"Frankly, I'm finding a lack of attention and a lack of understanding by the Congress and the (Bush) administration as to the serious nature of the threat," he said. "It's not nearly as sexy, or as engaging, or as interesting as the threats that are posed by terrorists boarding aircraft, or terrorists threats to the Brooklyn Bridge
Issues that affect us all, but...
Forthcoming cybersecurity legislation will be "meaningful regulatory approach to securing private-sector critical infrastructure" says Representative Adam Putnam
Shame it's only for the private sector. Ordinary decent home users would benefit greatly from a similary committee. Currently there is little or no useful media attention, which is a problem
Put it this way: if you were to hold a random sampling of U.S. citizens on cybersecurity, you would likely get a lot of semi- or un-informed views on it. The reason is simple: it's not considered important enough by society at large to have anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to it. If/when the details of cybersecurity (not just the fallout from high-profile cases) becomes a big thing in the media and in government, only then will the population at large (who are being spoonfed by popular media, remember) feel that it is important enough to become an issue.
Congress shouldn't take a "knee-jerk, let's legislate" approach to cybersecurity, Putnam answered. He noted that many people in Congress and in the public don't realize how many pieces of the U.S. critical infrastructure are controlled through networked technology. He used the example of flood-control gates on the Mississippi River or the power grids that serve stock markets.
No mention of the myriad other effects of problematic cybersecurity, such as that mentioned here, and presumably many similar more highly controlled privacy issues wrapped around the TIA and other institutional privacy violations.
Until then, it remains an issue for the interested parties and the various lobby groups, and now for the "private sector" affected by this committee. The average internet user doesn't understand the implementations, the "downsides" discussed ad nauseam on Slashdot, or the current infringements on privacy laws by the Bush administration and their agents, so there will be no popular upswing, no attempt to popularise privacy and security for Mr. Average Midwestern Suburbian, who currently doesn't spend as much time as we do reading up on "niche" issues such as this.
Ultimately, the population is only as interested in an issue such as cybersecurity as they are directly affected by it. Otherwise, it depends how the media portrays it. Think DMCA, think The Geneva Convention, think The Universal Convention on Human Rights. The US media targetted the DMCA issue at the public by suggesting that "hackers" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Patriot Act was introduced to wide public acclaim because the media suggested "Terrorists" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Geneva convention is flaunted in Guantanamo Bay, and the US public lets it past because the media doesn't highlight it.
If the general public - the majority of voters - are not negatively affected by the multivarious issues in cybersecurity - including things currently covered by wiretapping laws, TIA etc., and erosion of personal privacy - then it takes too much effort for them to take interest, and too much effort on the media's part to educate them.
Until it becomes an issue of general relevance, the voting public won't care, input will be limited to private sector industries, and their liberties will be further eroded until they have a mode of thought equivalent to "newspeak", with only the single state department/media line to go along with.
The heat comes from dissipation due to current flow in the components, such as the processor itself. The battery heats up substantially, but heat also comes from resistive components, silicon, power supply, etc.
The reason Crusoe runs cooler is because it requires less current, not because the battery technology is better.
Oops. Just realised I'm ranting!
Throwing more programmers at a project often times makes the project LATER, not earlier. Please take a look at Frederick Brooks' classic Mythical Man Month for a discussion of a real world example showing your claim to be false.
Next time you "quote" a respected source, try quoting properly. You omitted the word "late". To join yours and FB's statements together while retaining his meaning, throwing more manpower at a late software project makes it later. (The Jargon file entry for Brooks' Law is here).
There's a good reason for this - coders who are new to a project in full swing need to catch up to take some of the work on, and in doing so they sap some of the attention and effort of the coders who are already in the middle of their work.
However, a properly planned project can scale to hundreds or thousands of developers, and it so happens that all of Frederick Brooks' examples (and his experience) support that view, not your shallower misinterpretation.
The american legal system would be calm down a lot by the simple adoption of a rule, the loser in a lawsuit generally (with limited exceptions) pays the lawyer fees of the winner
This is already in effect in a lot of places and doesn't work.
So, Let's say Microsoft sues you. You have $20,000 in the bank, you take another loan, you can set up a slush fund of say $50,000 to cover your legal bills. MS have 10 - 20 times that. They can afford a bigger legal team. If they lose, they've to pay $50,000. Shucks. On the other hand, if you lose (already weighted against you seeing as they have more and possibly better lawyers) you have a potential bill of $500K - $1M.
All other things being equal, which they aren't, the big fish will always win. That's why the BSA is so successful - they threaten legal action on the small fry from the big fry. Small fry don't want to get involved in potentially astronomic legal bills, so they cough up.
You might think this is funny, but the doubleclick opt-out was exactly this. You had to click through several layers, including one page which solely consisted of a rant on how it is actually in your benefit to allow them to track your usage, and then you have to confusingly click to disagree with their policy, get to the last page, which made a tiny little change to a cookie. Would've been much quicker to print the instruction: Change the number in our cookie to OPT-OUT and it'll be fine.
Now, remember: there are three prongs to government: the administration (Bush, your friend) is not the same as Congress, the lads who legislate. Bush's input to this is a simple yes or no. It's up to your representatives to decide what gets through to Bush. So it can't really be his fault.
Also, remember - he's there because you voted for him. (you plural, not necessarily you singular). You want him out? then let democracy do its job, or change the system.
The congressmen in question are still at the suggestive stage, not quite ready to decide what level of privacy to offer, so if you've chosen the right representative last time you voted (you DID vote, didn't you?), then your chosen representative will make the right choice for you. If not, you made the wrong choice. Or you are surrounded by people who made the wrong choice. Or gerrymandering has been in operation in your area (see last week's economist article on gerrymandering in the US). Or your representative is corrupt and takes money from lobbyists to give their way, in which case we're back to square one: choose the right representative.
All in all, Bush cannot be fully responsible for whether or not businesses can share your information. That's down to the ethics of the businesses, and the legislation of the representatives that the American people have said they want to run the country. You want privacy? then use democracy.
"I'll predict a much greater level of Internet usage with these privacy policies in place," Boucher said.
I fail to see how this will work at statistical levels - it might encourage some people who have abstained to return to the 'net, but the vast majority, those simple casual users? The use of the word much is inappropriate here.
Put it this way: if you were to hold a random sampling of U.S. citizens on internet privacy, you would likely get a lot of semi- or un-informed views on it. The reason is simple: it's not considered important enough by society at large. If/when privacy becomes a big thing in the media and in government, only then will the population at large (who are being spoonfed by popular media, remember) feel that it is important enough to become an issue.
Until then, it remains an issue for the interested parties and the various lobby groups. The average internet user doesn't care, so there will be no upswing, no "much greater level", nice as it would be to believe that Mr. Average Midwestern Suburbian spends as much time as we do reading up on issues such as this.
Total obfuscation is not possible
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Pretty boring stuff, but the overall point is that once the end product is GPL'd, it won't take long for someone in the bazaar to figure out a meaning for "asdfgh", and do a s/asdfgh/meaningfulName/g through the whole thing. Or even figure a way to diff it with the original source.
As long as it's GPL'd, the source will be available, and it'll be figured. You're wasting a lot of your time (and the rest of the community's) for very little reason.
No matter how complex your obfuscation, it's likely much less complex than, say, CSS or DES was.
Well, the concept has beein applied in other countries for years... they get the vast majority of their intelligence from public sources
This makes perfect sense, but the part I disagree with goes beyond that.
If you think of the idea of treason, it assumes an individual holds the responsibility of supporting his/her immediate society, and when that responsibility fails or is reneged against, then society can punish that individual, often by death.
Taking that a step further, said responsibility can and often does include providing intelligence to the appropriate sources, either legitimately or illegitemately through blackmail, as is often the case.
However, the article is tendering the idea that these "open sources" can and should come from OTHER countries, which may not now or ever will owe such a debt to the U.S. In fact, in some countries, especially some of the third world countries - which are often islamic, remember - the help the U.S. would get from locals would actually be a treasonable offence.
I get the impression that the author of these ideas fails to realise that the foreign locals could conceivably be punished, ostracised, or killed by the normal populace, not to mention any fundamentalists who view their "help" as an "open source" as treasonable.
It's a lot of "take" and not much "give" on an international level, i.e. not at all open source (unless you take Microsoft's use of BSD code as "open source")
It's extremely US centric
The second point is forgivable in itself, seeing as he's an ex-spook, and it's an article aimed at improving the US's intelligence. But what's with the open source phrase? How can the rest of the world make use of it? (hint for the easily amused - read "America" and "U.S." as "Microsoft", and "Open Source" as "Embrace and Extend")
Non-Governmental Organization Data Warehouse ($10M) to provide free storage and
network access to the various international organizations whose "local knowledge" is vital to U.S. understanding.
Regional Open Source Information Networks for Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America ($40M) , each with an open source collection and processing center in partnership with local governments who will provide regional language skills and access to gray literature and local experts.
What makes him think that these places - some of the poor and rebellious even internally - will co-operate with the US in matters of security? He's not even suggesting bipartisan sharing, which doesn't even approach what true open-source would be.
The closest he gets to saying that this idea will be truly "open source" is an immediate increase in open source information sharing across the departments and with the private sector; and finally, the provision of a foundation for a web-based OSINT exchange with allies, other nations and international groups, in other words it's only open source if you're in the clique. A bit like any major software company we could name...
And what's this? Digital Marshall Plan ($20M) to provide direct assistance and subsidies to extend the Internet to every corner of the world (including rural areas in America) via wireless delivery means.
This is another example of how US-centric his ideas are - the most remote corner of the world he can think of is "rural areas in America"...
This is clearly an example of some hyper-patriot using buzzwords and buzzconcepts to expand his country's control over scant international resources (intelligence analyses) without really understanding the international environment, or indeed without really understanding the terms he's using. Open source? Not likely. Open (to him) intelligence sources, closed (to everyone else) information.
schools have to get money from somewhere, especially private schools
This is a good point. There have been discussions on this before, although from a different angle: patents.
It's no coincidence that we in the/. community are here sharing opinion and working with open source, and are also interested in education. We share a thirst for knowledge and philosophy. But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop. Like the PARC and IBM labs have been doing for a while. Yes, it feels like college to work there, but now the commercial aspect is pervasive.
One major advantage of "free" education (although this MIT initiative isn't free education, simply part of the means to a free education...) is that there are no pressures to raise money during the learning process, although there may be more pressure at MIT as a result of this. The university pressure still does not affect the quality of the public materials, or the open philosophy behind the publishing of those materials.
The idea of education as a business can result in an artificial view of what needs to be learned, or indeed what research needs to be carried out. I work in education, both at the consumer/training level, and at the academic university level. The contrast in management styles is amazing - the priorities are completely dipolar. On one side, you have "the almighty buck", we teach whatever you'll pay us to stand there and waffle about, on the other you have "the almighty word", we teach whatever we as bastions of the community agree you need to know in order to develop your foundation skills in your chosen discipline.
The issue is one of management, but it's also one of expectation. The world is getting more global, more capitalist, more liberal. One of the libertarian ideas is "if you don't like it, get a different one". In order for educational institutions to survive in a liberal market, they need to be attractive to the best candidates, in order to turn out as many overacheivers as possible, in order to attract the best candidates, etc. Market forces exist even at the idealogical pillars of society.
And what's the best way to facilitate such attraction? You got it, funding. And how do you improve funding? Either attract private funding (graduates, important donors who like/need the press), or hire a business-savvy funding manager. And what's the best way for a business-savvy funding manager to raise funds? Sell product.
The only product (other than education) that a university can sell is technology. Innovation. Knowledge-creation. And the reason it is attractive to sell it is because of our bizarre legal idea that anything I thought of patenting can be patented, which means anyone with an idea (even if fairly common) can patent it. Now, if the whole world of industry is already doing it, and making silly money in a high-profile way, then OF COURSE a fund-raising manager is going to see it as an early opportunity! It's selling knowledge creation! It's freely available on campus! It won't detract slightly from the research of the PhD students, and will likely attract more as students see the $$$.
Of course this doesn't even broach the sticky subject of market forces at the student level, i.e. do I as a student choose a project with industrial value, something patentable? or do I choose something worthwhile to society, and knowledge in general? Alas, that's a question for another day...
I teach a final year Software Systems development course for one of the largest universities in the world, and the majority of the courseware we use is available online. The university is The Open University, the course is M301: Software Systems and their Development.
The course includes a number of aspects of development, including ethics (links from the main student website to other ethical institutions), project management, java, UML, and concurrency. Most of the materials are on that site, except of course for the two set books - a java book and a concurrency book.
The open philosophy of the Open University predates that of MIT, although has a lot in common with academia in general - that of a meritocracy where knowledge is shared, and the importance is placed on what you do with it and how you do it, rather than where you come from or what you look like.
I find the MIT angle to be very interesting, because they say they are not giving the "experience" or "education" away. This is true, and probably the only thing the OU lacks is regular face to face tuition. Having said that, I gave a tutorial just yesterday, and met my students for the first time this year, and we are in regular communication via email and webchat, so we are not losing that much!
I am very interested in seeing how MIT perform in terms of materials - because we in the OU don't have a large face-to-face component, the materials have to read very well, and I feel they do (check it out).
Reminded me of HUD technologies (with AWACS support), where when a plane's radar picks up another plane, the HUD shows its location with a square, and various other information appears, generated from the AWACS feed, or other embedded signals in the radar (for friend/foe recognition etc.)
There's an interesting article in New Scientist about similar technology, used to "supplement" what your eyes can see. A guy from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Rostock has come up with a "Virtual Showcase" that has the target artefact in, and then with the aid of special goggles the wearer sees a superimposed image, with a likely representation of what the artefact may have looked like originally.
You can find the link here (http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/arti cl e.jsp?id=99991959&sub=Hot%20Stories)
The average consumer thinks Windows is "included" with their PC purchase. That means that in their mind it's free, not a major portion of the actual cost.
I believe the point was more that the vendors would have a harder time justifying "the microsoft tax" than the users - of course, if Microsoft reduce their price substantially, or if vendors refuse to install or support Linux/*BSD, then this is all moot - you are right in that situation, as the public would have nothing to compare their $450 box with (if the $350 Linux box beside it is equal in features, why the extra $100?).
how much of that cost is actually Windows? No one knows, no one's talking.
You can get that information from most vendors - you can even ask for a price "with no OS" sometimes:-)
Anyways, PC's are a LUXURY, not a necessity.
That's a WHOLE other issue... PCs are rapidly becoming a commodity. Again that was an observation made by ESR. TVs, Cars, VCRs, HiFis, all are becoming accepted commodities more than luxuries, even though in pure subsistence terms they are recreational more than necessary...
The pictures are cool but wouldn't one of the Fasttrack [fasttrack.nu] based P2P networks be a better example?...Can anyone enlighten me as to why Gnutella would be better?
Three possible reasons I can think of:
Gnutella's more widely known, and would generate more interest in the researcher's peer group. We all know academia's all about interested peer groups:-)
The researcher may have been more familiar with Gnutella
Gnutella's been around for longer, and is less centralised (if such a comparison is possible in the P2P world), has more diverse clients on different OSs, and is in continual development in so many different projects. The research was on a protocol and distributed application, and gnutella matches these in a fairly well known way.
There may be more, but research is tough, and any shortcuts to getting data are usually welcomed with open arms...
All of those visualizations seem like every other visual representation of the internet.
Only on a fairly shallow level - internet and p2p representations both have lots of lines and squiggles.
The important point being made here is that the internet is very much a client/server mechanism - lots and lots of clients (browsers, ftp clients, etc) connecting to fewer servers, with clusters of servers in associated areas.
Peer to peer networks are by definition non-client/server, i.e. they are more distributed, and any clustering is worthy of further study, due to demographic correlation on a particular IP range, with a certain ISP, or due to academic or organisational density.
Pretty pictures, all - but look below, see what they represent.
If storage manufacturers are actively heading in a direction I don't want then they will not get a penny of my money.
Ah, the standard libertarian argument - the consumer / market leads the way. I would agree, if I felt the average consumer / market was concerned enough with the issues in question. The problem is, most users don't care about principles, simply whether it does what they want, and isn't prohibitively expensive. The makers of such devices will make money if they sell something that a lot of people want to buy, whether or not it matches some smaller group's set of principles.
Currently, pretty much every car driver pollutes the air considerably, me included. Even the ones who are ostensibly "green". Same goes for existing societies - I find I have to subsidise (through taxes) various measures that I disagree with fundamentally. I vote for some representative who agrees with my principles, as is my democratic right, but it has no further reaching effect. Why? Because my principles are not echoed by a substantial proportion of the rest of the population.
Ultimately, the population is only as interested in an issue such as this - prohibition on copying - as they are affected by it. Otherwise, it depends how the media portrays it. Think DMCA, think The Geneva Convention, think The Universal Convention on Human Rights. The US media targetted the DMCA issue at the public by suggesting that "hackers" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Patriot Act was introduced to wide public acclaim because the media suggested "Terrorists" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Geneva convention is flaunted in Guantanamo Bay, and the US public lets it past because the media doesn't highlight it.
If the general public - the majority of voters - are not negatively affected by the SSSCA, then it takes too much effort for them to take interest, and too much effort on the media's part to educate them. If I'm not going to copy digital content creatively, then I don't care if someone who does it illegally is prohibited from doing that technically. If I don't understand the technical reasons why someone could do it legally, then I won't want to spend time learning how, or why. It simply will be outside my sphere of interest.
To paraphrase a Civil War soldier, They will win, because they can't abide the way we live, yet we don't care how they live[1]. Until it becomes an issue of general relevance, the voting public won't care, and their liberties will be further eroded until they have a mode of thought equivalent to "newspeak", with only the single state department/media line to go along with.
[1] if someone knows who said that, and when, please reply!
NO, NO, NO, NO, and NO. Goddammit, if I ever hear this myth again I'll kill someone.
Kill Yahoo so... The Internet began as a Cold War project to create a communications network that was immune to a nuclear attack.
http://smithsonian.yahoo.com/internethistory.html
Also:
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/01birth.ht m
These sites (and others found by a QuickGoogling) agree with your other postulation - that ARPANET was intended for co-operation with military and academic institutions, but that doesn't mean it wasn't originally for military redundancy;-)
The Internet should be renamed InformationNet and we can get this all over with quickly.
I seem to remember something in CS class about information not equalling data, although something else about a well known scientist deciding that information is representable by 1s and 0s. The internet is an interconnected network of networks, which happens to share information. But it's not all about information.
See, it was *built* to provide easy access to information. The Internet was *not* built to replace the shopping mall
This is so untrue. You're right about the internet not having been built to replace the shopping mall, or anything else for that matter. The internet was actually built to provide redundancy and failover protection in the event of a major military strike (and by extension a major Force Majeure) on an installation, to allow the military to continue communications. It developed into an academic network, which it remained until the advent of HTTP and the WWW, which resulted in an explosion of popularity in the early 90s, culminating in the dot com explosion beginning in the late 90s. This included various commercial entities, you could say the same kind of entity who decided a mall was a cool place to sell stuff because their target markets hung out there or visited there for other reasons.
As it happens, the advertising model these guys relied on has proven to be largely unfounded, which is why various internet groups (including this very website!) are now or will soon be replacing or "enhancing" their services with pay schemes. MyOwnEmail have done it, as have BlueMountain, as did Slate some time ago, etc. Interestingly, Microsoft did the opposite with their MSDN website, but I'd rather not go into that now;-)
Effectively, we're looking at a reshuffle of business models, of companies and businesses looking at how they make money and deciding that perhaps advertising doesn't cut it. The rest of the media industries are doing it, why can't the web?
(oh, and shopping mall - a place which is usually entirely void of any useful information about anything. - must just be the malls you visit that don't have internet cafes, bookshops, newsagents, libraries.... etc;-)
The answer to "why?" is either political, i.e. they don't want the splatters as the RAMBUS s**t hits the fan, or simply financial - the pennies saved on supporting chipsets might be worth it for the less serious customers, forced to choose between price and performance.
Of course this still says nothing about the benchmarking process, should be fun seeing unbiassed reports as they trickle out.
I wonder how much of this switch was due to the recent scandals - are Intel worried about the pockets of their customers? have they decided to stick with less, ahem, notorious technologies? are they truly concerned with the performance? I notice they haven't mentioned comparitive benchmarks in the article though... not a good sign.
If their competitors follow suit, we'll see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
"Frankly, I'm finding a lack of attention and a lack of understanding by the Congress and the (Bush) administration as to the serious nature of the threat," he said. "It's not nearly as sexy, or as engaging, or as interesting as the threats that are posed by terrorists boarding aircraft, or terrorists threats to the Brooklyn Bridge
Issues that affect us all, but... Forthcoming cybersecurity legislation will be "meaningful regulatory approach to securing private-sector critical infrastructure" says Representative Adam Putnam
Shame it's only for the private sector. Ordinary decent home users would benefit greatly from a similary committee. Currently there is little or no useful media attention, which is a problem
Put it this way: if you were to hold a random sampling of U.S. citizens on cybersecurity, you would likely get a lot of semi- or un-informed views on it. The reason is simple: it's not considered important enough by society at large to have anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to it. If/when the details of cybersecurity (not just the fallout from high-profile cases) becomes a big thing in the media and in government, only then will the population at large (who are being spoonfed by popular media, remember) feel that it is important enough to become an issue.
Congress shouldn't take a "knee-jerk, let's legislate" approach to cybersecurity, Putnam answered. He noted that many people in Congress and in the public don't realize how many pieces of the U.S. critical infrastructure are controlled through networked technology. He used the example of flood-control gates on the Mississippi River or the power grids that serve stock markets.
No mention of the myriad other effects of problematic cybersecurity, such as that mentioned here, and presumably many similar more highly controlled privacy issues wrapped around the TIA and other institutional privacy violations.
Until then, it remains an issue for the interested parties and the various lobby groups, and now for the "private sector" affected by this committee. The average internet user doesn't understand the implementations, the "downsides" discussed ad nauseam on Slashdot, or the current infringements on privacy laws by the Bush administration and their agents, so there will be no popular upswing, no attempt to popularise privacy and security for Mr. Average Midwestern Suburbian, who currently doesn't spend as much time as we do reading up on "niche" issues such as this.
Ultimately, the population is only as interested in an issue such as cybersecurity as they are directly affected by it. Otherwise, it depends how the media portrays it. Think DMCA, think The Geneva Convention, think The Universal Convention on Human Rights. The US media targetted the DMCA issue at the public by suggesting that "hackers" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Patriot Act was introduced to wide public acclaim because the media suggested "Terrorists" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Geneva convention is flaunted in Guantanamo Bay, and the US public lets it past because the media doesn't highlight it.
If the general public - the majority of voters - are not negatively affected by the multivarious issues in cybersecurity - including things currently covered by wiretapping laws, TIA etc., and erosion of personal privacy - then it takes too much effort for them to take interest, and too much effort on the media's part to educate them.
Until it becomes an issue of general relevance, the voting public won't care, input will be limited to private sector industries, and their liberties will be further eroded until they have a mode of thought equivalent to "newspeak", with only the single state department/media line to go along with.
rem lootmp3.bat
copy c:\Music\*.mpx c:\mp3\*.mp3
Oops. Call in the DMCA - we have a decryption program published here...
The heat comes from dissipation due to current flow in the components, such as the processor itself. The battery heats up substantially, but heat also comes from resistive components, silicon, power supply, etc. The reason Crusoe runs cooler is because it requires less current, not because the battery technology is better. Oops. Just realised I'm ranting!
Throwing more programmers at a project often times makes the project LATER, not earlier. Please take a look at Frederick Brooks' classic Mythical Man Month for a discussion of a real world example showing your claim to be false.
Next time you "quote" a respected source, try quoting properly. You omitted the word "late". To join yours and FB's statements together while retaining his meaning, throwing more manpower at a late software project makes it later.
(The Jargon file entry for Brooks' Law is here).
There's a good reason for this - coders who are new to a project in full swing need to catch up to take some of the work on, and in doing so they sap some of the attention and effort of the coders who are already in the middle of their work.
However, a properly planned project can scale to hundreds or thousands of developers, and it so happens that all of Frederick Brooks' examples (and his experience) support that view, not your shallower misinterpretation.
This is already in effect in a lot of places and doesn't work.
So, Let's say Microsoft sues you. You have $20,000 in the bank, you take another loan, you can set up a slush fund of say $50,000 to cover your legal bills. MS have 10 - 20 times that. They can afford a bigger legal team. If they lose, they've to pay $50,000. Shucks. On the other hand, if you lose (already weighted against you seeing as they have more and possibly better lawyers) you have a potential bill of $500K - $1M.
All other things being equal, which they aren't, the big fish will always win. That's why the BSA is so successful - they threaten legal action on the small fry from the big fry. Small fry don't want to get involved in potentially astronomic legal bills, so they cough up.
Look what happened to doubleclick...
Now, remember: there are three prongs to government: the administration (Bush, your friend) is not the same as Congress, the lads who legislate. Bush's input to this is a simple yes or no. It's up to your representatives to decide what gets through to Bush. So it can't really be his fault.
Also, remember - he's there because you voted for him. (you plural, not necessarily you singular). You want him out? then let democracy do its job, or change the system.
The congressmen in question are still at the suggestive stage, not quite ready to decide what level of privacy to offer, so if you've chosen the right representative last time you voted (you DID vote, didn't you?), then your chosen representative will make the right choice for you. If not, you made the wrong choice. Or you are surrounded by people who made the wrong choice. Or gerrymandering has been in operation in your area (see last week's economist article on gerrymandering in the US). Or your representative is corrupt and takes money from lobbyists to give their way, in which case we're back to square one: choose the right representative.
All in all, Bush cannot be fully responsible for whether or not businesses can share your information. That's down to the ethics of the businesses, and the legislation of the representatives that the American people have said they want to run the country. You want privacy? then use democracy.
I fail to see how this will work at statistical levels - it might encourage some people who have abstained to return to the 'net, but the vast majority, those simple casual users? The use of the word much is inappropriate here.
Put it this way: if you were to hold a random sampling of U.S. citizens on internet privacy, you would likely get a lot of semi- or un-informed views on it. The reason is simple: it's not considered important enough by society at large. If/when privacy becomes a big thing in the media and in government, only then will the population at large (who are being spoonfed by popular media, remember) feel that it is important enough to become an issue.
Until then, it remains an issue for the interested parties and the various lobby groups. The average internet user doesn't care, so there will be no upswing, no "much greater level", nice as it would be to believe that Mr. Average Midwestern Suburbian spends as much time as we do reading up on issues such as this.
Pretty boring stuff, but the overall point is that once the end product is GPL'd, it won't take long for someone in the bazaar to figure out a meaning for "asdfgh", and do a s/asdfgh/meaningfulName/g through the whole thing. Or even figure a way to diff it with the original source.
As long as it's GPL'd, the source will be available, and it'll be figured. You're wasting a lot of your time (and the rest of the community's) for very little reason.
No matter how complex your obfuscation, it's likely much less complex than, say, CSS or DES was.
This makes perfect sense, but the part I disagree with goes beyond that.
If you think of the idea of treason, it assumes an individual holds the responsibility of supporting his/her immediate society, and when that responsibility fails or is reneged against, then society can punish that individual, often by death.
Taking that a step further, said responsibility can and often does include providing intelligence to the appropriate sources, either legitimately or illegitemately through blackmail, as is often the case.
However, the article is tendering the idea that these "open sources" can and should come from OTHER countries, which may not now or ever will owe such a debt to the U.S. In fact, in some countries, especially some of the third world countries - which are often islamic, remember - the help the U.S. would get from locals would actually be a treasonable offence.
I get the impression that the author of these ideas fails to realise that the foreign locals could conceivably be punished, ostracised, or killed by the normal populace, not to mention any fundamentalists who view their "help" as an "open source" as treasonable.
This is quite funny on two levels:
- It's a lot of "take" and not much "give" on an international level, i.e. not at all open source (unless you take Microsoft's use of BSD code as "open source")
- It's extremely US centric
The second point is forgivable in itself, seeing as he's an ex-spook, and it's an article aimed at improving the US's intelligence. But what's with the open source phrase? How can the rest of the world make use of it? (hint for the easily amused - read "America" and "U.S." as "Microsoft", and "Open Source" as "Embrace and Extend")Non-Governmental Organization Data Warehouse ($10M) to provide free storage and network access to the various international organizations whose "local knowledge" is vital to U.S. understanding.
Regional Open Source Information Networks for Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America ($40M) , each with an open source collection and processing center in partnership with local governments who will provide regional language skills and access to gray literature and local experts.
What makes him think that these places - some of the poor and rebellious even internally - will co-operate with the US in matters of security? He's not even suggesting bipartisan sharing, which doesn't even approach what true open-source would be.
The closest he gets to saying that this idea will be truly "open source" is an immediate increase in open source information sharing across the departments and with the private sector; and finally, the provision of a foundation for a web-based OSINT exchange with allies, other nations and international groups, in other words it's only open source if you're in the clique. A bit like any major software company we could name...
And what's this?
Digital Marshall Plan ($20M) to provide direct assistance and subsidies to extend the Internet to every corner of the world (including rural areas in America) via wireless delivery means.
This is another example of how US-centric his ideas are - the most remote corner of the world he can think of is "rural areas in America"...
This is clearly an example of some hyper-patriot using buzzwords and buzzconcepts to expand his country's control over scant international resources (intelligence analyses) without really understanding the international environment, or indeed without really understanding the terms he's using. Open source? Not likely. Open (to him) intelligence sources, closed (to everyone else) information.
This is a good point. There have been discussions on this before, although from a different angle: patents.
It's no coincidence that we in the /. community are here sharing opinion and working with open source, and are also interested in education. We share a thirst for knowledge and philosophy. But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop. Like the PARC and IBM labs have been doing for a while. Yes, it feels like college to work there, but now the commercial aspect is pervasive.
One major advantage of "free" education (although this MIT initiative isn't free education, simply part of the means to a free education...) is that there are no pressures to raise money during the learning process, although there may be more pressure at MIT as a result of this. The university pressure still does not affect the quality of the public materials, or the open philosophy behind the publishing of those materials.
The idea of education as a business can result in an artificial view of what needs to be learned, or indeed what research needs to be carried out. I work in education, both at the consumer/training level, and at the academic university level. The contrast in management styles is amazing - the priorities are completely dipolar. On one side, you have "the almighty buck", we teach whatever you'll pay us to stand there and waffle about, on the other you have "the almighty word", we teach whatever we as bastions of the community agree you need to know in order to develop your foundation skills in your chosen discipline.
The issue is one of management, but it's also one of expectation. The world is getting more global, more capitalist, more liberal. One of the libertarian ideas is "if you don't like it, get a different one". In order for educational institutions to survive in a liberal market, they need to be attractive to the best candidates, in order to turn out as many overacheivers as possible, in order to attract the best candidates, etc. Market forces exist even at the idealogical pillars of society.
And what's the best way to facilitate such attraction? You got it, funding. And how do you improve funding? Either attract private funding (graduates, important donors who like/need the press), or hire a business-savvy funding manager. And what's the best way for a business-savvy funding manager to raise funds? Sell product.
The only product (other than education) that a university can sell is technology. Innovation. Knowledge-creation. And the reason it is attractive to sell it is because of our bizarre legal idea that anything I thought of patenting can be patented, which means anyone with an idea (even if fairly common) can patent it. Now, if the whole world of industry is already doing it, and making silly money in a high-profile way, then OF COURSE a fund-raising manager is going to see it as an early opportunity! It's selling knowledge creation! It's freely available on campus! It won't detract slightly from the research of the PhD students, and will likely attract more as students see the $$$.
Of course this doesn't even broach the sticky subject of market forces at the student level, i.e. do I as a student choose a project with industrial value, something patentable? or do I choose something worthwhile to society, and knowledge in general? Alas, that's a question for another day...
I teach a final year Software Systems development course for one of the largest universities in the world, and the majority of the courseware we use is available online. The university is The Open University, the course is M301: Software Systems and their Development.
The course includes a number of aspects of development, including ethics (links from the main student website to other ethical institutions), project management, java, UML, and concurrency. Most of the materials are on that site, except of course for the two set books - a java book and a concurrency book.
The open philosophy of the Open University predates that of MIT, although has a lot in common with academia in general - that of a meritocracy where knowledge is shared, and the importance is placed on what you do with it and how you do it, rather than where you come from or what you look like.
I find the MIT angle to be very interesting, because they say they are not giving the "experience" or "education" away. This is true, and probably the only thing the OU lacks is regular face to face tuition. Having said that, I gave a tutorial just yesterday, and met my students for the first time this year, and we are in regular communication via email and webchat, so we are not losing that much!
I am very interested in seeing how MIT perform in terms of materials - because we in the OU don't have a large face-to-face component, the materials have to read very well, and I feel they do (check it out).
Reminded me of HUD technologies (with AWACS support), where when a plane's radar picks up another plane, the HUD shows its location with a square, and various other information appears, generated from the AWACS feed, or other embedded signals in the radar (for friend/foe recognition etc.)
There's an interesting article in New Scientist about similar technology, used to "supplement" what your eyes can see. A guy from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Rostock has come up with a "Virtual Showcase" that has the target artefact in, and then with the aid of special goggles the wearer sees a superimposed image, with a likely representation of what the artefact may have looked like originally.
You can find the link herei cl e.jsp?id=99991959&sub=Hot%20Stories)
(http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/art
I believe the point was more that the vendors would have a harder time justifying "the microsoft tax" than the users - of course, if Microsoft reduce their price substantially, or if vendors refuse to install or support Linux/*BSD, then this is all moot - you are right in that situation, as the public would have nothing to compare their $450 box with (if the $350 Linux box beside it is equal in features, why the extra $100?).
how much of that cost is actually Windows? No one knows, no one's talking.
You can get that information from most vendors - you can even ask for a price "with no OS" sometimes :-)
Anyways, PC's are a LUXURY, not a necessity.
That's a WHOLE other issue... PCs are rapidly becoming a commodity. Again that was an observation made by ESR. TVs, Cars, VCRs, HiFis, all are becoming accepted commodities more than luxuries, even though in pure subsistence terms they are recreational more than necessary...
http://www.openbsd.org/slides/musess_2002/index.ht ml
This website gives a few tips on avoiding the main pitfalls of insecure coding, including how to avoid buffer overflow exploits.
Three possible reasons I can think of:
There may be more, but research is tough, and any shortcuts to getting data are usually welcomed with open arms...
Only on a fairly shallow level - internet and p2p representations both have lots of lines and squiggles.
The important point being made here is that the internet is very much a client/server mechanism - lots and lots of clients (browsers, ftp clients, etc) connecting to fewer servers, with clusters of servers in associated areas.
Peer to peer networks are by definition non-client/server, i.e. they are more distributed, and any clustering is worthy of further study, due to demographic correlation on a particular IP range, with a certain ISP, or due to academic or organisational density.
Pretty pictures, all - but look below, see what they represent.
Ah, the standard libertarian argument - the consumer / market leads the way. I would agree, if I felt the average consumer / market was concerned enough with the issues in question. The problem is, most users don't care about principles, simply whether it does what they want, and isn't prohibitively expensive. The makers of such devices will make money if they sell something that a lot of people want to buy, whether or not it matches some smaller group's set of principles.
Currently, pretty much every car driver pollutes the air considerably, me included. Even the ones who are ostensibly "green". Same goes for existing societies - I find I have to subsidise (through taxes) various measures that I disagree with fundamentally. I vote for some representative who agrees with my principles, as is my democratic right, but it has no further reaching effect. Why? Because my principles are not echoed by a substantial proportion of the rest of the population.
Ultimately, the population is only as interested in an issue such as this - prohibition on copying - as they are affected by it. Otherwise, it depends how the media portrays it. Think DMCA, think The Geneva Convention, think The Universal Convention on Human Rights. The US media targetted the DMCA issue at the public by suggesting that "hackers" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Patriot Act was introduced to wide public acclaim because the media suggested "Terrorists" would benefit if it wasn't in place. The Geneva convention is flaunted in Guantanamo Bay, and the US public lets it past because the media doesn't highlight it.
If the general public - the majority of voters - are not negatively affected by the SSSCA, then it takes too much effort for them to take interest, and too much effort on the media's part to educate them. If I'm not going to copy digital content creatively, then I don't care if someone who does it illegally is prohibited from doing that technically. If I don't understand the technical reasons why someone could do it legally, then I won't want to spend time learning how, or why. It simply will be outside my sphere of interest.
To paraphrase a Civil War soldier, They will win, because they can't abide the way we live, yet we don't care how they live[1]. Until it becomes an issue of general relevance, the voting public won't care, and their liberties will be further eroded until they have a mode of thought equivalent to "newspeak", with only the single state department/media line to go along with.
[1] if someone knows who said that, and when, please reply!
NO, NO, NO, NO, and NO. Goddammit, if I ever hear this myth again I'll kill someone.
Kill Yahoo so...The Internet began as a Cold War project to create a communications network that was immune to a nuclear attack.
http://smithsonian.yahoo.com/internethistory.html
Also:t m
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/01birth.h
These sites (and others found by a QuickGoogling) agree with your other postulation - that ARPANET was intended for co-operation with military and academic institutions, but that doesn't mean it wasn't originally for military redundancy ;-)
"Calls to the new company were not returned yesterday."
Not a good start for inspiring customer confidence...
Maybe they got slashdotted...
I seem to remember something in CS class about information not equalling data, although something else about a well known scientist deciding that information is representable by 1s and 0s. The internet is an interconnected network of networks, which happens to share information. But it's not all about information.
See, it was *built* to provide easy access to information.
The Internet was *not* built to replace the shopping mall
This is so untrue. You're right about the internet not having been built to replace the shopping mall, or anything else for that matter. The internet was actually built to provide redundancy and failover protection in the event of a major military strike (and by extension a major Force Majeure) on an installation, to allow the military to continue communications. It developed into an academic network, which it remained until the advent of HTTP and the WWW, which resulted in an explosion of popularity in the early 90s, culminating in the dot com explosion beginning in the late 90s. This included various commercial entities, you could say the same kind of entity who decided a mall was a cool place to sell stuff because their target markets hung out there or visited there for other reasons.
As it happens, the advertising model these guys relied on has proven to be largely unfounded, which is why various internet groups (including this very website!) are now or will soon be replacing or "enhancing" their services with pay schemes. MyOwnEmail have done it, as have BlueMountain, as did Slate some time ago, etc. Interestingly, Microsoft did the opposite with their MSDN website, but I'd rather not go into that now ;-)
Effectively, we're looking at a reshuffle of business models, of companies and businesses looking at how they make money and deciding that perhaps advertising doesn't cut it. The rest of the media industries are doing it, why can't the web?
(oh, and shopping mall - a place which is usually entirely void of any useful information about anything. - must just be the malls you visit that don't have internet cafes, bookshops, newsagents, libraries.... etc ;-)
Of course this still says nothing about the benchmarking process, should be fun seeing unbiassed reports as they trickle out.
I wonder how much of this switch was due to the recent scandals - are Intel worried about the pockets of their customers? have they decided to stick with less, ahem, notorious technologies? are they truly concerned with the performance? I notice they haven't mentioned comparitive benchmarks in the article though... not a good sign.
If their competitors follow suit, we'll see what happens.