Contents of the Letter (playfair.txt)
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 3, Informative
(cut out '-' used to serve as underlines for section headers to get past/.'s "lameness filter" and made all paragraphs into one line to get past/.'s "lines contain fewer than 38 characters". Enjoy)
BACKGROUND
Sarovar (http://www.sarovar.org/) was setup about a year back as a facility for free software hackers. It's running the GForge software under Debian GNU/Linux. Think of it as a Savannah in India (http://savannah.gnu.org/ and http://savannah.nongnu.org/ are servers providing facilities for distributed development of free software projects). The Sarovar server is physically located in Trivandrum, India. It is sponsored by Trivandrum based company River Valley Technologies and maintained by Linuxense, another Trivandrum-based company. Rajkumar S, who works at Linuxense. is one of the maintainers of Sarovar. These 2 companies (River Valley and Linuxense) maintain Sarovar as a service for the free software community in India and abroad. Sarovar now hosts 130 projects and has more than 930 registered users from across the world.
PlayFair is a tool to enable fair use for music purchased from Apple's iTunes music service. It lets people play music in non-Apple authorized hardware like a GNU/Linux PC, provided an authorized key is available. It does that by stripping the Digital Rights Management (DRM) facility from a song, provided the key to playing the song is available. PlayFair is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL).
The author of PlayFair prefers to remain anonymous.
HISTORY
PlayFair was originally hosted at Sourceforge.net, a US-based project similar to Savannah and Sarovar. Apple invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against PlayFair and Sourceforge took down the project. Since DMCA has an anti circumvision provision, PlayFair *may* be illegal in the USA.
Once Sourceforge shut down the project, PlayFair's author contacted Sarovar for hosting, and since India do not have a DMCA like law, Rajkumar S approved the project as it is legal in India. The project was available at Sarovar for about a week and had about 30,000 downloads.
Last Friday (2004-04-16) Apple sent a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter to the sponsors, maintainers and ISP of Sarovar.org invoking the IT Act 2002 and Indian Copyright act, and instructed them to take down PlayFair within 24 hours. The full letter from apple is available at
http://sarovar.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=474
Since the letter was addressed to the ISP and sponsors, and as they had some limitations on fighting the case, Sarovar decided to take down PlayFair, even though they believed that it was legal.
Some of the hackers who maintain Sarovar.org had pretty strong feelings about this case, but were helpless against the legal force from Apple.
As we think about the implications of such a C&D letter from a corporation against a free software project, it becomes apparent that the issue at hand is not just related to PlayFair or Sarovar or River Valley. What is really happening is a corporation is using legal means to shut down a free software project in India for the first time and the small project is left defenseless even though they believe that they are right.
This letter from Apple will have a profound impact on freedom for Indians and people all over the world. If we do not fight back, we will be on our way on a slippery slope. If we win it will be a momentous victory with impact all over the world.
PLAYFAIR IS NOT MUSIC THEFT
PlayFair does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given the user:
1. PlayFair requires a valid key from Apple to convert the format of music downloaded from iTunes. PlayFair cannot convert downloaded songs' formats without authorized keys.
2. PlayFair is not a music distribution program. All PlayFair does is convert songs from one, restricted format to another, le
2.5 has been largely successful, and a lot of end users were able to compile it. 2.3? That's another story. I remember not being able to compile 2.3 once.
I have cable. I also run my own mail server. If that's implemented, then no mail server will receive my mail because my residential cable IP won't be allowed to send mail from my ISP's netblock. Thus we all need to pay just to run our mail domains, which is too expensive.
What I really would like to know is how they install and configure all those machines. Their method of doing that will be very useful for even the (relatively) smaller networks that don't necessarily have to be clusters.
For example, I've yet to figure out a way to effectively get a computer lab with 30 eMacs installed and configured the same way. DHCP/Netboot is slow because we only have 100mbit switches. Split CD images are slow, and Jaguar doesn't yet have free software that does that yet (besides the dd of course). I'm not sure how to keep them all updated either.
I really hope they describe how they maintain the operating system on them.
Popular Science Article
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This month's issue of popular science has an article also. Click.
Hm... I don't think it's a 3d scale model. All the planets except Pluto are all coplanar. Unfortunately, from the pictures on the site, all the planets seem to be an equal distance off the ground... but did they take into account the Earth's curvature? If not, then in reality all the model planets are not coplanar and therefore not a 3d scale (2d maybe). Right now the scale is treating the curvature of the Earth as a flat plane and that's not right.
That's true, but biologists would definately be interested in at least an attempt at preserving what's on the planet for research either in the present or in the future.
I'm kinda surprised that the DoD would go on with their decision to make civilian GPS as accurate as it is technologically possible, even after we know that the hijackers located and flew into their targets on September 11th using civilian GPS. I'm not saying that the hijackers should spoil the treat for the rest of us. I just find it paradoxical.
And what if other countries design their offensive weapons to aim with our system? (Temporarily shutting civilian GPS down might work.. then again, we can tweak the numbers that are transmitted to any civilian client during this event so that we are able to redirect those weapons to our targets)
1) su
- type in password
2) echo "0 6 * * * root apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" >>/etc/crontab
And you'll always get the updates.
As other people said, I've never HEARD of urpmi. There's one thing I have to give Mandrake credit, though - I learned linux off of that distrib, but that was after I was too confused on Debian's SETUP, not apt-get (that too, considering I was only on dialup, and I didn't download their CD images because I couldn't find it, being the linux-newbie I was. Cable made the difference)
Slashdot Mirror
(cut out '-' used to serve as underlines for section headers to get past /.'s "lameness filter" and made all paragraphs into one line to get past /.'s "lines contain fewer than 38 characters". Enjoy)
BACKGROUND
Sarovar (http://www.sarovar.org/) was setup about a year back as a facility for free software hackers. It's running the GForge software under Debian GNU/Linux. Think of it as a Savannah in India (http://savannah.gnu.org/ and http://savannah.nongnu.org/ are servers providing facilities for distributed development of free software projects). The Sarovar server is physically located in Trivandrum, India. It is sponsored by Trivandrum based company River Valley Technologies and maintained by Linuxense, another Trivandrum-based company. Rajkumar S, who works at Linuxense. is one of the maintainers of Sarovar. These 2 companies (River Valley and Linuxense) maintain Sarovar as a service for the free software community in India and abroad. Sarovar now hosts 130 projects and has more than 930 registered users from across the world.
PlayFair is a tool to enable fair use for music purchased from Apple's iTunes music service. It lets people play music in non-Apple authorized hardware like a GNU/Linux PC, provided an authorized key is available. It does that by stripping the Digital Rights Management (DRM) facility from a song, provided the key to playing the song is available. PlayFair is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL).
The author of PlayFair prefers to remain anonymous.
HISTORY
PlayFair was originally hosted at Sourceforge.net, a US-based project similar to Savannah and Sarovar. Apple invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against PlayFair and Sourceforge took down the project. Since DMCA has an anti circumvision provision, PlayFair *may* be illegal in the USA.
Once Sourceforge shut down the project, PlayFair's author contacted Sarovar for hosting, and since India do not have a DMCA like law, Rajkumar S approved the project as it is legal in India. The project was available at Sarovar for about a week and had about 30,000 downloads.
Last Friday (2004-04-16) Apple sent a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter to the sponsors, maintainers and ISP of Sarovar.org invoking the IT Act 2002 and Indian Copyright act, and instructed them to take down PlayFair within 24 hours. The full letter from apple is available at
http://sarovar.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=474
Since the letter was addressed to the ISP and sponsors, and as they had some limitations on fighting the case, Sarovar decided to take down PlayFair, even though they believed that it was legal.
Some of the hackers who maintain Sarovar.org had pretty strong feelings about this case, but were helpless against the legal force from Apple.
As we think about the implications of such a C&D letter from a corporation against a free software project, it becomes apparent that the issue at hand is not just related to PlayFair or Sarovar or River Valley. What is really happening is a corporation is using legal means to shut down a free software project in India for the first time and the small project is left defenseless even though they believe that they are right.
This letter from Apple will have a profound impact on freedom for Indians and people all over the world. If we do not fight back, we will be on our way on a slippery slope. If we win it will be a momentous victory with impact all over the world.
PLAYFAIR IS NOT MUSIC THEFT
PlayFair does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given the user:
1. PlayFair requires a valid key from Apple to convert the format of music downloaded from iTunes. PlayFair cannot convert downloaded songs' formats without authorized keys.
2. PlayFair is not a music distribution program. All PlayFair does is convert songs from one, restricted format to another, le
2.5 has been largely successful, and a lot of end users were able to compile it. 2.3? That's another story. I remember not being able to compile 2.3 once.
Good job to all the kernel hackers.
Maybe google is doing this because a few companies paid for exclusive results for a string?
I have cable. I also run my own mail server. If that's implemented, then no mail server will receive my mail because my residential cable IP won't be allowed to send mail from my ISP's netblock. Thus we all need to pay just to run our mail domains, which is too expensive.
IMHO, if these viruses keep coming around, one is BOUND to attack 2003 servers. Then the 5%'ll feel bad and then revert back.
It's only a matter of time (and trial and error).
What I really would like to know is how they install and configure all those machines. Their method of doing that will be very useful for even the (relatively) smaller networks that don't necessarily have to be clusters.
For example, I've yet to figure out a way to effectively get a computer lab with 30 eMacs installed and configured the same way. DHCP/Netboot is slow because we only have 100mbit switches. Split CD images are slow, and Jaguar doesn't yet have free software that does that yet (besides the dd of course). I'm not sure how to keep them all updated either.
I really hope they describe how they maintain the operating system on them.
This month's issue of popular science has an article also. Click.
Hm... I don't think it's a 3d scale model. All the planets except Pluto are all coplanar. Unfortunately, from the pictures on the site, all the planets seem to be an equal distance off the ground... but did they take into account the Earth's curvature? If not, then in reality all the model planets are not coplanar and therefore not a 3d scale (2d maybe). Right now the scale is treating the curvature of the Earth as a flat plane and that's not right.
That's true, but biologists would definately be interested in at least an attempt at preserving what's on the planet for research either in the present or in the future.
Shouldn't we be more worried about the other way around first - the contamination of Mars by some Earthly micro-organism?
I'm kinda surprised that the DoD would go on with their decision to make civilian GPS as accurate as it is technologically possible, even after we know that the hijackers located and flew into their targets on September 11th using civilian GPS. I'm not saying that the hijackers should spoil the treat for the rest of us. I just find it paradoxical.
And what if other countries design their offensive weapons to aim with our system? (Temporarily shutting civilian GPS down might work.. then again, we can tweak the numbers that are transmitted to any civilian client during this event so that we are able to redirect those weapons to our targets)
As root:
/etc/crontab
1) su
- type in password
2) echo "0 6 * * * root apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" >>
And you'll always get the updates.
As other people said, I've never HEARD of urpmi. There's one thing I have to give Mandrake credit, though - I learned linux off of that distrib, but that was after I was too confused on Debian's SETUP, not apt-get (that too, considering I was only on dialup, and I didn't download their CD images because I couldn't find it, being the linux-newbie I was. Cable made the difference)