The evidence we're seeing - Carnivore being the best example - indicates that The Powers That Be are more interested in traffic analysis than in terms of decrypting your content.
In other words, all the strong crypto in the DATA segment of the SMTP transaction isn't gonna save you if an FBI agent decides he wants to forge a "From: kiddypr0narchive@fbi.gov" in an email to you. For mail to truly be secure, it's clear that we now need to encrypt all headers in the SMTP and/or POP transactions.
Likewise, for safe browsing, SSL on the content of the pages isn't enough; all the metadata in the HTTP GET requests have to be encrypted too.
Traffic analysis makes sense; it's machine-readable data, machine-parsable, and very easy to inject into a database for profiling purposes. Scanning a database for all From: addresses associated with To: fields of osama_bin_laden@secretterroristcamp.iq, or IP addresses associated with Referrer-ID: fields matching the regexp *janetreno*goat*pr0n* is a lot easier than actually trying to examine a terabyte of.JPGs.
We've seen it in the public domain with the "auto-sue" programs used against Napster users.
We're seeing the gummint getting into the act with Carnivore. Whaddyawannabet that 5 years from now, when Jaz and ZIP drives are no longer available, the "physical evidence" ceases to be a piddly 120M disk (which can probably only hold the sniffed headers from a handful of users before it has to be swapped for another disc) and becomes a 200G hard drive (which can hold everyone's traffic for a few days)? Hell, the cost of the "removable hard drive Carnivore" isn't much more than the ZIP drive one today.
At what point will we redesign our basic communications protocols to be snoop-resistant?
> The Australian Federal Government claims that its content regulation laws have "boosted Internet use in Australia",
Hogwash. An Aussie friend of mine claims it's the continued stench emitting from the pile of foetid dingoes' kidneys that's responsible for the increase in internet use in Australia.
And I claim it's the fact that I ate kippers last Tuesday that's led to the increase in internet use in Australia.
Just because it happened after a stupid law passed, doesn't mean it happened because the stupid law passed.
It's a sad commentary on the state of public education in any Western "democracy" that its politicians can pass off the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy as truth and get away with it.
> But in the Information Age, governments chosen by the majority are governments chosen by losers.
Since Mr. Angell isn't here to speak on his own behalf, I'll paraphrase him from a documentary I once saw on his work:
He's not a techno-libertarian, he's an economist. While the future he portrays in his writings has an obvious direct appeal to the hardcore technolibertarian segment, his opinions of the morality of such a society are neutral.
If he were here (and I think he'd make a great slashdot interviewee someday, and I hereby apologize for putting words in his mouth), I think he'd say something like "I'm not a moralist - whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is not for me to judge. But whether for good or ill, this is what I think the future holds."
The fact that people (such as myself, and presumably such as Snocone) read his writings and think "Wow, cool! The future's gonna be hardass, but at least we're in the lucky small percentage of the population that has a chance at surviving it!" is a reflection of Angell's readers, not on Angell's politics themselves.
Indeed, the thing I like most about reading Angell is that he keeps his personal opinions about the morality of the future to himself; it's up to the reader to decide whether this is:
Good, and something in which you want to actively participate and help bring about.
Evil, but inevitable, so you'll swallow your pride for the shiny toyz that come with being part of Dogbert's New Ruling Class (TINDNRC:)
Good, but worth opposing because it benefits the few at the expense of many.
Evil, and worth opposing tooth-and-nail on the same grounds.
It's a matter of considerable philosophical debate whether the middle two items on that list are self-contradictory.
I don't know anyone who would argue in favor of the third item on the list ("Good, but worth opposing on moral grounds!"), but I know many who would argue for the second ("Evil, but wotthehell, bring it on!").
I posit that both of these positions are contradictory. The third is more obviously loony than the second - if you believe the needs of the many are greater than the needs of the few/one, how can you say it's "Good"? But the second is no less self-contradictory; it just presumes that the needs of the few/one ought to be subservient to the needs of the many, rather than the other way around.
I say pick one baseline for Goodness or Evilness and stick with it. If your choice makes you "altruistic", or "cyberselfish", so be it. (But then, I have a value system that considers logical inconsistency to be more "evil" than selfishness, so what else would I say?:-)
Angell's money (and Rees-Mogg's, and mine, for what little all three of us are worth in the grand scheme of things) is bet on the selfish side of the battle. Where you put your money - and more importantly, your actions - is up to you.
> Netpliance, after the slashdot story about putting Linux on it, reportedly made it impossible to do this
Off-topic correction on the I-Opener:
s/made/attempted to make/g
The most recent models of IO require a little more work, but they're even easier to upgrade than the earlier ones. Folks are also upgrading the stock CPU with beefier models.
Interestingly enough, NPLI finally got a clue and stopped trying to attack the hacker community with shady business techniques (e.g., trying to retroactively enforce a TOS contract not in effect at time of purchase), and eventually changed their business model of "give away the razor, hope they'll buy the blades" to "give away the razor, make the customer sign a contract pledging that they'll purchase some blades".
And even NPLI, whose business model was arguably threatened by geeks buying $500 units for $99, never attempted to sue the IO-hacking community into submission. They just raised the technical bar enough to discourage the EBay scalpers, changed their business model to give them the ability to enforce a TOS, and their business practices to enforce TOS only on customers actually bound by the TOS.
Savvy moves on all three angles.
I've even seen rumors that the next revision of the IO will be "buyable" (as in, "free and clear of TOS") for a certain price. Another cool move. It's quite an attractive form factor.
NPLI ended up acquiring clue. DCNV, we'll have to wait and see.
> Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. Why the hell did you have to remind us?
*giggle*. That old USENET archive brought back some pleasant memories. And besides, seeing ALL the CAPS in the ARTICLE from the CUECAT(tm) guys brought back some LESS PLEASANT memories.
So I figured I'd share the misery.:-) Glad to see I'm not the only one who remembers.
ObUSENET:
"Serdar Argic HOWLING THROUGH THE WIRES tour!"
"Un-ALTERED" (oh, we covered him!)
"PLUTONIUM!" (nuff said!)
> [... ] the "phone home" feature is why they are squawking.
True. And as imp states, the phone-home is at the next level (actually, several levels up:-) in the stack. Application layer versus hardware layer.
Frankly, I don't see how this hack can threaten their business model.
A Linux guy writes a device driver that allows it to scan barcodes and not phone home. BFD.
Something that might bave been a threat to their business model would have been a Linux device driver that did phone home -- to somewhere other than Digital Convergence -- and tried to build a database of customer information for future resale to some other privacy invader.
While it's still possible that someone might code such a thing, who the hell would run it?
(For that matter, how many of us geeks would have run their Windoze software that phoned home to DCNV?;)
Interesting thought - Windoze users are used to getting closed-source binary-only distributions of software, which makes this type of product (the:CueCat that phones home) feasible.
I wonder if DCNV will release source code to the Linux version of their client.
I wonder - if they do - who among us will compile and run it?
Maybe we don't want our computers phoning home.
Broader question: In a world in which there exist open sourced apps which don't phone home and which can be inspected at the source code level to verify that they can't phone home, why would anyone choose to run an app that couldn't be trusted?
The "Give away the razor, sell the blades" model isn't in jeopardy. Despite their management team's abysmal English skills, DCNV has an interesting product and viable strategy for compiling large databases of consumer preferences.
What might be in jeopardy, two or three years down the road, is the whole "hide functionality from the user and collect data surreptitiously" business model espoused by everyone from MSFT (think.NET) and Doublefsck on down to DCNV.
Trying to sue every species of penguin into extinction is gonna be a much bigger different kettle of herring than a cat-shaped barcode reader and some flying butt monkeys...
I happen to think Sovereign Individual was pretty cool. But I'm one of them eeeevul cyberselfish libertarian types.
But Katz? I was expecting a massive flame of Biblical proportions - and yet Katz is "interested". Katz is probably the exact opposite, ideologically, of Rees-Mogg and what-not. I'm stunned that Katz didn't use the word "corporatism" or "globalism" once! These guys make the most slavering Randroid look like a shiny-happy hippychick.
So many CAPITAL LETTERS whenever he's REALLY CONCERNED that you DON'T GET HIS POINT. The guy reads like Robert McElwaine. You know, "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED."
Well, ACTUALLY, in this CASE, this guy's DIS-couraging it, but MY BASIC POINT is the SAME!
Abysmal English skills. This guy's a CEO?
"reversed engineered"?
"intellectually property"?
"we loose any remedies"?
"the Linux Community could of inadvertently" Could OF?
This in just two paragraphs. Jesus H. Christ, I've seen kids in grade school with better English skills. Call FuckedCompany now!
Finally, and most seriously, a complete failure to grasp the concept of IP. Nowhere in his rambling spiel does he actually articulate to what "property" he makes claims of ownership.
"if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP"
No, you dipsticks, that's trademark law. If I create something called the CueCat (without the dippy colon in front of the "C"), and it's a plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy, and he doesn't sue me, he stands to lose the right to use the word ":CueCat" to describe his plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy.
The rest of the screed is more of the same. Incoherent rants about how a geek with a few lines of Perl is a dire threat to their entire business model and a furtherance of the Micros~1 monopoly. Yeah, and flying monkeys might come out of my butt. (Oh, wait a minute... that's what started this!)
Netpliance (with the I-Opener and the resulting arms race of BIOS upgrades and anti-hack measures they wasted time with) missed the clue train, but at least can claim they faced a genuine threat. And even they didn't try to sue anyone.
But these guys, good Lord, they haven't just missed the Cluetrain, they aren't even at the friggin' station!
In closing, I'm pretty sure think there's more than one reason the "threatening letter" was merely a vaguely-threatening letter and not a real cease-and-desist.
1) As flamed ad infinitum on/. last week, any case against the developers of:CueCat(tm)-related hacks is likely to be extremely weak.
2) If Digital Convergence doesn't even have proofreaders, what the fuck are they using for corporate counsel?
3) And on that corporate counsel, if they do have corporate counsel, could one of them kindly bitchslap their management team and explain the difference between trademark law and "whatever the ring-tailed rambling fuck" (that's waht I'm calling it, because they've utterly failed to explain it - again) they're trying to use as grounds to sue an open-source developer with a funny domain name?
>"And of course HTML emails" [... clever, but not new, why the big MSFT-is-evil hype? ]
This reminds me of a.sig I've loved since the day I saw it:
"The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a
hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his
computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."
- Paul Tomblin, in the Monastery
If I wanted a web browser to view something, I'd use a web browser. If I wanted a word processor, I'd use... well, actually, I'd use anything but Word. But you get the idea.
Why the big "MSFT is evil" hype?
Because it's yet another case of MSFT assuming that the entire world is a Microsoft Orifice shop, and that the entire WWW is limited to your corporate intranet.
Look at the past few years of MSFT's design decisions - they all make sense when you realize that the only use MSFT has for TCP/IP is to share and link data from one Office LAN user to another LAN user, security and privacy issues - as always at MSFT - are an afterthought.
The M$Orifice luser in the cube farm is the only user who(se manager) pays for the product; as a necessary consequence of this, most MSFT design decisions are made with this usage profile in mind (another good example, "zones" of security in IE). When every host can be assumed to be on the corporate LAN (of course, www.microsoft.com is considered part of this LAN - Windows Update being another good example) and is considered "trusted", much of what MSFT does makes much more sense.
It's just as wrong, of course - I'm just saying that it makes sense if you view it from their (rather myopic) perspective.
> As much as we may support 2600, they have very little support outside our community, I'm
> afraid. Imagine how quickly the tide could turn against MPAA if they tried to push around Yahoo! or AOL.
That's precisely the problem, though.
MPAA will sue whom it pleases, when it pleases. The Yahoos and Googles and AOLs don't have to worry; MPAA won't bother suing them. MPAA's goal is to put the fear of God into the little guys. Us. The ones nobody cares enough about to defend. When they've chilled reverse-engineering for the sake of interoperability (even though explicitly permitted by DMCA) out of the public eye, they'll have won. The search engines can only index what gets developed and released.
Of course, they'll never do it - the next DeCSS-type application will be released anonymously, through real anonymous channels, as opposed to pseudonymous channels. A post on USENET via an anonymizing remailer through a poorly-configged NNTP server that doesn't include NNTP-Posting-Host: for instance.
Sigh. Didn't we go through this in way the hell back 1995 with alt.religion.scientology and the internal cult docs that wound up mirrored around the world?
It seems the only difference between then and now is that we're up against the part of the movie industry that isn't run by the Cult.
(Although MPAA is just as clueless about how the 'net works as the Cult was, they seem to be somewhat more adaptable, albeit far less entertaining.;-)
I wonder what happens if someone reads DeCSS into the Swedish Parliamentary records. Let's see the MPAA try to take that down! They can arrest a Norwegian, but can they shut down an entire foreign government?
[ jvmatthe, responding to ackthpt's comment to the effect
that MPAA will sue anyone who has ever used
the letters c,d,e & s in any way, shape or form,
wrote..]
> Th_ Unit__ _tat__ wa_ on__ a fr__ _ountry, but not anymor_.
Because I was able to parse and reconstruct jvmatthe's comment, can jvmatthe throw me in jail for circumventing his access control mechanism?
Has anyone looked into the feasibility of turning a:CueCat into a receiver for an IR keyboard?
It looks like it's just a matter of hacking a PIC and putting it between the:CueCat's receiver and the output lines for keyboard clock and data.
Anyone got timing diagrams for a PS/2 keyboard (and/or something like a Sejin 8630 as a generic example of an IR keyboard)
IR frequency is 38.4 KHz / 56 KHz depending on model.
Yeah, I think the Betamax standard should apply here too. But let's assume it doesn't - and that the relevant precedent is the "swap meet" (Fonovisa) case cited here:
Well, it'd suck to be Napster, as Napster's getting a commercial benefit (in terms of banner impressions and a database of requested downloads for marketing resale purposes) in exchange for running a "flea market" at which infringing materials are traded.
But what if the next Napster to be sued wasn't making a red cent off it? What if the "flea market" RIAA's trying to sue is being run by no one, and makes no money? What if there were no central server maintainers to sue?
What if there was no financial benefit to be had by anyone? IANAL, but would this not blow a WW-II-mine-sized hole in the Kursk of RIAA's "Napster Bad 'cuz Napster do contributory and vicarious infringement!" argument?
Wouldn't Patel's decision to apply the Fonivsa standard (as opposed to the Betamax standard), while nuking Napster, be a colossal foot-bullet for RIAA and MPAA, on the grounds that it might legitimize non-commercial file-sharing applications like Gnutella and Freenet?
The injuction only enjoined 2600 from linking to the DeCSS code.
Presumably, CNN and Time-Warner are free to link to it as they see fit.
If I couldn't tell my ass from my head, I'd say that 2600 got sued because they didn't believe in copyright law, and Eric's mother dressed him funny (two facts which have about the same relevance to the case, except for the fact that since I can't tell my head from my ass, I can choose ignore the sworn testimony of the defendants to the contrary)... and that CNN/Time-Warner shouldn't be sued because, after all, they're respectable law-abiding organizations that promulgate goodthought.
As others have pointed out, this is a first amendment case - if linking to source code is legally actionable under DMCA, we're all suffering from a chilling effect, because it's reasonable to assume that MPAA is much more likely to sue "one of us" than it is CNN/Time-Warner.
This is also an antitrust case - going offtopic for a moment: since CSS does (as a matter of simple fact) not prevent DVDs from being pirated (the encrypted streams can be copied with suitable equipment), about the only function it serves is to protect a licensing cartel between MPAA and the hardware manufacturers. DeCSS isn't required for DVD piracy. Indeed, the only thing DeCSS does is allow an end user to decrypt and play back the encrypted video stream on hardware not licensed by the aforementioned MPAA/hardware-manufacturer cartel.
> Is [Kaplan] therefore saying that our use of computers to generate capital is
> more important than our use of computers for the free exchange of information?
Yes, he is.
The most depressing thing about the state of IP law and those who practise it is that they utterly fail to grok the fact that it's precisely the use of computers for the free exchange of information that's led to the generation of so much capital over the past 20 years.
With real freedom to innovate, you get real freedom and real innovation. With Freedom To Innovate(tm), you get DIVX(tm) and SDMI(tm).
> > 2600 simply removed the links to copies of
> > DeCSS. But they left the non-HTML versions of the
> > addresses intact, so visitors can simply copy and paste
> > them into a browser window.
>
> Now I'm two clicks away from DeCSS, damn!
Wait a minute.
Corley took down the links to DeCSS, but left the text versions intact. Fair enough.
But for Wired to tell someone how to cut-and-paste the text versions of the URLs into a browser window, why, that's like giving a map to the guy who's driving the burglar to your back door, and Wired should be sued into oblivion for it!
And you, you, you bastard, you had the gall not only to steal Wired's intellectual property (in the old days before DMCA, we called it "quoting from an article), why, that's like making a photocopy of a map that someone gives to the guy who's driving the burglar to your back door! And you even said that it was a matter of two mouse clicks (well, three if I had to read your post first!) to get to it! You thief! Murderer! Copyright Terrorist!
So now there's these guys in black suits telling me that for making my photocopy of your photocopy of the map that...
...oh wait, this isn't a map to just anyone's back door. It's a map to Judge Kaplan's back door. Hey, here's his head! How'd that get stuck up there?
> What kind of damages would they have to pay and to whom?
That's the part that frightens me.
Y'know how your phone bill has lots of "charges" from the FCC? When the FCC charges the phone companies a few gazillion for Al Gore's latest "wire up the poor" tax^H^H^Hinitiative, the phone companies pass it on to us, washing their hands of it with the line "well, we have to charge you, the consumer, in order to recoup the lost revenue from the FCC's decision".
Just imagine RIAA's response to losing the class action suit. "What? We owe the gummint $500M? Damn, we'd better slap an 'FTC-mandated $2.49 MAP-restitution fee' onto every CD we sell!"
Yeah, I know, I'm just being paranoid and talking off the top of my head.
But if I were a slug^H^H^H^HRIAA executive, and lost the case, it's what I'd do. (And yeah, apologies to all the slugs I just insulted.)
Maybe with Napster down, the end users will have to learn how to point their Napster clients to other servers that do the same job as Napster's centralized server. Or better yet, drop the closed-source and centralized-server approach of Napster altogether and get into Gnutella, FreeNet, and what-not.
Really, who really needs Napster when they've practically admitted that their goal is to get into "selling content" and tracking users' search queries. It's easy to use, but is it necessarily better from a privacy perspective?
And if it's just MP3s they're after, with proper choice of provider, there's a hell of a lot better quality cycling through the servers listening to port 119 anyways.
And unlike any of the peer-to-peer networks, where you have to trust the machine from which you leech, what you suck down through port 119 is strictly between you and your ISP.
(Of course, what you upload, whether through port 119 or any other service, is always traceable back to you. But since your garden-variety Napster user is more interested in downloading, this isn't really a factor.)
Shutting down Napster is gonna help people share files, not hinder them.
The harder RIAA tries to fight, the more I can't help but think that Pandora must have looked really stupid trying to close that damn box.
brokeninside: I agree it'll be interesting, and I think you're dead on about how the first mutants will be Hollywood beauty drones.
I figure that's evolution in action. As you also suggest, it'll be several generations before people start asking for well-rounded sproggen as opposed to critters engineered for one physical/personality trait at the expense of all others.
The other alternative, namely overspecialization, isn't that bad either, though. Suppose we do fork the code:
The Hollywood crowd can create ageless bimbos and hunks that hit puberty at 8, look beautiful for 40 years, pop out a dozen sprog, and then keel over dead.
The extropians can create spindly things that eat like fieldmice, hit puberty at age 30, and live to 200 years old. The extropians won't need to reproduce conventionally 'cuz they'll all be on starships bound for Alpha Centauri, and then they'll break out the sperm tanks and breed hardier things suitable for farming a new world.
The geeks can produce hypercephalic brains suitable for man/machine interfaces... the brainiacs won't need to look cool because they'll reproduce asexually among their own kind.
It's not like these classes of people would be interbreeding anyways. Even in the year 2000, lack of shared interest tends to keep people from widely-differing value systems apart pretty effectively.
Don't get me wrong here -- overspecialization does come with liabilities, but sometimes you want the benefit, even at the cost of the health liability. I really like your dog analogy. (Mutts are great!)
I'll make one more controversial point... I think one of the best things about this technology is that it's gonna be expensive at first. This keeps it out of the hands of the average Joes and Jills (and for another 2-3 generations, the average N'kumbas:) and ensures that the present genetic diversity of homo sapiens remains in full flower while the rich, the early-adopters, and the just-plain-stupid deal with the inevitable results of the beta testing. If the beta programme sucks, there are still gonna be a lot of unmodded humans available to point and laugh.
By the time the technology's widely available, I suspect everyone on the planet will have had ample opportunity to decide for themselves whether they want to be part of one of the many codeline forks and optimize for a chosen subspecies/specialization, or if they wanna remain unmodified generalists.
And if most of the codeline forks turn out to be nonviable - evolution hasn't gone anywhere. The healthiest dogs are the mutts... and we all know the mutt is the easiest kind of dog to breed;-)
Hnice: Very well-put. I'm throwing my two cents' worth in here:
From Katz' article: > Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world > with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Katz, I just can't let this one pass without comment. Your faith in "democracy" frightens the hell out of me.
This isn't something that anyone should "vote on" - at least not at the ballot box. No politician should be granted the power to tell us what to do with this technology. This isn't about "corporatism" vs. "JonKatzism", it's about self-determination.
And as long as we can keep the lawmakers' hands off our bodies, we'll ALL get to vote on this -- with our genes.
Choose 'em good, they propagate. Choose 'em bad, they don't. Evolution's the ultimate self-regulating system. So the first century of widespread human genetic tinkering will be littered with failures. SO WHAT?
All this talk fundamentally boils down to an increase in the mutation rate, combined with a possible increase in the ratio of beneficial (== more-likely-to-propagate, like bigger brains, breasts, and buns) mutations to harmful (== less-likely-to-propagate, like $DISEASE_FOO) mutations.
The system has functioned for three billion years in the face of more abrupt changes. It's sufficiently robust to handle this. If we screw up, our descendants look back at our mutants and laugh at our naivete. If we pull it off, what comes out 1,000 years down the road may not even be recognizable as human. But if it's rad-hardened, can breathe methane as well as oxygen, and has an IQ of 300, is that really such a bad thing?
The problem is that there are states in which, if you don't have consent to record the call, it's illegal to record it. In these states, whether you attempted to obtain consent or not is likely irrelevant, even if the caller is a machine:(
This gets into the other problem, of course. At least with spammers you can trace headers and nail 'em with their originating ISP. With phonespammers, they generally block their numbers, and the phone companies won't let you find out who they are without a hell of a fight. So finding out whom to charge is damn near impossible, even in the case of egregious violators like the piece of human shit that called me from AT&T - for the third time after I'd explicitly said "Place this number on your do not call list" - and who refused to give me his name (and who hung up immediately!) when I informed him of his violation of TCPA.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, all the strong crypto in the DATA segment of the SMTP transaction isn't gonna save you if an FBI agent decides he wants to forge a "From: kiddypr0narchive@fbi.gov" in an email to you. For mail to truly be secure, it's clear that we now need to encrypt all headers in the SMTP and/or POP transactions.
Likewise, for safe browsing, SSL on the content of the pages isn't enough; all the metadata in the HTTP GET requests have to be encrypted too.
Traffic analysis makes sense; it's machine-readable data, machine-parsable, and very easy to inject into a database for profiling purposes. Scanning a database for all From: addresses associated with To: fields of osama_bin_laden@secretterroristcamp.iq, or IP addresses associated with Referrer-ID: fields matching the regexp *janetreno*goat*pr0n* is a lot easier than actually trying to examine a terabyte of .JPGs.
We've seen it in the public domain with the "auto-sue" programs used against Napster users.
We're seeing the gummint getting into the act with Carnivore. Whaddyawannabet that 5 years from now, when Jaz and ZIP drives are no longer available, the "physical evidence" ceases to be a piddly 120M disk (which can probably only hold the sniffed headers from a handful of users before it has to be swapped for another disc) and becomes a 200G hard drive (which can hold everyone's traffic for a few days)? Hell, the cost of the "removable hard drive Carnivore" isn't much more than the ZIP drive one today.
At what point will we redesign our basic communications protocols to be snoop-resistant?
Hogwash. An Aussie friend of mine claims it's the continued stench emitting from the pile of foetid dingoes' kidneys that's responsible for the increase in internet use in Australia.
And I claim it's the fact that I ate kippers last Tuesday that's led to the increase in internet use in Australia.
Just because it happened after a stupid law passed, doesn't mean it happened because the stupid law passed. It's a sad commentary on the state of public education in any Western "democracy" that its politicians can pass off the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy as truth and get away with it.
> But in the Information Age, governments chosen by the majority are governments chosen by losers.
Since Mr. Angell isn't here to speak on his own behalf, I'll paraphrase him from a documentary I once saw on his work:
He's not a techno-libertarian, he's an economist. While the future he portrays in his writings has an obvious direct appeal to the hardcore technolibertarian segment, his opinions of the morality of such a society are neutral.
If he were here (and I think he'd make a great slashdot interviewee someday, and I hereby apologize for putting words in his mouth), I think he'd say something like "I'm not a moralist - whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is not for me to judge. But whether for good or ill, this is what I think the future holds."
The fact that people (such as myself, and presumably such as Snocone) read his writings and think "Wow, cool! The future's gonna be hardass, but at least we're in the lucky small percentage of the population that has a chance at surviving it!" is a reflection of Angell's readers, not on Angell's politics themselves.
Indeed, the thing I like most about reading Angell is that he keeps his personal opinions about the morality of the future to himself; it's up to the reader to decide whether this is:
- Good, and something in which you want to actively participate and help bring about.
- Evil, but inevitable, so you'll swallow your pride for the shiny toyz that come with being part of Dogbert's New Ruling Class (TINDNRC
:)
- Good, but worth opposing because it benefits the few at the expense of many.
- Evil, and worth opposing tooth-and-nail on the same grounds.
It's a matter of considerable philosophical debate whether the middle two items on that list are self-contradictory.I don't know anyone who would argue in favor of the third item on the list ("Good, but worth opposing on moral grounds!"), but I know many who would argue for the second ("Evil, but wotthehell, bring it on!").
I posit that both of these positions are contradictory. The third is more obviously loony than the second - if you believe the needs of the many are greater than the needs of the few/one, how can you say it's "Good"? But the second is no less self-contradictory; it just presumes that the needs of the few/one ought to be subservient to the needs of the many, rather than the other way around.
I say pick one baseline for Goodness or Evilness and stick with it. If your choice makes you "altruistic", or "cyberselfish", so be it. (But then, I have a value system that considers logical inconsistency to be more "evil" than selfishness, so what else would I say? :-)
Angell's money (and Rees-Mogg's, and mine, for what little all three of us are worth in the grand scheme of things) is bet on the selfish side of the battle. Where you put your money - and more importantly, your actions - is up to you.
s/made/attempted to make/g
The most recent models of IO require a little more work, but they're even easier to upgrade than the earlier ones. Folks are also upgrading the stock CPU with beefier models.
Interestingly enough, NPLI finally got a clue and stopped trying to attack the hacker community with shady business techniques (e.g., trying to retroactively enforce a TOS contract not in effect at time of purchase), and eventually changed their business model of "give away the razor, hope they'll buy the blades" to "give away the razor, make the customer sign a contract pledging that they'll purchase some blades".
And even NPLI, whose business model was arguably threatened by geeks buying $500 units for $99, never attempted to sue the IO-hacking community into submission. They just raised the technical bar enough to discourage the EBay scalpers, changed their business model to give them the ability to enforce a TOS, and their business practices to enforce TOS only on customers actually bound by the TOS.
Savvy moves on all three angles. I've even seen rumors that the next revision of the IO will be "buyable" (as in, "free and clear of TOS") for a certain price. Another cool move. It's quite an attractive form factor.
NPLI ended up acquiring clue. DCNV, we'll have to wait and see.
*giggle*. That old USENET archive brought back some pleasant memories. And besides, seeing ALL the CAPS in the ARTICLE from the CUECAT(tm) guys brought back some LESS PLEASANT memories.
So I figured I'd share the misery. :-) Glad to see I'm not the only one who remembers.
ObUSENET:
"Serdar Argic HOWLING THROUGH THE WIRES tour!"
"Un-ALTERED" (oh, we covered him!)
"PLUTONIUM!" (nuff said!)
> Probably some guy who starts his memos with "IANAL..."
Or maybe McElwaine himself :)
True. And as imp states, the phone-home is at the next level (actually, several levels up :-) in the stack. Application layer versus hardware layer.
Frankly, I don't see how this hack can threaten their business model.
A Linux guy writes a device driver that allows it to scan barcodes and not phone home. BFD.
Something that might bave been a threat to their business model would have been a Linux device driver that did phone home -- to somewhere other than Digital Convergence -- and tried to build a database of customer information for future resale to some other privacy invader.
While it's still possible that someone might code such a thing, who the hell would run it?
(For that matter, how many of us geeks would have run their Windoze software that phoned home to DCNV? ;)
Interesting thought - Windoze users are used to getting closed-source binary-only distributions of software, which makes this type of product (the :CueCat that phones home) feasible.
I wonder if DCNV will release source code to the Linux version of their client.
I wonder - if they do - who among us will compile and run it?
Maybe we don't want our computers phoning home.
Broader question: In a world in which there exist open sourced apps which don't phone home and which can be inspected at the source code level to verify that they can't phone home, why would anyone choose to run an app that couldn't be trusted?
The "Give away the razor, sell the blades" model isn't in jeopardy. Despite their management team's abysmal English skills, DCNV has an interesting product and viable strategy for compiling large databases of consumer preferences.
What might be in jeopardy, two or three years down the road, is the whole "hide functionality from the user and collect data surreptitiously" business model espoused by everyone from MSFT (think .NET) and Doublefsck on down to DCNV.
Trying to sue every species of penguin into extinction is gonna be a much bigger different kettle of herring than a cat-shaped barcode reader and some flying butt monkeys...
I happen to think Sovereign Individual was pretty cool. But I'm one of them eeeevul cyberselfish libertarian types.
But Katz? I was expecting a massive flame of Biblical proportions - and yet Katz is "interested". Katz is probably the exact opposite, ideologically, of Rees-Mogg and what-not. I'm stunned that Katz didn't use the word "corporatism" or "globalism" once! These guys make the most slavering Randroid look like a shiny-happy hippychick.
Hey kids, if you liked Sovereign Individual, you'll love Ian Angell, who argues (quite convincingly) that The signs are clear: the future is inequality.
Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.
OK, let's see here:
- So many CAPITAL LETTERS whenever he's REALLY CONCERNED that you DON'T GET HIS POINT. The guy reads like Robert McElwaine. You know, "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED."
Well, ACTUALLY, in this CASE, this guy's DIS-couraging it, but MY BASIC POINT is the SAME!-
Abysmal English skills. This guy's a CEO?
Finally, and most seriously, a complete failure to grasp the concept of IP. Nowhere in his rambling spiel does he actually articulate to what "property" he makes claims of ownership.- "reversed engineered"?
- "intellectually property"?
- "we loose any remedies"?
- "the Linux Community could of inadvertently" Could OF?
This in just two paragraphs. Jesus H. Christ, I've seen kids in grade school with better English skills. Call FuckedCompany now!- "if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP"
The rest of the screed is more of the same. Incoherent rants about how a geek with a few lines of Perl is a dire threat to their entire business model and a furtherance of the Micros~1 monopoly. Yeah, and flying monkeys might come out of my butt. (Oh, wait a minute... that's what started this!)No, you dipsticks, that's trademark law. If I create something called the CueCat (without the dippy colon in front of the "C"), and it's a plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy, and he doesn't sue me, he stands to lose the right to use the word ":CueCat" to describe his plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy.
Netpliance (with the I-Opener and the resulting arms race of BIOS upgrades and anti-hack measures they wasted time with) missed the clue train, but at least can claim they faced a genuine threat. And even they didn't try to sue anyone.
But these guys, good Lord, they haven't just missed the Cluetrain, they aren't even at the friggin' station!
In closing, I'm pretty sure think there's more than one reason the "threatening letter" was merely a vaguely-threatening letter and not a real cease-and-desist.
1) As flamed ad infinitum on /. last week, any case against the developers of :CueCat(tm)-related hacks is likely to be extremely weak.
2) If Digital Convergence doesn't even have proofreaders, what the fuck are they using for corporate counsel?
3) And on that corporate counsel, if they do have corporate counsel, could one of them kindly bitchslap their management team and explain the difference between trademark law and "whatever the ring-tailed rambling fuck" (that's waht I'm calling it, because they've utterly failed to explain it - again) they're trying to use as grounds to sue an open-source developer with a funny domain name?
Old computers. Old video games. These are a few of my favorite things...
This reminds me of a .sig I've loved since the day I saw it:
If I wanted a web browser to view something, I'd use a web browser. If I wanted a word processor, I'd use... well, actually, I'd use anything but Word. But you get the idea.
Why the big "MSFT is evil" hype?
Because it's yet another case of MSFT assuming that the entire world is a Microsoft Orifice shop, and that the entire WWW is limited to your corporate intranet.
Look at the past few years of MSFT's design decisions - they all make sense when you realize that the only use MSFT has for TCP/IP is to share and link data from one Office LAN user to another LAN user, security and privacy issues - as always at MSFT - are an afterthought.
The M$Orifice luser in the cube farm is the only user who(se manager) pays for the product; as a necessary consequence of this, most MSFT design decisions are made with this usage profile in mind (another good example, "zones" of security in IE). When every host can be assumed to be on the corporate LAN (of course, www.microsoft.com is considered part of this LAN - Windows Update being another good example) and is considered "trusted", much of what MSFT does makes much more sense.
It's just as wrong, of course - I'm just saying that it makes sense if you view it from their (rather myopic) perspective.
> afraid. Imagine how quickly the tide could turn against MPAA if they tried to push around Yahoo! or AOL.
That's precisely the problem, though.
MPAA will sue whom it pleases, when it pleases. The Yahoos and Googles and AOLs don't have to worry; MPAA won't bother suing them. MPAA's goal is to put the fear of God into the little guys. Us. The ones nobody cares enough about to defend. When they've chilled reverse-engineering for the sake of interoperability (even though explicitly permitted by DMCA) out of the public eye, they'll have won. The search engines can only index what gets developed and released.
Of course, they'll never do it - the next DeCSS-type application will be released anonymously, through real anonymous channels, as opposed to pseudonymous channels. A post on USENET via an anonymizing remailer through a poorly-configged NNTP server that doesn't include NNTP-Posting-Host: for instance.
Sigh. Didn't we go through this in way the hell back 1995 with alt.religion.scientology and the internal cult docs that wound up mirrored around the world?
It seems the only difference between then and now is that we're up against the part of the movie industry that isn't run by the Cult. (Although MPAA is just as clueless about how the 'net works as the Cult was, they seem to be somewhat more adaptable, albeit far less entertaining. ;-)
I wonder what happens if someone reads DeCSS into the Swedish Parliamentary records. Let's see the MPAA try to take that down! They can arrest a Norwegian, but can they shut down an entire foreign government?
> Th_ Unit__ _tat__ wa_ on__ a fr__ _ountry, but not anymor_.
Because I was able to parse and reconstruct jvmatthe's comment, can jvmatthe throw me in jail for circumventing his access control mechanism?
It looks like it's just a matter of hacking a PIC and putting it between the :CueCat's receiver and the output lines for keyboard clock and data.
Anyone got timing diagrams for a PS/2 keyboard (and/or something like a Sejin 8630 as a generic example of an IR keyboard) IR frequency is 38.4 KHz / 56 KHz depending on model.
Yeah, I think the Betamax standard should apply here too. But let's assume it doesn't - and that the relevant precedent is the "swap meet" (Fonovisa) case cited here:
Of flea markets and file swapping
What would this mean?
Well, it'd suck to be Napster, as Napster's getting a commercial benefit (in terms of banner impressions and a database of requested downloads for marketing resale purposes) in exchange for running a "flea market" at which infringing materials are traded.
But what if the next Napster to be sued wasn't making a red cent off it? What if the "flea market" RIAA's trying to sue is being run by no one, and makes no money? What if there were no central server maintainers to sue?
What if there was no financial benefit to be had by anyone? IANAL, but would this not blow a WW-II-mine-sized hole in the Kursk of RIAA's "Napster Bad 'cuz Napster do contributory and vicarious infringement!" argument?
Wouldn't Patel's decision to apply the Fonivsa standard (as opposed to the Betamax standard), while nuking Napster, be a colossal foot-bullet for RIAA and MPAA, on the grounds that it might legitimize non-commercial file-sharing applications like Gnutella and Freenet?
And dare I say, USENET and FTP?
Presumably, CNN and Time-Warner are free to link to it as they see fit.
If I couldn't tell my ass from my head, I'd say that 2600 got sued because they didn't believe in copyright law, and Eric's mother dressed him funny (two facts which have about the same relevance to the case, except for the fact that since I can't tell my head from my ass, I can choose ignore the sworn testimony of the defendants to the contrary)... and that CNN/Time-Warner shouldn't be sued because, after all, they're respectable law-abiding organizations that promulgate goodthought.
As others have pointed out, this is a first amendment case - if linking to source code is legally actionable under DMCA, we're all suffering from a chilling effect, because it's reasonable to assume that MPAA is much more likely to sue "one of us" than it is CNN/Time-Warner.
This is also an antitrust case - going offtopic for a moment: since CSS does (as a matter of simple fact) not prevent DVDs from being pirated (the encrypted streams can be copied with suitable equipment), about the only function it serves is to protect a licensing cartel between MPAA and the hardware manufacturers. DeCSS isn't required for DVD piracy. Indeed, the only thing DeCSS does is allow an end user to decrypt and play back the encrypted video stream on hardware not licensed by the aforementioned MPAA/hardware-manufacturer cartel.
> more important than our use of computers for the free exchange of information?
Yes, he is.
The most depressing thing about the state of IP law and those who practise it is that they utterly fail to grok the fact that it's precisely the use of computers for the free exchange of information that's led to the generation of so much capital over the past 20 years.
With real freedom to innovate, you get real freedom and real innovation. With Freedom To Innovate(tm), you get DIVX(tm) and SDMI(tm).
So? From where I sit, I can't tell the difference between Kaplan's head and his ass either.
> > DeCSS. But they left the non-HTML versions of the
> > addresses intact, so visitors can simply copy and paste
> > them into a browser window. >
> Now I'm two clicks away from DeCSS, damn!
Wait a minute.
Corley took down the links to DeCSS, but left the text versions intact. Fair enough.
But for Wired to tell someone how to cut-and-paste the text versions of the URLs into a browser window, why, that's like giving a map to the guy who's driving the burglar to your back door, and Wired should be sued into oblivion for it!
And you, you, you bastard, you had the gall not only to steal Wired's intellectual property (in the old days before DMCA, we called it "quoting from an article), why, that's like making a photocopy of a map that someone gives to the guy who's driving the burglar to your back door! And you even said that it was a matter of two mouse clicks (well, three if I had to read your post first!) to get to it! You thief! Murderer! Copyright Terrorist!
So now there's these guys in black suits telling me that for making my photocopy of your photocopy of the map that...
They've hooked up with VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) and will be putting on a show of classic arcade games in San Jose towards the end of September.
That's the part that frightens me.
Y'know how your phone bill has lots of "charges" from the FCC? When the FCC charges the phone companies a few gazillion for Al Gore's latest "wire up the poor" tax^H^H^Hinitiative, the phone companies pass it on to us, washing their hands of it with the line "well, we have to charge you, the consumer, in order to recoup the lost revenue from the FCC's decision".
Just imagine RIAA's response to losing the class action suit. "What? We owe the gummint $500M? Damn, we'd better slap an 'FTC-mandated $2.49 MAP-restitution fee' onto every CD we sell!"
Yeah, I know, I'm just being paranoid and talking off the top of my head.
But if I were a slug^H^H^H^HRIAA executive, and lost the case, it's what I'd do. (And yeah, apologies to all the slugs I just insulted.)
Maybe with Napster down, the end users will have to learn how to point their Napster clients to other servers that do the same job as Napster's centralized server. Or better yet, drop the closed-source and centralized-server approach of Napster altogether and get into Gnutella, FreeNet, and what-not.
Really, who really needs Napster when they've practically admitted that their goal is to get into "selling content" and tracking users' search queries. It's easy to use, but is it necessarily better from a privacy perspective?
And if it's just MP3s they're after, with proper choice of provider, there's a hell of a lot better quality cycling through the servers listening to port 119 anyways.
And unlike any of the peer-to-peer networks, where you have to trust the machine from which you leech, what you suck down through port 119 is strictly between you and your ISP.
(Of course, what you upload, whether through port 119 or any other service, is always traceable back to you. But since your garden-variety Napster user is more interested in downloading, this isn't really a factor.)
Shutting down Napster is gonna help people share files, not hinder them.
The harder RIAA tries to fight, the more I can't help but think that Pandora must have looked really stupid trying to close that damn box.
I figure that's evolution in action. As you also suggest, it'll be several generations before people start asking for well-rounded sproggen as opposed to critters engineered for one physical/personality trait at the expense of all others.
The other alternative, namely overspecialization, isn't that bad either, though. Suppose we do fork the code:
- The Hollywood crowd can create ageless bimbos and hunks that hit puberty at 8, look beautiful for 40 years, pop out a dozen sprog, and then keel over dead.
- The extropians can create spindly things that eat like fieldmice, hit puberty at age 30, and live to 200 years old. The extropians won't need to reproduce conventionally 'cuz they'll all be on starships bound for Alpha Centauri, and then they'll break out the sperm tanks and breed hardier things suitable for farming a new world.
- The geeks can produce hypercephalic brains suitable for man/machine interfaces... the brainiacs won't need to look cool because they'll reproduce asexually among their own kind.
It's not like these classes of people would be interbreeding anyways. Even in the year 2000, lack of shared interest tends to keep people from widely-differing value systems apart pretty effectively.Don't get me wrong here -- overspecialization does come with liabilities, but sometimes you want the benefit, even at the cost of the health liability. I really like your dog analogy. (Mutts are great!)
I'll make one more controversial point... I think one of the best things about this technology is that it's gonna be expensive at first. This keeps it out of the hands of the average Joes and Jills (and for another 2-3 generations, the average N'kumbas :) and ensures that the present genetic diversity of homo sapiens remains in full flower while the rich, the early-adopters, and the just-plain-stupid deal with the inevitable results of the beta testing. If the beta programme sucks, there are still gonna be a lot of unmodded humans available to point and laugh.
By the time the technology's widely available, I suspect everyone on the planet will have had ample opportunity to decide for themselves whether they want to be part of one of the many codeline forks and optimize for a chosen subspecies/specialization, or if they wanna remain unmodified generalists.
And if most of the codeline forks turn out to be nonviable - evolution hasn't gone anywhere. The healthiest dogs are the mutts... and we all know the mutt is the easiest kind of dog to breed ;-)
From Katz' article:
> Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world
> with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Katz, I just can't let this one pass without comment. Your faith in "democracy" frightens the hell out of me.
This isn't something that anyone should "vote on" - at least not at the ballot box. No politician should be granted the power to tell us what to do with this technology. This isn't about "corporatism" vs. "JonKatzism", it's about self-determination.
And as long as we can keep the lawmakers' hands off our bodies, we'll ALL get to vote on this -- with our genes.
Choose 'em good, they propagate. Choose 'em bad, they don't. Evolution's the ultimate self-regulating system. So the first century of widespread human genetic tinkering will be littered with failures. SO WHAT?
All this talk fundamentally boils down to an increase in the mutation rate, combined with a possible increase in the ratio of beneficial (== more-likely-to-propagate, like bigger brains, breasts, and buns) mutations to harmful (== less-likely-to-propagate, like $DISEASE_FOO) mutations.
The system has functioned for three billion years in the face of more abrupt changes. It's sufficiently robust to handle this. If we screw up, our descendants look back at our mutants and laugh at our naivete. If we pull it off, what comes out 1,000 years down the road may not even be recognizable as human. But if it's rad-hardened, can breathe methane as well as oxygen, and has an IQ of 300, is that really such a bad thing?
This gets into the other problem, of course. At least with spammers you can trace headers and nail 'em with their originating ISP. With phonespammers, they generally block their numbers, and the phone companies won't let you find out who they are without a hell of a fight. So finding out whom to charge is damn near impossible, even in the case of egregious violators like the piece of human shit that called me from AT&T - for the third time after I'd explicitly said "Place this number on your do not call list" - and who refused to give me his name (and who hung up immediately!) when I informed him of his violation of TCPA.