topical alternative is biometrics, but these have two pretty much unavoidable problems themselves. Firstly, while they inhibit casual abuse, the serious guys will get hold of the data soon enough, and then you can't change your fingerprint or iris scan like you change a password. Secondly, this implies the creation of something like the National Identity Register, which in itself constitutes a far bigger threat to people's safety and quality of life than any individual identity theft or similar criminal hackery.
Personally, I think the future lies in simple measures that combine something you know with some physical object you have. Consider the success of "Chip 'n' Pin" card payments, which have dramatically reduced card fraud. The technology exists to use some sort of smart login to bank systems based on some device where the user enters a simple PIN or password and the device generates a one-time key that the bank can validate; IIRC, some banks have started trials of such technology as a way to make their on-line banking facilities more secure, reasoning that the cost of providing all customers with a physical key generator is less than the ongoing cost of the electronic fraud. The beauty of such systems is that they can use simple, memorable details that people won't just write down, because they form only part of the key and the other part is very strong.
It's not as black and white as that in most places where there is a so-called loser pays culture. It's simply that judges can award costs as well as whatever damages might be appropriate.
Moreover, in your entirely emotionally neutral example, if the large corporation really wronged your Grandma, why did she lose the court case? There's a lot of whining on Slashdot about armies of lawyers (unless they're Good Guys like the FSF, of course). Sure, a good, well-funded legal team may make a better case for their client than a poor and inadequately funded lawyer. However, no matter how good a lawyer is, they still can't actually change the law.
Meanwhile, why should a business have to bear the cost of defending themselves against any Tom, Dick or Harry who chooses to sue them without a decent case? Just because they're a business, their money doesn't grow on trees. If they have to spend a lot of money defending lawsuits, that is money that isn't going to their shareholders. And lest we forget, those shareholders aren't just filthy rich executive types. Typically, they also include your pension fund and perhaps your best friend's personal savings.
Ignorance as a defence is invalid because it's impossible to disprove it; anyone couldclaim not to know murder's illegal.
I understand why the legal system adopts the position it does. It is, like much in law, a pragmatic concession. That doesn't make the principle right, though.
As I said, if you want to adopt such a position, it is only fair to institute educational policies such that people can reasonably be expected not to be ignorant. It's interesting that you say in one paragraph that "everyone knows shoplifting is illegal", yet in the next that "anyone could claim not to know murder's illegal". Sorry, but you can't have it both ways!
I would argue that it is reasonable not to allow ignorance as a defence for things like shoplifting or murder, because these ideas are commonly understood by the age of criminal responsibility. You get into much more dubious territory when you consider issues where the popular understanding of the law is wrong. In this case, a fair solution is educating the population about what the law says and why. Another fair solution is changing the law to reflect the popular perception.
Politics aside, there are good reasons that those who have considered an issue deeply may propose laws that do not match the man in the street's idea of ethics or justice. An example that comes immediately to mind is making evidence inadmissible if it is improperly collected, and thus potentially forcing a court to let a guilty person go free even though they know they are guilty. The outcome is clearly unjust in that case, but it is necessary to prevent the entire system becoming corrupt in all cases. Refusal to negotiate with hostage takers is another example that follows a similar principle.
However, where these issues affect the average person and the law is counter-intuitive, I think it is fundamentally unfair to expect people to obey the law when it is unrealistic to assume they understand what is expected of them. Copyright infringement is a topical example, where there is a reasonable argument for the law saying what it does, but many people when asked do not understand the principle and think common behaviours are legal when in fact they are not. (I'm not getting into whether copyright is the best approach, merely contending that the current legal position is credible but widely misunderstood.)
That was all rather long and winding, but in short, if your law is too complicated or counter-intuitive for your citizens to understand, respect and obey, then your law is broken. You either need to inform people about the reasons behind it so that those conditions no longer apply, or you need to change the law itself. Doing neither, and then relying on the "ignorance is no defence" argument, is not in the interests of justice and ultimately harms the credibility of the entire legal system.
Government is not some nebulous entity. The instant you starting thinking of it as nothing but a body corporate with crown immunity, it becomes legally and ethically invulnerable. No-one can be held accountable for anything any more, and thus there is no need to fix anything that is broken.
In reality, governments are composed of large numbers of real people, each with their own role to play and responsibility for it. It is not acceptable for senior figures who produce foolish laws to pass the buck to the little guy who implements them. However, neither should a little guy who chooses to work for an unethical employer and to follow their unethical practices be wholly exempt from responsibility. Each person involved should be held responsible for their part in any unethical action, to the extent that they were or reasonably should have been aware of it, that they could reasonably do anything about it (including leaving the employment), and that they contributed to any adverse consequences. These are the rules for everyone else, and the fact that this case happens to involve the government makes no difference to the ethics of the situation.
That's a neat-sounding argument, except that only a tiny amount of the tax we pay goes into the kind of protection you're talking about, and they're not particularly effective as physical protection even then.
Why are we not holding banks liable for having a system that encourages identity theft by making it as easy as stealing a laptop? Or holding wallet makers responsible for not securing wallets with anything stronger than a clasp? The reason is because we realize that there are limits to the abilities of these companies that can't be stretched much further. Government employees are mentally stretched to their breaking points. How dare we threaten them with jail time when we can't expect any more from them in the first place?
Perhaps they should have thought of that before legally compelling me to disclose sensitive private data that could be used to ruin my life if it was abused or fell into the wrong hands?
If the situation is reversed, and a member of the public fails to follow procedures that have been shown to be too complicated for the average citizen to get right, the government has no trouble with imposing instant fines instead of allowing people to fix honest mistakes.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the government here. They make the rules. No-one is forcing them to make laws like this, and no-one is forcing anyone to work for departments with lax security. If you make a pact with the devil, expect to go to hell.
In practice the big four have been quite careful, and have tended to use fairly good encryption: it's no accident that the former building societies have found things harder
Sorry, I'm not sure I follow you. Pretty much all of the big names have been caught with their pants down failing to follow even basic security procedures, such as shredding documents before chucking them in a waste bag out the back of the office or restricting employee access to privileged personal data about customers. These failings have been repeatedly highlighted by consumer advocacy groups and critical media. I'm not aware that any groups within the financial sector have a particularly good record here. What makes you think the big four have been "quite careful"?
The problem with the whole "ignorance is not a defence" argument is that, as convenient a sound-bite as it makes, it's still an unreasonable cop-out.
No-one knows what every law in the country that applies to them says. Even if they did, many people could not understand the legalese without assistance. There have been demonstrations that show that even MPs who approve our legislation can't complete their own tax return correctly. Our own government frequently fails to follow its own laws because some official didn't know what some other official was doing — and that's their full-time job!
It may be a legal convenience to say that ignorance is not a defence, but ethically it is a very dubious principle if it isn't matched with an effective education policy that makes it a reasonable assumption that everyone should know and understand all the laws that apply to them. If you construct a system where no-one can know it, and then say that not knowing it is no defence, then you are simply criminalising arbitrarily, and that is universally the mark of a legal system gone too far.
I'm sorry, but comments like yours are why openness gets a bad name among real people.
Here is an interesting document. It's published in a format pretty much everyone can read, using fonts that produce a pleasant appearance. It serves its job perfectly well, and your only complaint is that some of the technology involved is not "open", according to some arbitrary definition of the word. Why is that a problem, other than some personal prejudice?
Ironically, TeX is one of the few programs ever written where it's a good bet that it isn't buggy. Esoteric? Sure. Somewhat outdated in modern terms? Of course. But buggy? It's not likely, and Knuth quite literally puts his money where his mouth is on that one.
(Yes, I did realise you were joking. But I think it's an interesting observation all the same.)
Fair enough.
The thing that always gets me about the concept of a mathematical proof is that it seems to be turtles all the way down. Sure, if you're proving, say, a simple result in group theory derived trivially from axioms, then the proof can be quite convincing. But recent proofs for some famous results run to many pages, and as experience shows, a "proof" can turn out to be completely undermined by a simple flaw in the logic that the person presenting the proof missed. Even if you break the steps down logically, as any substantial proof surely will, you ultimately rely on the logic being correct. Even if you employ some sort of automated theorem proving approach, how do you know that is operating correctly, and that whatever rules of logic or axioms it applies are themselves self-consistent and won't be undermined by some devious paradox discovered tomorrow?
I wouldn't be surprised to find that very clever people have long since worked out how to avoid these issues, but throughout my formal academic studies in the field, no-one ever really showed me a satisfactory explanation.
...that doesn't mean we should.
It's an old saying, but no less truthful for it. Modern technology makes communication, data storage and research into effectively free commodities. These things can be used for many constructive purposes, but a natural side effect is a loss of privacy.
The thing is, society has adopted privacy as an accepted cultural value for good reasons. Society also typically frowns on vigilantism for good reasons. No-one is perfect, and if you tend towards a system where there is some dirt to dig up on everyone and if you choose to share it then you can bring down disproportionate consequences on anyone you don't like, then no-one is ever safe from the screwed up people.
In a way, this is no different to any other criminal behaviour. You can't systematically prevent it, any more than you can systematically prevent someone from driving their car at reckless speeds and causing an accident, or from betraying the confidence of an ex-partner they no longer get on with to her friends or new partner, or from beating up a smaller kid in school when the teachers aren't looking. But these things are all the actions of someone deeply unpleasant, and society frowns on them, tries to prevent them as much as possible, and punishes them when it can.
What is different is simply that this whole context is new. A lot of people — particularly, it must be said, a lot of young people — are enjoying a kind of freedom and collective power that previous generations have not, but they don't yet understand the responsibility that comes with that freedom. Because it's so new, it's an alien concept to the adults responsible for teaching them, and mistakes are made. (There is an obvious parallel here with big businesses getting away with things because privacy laws haven't yet caught up.)
In time, I hope this will pass, and society will come to frown on invasion of privacy and sharing information without due respect in the same way that we frown on violence or blackmail today. But I'm afraid we're going to take a few years learning some hard lessons, and there are likely to be an unfortunately large number of relatively innocent victims along the way. As with any form of growing up, the road to maturity is sometimes a painful one. At least when you get there, you usually find others have walked the same path and can forgive youthful indiscretions.
I fear you and/or the AMS are giving too much credit to the big names in mathematical software. Sure, they have some bright people and they do some useful research in their own right, but they're still only human. They make mistakes, their software has bugs, and they don't know lots of deep secrets that the rest of academia don't. In fact, the development practices at certain high profile mathematical software companies leave a lot to be desired; they tend to hire PhD types, who know a lot about mathematics but may or may not know jack about how to write good software. I rather doubt they're about to kidnap all the leading edge research and make it disappear from everyone not working for them.
Disclosure: I work for a mathematical software firm well known in its industry, and I've encountered some of the others in a professional context. I am speaking personally and not on behalf of anyone else here.
Yes, I did say all of that, and I stand by it. Neither the most well-known article about Vista/DRM performance degradations, nor the pro-Microsoft ZDNet article you cited, really presents much evidence of anything. However, to anyone with any understanding of what DRM is and how it operates, it is clear that the results I listed are necessary consequences and the only question is how well Microsoft has minimised the effects. Do you deny that output quality for protected content may be degraded on Vista under some circumstances? Or that the DRM scheme favoured by Windows Media Player's native formats results in a delay before playing protected music? Or that Vista's own product registration/activation system includes the possibility of remotely disabling a computer?
However, I thought we were talking more generally at this point — as a result of your own reply to the post of mine you cited, actually — and my comments about Vista's poor performance in our test suite were made in that context. I am not claiming that the measured poor performance is necessarily a result of the DRM, or any other specific cause for that matter, because I do not have the necessary information to draw such conclusions. The only thing I can say with certainty is that in a controlled experiment, Vista was significantly slower than XP SP2, and therefore the criticism of Vista for having poorer performance than its predecessor is not just FUD.
I didn't say anything about DRM. The only thing I said is that the figures on two otherwise identical machines differed by a few percent with one running XP SP2 and one running Vista. I don't really care whether the performance drop is due to DRM issues, immature drivers, or someone writing a random Sleep(10) call in the kernel for that matter.
The software concerned is for mathematical modelling, and the suite concerned is our in-house unit tests, which take several minutes to run on the hardware concerned. I'm speaking personally and not on behalf of my employer, so I'm afraid that's as much detail as you're going to get.
For one thing, the measured performance of our test suite is several percent lower on a system running Vista than on an identically specified system running XP SP2.
The FUD about Vista has been thoroughly debunked.
Nice try. I have seen some of the major complaints about Vista demonstrated on a test rig with my own eyes.
It's only FUD if it's not actually true.
That's one possible outcome. Another is that it will lead to virtualisation technology becoming mainstream rather than the plaything of technical folks, and better implementation techniques with much more acceptable overheads will be developed along the way. I'm not saying this has to happen, but hey, a lot of programmers still think co-ordinating multiple threads has to be slow, while the Erlang folks try to politely hide their laughter. They get the equivalent effects in a different way, and sidestep the problems by being smart about how they implement things.
Any DRM system necessarily comes with some performance penalty by its nature. In this case, that means not only speed but also reliability, vulnerability to security flaws, and degraded output if you have the "wrong" software running, where "wrong" means not having jumped through Microsoft's and their partners' technical and financial hoops.
If you haven't read reviews citing numerous specific examples of this confirmed in labs then I don't know where you've been for the past couple of years, but in any case, you're as capable as the rest of us of using a search engine to find them. The fact that you apparently choose not to do so is not our problem.
You're missing the point. To run your typical office PC with XP today costs... nothing, because you've already got it.
To get Vista to run acceptably, you not only have to buy Vista, you also have to buy all the hardware at the prices you mentioned, which gains you... nothing, if the application you use to do real work all run at the same speed anyway.
I think it'll be rather more obvious than that.
When the leading business apps (not just word processors, but accounting packages, customer management, and so on) start getting the same release dates for Linux as for Windows, businesses will be looking at moving. When the leading games and multimedia formats start running at all on Linux without jumping through hoops and emulation layers, home users will be looking at moving. When Linux starts getting killer apps that aren't available on Windows, or aren't as good/early if they are, then average people will actually move.
Basically, you can predict accurately whether next year will be the year of any operating system on the desktop simply by looking at the application support.
The early versions of Linux were definitely for the tech savvy only. Driver support was lousy and you usually spent a lot of time on the command line getting yourself going. That's not something Joe Schmoe is going to want to do on his own.
It's not just tech savvy. It's tech savvy and masochistic. Just because I have plenty of experience editing configuration files, compiling code or writing/debugging device drivers from the hardware spec, that doesn't mean I want to spend my valuable free time doing it just to be able to use basic applications.