If steganography gains too much public knowledge, what will happen is as follows:
A nice, friendly policeman comes over to your house, points at any image you have on your hard drive, and say that you should give the encryption keys to decode the steganographic information in that file.
If you don't have any steganographic data in your random data file, then you'll basically be screwed, and thrown to jail for not providing the decrypting keys. Hooray.
In the end, moving over to steganography will not - in the long run - help the situation. However, the above scenario might well be used as a weapon against the law itself. I don't think anybody wants to give the power to throw anybody who owns a computer to jail at a whim over to your government...
A lot of the Europeans in the audience are shaking their heads and rolling eyes at the Americans now and their funny way of exaggerating things and congratulating themselves how things are better in Europe.
Unfortunately, the US situation will reflect on us Europeans. Remember the Wassenaar agreement? Two months before it became public, many governments in Europe (Finland for example) were proudly touting their open-cryptography policy. Then, a few short months later, they grinned sheepishly and signed the agreement, probably due to US or international pressure, declaring cryptographic products as armaments to be controlled.
The MPAA has so much leverage via the different giants in the entertainment industry, that whatever happens in the US will leak over to Europe as well. I'm almost certain that very soon something like the DMCA will be attempted to pass in the EU parliament, "in order to comply with international convention."
Copyright and IP rights are an important matter, but we should still keep the fair use-policy that allows individuals to do as they please with their own, legally purchased property. Video did not kill the movie industry - vice versa. Nor did DVD. And neither will DeCSS or MP3. After all, deliberate piracy hasn't killed the computer games industry - and they use no copy protection whatsoever!
The main problem with wearable technology is power. It really defeats the purpose of having a computer that sits in your shirt pocket because you need a kilogram worth of batteries to run the thing for a day.
This is the reason why most of wearcomp stuff runs on embedded CPUs, such as the Motorola Dragonball series (as used in Palm) or the ARM chips (as used in Psion and Newton), NOT X86. Xybernaut does great stuff, but so far their systems have been hampered by the fact that they insist on running Windows on their wearables, so they need hefty processing power. Not that there are many companies in the wearable business anyway...
What Linux will offer is the ability to adapt to multiple platforms: you can do your development on your top-of-the-line Athlon system at home, then quite easily port onto your uCsimm system. I personally think that we're going to see a lot of new wearable systems based on light-weight embedded systems and uCLinux.
BTW, for anyone who is interested, go see the International Symposium on Wearable Computing home page (you can download most of the presentations from 98 and 99 as PDF (abstracts) and RealVideo). Another good place (though still heavily under construction) is the Wearable.org page. Did you know, for example, that you can harvest power from your shoes to power a wearable?
I feel that while discussion about the ethics and morality of creating artificial DNA and through that, artificial life is good, it is also wasted in the sense that someone is going to do it, whether we decide it's for the bad or for the good.
Most of the great discoveries in history are attributed to one man or team, but in truth they built their work on the works of other scientists, and like Leibnitz discovered differential calculus at the same time as Newton, so have others also the potential of doing the same discoveries.
I think it is inevitable for us to attempt to create new life, digital or analog. It's in our genes.
I think what the people behind the Linux for Psion PDAs have in mind is that they really like the form factor and keyboard of these little and very portable devices. They really don't want an organizer - they want a Linux portable that fits in your shirt pocket.
In addition, the porting experience will prove helpful in designing future PDAs possibly based on Linux, such as the Itsy (BTW, I saw Itsy 2 in action at the International Symposium on Wearable Computing 99 - it's smaller than the original Itsy and runs X. I think Linux does have a future on palmtop-sized devices as well.)
I agree with you, Linux is great on the desktop, though there will need to be made a lot of work to make Linux the best, especially in the user interfaces. My personal preference of course, but I find almost any other OS desktop to be more comfortable than KDE, Gnome or any other window manager.
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If steganography gains too much public knowledge, what will happen is as follows:
A nice, friendly policeman comes over to your house, points at any image you have on your hard drive, and say that you should give the encryption keys to decode the steganographic information in that file.
If you don't have any steganographic data in your random data file, then you'll basically be screwed, and thrown to jail for not providing the decrypting keys. Hooray.
In the end, moving over to steganography will not - in the long run - help the situation. However, the above scenario might well be used as a weapon against the law itself. I don't think anybody wants to give the power to throw anybody who owns a computer to jail at a whim over to your government...
A lot of the Europeans in the audience are shaking their heads and rolling eyes at the Americans now and their funny way of exaggerating things and congratulating themselves how things are better in Europe.
Unfortunately, the US situation will reflect on us Europeans. Remember the Wassenaar agreement? Two months before it became public, many governments in Europe (Finland for example) were proudly touting their open-cryptography policy. Then, a few short months later, they grinned sheepishly and signed the agreement, probably due to US or international pressure, declaring cryptographic products as armaments to be controlled.
The MPAA has so much leverage via the different giants in the entertainment industry, that whatever happens in the US will leak over to Europe as well. I'm almost certain that very soon something like the DMCA will be attempted to pass in the EU parliament, "in order to comply with international convention."
Copyright and IP rights are an important matter, but we should still keep the fair use-policy that allows individuals to do as they please with their own, legally purchased property. Video did not kill the movie industry - vice versa. Nor did DVD. And neither will DeCSS or MP3. After all, deliberate piracy hasn't killed the computer games industry - and they use no copy protection whatsoever!
The main problem with wearable technology is power. It really defeats the purpose of having a computer that sits in your shirt pocket because you need a kilogram worth of batteries to run the thing for a day.
This is the reason why most of wearcomp stuff runs on embedded CPUs, such as the Motorola Dragonball series (as used in Palm) or the ARM chips (as used in Psion and Newton), NOT X86. Xybernaut does great stuff, but so far their systems have been hampered by the fact that they insist on running Windows on their wearables, so they need hefty processing power. Not that there are many companies in the wearable business anyway...
What Linux will offer is the ability to adapt to multiple platforms: you can do your development on your top-of-the-line Athlon system at home, then quite easily port onto your uCsimm system. I personally think that we're going to see a lot of new wearable systems based on light-weight embedded systems and uCLinux.
BTW, for anyone who is interested, go see the International Symposium on Wearable Computing home page (you can download most of the presentations from 98 and 99 as PDF (abstracts) and RealVideo). Another good place (though still heavily under construction) is the Wearable.org page. Did you know, for example, that you can harvest power from your shoes to power a wearable?
I feel that while discussion about the ethics and morality of creating artificial DNA and through that, artificial life is good, it is also wasted in the sense that someone is going to do it, whether we decide it's for the bad or for the good.
Most of the great discoveries in history are attributed to one man or team, but in truth they built their work on the works of other scientists, and like Leibnitz discovered differential calculus at the same time as Newton, so have others also the potential of doing the same discoveries.
I think it is inevitable for us to attempt to create new life, digital or analog. It's in our genes.
I think what the people behind the Linux for Psion PDAs have in mind is that they really like the form factor and keyboard of these little and very portable devices. They really don't want an organizer - they want a Linux portable that fits in your shirt pocket.
In addition, the porting experience will prove helpful in designing future PDAs possibly based on Linux, such as the Itsy (BTW, I saw Itsy 2 in action at the International Symposium on Wearable Computing 99 - it's smaller than the original Itsy and runs X. I think Linux does have a future on palmtop-sized devices as well.)
I agree with you, Linux is great on the desktop, though there will need to be made a lot of work to make Linux the best, especially in the user interfaces. My personal preference of course, but I find almost any other OS desktop to be more comfortable than KDE, Gnome or any other window manager.