I'm not buying into self restraint when it comes to freedom.
Either explain and prove them wrong and thus antagonize them, (these top dogs don't like to be proven wrong) or leave them alone and get blocked by them.
You can say that about anything, not just the example "security through obscurity" non argument. When you get an audience with a "top dog," you owe it to the dog and yourself to speak your mind. OpenBSD has a reputation that pretty much kills this problem. Moves by IBM, Sun and Apple also go a long way. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is the surest way to get bounced. Why bother, when it's easy enough to present the benefits of freedom politely?
even MSFT is coming out with, "ours is also an open standard" line
Have they ever said anything different? M$ has always used smoke and mirror language like, "industry standard" and "compatible" to promote itself.
There are many closed source vendors who would like to get just a piece of MSFT's market share. It would be foolish for the open-standards advocates not to include them in the big tent. Don't antagonize these people whose interests are aligned with ours.
Who's left that thinks like that? Sun, Apple, IBM, HP, Sharp, Sony and everyone else is rushing into the free software world. M$'s actions have made clear the downside of non free software and they all know where their interests really are. Marketshare means nothing if you have to sacrifice your freedom to gain it. Whoever takes control will also take the market and present everyone with M$ under a different name.
MSXML is an ActiveX control for dealing with XML stuff, such as AJAX.
Few people actually know that and no one really cares. MSXML is easy to write and say and it gets the point across. Five syllables is better than eight.
the other side can argue against Open Source to defeat Open Standards.
There's nothing very clever about this, M$ is offering neither and will continue to argue against both. It's stupid and people are not falling for it. There will be a lot of namecalling over this legislation and that will only hasten the adoption of similar legislation by other countries. People are fed up with the intentional waste that non free software continuously imposes. Those who make money off this waste have their silly arguments about "choice" and "market forces" but the nature of their monopoly and non free software deny both.
The reason standards are important to businesses and governments is to assure continued perfect access to their work and data stored in archives and libraries. Without software freedom, this goal is impossible and everyone knows it. MSXML is failing as an ISO standard because it's incomplete and controlled by a single company, so it fails both as "open" and as a standard. ODF and other real standards are being adopted because they meet the goal. Multiple implementations and lower costs of real competition are icing on the cake.
If M$ continues to thwart standards on their platform people will soon abandon it too. Their refusal to adopt ODF is telling but so is the sorry state of IE7. Not even a billion dollars a month in advertising can hide the simple facts of software freedom.
Supporters of open source should tone down the rhetoric about it and fight for open standards.
It's hard for me to understand what this means. The message of software freedom is simple, non threatening and easy to deliver. The concept of peer review is appreciated by management types with higher education and the concept of freedom is universal. People like real choices and control. People hate monopolies. The details of any specific issue can be explored but they are boring and put people off.
Yes, OOXML is a misnomer. Because no one else can modify or fully implement ooxml the name should be "msxml". I suggest that we all use this term to describe the thing M$ is trying to push. It's short and impossible to confuse with anything else.
Soon enough, you won't have a choice. Seen any DVDs without CSS lately?
Encrypted documents should not be protected by copyright because they will never enter the public domain. Laws protecting encryption violate your rights.
There's a big difference between copying and making available.
Regardless of what you see in colleges, copying copyrighted books and distributing the copies IS illegal.
You can learn something in college after all. There are specific exemptions for making copies and distributing them for educational purposes. If you study copyright itself you might discover the basis of the law and be able to judge when it's being abused.
Things are going to get stickier for publishers in the future as paper goes away. I already loath adding paper to my library. The downside of this is idiots like you think that I should be punished if I were to share my books with others, something that's impossible to do without copying and distributing when the book is in a reasonable electronic format. I want unrestricted pdf so that I can enjoy the full benefits of electronic publishing. I'll gladly pay publishers (hopefully authors) for books, but I don't want them creating new and stupid restrictions. The purpose of publishers and copyright law is to spread knowledge, not perpetual profits from a specific business model. Laws and publishers that act as barriers to the spread of knowledge are acting contrary to their purpose and do not deserve to exist.
Your continued defense of MSXML is puzzling. MSXML and ODF are worlds apart, why present them as comparable "standards"? People have shown that MSXML is patent encumbered, incomplete, and contradictory. It is being advanced by a single company with a track record for anti-competitive practices. Why do you defend it's owner and the spec itself as reasonable?
I can almost understand wanting to have free software implementations of MSXML. The fear is that M$ will use it's monopoly power to push their standard and free software will be left in the lurch unless there is substantial effort now. The problem is practically avoiding that. Can you have free implementations of things that have patent and trade secret problems? Do you really trust M$ to give you what you need to make a competitive product? As a user, I'm grateful to have free implementations of WORD.DOC and other legacy formats, but it's never enough to overcome M$'s treachery. I can't really use these legacy formats to collaborate with peers. My perspective is that these efforts don't work and as soon as they come close, M$ moves the goal posts because they have never cared about their customers. Overall, I'm glad that some people will spend their time on such things. Legacy format translators give people an exit and a way to preserve work they once trusted to non free software.
What I don't understand is a continued belief that anything Microsoft says or does can be trusted. It is in their power and best interest to waste your effort and insure you never succeed. Peter Quinn can tell you where reason goes when push comes to shove. How can you trust a partner like that?
There are about twelve English language stories about this from all over the world but panic about Iran is a US/Israel thing. No one else really cares, so long as they can trade for oil. Fear over a cluster of widely available parts is stupid.
You misspelled Outlook. I've been using Kmail for five years and I have never lost a message. Outlook, on the other hand, is famous for corrupted databases where the victim loses everything suddenly and without warning.
The article refers to "Internet Companies" but that does not fit into the subject field. This is a technical limitation and it's irrelevant.
The purpose of the bill is to promote online freedom at all levels of the food chain, including access and equipment maker. The authors and they NYT are disgusted by the willing co-operation of US companies that should know better. Dumb networks work better than networks that can be filtered, everyone knows that. US companies are not really going to like it when these tools are turned on them at home. I can only hope that the bills authors will ride the easy to obtain wave indignation for China to a less easy to obtain indignation for the same practices here. Freedom is important everywhere.
Sure, why not? Can you tell me the difference in intent between restrictions on a movie and restrictions on a newspaper? M$ has already tried to sell self destructing email. It seem ludicrous for web pages but the web is already full of language about "this may not be reproduced, distributed or copied in any way." M$ has been at war with simple standards forever. The end game is control they can sell.
Candidates for implementation of the M$ interweb are their fancy new jpeg format, Silverlight and Word. It's all part of the trusted path. Those without a "trusted" browser will not be served anymore than those without a trusted OS will be allowed to watch DVDs. Yes, it's stupid but you can see where they are going. If they did not want to exercise control, they would have adopted the same formats everone else did long ago. They are, after all, free to implement.
Going from XP to Vista is hard. Going the other way is a huge pain in the ass. No, you can't dual boot. Information does not move smoothly. This is by design, so they can force people along and create the illusion that moving to free software is even more difficult.
If you consider the 50/50 split, you end up with some sites where no single version of IE matches FF. Oh yeah, that's a developer site and it kind of shows you where this is all going.
Agile development is ok, total cowboy development on something this important is not.
If it's that important, no single company should have control of it. If you want it to work well, it should not have owners. The failings of IE7 are failings of non free software. The owners have a fundamental conflict with user's interests and will never deliver what the users want.
I still let my e-mail provider read all my mails. How else does anyone think that spam filters work? You can't filter out spam without reading the e-mails.
What choice do you really have? You could run your own mail server through dyndns but non of the major ISPs will take your mail or send mail to you. Because of this, you are forced to use an ISP of one sort or another. They same things can be said about encrypted email. Without M$ and ISP "support" encryption will remain something restricted to a very few people who will be harassed.
"Reading" your mail for spam filtering is not the kind of profiling privacy experts are worried about. What you should be worried about is a profile based on your buying and reading habits that can be used to smear you, have you watched as a criminal/terrorist, denied health insurance, employment, credit and housing. Even if you are not the sort of person who would end up on a list for challenging some power that is, you should care to protect those other people because they are fighting for the rights of the rest of us.
Now, of all the ISPs, I'd trust Google before the rest but NO ONE should be doing this kind of thing. Your grocer, for example, should not report your purchases to others because it's none of their business. The fact that the grocer can make money that way is irrelevant but does not make up for the greater social harm that is done. People can make money through armed robbery and murder but society protects itself from that kind of thing.
Partial restrictions some people can get around are no less odious. The intent is the same and they are designed to get you used to a restricted world.
It's clear that WD was advertising the device people want but delivering something else. This WD page promisses:
WD Anywhere Access - This storage system and all the files on it are always accessible when you need them, even when your local computer is turned off.
Anyone who thinks restrictions like this are OK needs to take a step back and ask themselves why a hard disk should not give you back your media on demand. If it does less than that, it's defective. Media propaganda continues to market restrictions as necessary and enabling. They are nothing of the sort. Digital media and networks are enabling. Restrictions just suck.
For one thing, it seems as if though the system only works with Windoze. The easiest way to make it do what you want is to take the drives out and put them into a free computer. It is better and possible to unlock it (this reference) but it's a pain in the neck and clearly against the intentions of the maker.
More importantly, ESR's prediction of M$ behavior is something you should generalize to the entire non free software ecosystem. He predicted collusion with the MAFIAA to force hardware based restrictions and he predicted attacks on freedom based on freedom being a "terrorist" asset. That they are doing it with free software is a double ding. Having free software won't do any good if WD, M$ and friends push bad laws that require all files to have "verifiable media license authentication" or other digital restrictions controlled by others. That's the direction ESR predicted we would be heading and the World Book is both physical and ideological proof that he was right.
It's easier to point out that you can't use these drives to share your movies and songs. People want network storage for the same thing they use YouTube for, movies of their kids and other fun for out of town friends and family. No avi == no sale.
More devices will be like this until they are legally mandated. This is the kind of network the MAFIAA wants to build. It looks a lot like the old network that served them well. You are only invited to purchase. Government will be happy that way too. YouTube is bad enough for them. If people could simply share through their own equipment, censorship would be impossible and the terroris^H^H public good would win. Watch out for the Next DMCA type act to outlaw general purpose computing access to networks. ESR predicted stuff like this three years ago:
Expect Microsoft to ally even more closely with the RIAA and MPAA in making yet another try at hardware-based DRM restrictions and legislation making them mandatory. The rationale will be to stop piracy and spam, but the real goal will be customer control and a lockout of all unauthorized software. Two previous attempts at this have failed, but the logic of Microsoft's situation is such that they must keep trying.
I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.
ESR had some good ways to fight this loss of freedom, but the easiest is to let people know that restricted devices don't do what they want to them to do.
Great, but why make it hard? Why force the deletion of one or the other instead of a smooth migration or -*gasp*- allowing both systems to access the same user data via dual boot or virtual machines. Mac and GNU/Linux pull this off.
Journals that don't share their information should not complain when people are ignorant. The abstract does not convince me of anything other than four MDs spent some time looking at YouTube and fear people will use YouTube as a substitute for their doctor.
Next article, Insurance Company Complains that People Can't Afford the Doctor and Cost too Much to Make Well.
M$ has made all of the above difficult so they can continue to sell you the same thing again and again. I'm supposed to be impressed by one time use "downgrade rights"? Directions on Microsoft got this one right:
The whole concept that you have to buy an upgrade so you can downgrade to an older version is perverse anywhere but inside Microsoft
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not buying into self restraint when it comes to freedom.
Either explain and prove them wrong and thus antagonize them, (these top dogs don't like to be proven wrong) or leave them alone and get blocked by them.
You can say that about anything, not just the example "security through obscurity" non argument. When you get an audience with a "top dog," you owe it to the dog and yourself to speak your mind. OpenBSD has a reputation that pretty much kills this problem. Moves by IBM, Sun and Apple also go a long way. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is the surest way to get bounced. Why bother, when it's easy enough to present the benefits of freedom politely?
even MSFT is coming out with, "ours is also an open standard" line
Have they ever said anything different? M$ has always used smoke and mirror language like, "industry standard" and "compatible" to promote itself.
There are many closed source vendors who would like to get just a piece of MSFT's market share. It would be foolish for the open-standards advocates not to include them in the big tent. Don't antagonize these people whose interests are aligned with ours.
Who's left that thinks like that? Sun, Apple, IBM, HP, Sharp, Sony and everyone else is rushing into the free software world. M$'s actions have made clear the downside of non free software and they all know where their interests really are. Marketshare means nothing if you have to sacrifice your freedom to gain it. Whoever takes control will also take the market and present everyone with M$ under a different name.
MSXML is an ActiveX control for dealing with XML stuff, such as AJAX.
Few people actually know that and no one really cares. MSXML is easy to write and say and it gets the point across. Five syllables is better than eight.
the other side can argue against Open Source to defeat Open Standards.
There's nothing very clever about this, M$ is offering neither and will continue to argue against both. It's stupid and people are not falling for it. There will be a lot of namecalling over this legislation and that will only hasten the adoption of similar legislation by other countries. People are fed up with the intentional waste that non free software continuously imposes. Those who make money off this waste have their silly arguments about "choice" and "market forces" but the nature of their monopoly and non free software deny both.
The reason standards are important to businesses and governments is to assure continued perfect access to their work and data stored in archives and libraries. Without software freedom, this goal is impossible and everyone knows it. MSXML is failing as an ISO standard because it's incomplete and controlled by a single company, so it fails both as "open" and as a standard. ODF and other real standards are being adopted because they meet the goal. Multiple implementations and lower costs of real competition are icing on the cake.
If M$ continues to thwart standards on their platform people will soon abandon it too. Their refusal to adopt ODF is telling but so is the sorry state of IE7. Not even a billion dollars a month in advertising can hide the simple facts of software freedom.
Supporters of open source should tone down the rhetoric about it and fight for open standards.
It's hard for me to understand what this means. The message of software freedom is simple, non threatening and easy to deliver. The concept of peer review is appreciated by management types with higher education and the concept of freedom is universal. People like real choices and control. People hate monopolies. The details of any specific issue can be explored but they are boring and put people off.
Yes, OOXML is a misnomer. Because no one else can modify or fully implement ooxml the name should be "msxml". I suggest that we all use this term to describe the thing M$ is trying to push. It's short and impossible to confuse with anything else.
They're not making you buy anything.
Soon enough, you won't have a choice. Seen any DVDs without CSS lately?
Encrypted documents should not be protected by copyright because they will never enter the public domain. Laws protecting encryption violate your rights.
650 GB of Error Logs a day.
There's a big difference between copying and making available. Regardless of what you see in colleges, copying copyrighted books and distributing the copies IS illegal.
You can learn something in college after all. There are specific exemptions for making copies and distributing them for educational purposes. If you study copyright itself you might discover the basis of the law and be able to judge when it's being abused.
Things are going to get stickier for publishers in the future as paper goes away. I already loath adding paper to my library. The downside of this is idiots like you think that I should be punished if I were to share my books with others, something that's impossible to do without copying and distributing when the book is in a reasonable electronic format. I want unrestricted pdf so that I can enjoy the full benefits of electronic publishing. I'll gladly pay publishers (hopefully authors) for books, but I don't want them creating new and stupid restrictions. The purpose of publishers and copyright law is to spread knowledge, not perpetual profits from a specific business model. Laws and publishers that act as barriers to the spread of knowledge are acting contrary to their purpose and do not deserve to exist.
Your continued defense of MSXML is puzzling. MSXML and ODF are worlds apart, why present them as comparable "standards"? People have shown that MSXML is patent encumbered, incomplete, and contradictory. It is being advanced by a single company with a track record for anti-competitive practices. Why do you defend it's owner and the spec itself as reasonable?
I can almost understand wanting to have free software implementations of MSXML. The fear is that M$ will use it's monopoly power to push their standard and free software will be left in the lurch unless there is substantial effort now. The problem is practically avoiding that. Can you have free implementations of things that have patent and trade secret problems? Do you really trust M$ to give you what you need to make a competitive product? As a user, I'm grateful to have free implementations of WORD.DOC and other legacy formats, but it's never enough to overcome M$'s treachery. I can't really use these legacy formats to collaborate with peers. My perspective is that these efforts don't work and as soon as they come close, M$ moves the goal posts because they have never cared about their customers. Overall, I'm glad that some people will spend their time on such things. Legacy format translators give people an exit and a way to preserve work they once trusted to non free software.
What I don't understand is a continued belief that anything Microsoft says or does can be trusted. It is in their power and best interest to waste your effort and insure you never succeed. Peter Quinn can tell you where reason goes when push comes to shove. How can you trust a partner like that?
There are about twelve English language stories about this from all over the world but panic about Iran is a US/Israel thing. No one else really cares, so long as they can trade for oil. Fear over a cluster of widely available parts is stupid.
KMail "losing" my mail
You misspelled Outlook. I've been using Kmail for five years and I have never lost a message. Outlook, on the other hand, is famous for corrupted databases where the victim loses everything suddenly and without warning.
The article refers to "Internet Companies" but that does not fit into the subject field. This is a technical limitation and it's irrelevant.
The purpose of the bill is to promote online freedom at all levels of the food chain, including access and equipment maker. The authors and they NYT are disgusted by the willing co-operation of US companies that should know better. Dumb networks work better than networks that can be filtered, everyone knows that. US companies are not really going to like it when these tools are turned on them at home. I can only hope that the bills authors will ride the easy to obtain wave indignation for China to a less easy to obtain indignation for the same practices here. Freedom is important everywhere.
DRM... on the browser? What?
Sure, why not? Can you tell me the difference in intent between restrictions on a movie and restrictions on a newspaper? M$ has already tried to sell self destructing email. It seem ludicrous for web pages but the web is already full of language about "this may not be reproduced, distributed or copied in any way." M$ has been at war with simple standards forever. The end game is control they can sell.
Candidates for implementation of the M$ interweb are their fancy new jpeg format, Silverlight and Word. It's all part of the trusted path. Those without a "trusted" browser will not be served anymore than those without a trusted OS will be allowed to watch DVDs. Yes, it's stupid but you can see where they are going. If they did not want to exercise control, they would have adopted the same formats everone else did long ago. They are, after all, free to implement.
Going from XP to Vista is hard. Going the other way is a huge pain in the ass. No, you can't dual boot. Information does not move smoothly. This is by design, so they can force people along and create the illusion that moving to free software is even more difficult.
The next IE version will be like Word for the Web. Not just a browser but an editor to completely interact with content. Ok, I made it up.
You got it from WebTV adverts.
Considering M$'s recent experience with blogs, the next version of IE will not let developers edit M$'s web site.
If you consider the 50/50 split, you end up with some sites where no single version of IE matches FF. Oh yeah, that's a developer site and it kind of shows you where this is all going.
before Opera 9.5/FF3 are released and they have new ideas to copy?
Because they still don't have the feature set of the last crop of free browsers. They are going to promise the same things again and DRM.
Agile development is ok, total cowboy development on something this important is not.
If it's that important, no single company should have control of it. If you want it to work well, it should not have owners. The failings of IE7 are failings of non free software. The owners have a fundamental conflict with user's interests and will never deliver what the users want.
I still let my e-mail provider read all my mails. How else does anyone think that spam filters work? You can't filter out spam without reading the e-mails.
What choice do you really have? You could run your own mail server through dyndns but non of the major ISPs will take your mail or send mail to you. Because of this, you are forced to use an ISP of one sort or another. They same things can be said about encrypted email. Without M$ and ISP "support" encryption will remain something restricted to a very few people who will be harassed.
"Reading" your mail for spam filtering is not the kind of profiling privacy experts are worried about. What you should be worried about is a profile based on your buying and reading habits that can be used to smear you, have you watched as a criminal/terrorist, denied health insurance, employment, credit and housing. Even if you are not the sort of person who would end up on a list for challenging some power that is, you should care to protect those other people because they are fighting for the rights of the rest of us.
Now, of all the ISPs, I'd trust Google before the rest but NO ONE should be doing this kind of thing. Your grocer, for example, should not report your purchases to others because it's none of their business. The fact that the grocer can make money that way is irrelevant but does not make up for the greater social harm that is done. People can make money through armed robbery and murder but society protects itself from that kind of thing.
Partial restrictions some people can get around are no less odious. The intent is the same and they are designed to get you used to a restricted world.
It's clear that WD was advertising the device people want but delivering something else. This WD page promisses:
It even has pictures of music on the beach and images flowing to multiple houses, but this page lets you know that you can't share anything with "unverifiable media license authentication" and lists every media type but text and still images. Copyright warriors want to know why WD hates poets, the press and photographers. Normal people are feel ripped off because getting around this dissapointment is beyond the average user. Other people have voiced their anger at the restrictions as described and described in detail how they suck beyond the description.
Anyone who thinks restrictions like this are OK needs to take a step back and ask themselves why a hard disk should not give you back your media on demand. If it does less than that, it's defective. Media propaganda continues to market restrictions as necessary and enabling. They are nothing of the sort. Digital media and networks are enabling. Restrictions just suck.
For one thing, it seems as if though the system only works with Windoze. The easiest way to make it do what you want is to take the drives out and put them into a free computer. It is better and possible to unlock it (this reference) but it's a pain in the neck and clearly against the intentions of the maker.
More importantly, ESR's prediction of M$ behavior is something you should generalize to the entire non free software ecosystem. He predicted collusion with the MAFIAA to force hardware based restrictions and he predicted attacks on freedom based on freedom being a "terrorist" asset. That they are doing it with free software is a double ding. Having free software won't do any good if WD, M$ and friends push bad laws that require all files to have "verifiable media license authentication" or other digital restrictions controlled by others. That's the direction ESR predicted we would be heading and the World Book is both physical and ideological proof that he was right.
It's easier to point out that you can't use these drives to share your movies and songs. People want network storage for the same thing they use YouTube for, movies of their kids and other fun for out of town friends and family. No avi == no sale.
More devices will be like this until they are legally mandated. This is the kind of network the MAFIAA wants to build. It looks a lot like the old network that served them well. You are only invited to purchase. Government will be happy that way too. YouTube is bad enough for them. If people could simply share through their own equipment, censorship would be impossible and the terroris^H^H public good would win. Watch out for the Next DMCA type act to outlaw general purpose computing access to networks. ESR predicted stuff like this three years ago:
Expect Microsoft to ally even more closely with the RIAA and MPAA in making yet another try at hardware-based DRM restrictions and legislation making them mandatory. The rationale will be to stop piracy and spam, but the real goal will be customer control and a lockout of all unauthorized software. Two previous attempts at this have failed, but the logic of Microsoft's situation is such that they must keep trying.
I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.
ESR had some good ways to fight this loss of freedom, but the easiest is to let people know that restricted devices don't do what they want to them to do.
Great, but why make it hard? Why force the deletion of one or the other instead of a smooth migration or -*gasp*- allowing both systems to access the same user data via dual boot or virtual machines. Mac and GNU/Linux pull this off.
You should trust the JAMA because they won't let you read their journal.
Funny they should worry about ignorance.
Journals that don't share their information should not complain when people are ignorant. The abstract does not convince me of anything other than four MDs spent some time looking at YouTube and fear people will use YouTube as a substitute for their doctor.
Next article, Insurance Company Complains that People Can't Afford the Doctor and Cost too Much to Make Well.
You get to chose one or the other. Forever.
Imagine you could just move the software you have already purchased from your old computer to your new computer.
Imagine you could dual boot or run things in virtual machines.
Imagine Vista worked at all. Opps.
M$ has made all of the above difficult so they can continue to sell you the same thing again and again. I'm supposed to be impressed by one time use "downgrade rights"? Directions on Microsoft got this one right: