Re:Why they /should/ be used, and more than one, t
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
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· Score: 2
Frankly, I don't have time to keep up with the spammers. They find new open relays every day.
I don't know why we need a service for ORBS. Why can't I just adjust sendmail to not recieve mail from open relays, i.e. do what ORBS dose, but keep no database. Shure, it's more email load for the internet, but these are small infrequent transmitions so it wont bring anyone's system down.
Fortunately, there are more than one, and you can mix and match your blackholing sources.
Now, this is a good idea execpt some lists (ORBS) are much longer then others (MAPS), so you really need a thumbs down, neutral, or thumbs up flag, i.e. block everything ORBS tells you to block unless MAPS specifically says not to block it.
The first reply to your post was perfectly correct about the theoretical limitations of imperitive langauges (including assembly), but I was actually talking about a more practical limitation.. time. I will explain: First, assume you have a non-trivial constraint on programmer skill, preexisting libraries, and time. Now, our programmer can probable write a faster program in C then assembly since he can take advantage of things which make writing the program faster and can spend more time profiling, adding complex features which boost speed (say by using function pointers), etc. Yes, he *could* do all these things in assembly, but he would need MUCH more time and/or skill. Functional langauges provide another layer of abstraction, so there is more work for the machine to do.. and the programmer can spend more time worring about the details which are really importent to makign things faster. Example: It's easy for a Haskell or ML complier to make functions which write functions, i.e. safe complier level structured self modifing code. I'd really love to you do that in assembly. Shure your self modifing code tricks might be faster, but the functional langauge compiler's self modifing code tricks are not going to fuck up, so Joe average programmer can use them. Implementing these tricks in assembly is something only mr. assembly god can do.. and only after a great deal of time and testing.
Functional languages are slower, as a rule, than imperative languages. Compilation, rather than interpretation, helps - but few functional languages can approach the speed of a well-written imperative program. Imperative langauges have limitations on the optimizing of code. This means that we will eventually see compiled functional langauges which produce faster code then ANY imperative langauge (assuming a time constraint and/or programmer skill constraint). There is just more analysis that can be done to functional code, so the machine can do more of the work for you. The only real problem is that someone needs to put a lot of work into the compiler. They don't support things like graphics toolkits, CORBA bindings, parser generators, database interfaces Total bullshit! Haskell has many/several diffrent packages for ALL of those things. I'd say most serious functional langauges probable have most/all of those things. Actually, imperative langauges are the ones with suck ass parser generators. You have Lex and Yacc style parser generators for Haskell, but Lex and Yacc are total crap compaired to the monadic recurisve descent parsers in Haskell. These parsers have all the power of YACC, but they are just a Haskell library & include, so you can add your own shit. Every want to intermix contex free grammors and regular expressions freely, i.e. not this stupid Lex dose the regex and Yacc dose the CFG bullshit, it's cake under Haskell.. or you could write millions of other short cots to make you CFGs much smaller/simpler. Parsing is one of those things functional langauge were made to do.. and the moderatly good ones kick the shit out of all imperitive langauge at doing it. Also, it's worth pointing out that Functionall langauges have had steller results in "ultra high reliability" programming situations (like phone switching networks), i.e. you can not afford the program to break, so you force yourselve to write it in a manor when it can be "nearly" proven to not be breakable.
Plus, the independent artist who do place advertisment inside their songs will do it more taisfully then the big boys (who wil just have a dumb ass DJ talk to 5 min).
Regardless, what we really need is for the mp3 players to support launching a web browser to view a URL or an attached web page. The attached web page could contain advertisments and links to buy CDs, but it would also contain things like song lyrics, art, URLs for more songs, etc (to keep people from stripping the attachments). This type of advertising might piss off the major labels (remember eople must actually go to some work and push a button to launch the advertisment), but independent artists would love it since it's a much more respectable way to add stuff, i.e. not talking in the song.
Yes, the idea of a DJ adding the advertisment could create real crap, but there is a good thing which will come out of this: this gives the artists a chance to really take back the money making machine from the record industry. Plus, a small time artist who puts an ad. into his own song will do it taistfully while the DJ's who Metallica hires to put ads into their will talk for hours. Now, I do think advertising inside mp3s is the answer, but advertising inside the audio content will just piss people off. We need a way to attach a tar file contianing a web page top the end of the mp3 (and the mp3 players need to support launching a web browser to view the page). Yes, people could strip the content, but artist could just include useful information like song lyrics too. The ads would no lo0nger interfear with lissening to the music, so people would not want to strip them if they risked stripping cool stuff too.
It depends on what you mean by GUI research. There is a lot of bullshit "lets copy the Mac and call it GUI research" at your lower quality schools (and industry). Frequently, "themability" or simmilar crap gets passed off as GUI research. I think your better places are working on real stuff though (i.e. not fluf like themes).
Plan9's GUI applications have a lot of inovative ideas like: use cut and paste for menus instead of plldowns (pulldowns are crap), make dialog boxes appear on the side of the screan where they will not interupt the person who is really doing something (traditional dialog boxes are a dumb idea too). Anywho, it's pretty cool ideas with real research to back them up (unlike 99% of "GUI Research"). I'm shure the good school's like MIT have one or two people with even more brilliant ideas.
Before we all get on the "France is standing up to government intrusion" bandwagon, let's remember that France is well-known for "borrowing" travelling executives' laptops at customs, long enough to copy the entire hard drive.
Yes, France dose a lot of nasty shit.. all gorerments do this stuff, but their is diffinitly a very good reason we should all get on the "France is standing up to government intrusion" bandwagon.
Our goal should not be to maintain some twisted sence of "fairness" in our yelling at governments to reform, i.e. we should not say "Ok, France has been doing this stuff so it's ok for the U.S. to do it." Our purpose should be to reduce our chances of being spied on period. I'd say that means we should just on the bandwagon when it's here to jump on. We must make U.S. ellected officials and the NSA's budget hurt for this Echelon crap. The French can help us do this. We can deal with the French in a few years when people are pissed at them once more.
Anyway, our goal should be to kill Echelon (and reduce the NSA's power), we need all the allies we can have for that. This is how you play the game of polotics.
It can still be civil disobeience when people will not be going to jail. It's a much more relaxed form of civil disobedeance which says "these are unjust laws, so lets make it people's habit to break the law, then they wil change the law."
i.e. The people writing Gnutella, Freenet, and maybe Napster could be to be engaging in civil disobedeance. The users who encurage their friends to use these programs or put up lots of stuf so that people will like the programs may be engaging in civil disobedeance, but they guy who just logs on to Napster to DL a file is not really ngaging in civil disobedeance.
This book sounds a bit like it was designed to catter to serious christians. I think most Atheists reactions to Aliens with convincing evidence which said there was a god would be "Ok, I'm curious lets figure this out." Also, Aliens with more advance technology whic could convince an Atheists her that there was a god, would probable not have made the leap of logic to assume that there was some kind of after life, i.e. planets getting hit with metiors simultaniously dose not imply after life period, it implies a big alien race which is wiping out the big stupid animals so that smaller intelegent animals will evolve.
A technical point of bad research on the authors part: I think some palentologists believe that extinction of the dinosaurs slowed the development of intelegent life since some of the small dinosaurs were well on their way to becomming intelegent.
Finally, the coolest lets thing about god books were the ons writen by Frank Herbert. There were several of these books where people created a god for some purpose or another. There was a god one about an AI becoming god and another good one about the psychological effects that a person when through as he became a god.
Yes, banning telnet and ftp is a very bad thing, since it would hurt an importent minority (Unix geeks). It would be a better idea to require everyone to know how to use ssh and scp, then people will switch on their own.
Actaully, "banning" unencrypted email might be a good idea since you could not really "ban" all unencrypted email. You could just have a policy that made it difficult for most people to send unencrypted email to people on campus AND made it against the rules for profesors to ask their students to send them unencrypted email. This would force everyone to switch to email readers which could use PGP and the campus PGP Key Server.
I suppose you could do something simillar with telnet. You could prevent the freshman computer classes from teaching telnet and make them teach ssh instead.
You are correct. The problem is that we need people topush technology away from things which the RIAA can control, i.e. Napster and mp3.com. I have a few ideas:
(1) Freeware music distribution programs like Gnutella, but that can DL Napster file. These programs should not share file to Napster, just search Napster for files to DL.
(2) More agressive free music distribution systems for non-industry bands. Example: You sing up to recieve an mp3 from some random band in your email every day. the email would contain various information about the band (like how to order their CDs and/or how to support them).
(3) Add an HTML option to mp3 tags, i.e. the players would have a little button whhich the user could push to launch a web page. This web page would contain information about the artist, song lyrics, begging for people to give the artist money, and advertising (if the artist would want to sell advertising in their songs).
Anyway, the point is we just need to make it easy for people to abandon the industry and go directly to the artist.
I'm not a big fan of tabbacco companies or gun makers, i.e. I like the idea of *people* suing these companies to force things like child locks, etc. Would you prohibit the government from being a party to a civil case?
You are correct that it is very dangerous for the executive (or legislative) branch to avoid the checks and balances, but this is not a really serous violation.
Now we do have very serious violations of seperation of powers, including: (1) the various states of emergency which have been in effect since the 50s to avoid various parts of the constitution, (2) the parts of the executive branch which get to make up laws instead of just enforcing them (EPA, FDA, FAA, IRS, etc.), (3) the fact the federal gov. controls the state gov. via the money it gives them,.
Actually, the single biggest mistake in our constitution is not regulating the flow of money more strictly.
Yes, peer-to-peer file transfers can not be anonymous. You could route the file via a random intermidiate system, but this would be a lot of bandwidth. You could make Gnutella support email attachments as a transfer protocol, so that paranoid people could have their files sent to a hotmail account.
The most interesting solution would be to have a "localized" network where no one was allowed to search the entire network, so no one could track down everyone who was on the network. Anyway, you need to think about the threat models a little to figure out how to make it really hard for the RIAA to track down everyone.
There is simply no easy way to 'stop' people from using gnutella. we can switch ports easily.. it really doeos need randomized ports.
This is not really true. The collages can just scan the packet to identify Gnutella packets. Gnutella needs to use an encrypted protocol (like SSL or SSH) to prevent the collage routers from blocking packets.
Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver.
Yes, that would be very cool. It's importent that the computer retain control of things like seeking with the MP3 and selecting songs. I do not want to be stuck to some fucking playlist or a massive random play. I wrote a little program which attempts to learn your music lissening moods. It's not very reliable or stable, but it makes the point that ALL current mp3 players and sterios have uninspired crap for user interfaces. Anyway, if Joe Random Geek has the ability to write his/her own music user interface then we should see some cool shit in a few years, but if the corporations keep giving us the 3 button remote control because they are affraid to cornfuse their customers then we will be stuck with the crappy interfaces we have now.
You do not have any evidence to back up the statment that humans have stopped evolving. First, it happens that we are not liviing in a spurt of bioogical evolution. I don't think we totally understand the factors that control the spurts of biological evolution, so it's pretty premature to make any judgements. I know someone mentioned that scarcaty and overpopulation have something to do with it, but it could be other things like society percolating into subcultures too.
Second, our intelegecne and understanding of the world *is* one of the ways we evolve. The development of biotechnology just gives one more way for this software evoltion to influence the hardware evolution.
Third, humans controlling their own evolution is not scary. The human modifications which fuck up will not survive. Humans and/or natural selection will undo our screwups.
Actualy, human control over human evolution could be a wonderful thing for exactly all the reasons that the ludites fear it (like new viruses). If human evolution divurges into multiple species then we may become more immune to these new viruses.
Really, the one hting we should do is pass laws requiring human genetic modifications to be "open source," i.e. no patents on modifications to humans. This would prevent the corperations from controlling all the technology and would allow human evolution to divurge.
Open blacklists are a better solution for parents and home computers, but there are still many problems. Specifically, the riligious right may try to force their views on the open black list. Remember, religious people are the majority of people who will volontear to check sites out. Would you really want to child's exposure to ideas influnced by the kind of person who would volontear to scan the web for porn?
Anyway, my point is that most parent should just say "I do not trust anyone who would make a censorware program, so I'm just going to trust my kid untill I get a clear indication of a problem."
Libraries have the same problem, execpt they have lots of people walking arround, so they can just move the computers into an open area and ask people who look at porn to leave.
A Library which has a really serious problem with porn then they can share the netscape cache directories, have a computer scan images for fleshtones, and display possible images to the librarians. If the librarian judges the image to be pornographic, she/he can walk over to the computers, figure out who downloaded the image, and ask them to leave.
The advantage of the above system is that you not restricting anything ligitimate (unless the librarian makes a bad call). Also, you should not tell the librarian which comouter viewed the image to provent librarians from being able to spy on specific people while browsing.
The point of the article is to publish information without incuring blame, not to publish information which the gov. can not read.
Example: I find the NSA top secret algorithm for factoring numbers in polynomial time. Clearly, this is something which the NSA should not be keeping secret, so I'm going to publish it, but they will kill me if they find out who did it.
Proposed Solution:
(1) I locate and download a reasonable number of "pads" (say 10,000) which people have posted. Now these pads may be random shit or they may have been part of a previous anonymous publication.
(2) I XOR all the pads I DLed with the data I want to send which produces one random string of data. I can safely publish this random string of data like any other random string of data.
(3) I anonymously publish the list of pads (including the one I just created).
Problems:
(a) The NSA only needs to track the list of pads back to me to figure out that I published their algorithm, i.e. this whole procedure only helps me if it is easy for me to publish 10,001 web addresses anoymously, but hard for me to directly publish their algorithm anonymously.
(b) The NSA only needs to figure out which of the 10,001 pads was published last to figure out which one I posted, so I need to know that the published pads to not have date infomration.
(c) The NSA only need to cross reference the list of people who have access to this secret information with the list of people who own the pad I used to find me, so I may need to publish my pad anonymously too.
(d) The NSA must not be able to trace the information to you independently.
Finally, failing the above conditions the NSA must actually prove that all 10,000 pads innocent pads are not guilty to prove that I am guilty.
Anyway, it's not *totally* uselss, but it's useful to few enough people that it's not worth implementing, i.e. it's going to be hard to meet the above criteria.
Personaly, i would just go to a cyber-cafe or a free terminal (Newark airport, collage campuses, etc.) to publish the information.
BTW> People mentioned the secret sharing algorithms. These would be useless for this task as you must distribute each part anonymously, which increases the gov. chances of tracking you.
Gibson is underestimating the degree to which MP3's have been allowed to prosper, so as to force the hands of the courts, the houses, the lobbyists, and the competitors
Yes, MP3 has been allowed to prosper. No, the media companies did not allow it to prosper intentionally so that they would have more power to create stronger IP laws. MP3s were allowed to prosper becuase the media companies had no effective way to fight mp3s.
Now, more file sharing and weaker IP laws are a very good thing for all the importent people (Artists and Consumers). Mp3s are pushing things that direction, but the media companies are doing a good job of pushing the laws the opposite direction.
Gibson's ideas will only work out if we can make file sharing (piracy or free software/music/etc.) the norm before the media companies can do anything about it. User friendly programs like Napster help. Also, we must make products which protect the media companies interests and remove fair use rights (like SDMI) go down the toilet.
how long will it be before they begin to test the limits imposed on them and find loopholes to worm through, knowing that if they step over the line, the worst they might face is another long, drawn-out court battle until they're reined in again?
You are correct. Corperations AND their executives should be punished. Bill Gates should have large *personal* fines and/or *jail* time for the emails he sent telling people to make microsoft products not work with compeditors products. The justice department should attempts to convict all microsoft witnesses which lied of pergery, so they would get personal fines and/or jail time.
Now you should not punish only the executives and let the stock holders off. I would say that the government should revoke Microsofts copyright to some of the products that they used to hurt compeditors (Windows, Word, IE). I don't know that they have done things so bad as to justify decorperating them (revoke their status as a corperation and sell off the assets).
Anyway, I think revokation of copyrights and decorperation should be the standard attacks that we use for monopolies. Splitting should be reserved for when we think that it can really be made to work (ala phone companies). It would also be nice to see diffrent countries use revokation of copyrights independantly, i.e. France could convict Microsoft of unfair comptition and revoke Microsofts copyright on Windows within France.
Yes, Gnutella dose not scale to large networks very well, but there is a solution (which also kills NetPD).
The speed problem with programs like Gnutella is that it tries to search everything. This is just plain stupid. The privacy issue with Gnutella and Napster is that anyone (NetPD) can get the IP addresses of everyone with some song. This is stupid too.
The solution is a "reputation system" where only nodes where you have established a reputation allow you to do searches to find more nodes. Here is how the system should work: Jane's Gnutella would establish an account with Bill's Gnutella node when it connects to Bill's node forthe first time. After some time passes and Jane and Bill have traded many mp3s then Bill trusts Jane enough to let here do searches through his node (this process is automated). This allows Jane to find new Gnutella nodes.
Anyway, the point is that an mostly automated "references" systems could allow people to search realitivly freely, but not allow anyone to learn too much too fast. The real kicker is that the network will probable grow faster then a node can gain reputation. This prevents NetPD from sssing too much of the network.. and it prevents you from seeing too much of the network.
The only remaining issue is how well will mp3s be dispurced through the network anbd how much wil the network fragment into intrest groups.
BTW> Gnutella needs to piggy back it's protocol on a conection which looks like SSH, SSL telnet, or SSL HTTP to prevent collage routers from detecting the protocol.
Many state chapters of the ACLU have supported the NRA and gun rights. The national ACLU dose not defend gun rights for a couple of reasons, but this big reason is:
The ACLU uses the legal system to defend us from the legal system. Gun rights are an extra-legal part of the constitution. i.e. gun rights exist to allow us to kill our political leaders when things get really really bad.. the courts and people who use them tend to frown uppon this type of problem resolution.
It's not that gun rights are not importent. They are very importent (sometiems you just need a revolution). it's that gun rights are not soemthing the ACLU can defend by explaining them to a court. It's not necissarily something the ACLU can really understand (they are lawyers after all).
Anyway, you should not critisize the ACLU too much for not supporting gun rights. They are doing what they know how to do.. and they are doing a lot of good (gun rights are only one amendment out of many). If you care about gun rights you should join the NRA (and try to explain them to your more liberal friends).
Re:Could someone explain this ACLU position to me?
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The Corporate Republic
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· Score: 1
First, The ACLU opposes using tax payer money to fund religious schools since this is a pretty clear cut violation of the establishment clause, i.e. there are not enough students for a Budist school, so all the budist children must go to christian school.
Scond, I suspect many of the people who are involved with the ACLU oppose taking tax payer money frm public school to pay for any private schools or home schools (since this would harm poor children). This is puerly a money and quality of education for the poor issue, i.e. a poor parent might not have the qualifications or ability for home schooling. I do not know the ACLU's official position on this issue, but it will revolve around the poor having a right to a half way decent education.
Anyway, I'm shure most people at the ACLU like the idea of home schooling, but do not think that the government should pay for non-standard parts of it. The government should give home schoolers some help (text books, classes for parents, etc), but should not give them funds which could be spent in way which violate the establisment clause.
BTW> There are some pretty good evidence that home schooling is the best alternative when the parent is sufficently educated).
BTW2> The only solution to the "privatize" education debate is to require schools to offer "partial schooling options," i.e. parents could send their kids to diffrent schools for diffrent classes. Example: I can send my kid to public school for most classes, but send them to a religious school for a couple of classes (at my expence). This soltion prevents the public and private schools from running an "ideological monopoly." The private schools can not force kids to take religon classes and can not force parents to pay for all ofthe tuition when the parent only wants their kid to take a couple of classes at the school. Public schools can not prevent kids from taking religiohn classes.
Have american courts rules that passwords are protected by taking the 5th? The treaty is still a very bad thing because it will force many countries to take a shitty crypto position (like the UK's).
The supreme court has jurisdiction over every conceivable piece of law in the country
I'm not shure how much power they have regarding "National Security" issues. I would rally like them to set a precendent that judges can claim the right to rievew classified documents which are relevent to a case. We need a supream court with balls to create this kind of judicial review power.
Actually, senitors should have automatic security clearance and "need to know" too (I mean seriously, what kind of a democrasy would not allow it's senetors access to classified information).
Just as there is a place for envelopes in this world, so is there a place for postcards. And even skywriting.
Well it would probable be a good thing to make ALL email encrypted. It's no more bandwidth and it's not really that much processor time. The only real bad thing about sendmail doing the encryption is that the system's sendmail can spy on users, but I can not think of a better way to do it.
I'm sure it's *NOT* a good idea.
Well it's never a good idea to lie to people when you don't need to, but it's not like you would send these messages to everyone who sent you unencrypted email. You would send these messages to people who you do not care about. Clearly, you will send a friend a personalized email mssage suggesting that they install an encrpyted email program (and you would not harass them). This would just be a clever way to delete a mail which you were not going to reply to anyway.
Actually, once I start TAing for calculus classes I think I'll write myself a little script to email students their grades after tests, but only once they submit a PGP public key.
Anywho, my point is that we should try to "descriminate" against the people who do not use encryption when it seems likely to make mre people use encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't have time to keep up with the spammers. They find new open relays every day.
I don't know why we need a service for ORBS. Why can't I just adjust sendmail to not recieve mail from open relays, i.e. do what ORBS dose, but keep no database. Shure, it's more email load for the internet, but these are small infrequent transmitions so it wont bring anyone's system down.
Fortunately, there are more than one, and you can mix and match your blackholing sources.
Now, this is a good idea execpt some lists (ORBS) are much longer then others (MAPS), so you really need a thumbs down, neutral, or thumbs up flag, i.e. block everything ORBS tells you to block unless MAPS specifically says not to block it.
The first reply to your post was perfectly correct about the theoretical limitations of imperitive langauges (including assembly), but I was actually talking about a more practical limitation.. time. I will explain: First, assume you have a non-trivial constraint on programmer skill, preexisting libraries, and time. Now, our programmer can probable write a faster program in C then assembly since he can take advantage of things which make writing the program faster and can spend more time profiling, adding complex features which boost speed (say by using function pointers), etc. Yes, he *could* do all these things in assembly, but he would need MUCH more time and/or skill. Functional langauges provide another layer of abstraction, so there is more work for the machine to do.. and the programmer can spend more time worring about the details which are really importent to makign things faster. Example: It's easy for a Haskell or ML complier to make functions which write functions, i.e. safe complier level structured self modifing code. I'd really love to you do that in assembly. Shure your self modifing code tricks might be faster, but the functional langauge compiler's self modifing code tricks are not going to fuck up, so Joe average programmer can use them. Implementing these tricks in assembly is something only mr. assembly god can do.. and only after a great deal of time and testing.
Functional languages are slower, as a rule, than imperative languages. Compilation, rather than interpretation, helps - but few functional languages can approach the speed of a well-written imperative program. Imperative langauges have limitations on the optimizing of code. This means that we will eventually see compiled functional langauges which produce faster code then ANY imperative langauge (assuming a time constraint and/or programmer skill constraint). There is just more analysis that can be done to functional code, so the machine can do more of the work for you. The only real problem is that someone needs to put a lot of work into the compiler. They don't support things like graphics toolkits, CORBA bindings, parser generators, database interfaces Total bullshit! Haskell has many/several diffrent packages for ALL of those things. I'd say most serious functional langauges probable have most/all of those things. Actually, imperative langauges are the ones with suck ass parser generators. You have Lex and Yacc style parser generators for Haskell, but Lex and Yacc are total crap compaired to the monadic recurisve descent parsers in Haskell. These parsers have all the power of YACC, but they are just a Haskell library & include, so you can add your own shit. Every want to intermix contex free grammors and regular expressions freely, i.e. not this stupid Lex dose the regex and Yacc dose the CFG bullshit, it's cake under Haskell.. or you could write millions of other short cots to make you CFGs much smaller/simpler. Parsing is one of those things functional langauge were made to do.. and the moderatly good ones kick the shit out of all imperitive langauge at doing it. Also, it's worth pointing out that Functionall langauges have had steller results in "ultra high reliability" programming situations (like phone switching networks), i.e. you can not afford the program to break, so you force yourselve to write it in a manor when it can be "nearly" proven to not be breakable.
Plus, the independent artist who do place advertisment inside their songs will do it more taisfully then the big boys (who wil just have a dumb ass DJ talk to 5 min).
Regardless, what we really need is for the mp3 players to support launching a web browser to view a URL or an attached web page. The attached web page could contain advertisments and links to buy CDs, but it would also contain things like song lyrics, art, URLs for more songs, etc (to keep people from stripping the attachments). This type of advertising might piss off the major labels (remember eople must actually go to some work and push a button to launch the advertisment), but independent artists would love it since it's a much more respectable way to add stuff, i.e. not talking in the song.
Yes, the idea of a DJ adding the advertisment could create real crap, but there is a good thing which will come out of this: this gives the artists a chance to really take back the money making machine from the record industry. Plus, a small time artist who puts an ad. into his own song will do it taistfully while the DJ's who Metallica hires to put ads into their will talk for hours. Now, I do think advertising inside mp3s is the answer, but advertising inside the audio content will just piss people off. We need a way to attach a tar file contianing a web page top the end of the mp3 (and the mp3 players need to support launching a web browser to view the page). Yes, people could strip the content, but artist could just include useful information like song lyrics too. The ads would no lo0nger interfear with lissening to the music, so people would not want to strip them if they risked stripping cool stuff too.
It depends on what you mean by GUI research. There is a lot of bullshit "lets copy the Mac and call it GUI research" at your lower quality schools (and industry). Frequently, "themability" or simmilar crap gets passed off as GUI research. I think your better places are working on real stuff though (i.e. not fluf like themes).
Plan9's GUI applications have a lot of inovative ideas like: use cut and paste for menus instead of plldowns (pulldowns are crap), make dialog boxes appear on the side of the screan where they will not interupt the person who is really doing something (traditional dialog boxes are a dumb idea too). Anywho, it's pretty cool ideas with real research to back them up (unlike 99% of "GUI Research"). I'm shure the good school's like MIT have one or two people with even more brilliant ideas.
Before we all get on the "France is standing up to government intrusion" bandwagon, let's remember that France is well-known for "borrowing" travelling executives' laptops at customs, long enough to copy the entire hard drive.
Yes, France dose a lot of nasty shit.. all gorerments do this stuff, but their is diffinitly a very good reason we should all get on the "France is standing up to government intrusion" bandwagon.
Our goal should not be to maintain some twisted sence of "fairness" in our yelling at governments to reform, i.e. we should not say "Ok, France has been doing this stuff so it's ok for the U.S. to do it." Our purpose should be to reduce our chances of being spied on period. I'd say that means we should just on the bandwagon when it's here to jump on. We must make U.S. ellected officials and the NSA's budget hurt for this Echelon crap. The French can help us do this. We can deal with the French in a few years when people are pissed at them once more.
Anyway, our goal should be to kill Echelon (and reduce the NSA's power), we need all the allies we can have for that. This is how you play the game of polotics.
It can still be civil disobeience when people will not be going to jail. It's a much more relaxed form of civil disobedeance which says "these are unjust laws, so lets make it people's habit to break the law, then they wil change the law."
i.e. The people writing Gnutella, Freenet, and maybe Napster could be to be engaging in civil disobedeance. The users who encurage their friends to use these programs or put up lots of stuf so that people will like the programs may be engaging in civil disobedeance, but they guy who just logs on to Napster to DL a file is not really ngaging in civil disobedeance.
This book sounds a bit like it was designed to catter to serious christians. I think most Atheists reactions to Aliens with convincing evidence which said there was a god would be "Ok, I'm curious lets figure this out." Also, Aliens with more advance technology whic could convince an Atheists her that there was a god, would probable not have made the leap of logic to assume that there was some kind of after life, i.e. planets getting hit with metiors simultaniously dose not imply after life period, it implies a big alien race which is wiping out the big stupid animals so that smaller intelegent animals will evolve.
A technical point of bad research on the authors part: I think some palentologists believe that extinction of the dinosaurs slowed the development of intelegent life since some of the small dinosaurs were well on their way to becomming intelegent.
Finally, the coolest lets thing about god books were the ons writen by Frank Herbert. There were several of these books where people created a god for some purpose or another. There was a god one about an AI becoming god and another good one about the psychological effects that a person when through as he became a god.
Yes, banning telnet and ftp is a very bad thing, since it would hurt an importent minority (Unix geeks). It would be a better idea to require everyone to know how to use ssh and scp, then people will switch on their own.
Actaully, "banning" unencrypted email might be a good idea since you could not really "ban" all unencrypted email. You could just have a policy that made it difficult for most people to send unencrypted email to people on campus AND made it against the rules for profesors to ask their students to send them unencrypted email. This would force everyone to switch to email readers which could use PGP and the campus PGP Key Server.
I suppose you could do something simillar with telnet. You could prevent the freshman computer classes from teaching telnet and make them teach ssh instead.
You are correct. The problem is that we need people topush technology away from things which the RIAA can control, i.e. Napster and mp3.com. I have a few ideas:
(1) Freeware music distribution programs like Gnutella, but that can DL Napster file. These programs should not share file to Napster, just search Napster for files to DL.
(2) More agressive free music distribution systems for non-industry bands. Example: You sing up to recieve an mp3 from some random band in your email every day. the email would contain various information about the band (like how to order their CDs and/or how to support them).
(3) Add an HTML option to mp3 tags, i.e. the players would have a little button whhich the user could push to launch a web page. This web page would contain information about the artist, song lyrics, begging for people to give the artist money, and advertising (if the artist would want to sell advertising in their songs).
Anyway, the point is we just need to make it easy for people to abandon the industry and go directly to the artist.
I'm not a big fan of tabbacco companies or gun makers, i.e. I like the idea of *people* suing these companies to force things like child locks, etc. Would you prohibit the government from being a party to a civil case?
You are correct that it is very dangerous for the executive (or legislative) branch to avoid the checks and balances, but this is not a really serous violation.
Now we do have very serious violations of seperation of powers, including: (1) the various states of emergency which have been in effect since the 50s to avoid various parts of the constitution, (2) the parts of the executive branch which get to make up laws instead of just enforcing them (EPA, FDA, FAA, IRS, etc.), (3) the fact the federal gov. controls the state gov. via the money it gives them,.
Actually, the single biggest mistake in our constitution is not regulating the flow of money more strictly.
Yes, peer-to-peer file transfers can not be anonymous. You could route the file via a random intermidiate system, but this would be a lot of bandwidth. You could make Gnutella support email attachments as a transfer protocol, so that paranoid people could have their files sent to a hotmail account.
The most interesting solution would be to have a "localized" network where no one was allowed to search the entire network, so no one could track down everyone who was on the network. Anyway, you need to think about the threat models a little to figure out how to make it really hard for the RIAA to track down everyone.
There is simply no easy way to 'stop' people from using gnutella. we can switch ports easily.. it really doeos need randomized ports.
This is not really true. The collages can just scan the packet to identify Gnutella packets. Gnutella needs to use an encrypted protocol (like SSL or SSH) to prevent the collage routers from blocking packets.
Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver.
Yes, that would be very cool. It's importent that the computer retain control of things like seeking with the MP3 and selecting songs. I do not want to be stuck to some fucking playlist or a massive random play. I wrote a little program which attempts to learn your music lissening moods. It's not very reliable or stable, but it makes the point that ALL current mp3 players and sterios have uninspired crap for user interfaces. Anyway, if Joe Random Geek has the ability to write his/her own music user interface then we should see some cool shit in a few years, but if the corporations keep giving us the 3 button remote control because they are affraid to cornfuse their customers then we will be stuck with the crappy interfaces we have now.
You do not have any evidence to back up the statment that humans have stopped evolving. First, it happens that we are not liviing in a spurt of bioogical evolution. I don't think we totally understand the factors that control the spurts of biological evolution, so it's pretty premature to make any judgements. I know someone mentioned that scarcaty and overpopulation have something to do with it, but it could be other things like society percolating into subcultures too.
Second, our intelegecne and understanding of the world *is* one of the ways we evolve. The development of biotechnology just gives one more way for this software evoltion to influence the hardware evolution.
Third, humans controlling their own evolution is not scary. The human modifications which fuck up will not survive. Humans and/or natural selection will undo our screwups.
Actualy, human control over human evolution could be a wonderful thing for exactly all the reasons that the ludites fear it (like new viruses). If human evolution divurges into multiple species then we may become more immune to these new viruses.
Really, the one hting we should do is pass laws requiring human genetic modifications to be "open source," i.e. no patents on modifications to humans. This would prevent the corperations from controlling all the technology and would allow human evolution to divurge.
Open blacklists are a better solution for parents and home computers, but there are still many problems. Specifically, the riligious right may try to force their views on the open black list. Remember, religious people are the majority of people who will volontear to check sites out. Would you really want to child's exposure to ideas influnced by the kind of person who would volontear to scan the web for porn?
Anyway, my point is that most parent should just say "I do not trust anyone who would make a censorware program, so I'm just going to trust my kid untill I get a clear indication of a problem."
Libraries have the same problem, execpt they have lots of people walking arround, so they can just move the computers into an open area and ask people who look at porn to leave.
A Library which has a really serious problem with porn then they can share the netscape cache directories, have a computer scan images for fleshtones, and display possible images to the librarians. If the librarian judges the image to be pornographic, she/he can walk over to the computers, figure out who downloaded the image, and ask them to leave.
The advantage of the above system is that you not restricting anything ligitimate (unless the librarian makes a bad call). Also, you should not tell the librarian which comouter viewed the image to provent librarians from being able to spy on specific people while browsing.
The point of the article is to publish information without incuring blame, not to publish information which the gov. can not read.
Example: I find the NSA top secret algorithm for factoring numbers in polynomial time. Clearly, this is something which the NSA should not be keeping secret, so I'm going to publish it, but they will kill me if they find out who did it.
Proposed Solution:
(1) I locate and download a reasonable number of "pads" (say 10,000) which people have posted. Now these pads may be random shit or they may have been part of a previous anonymous publication.
(2) I XOR all the pads I DLed with the data I want to send which produces one random string of data. I can safely publish this random string of data like any other random string of data.
(3) I anonymously publish the list of pads (including the one I just created).
Problems:
(a) The NSA only needs to track the list of pads back to me to figure out that I published their algorithm, i.e. this whole procedure only helps me if it is easy for me to publish 10,001 web addresses anoymously, but hard for me to directly publish their algorithm anonymously.
(b) The NSA only needs to figure out which of the 10,001 pads was published last to figure out which one I posted, so I need to know that the published pads to not have date infomration.
(c) The NSA only need to cross reference the list of people who have access to this secret information with the list of people who own the pad I used to find me, so I may need to publish my pad anonymously too.
(d) The NSA must not be able to trace the information to you independently.
Finally, failing the above conditions the NSA must actually prove that all 10,000 pads innocent pads are not guilty to prove that I am guilty.
Anyway, it's not *totally* uselss, but it's useful to few enough people that it's not worth implementing, i.e. it's going to be hard to meet the above criteria.
Personaly, i would just go to a cyber-cafe or a free terminal (Newark airport, collage campuses, etc.) to publish the information.
BTW> People mentioned the secret sharing algorithms. These would be useless for this task as you must distribute each part anonymously, which increases the gov. chances of tracking you.
Gibson is underestimating the degree to which MP3's have been allowed to prosper, so as to force the hands of the courts, the houses, the lobbyists, and the competitors
Yes, MP3 has been allowed to prosper. No, the media companies did not allow it to prosper intentionally so that they would have more power to create stronger IP laws. MP3s were allowed to prosper becuase the media companies had no effective way to fight mp3s.
Now, more file sharing and weaker IP laws are a very good thing for all the importent people (Artists and Consumers). Mp3s are pushing things that direction, but the media companies are doing a good job of pushing the laws the opposite direction.
Gibson's ideas will only work out if we can make file sharing (piracy or free software/music/etc.) the norm before the media companies can do anything about it. User friendly programs like Napster help. Also, we must make products which protect the media companies interests and remove fair use rights (like SDMI) go down the toilet.
how long will it be before they begin to test the limits imposed on them and find loopholes to worm through, knowing that if they step over the line, the worst they might face is another long, drawn-out court battle until they're reined in again?
You are correct. Corperations AND their executives should be punished. Bill Gates should have large *personal* fines and/or *jail* time for the emails he sent telling people to make microsoft products not work with compeditors products. The justice department should attempts to convict all microsoft witnesses which lied of pergery, so they would get personal fines and/or jail time.
Now you should not punish only the executives and let the stock holders off. I would say that the government should revoke Microsofts copyright to some of the products that they used to hurt compeditors (Windows, Word, IE). I don't know that they have done things so bad as to justify decorperating them (revoke their status as a corperation and sell off the assets).
Anyway, I think revokation of copyrights and decorperation should be the standard attacks that we use for monopolies. Splitting should be reserved for when we think that it can really be made to work (ala phone companies). It would also be nice to see diffrent countries use revokation of copyrights independantly, i.e. France could convict Microsoft of unfair comptition and revoke Microsofts copyright on Windows within France.
Yes, Gnutella dose not scale to large networks very well, but there is a solution (which also kills NetPD).
The speed problem with programs like Gnutella is that it tries to search everything. This is just plain stupid. The privacy issue with Gnutella and Napster is that anyone (NetPD) can get the IP addresses of everyone with some song. This is stupid too.
The solution is a "reputation system" where only nodes where you have established a reputation allow you to do searches to find more nodes. Here is how the system should work: Jane's Gnutella would establish an account with Bill's Gnutella node when it connects to Bill's node forthe first time. After some time passes and Jane and Bill have traded many mp3s then Bill trusts Jane enough to let here do searches through his node (this process is automated). This allows Jane to find new Gnutella nodes.
Anyway, the point is that an mostly automated "references" systems could allow people to search realitivly freely, but not allow anyone to learn too much too fast. The real kicker is that the network will probable grow faster then a node can gain reputation. This prevents NetPD from sssing too much of the network.. and it prevents you from seeing too much of the network.
The only remaining issue is how well will mp3s be dispurced through the network anbd how much wil the network fragment into intrest groups.
BTW> Gnutella needs to piggy back it's protocol on a conection which looks like SSH, SSL telnet, or SSL HTTP to prevent collage routers from detecting the protocol.
Many state chapters of the ACLU have supported the NRA and gun rights. The national ACLU dose not defend gun rights for a couple of reasons, but this big reason is:
The ACLU uses the legal system to defend us from the legal system. Gun rights are an extra-legal part of the constitution. i.e. gun rights exist to allow us to kill our political leaders when things get really really bad.. the courts and people who use them tend to frown uppon this type of problem resolution.
It's not that gun rights are not importent. They are very importent (sometiems you just need a revolution). it's that gun rights are not soemthing the ACLU can defend by explaining them to a court. It's not necissarily something the ACLU can really understand (they are lawyers after all).
Anyway, you should not critisize the ACLU too much for not supporting gun rights. They are doing what they know how to do.. and they are doing a lot of good (gun rights are only one amendment out of many). If you care about gun rights you should join the NRA (and try to explain them to your more liberal friends).
First, The ACLU opposes using tax payer money to fund religious schools since this is a pretty clear cut violation of the establishment clause, i.e. there are not enough students for a Budist school, so all the budist children must go to christian school.
Scond, I suspect many of the people who are involved with the ACLU oppose taking tax payer money frm public school to pay for any private schools or home schools (since this would harm poor children). This is puerly a money and quality of education for the poor issue, i.e. a poor parent might not have the qualifications or ability for home schooling. I do not know the ACLU's official position on this issue, but it will revolve around the poor having a right to a half way decent education.
Anyway, I'm shure most people at the ACLU like the idea of home schooling, but do not think that the government should pay for non-standard parts of it. The government should give home schoolers some help (text books, classes for parents, etc), but should not give them funds which could be spent in way which violate the establisment clause.
BTW> There are some pretty good evidence that home schooling is the best alternative when the parent is sufficently educated).
BTW2> The only solution to the "privatize" education debate is to require schools to offer "partial schooling options," i.e. parents could send their kids to diffrent schools for diffrent classes. Example: I can send my kid to public school for most classes, but send them to a religious school for a couple of classes (at my expence). This soltion prevents the public and private schools from running an "ideological monopoly." The private schools can not force kids to take religon classes and can not force parents to pay for all ofthe tuition when the parent only wants their kid to take a couple of classes at the school. Public schools can not prevent kids from taking religiohn classes.
Have american courts rules that passwords are protected by taking the 5th? The treaty is still a very bad thing because it will force many countries to take a shitty crypto position (like the UK's).
The supreme court has jurisdiction over every conceivable piece of law in the country
I'm not shure how much power they have regarding "National Security" issues. I would rally like them to set a precendent that judges can claim the right to rievew classified documents which are relevent to a case. We need a supream court with balls to create this kind of judicial review power.
Actually, senitors should have automatic security clearance and "need to know" too (I mean seriously, what kind of a democrasy would not allow it's senetors access to classified information).
Just as there is a place for envelopes in this world, so is there a place for postcards. And even skywriting.
Well it would probable be a good thing to make ALL email encrypted. It's no more bandwidth and it's not really that much processor time. The only real bad thing about sendmail doing the encryption is that the system's sendmail can spy on users, but I can not think of a better way to do it.
I'm sure it's *NOT* a good idea.
Well it's never a good idea to lie to people when you don't need to, but it's not like you would send these messages to everyone who sent you unencrypted email. You would send these messages to people who you do not care about. Clearly, you will send a friend a personalized email mssage suggesting that they install an encrpyted email program (and you would not harass them). This would just be a clever way to delete a mail which you were not going to reply to anyway.
Actually, once I start TAing for calculus classes I think I'll write myself a little script to email students their grades after tests, but only once they submit a PGP public key.
Anywho, my point is that we should try to "descriminate" against the people who do not use encryption when it seems likely to make mre people use encryption.