What this is about
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 5, Informative
No-one commenting so far seems to have a clue what this is all about, so here goes.
Imagine someone builds hardware that will only run binaries signed by the manufacturer (current example: X-box, future examples: who knows)
Now imagine someone makes a version of Linux with functionality limited in some way -- think DRM, and gets that version signed by the hardware manufacturer so that it will run on the controlled hardware.
Now, as a user of that version of Linux, you have all your GPL rights to obtain, modify, and redistribute the source. But, since only the exact original signed binary will actually run on the hardware, those rights are (arguably) worthless.
Linus is saying that this is permissible, or at least that it is not his job to try to prevent it.
Thing is, we have good sound physics to explain how various gas mixtures deal with radiated heat, and we have good sound evidence that the amounts of some of the relevant gasses in the atmosphere have grown exponentially as civilization has progressed.
OK, give me the good sound physics. In particular:
What is the wavelength band absorbed by CO2?
What percentage of outgoing radiation in that band is absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere?
How much difference is it possible for more CO2 in the atmosphere to make in total outgoing radiation absorbed?
Computers are dogs.
on
The Virus Did It
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, the day has come at last. I must say I'm surprised, as I've been expecting it for over 5 years.
The point is that the law has to decide how much responsibility a person has for what their computer decides to do.
Up till now, the assumption has been that whatever your computer does, is done at your request, and you are wholly responsible. This despite the fact that that has never been true, and is getting further from the truth every year.
There is no legal tradition to apply here. The nearest analogy to the relationship between a person and his computer is the relationship between a man and his dog.
People have kept dogs for thousands -- most likely tens of thousands -- of years, so everyone has a rough idea what the deal is. The general legal view is that you have a duty to keep your dog from causing harm under forseeable circumstances, but there is a distinction between what your dog does and what you do. If your dog attacks a child, you are not guilty of Grievous Bodily Harm, but you might be guilty of keeping a dangerous dog. If your dog craps on the street, that is different than if you crap on the street, but you might still be fined.
If you are found guilty of not properly controlling a dog, you can be banned from keeping one. If your dog causes harm and is considered not to be controllable, the court can order it to be destroyed.
(If you deliberately cause your dog to kill someone, that is still murder of course, but your intention is crucial)
This is the only rational legal framework for crimes committed by a computer without the intention of its owner.
When will computers that run MS-Windows be ordered to be put down?
The GPL was written for code, and it is very good for code.
If you've ever read interviews with RMS where he has been asked about copyright on things like music and books, he's usually very cagey. He tends to end up saying that there are interesting possibilities and difficult questions, but he's concerned with software, which is his area of expertise.
Software documentation is sort of software, and sort of literature. Writers of literature tend to be concerned about the integrity of their works more than writers of software, who usually expect their work to be enhanced and improved over the years, whether by themselves or by other people.
The GFDL is an attempt to manage the compromise between the freedom of software users to distribute derived works, and the need for literature writers to preserve the integrity of their works.
This compromise, of course is incompatible with the strict DFSG-type rights regarding software, and when a package contains code and documentation, the same requirements are applied to Debian by both.
I feel the answer is for Debian to relax the DFSG as they apply to non-program code. That's not simple to do, however. This is a fairly new problem, as it only comes from trying to make complete working distributions with professional quality documentation under GPL-like conditions, and it's going to take probably a few years to totally work it out.
Like almost all articles on privacy, this glosses over the distinction between data that was never private, but in the old days was not widely accessible, and true privacy.
Your address, your occupation and the approximate value of your house are not private information: lots of people know them.
The contents of your personal diary, your conversations with your SO in your bedroom, and how you voted at the last election are private information: no-one else can get them unless the government forces you to reveal them, someone burgles your house or a trusted person breaches your confidentiality.
We are approaching the point where all non-private data are easily accessible. That has some unfortunate effects (and many fortunate effects), but there's nothing that can be done about it.
There is however no reason why truly private information should become less private. The only cause of this loss of privacy is a growth in the ambition and power of government which has nothing to do with technology and which needs to be fiercely resisted.
"Rewrite" is rhetoric here. He is making large changes to the existing codebase, which he says will involve modifying about 30% of the code. He's not throwing it all away and starting again. Calm down, or RTFA.
What he's talking about is taking advantage of "exotic" filesystems. Currently Samba just assumes it has a plain-old Posix filesystem like ext2 behind it, and does things less efficiently than might be possible
I'm not sure ext3 is a good example, but let's imagine it has a concept of transactions. Samba might be able to take advantage of that to provide a better implementation of CIFS, but to do that it has to know about ext3, more than that it's compatible with Posix.
Other examples: ACLs, case-sensitivity, multiple streams in files (like Macintosh resource forks), stuff like that.
Stability. I've heard of people not having crashes on Windows, but I have to reboot my work PC every few days, and I lose 15 mins waiting for it to come up. I have only ever seen Linux crash once, and that was when I tried to hot-swap an ATAPI DVD drive.
Security. You say you don't care, but if something bad happens, you might suddenly start caring.
Remote Administration. Probably not relevant to you, but an end-user who has access to expert help could gain massively from having their machines remotely administered. True, Windows has remote administration too, but kind of like Linux has games...
Networking. Again, the difference between Linux networking and Windows networking is like the difference between Windows games and Linux games. If you have two or more machines in the house, and you don't have a separate box as an internet gateway / fileserver / printserver etc, you don't know the convenience you're missing.
Price. Don't knock it.
Against those, you have the drawbacks that
You're not using the same as what everyone else is using. This is the biggest problem.
If you're a serious gamer, forget it.
It's going to be more hassle to get set up to start with, compared to buying Windows pre-installed. (not compared to installing Windows yourself)
I don't know: I'm giving you the perspective from a country where "Murdoch" is virtually a synonym for "the media" in the popular mind.
At a guess, and it's no more than that, I'd say it's for the same reason that his Chinese media interests are so pro-government: You can't reach the kind of dominant position he has in Britain without earning the support of some group in the government.
If you wish to disagree further, do you think you could do it politely?
You're missing the point if you think the purpose of News Corp is to advance any political position
Politics comes a distant second to business in News Corporation. In the UK, Murdoch is seen as the very definition of a dangerous monopolist, controlling all satellite TV (which is more popular than cable) as well as several of the most popular newspapers (The Sun, The News of the World, The Times, The Sunday Times). The Murdoch media are generally populist right-wing, but they pretty soon slotted in behind Blair when they saw which way the wind was blowing. They are populist right-wing because it sells, that's all.
This is consistent with my experience working for a small telco in the UK when portability was coming in for non-geographic numbers (0800 etc)
We were strongly in favour of it, as it made it easier for us to take business from competitors, but it was a lot of work -- I was working on the issue for more than 6 months, plus a lot of bedding in afterwards, and that was just the billing and inter-company charging infrastructure. If exchange upgrades are needed, that's a very large delay and expense.
Obviously that's not much excuse for opposing it, and consumers need to keep pushing for it, but it's worth hanging on to a reasonable amount of patience...
Sorry to jump into this discussion late, but the above piece nicely crystallises the central error of the "Global Warming" debate
Your logic is fine, but the following statement is simply wrong
The temperature has risen steadily this century, but that does not mean that it will continue to do so. But it means that we are leaving the equilibrum position that the global climate has been in since the last ice age.
The climate has not been in equilibrium since the last Ice Age, or for that matter at any other time. It was much warmer than it is now a thousand years ago, and a good deal colder than it is now three hundred years ago. We can't say with confidence what the causes of these continuing large fluctuations are, but the most obvious possibilities are solar variations and vulcanism.
My conclusions:
Climate change might occur as a result of natural or man-made processes, and could cause huge damage to our societies.
We need to understand the climate much better than we do.
With that understanding, we may find out how we can affect the climate, to our benefit or our harm.
Trying to change the climate by changing our behaviour now, when we can't explain the causes of the climate changes in recent history, is pointless.
Well put. As another poster has pointed out, this legal action is (fortunately) a non-starter (Sega vs Accolade).
The key difference between your two examples is that in case 1 the owner of the computer which receives the mail is the one who would want to take action, and in case 2 the owner of the printer which recieves the cartridge would not want to take action (since he's the one who chose to insert the cartridge anyway -- or if not he has a valid complaint).
The ideal set-up would use my intellectual property or confidential data to send mail to me, not some remote third party's, so that it would be up to me to decide whether it was actually something I objected to or not
Spam is a small-to-moderate problem. It's big enough to attract attention, but not big enough to justify the sensible solutions.
It's a spin-off of anonymous internet use. The SMTP mail infrastructure allows anyone to anonymously send email to anyone. The solution to spam is to replace the system with a new one that accepts mail only from satisfactorily identifiable people. With that in place, all sorts of mechanisms -- technical, commercial and legal -- can be used against spam. Without it, all measures will be at best ameliorative.
Once the problem gets bad enough -- and it almost certainly will -- these steps will be taken. Very few people need to be able to receive mail from anonymous sources, and they will be able to use other arrangements.
Incidentally, in terms of punishing my inbox, Windows viruses are as big a problem than commercial spam. If all commercial spammers were wiped out, I would still get about 80% as many Kilobytes of unwanted mail as I do now.
Absolutely right. We're all more or less anti-spam, but this is actually a frightening development. The same sort of tricks have been tried before, I believe, for example requiring console game cartridges to print a specific copyright message in order to have them run. I would like to see this lawsuit fail, on the grounds that the spammers are simply "reverse engineering" the interface of the anti-spam tools.
A better mechanism would seek to apply anti-cracking laws rather than IP laws. (I don't know US law, but for example the Computer Misuse Act in the UK outlaws unauthorised access to systems.) If someone could work out the details of a scheme that forced the spammers into breaking that kind of law it would be much healthier than this operation.
The crucial difference is that in this case the purported legal victim is a more-or-less unrelated third party. If unauthorised access laws are being used, then the legal victim is the real victim -- the recipient of the spam, whose systems have been accessed in a manner they do not approve of.
Ah, but if I do not say that my people are objectively more important than other people, that is not the same as saying that objectively they are not more important.
In my opinion, importance has no objective meaning in that sense. People (and things) are important only to other people.
Morality is easier than some things. The hardest question is always "What would happen if I did that?"
The notion that all human lives are equal, and I should care as much for a remote starving child as for my own countryman or even as for my own family, has become widely parroted, largely due to Christianity. However, it is insane.
I am not saying that my people are "better" or objectively more important than foreigners, only that they are more important to me.
It is desirable that people have some respect for all human beings, and ascribe some value to their lives and happiness -- such principles can gain wide acceptance, and make everyone's lives better. But I would not expect any sane American to shrug their shoulders at the WTC and say "worse things happen at sea".
If the US government is going to act to protect it's own intersts, than individuals must act to protect their own.
That's fair enough, of course. I think the question is what sorts of privacy can be practically and usefully defended (see
my other comment
One kind demands the right to prevent information being collected about them, or in milder advocates to restrict collection of information. These people are fighting the same essentially doomed fight as the RIAA etc. The information is available, it has always been available, and the tools now exist to collect and distribute it. It is not going to be practical in the long run to prevent the tools being used. (That is not to say that the tide cannot be slowed in the short term, only eventually).
The other level of privacy is the right to withhold information. Defense of ths privacy is exhibited in objections to compulsory ID cards, compulsory escrowing of encryption keys, and many other areas where the government demands information from individuals.
There is some grey area between the two, where government gets access, with varying or unclear levels of coercion, to information held by third parties about individuals.
The intermediate cases notwithstanding, these are two essentially unrelated struggles. The first one has a hint of Luddism, but the second is an onging battle between authoritarians and small-l libertarians which has been going on for centuries and is not fundamentally altered by any new technologies.
Every problem... has a logical explanation. However, sometimes that explanation eludes us. So we tend to attribute that to "neurosis" or some other "human" issue. I guess it's easier than just admitting that we can't figure the damn thing out.
I wonder if background programs and spyware are the digital equivalent of having voices in one's head?
That's really cool.
Anthropomorphism is dangerous, but it can be useful too, particularly when instructing non-technical users. That one strikes me as quite a good analogy
Note I said instructing. If time and brain cells are available, it is better to educate them, which would involve telling more of the truth, and fewer iffy metaphors.
(If you're not careful, metaphors can jump out and bite you) ducks
In a sense, computers are made up of the same logical building-blocks that they always were. I don't think that's very significant. After all, a computer is made of the same electronics as a 1960's radio, but it's a lot more complex. And this year's computers are more complex than last year's (or last decade's). And their behaviour is more complex. And their modes of failure are more complex.
Slashdot Mirror
No-one commenting so far seems to have a clue what this is all about, so here goes.
Imagine someone builds hardware that will only run binaries signed by the manufacturer (current example: X-box, future examples: who knows)
Now imagine someone makes a version of Linux with functionality limited in some way -- think DRM, and gets that version signed by the hardware manufacturer so that it will run on the controlled hardware.
Now, as a user of that version of Linux, you have all your GPL rights to obtain, modify, and redistribute the source. But, since only the exact original signed binary will actually run on the hardware, those rights are (arguably) worthless.
Linus is saying that this is permissible, or at least that it is not his job to try to prevent it.
Now at least the flames can be on-topic...
Thing is, we have good sound physics to explain how various gas mixtures deal with radiated heat, and we have good sound evidence that the amounts of some of the relevant gasses in the atmosphere have grown exponentially as civilization has progressed.
OK, give me the good sound physics. In particular:
So, the day has come at last. I must say I'm surprised, as I've been expecting it for over 5 years.
The point is that the law has to decide how much responsibility a person has for what their computer decides to do.
Up till now, the assumption has been that whatever your computer does, is done at your request, and you are wholly responsible. This despite the fact that that has never been true, and is getting further from the truth every year.
There is no legal tradition to apply here. The nearest analogy to the relationship between a person and his computer is the relationship between a man and his dog.
People have kept dogs for thousands -- most likely tens of thousands -- of years, so everyone has a rough idea what the deal is. The general legal view is that you have a duty to keep your dog from causing harm under forseeable circumstances, but there is a distinction between what your dog does and what you do. If your dog attacks a child, you are not guilty of Grievous Bodily Harm, but you might be guilty of keeping a dangerous dog. If your dog craps on the street, that is different than if you crap on the street, but you might still be fined.
If you are found guilty of not properly controlling a dog, you can be banned from keeping one. If your dog causes harm and is considered not to be controllable, the court can order it to be destroyed.
(If you deliberately cause your dog to kill someone, that is still murder of course, but your intention is crucial)
This is the only rational legal framework for crimes committed by a computer without the intention of its owner.
When will computers that run MS-Windows be ordered to be put down?
The GPL was written for code, and it is very good for code.
If you've ever read interviews with RMS where he has been asked about copyright on things like music and books, he's usually very cagey. He tends to end up saying that there are interesting possibilities and difficult questions, but he's concerned with software, which is his area of expertise.
Software documentation is sort of software, and sort of literature. Writers of literature tend to be concerned about the integrity of their works more than writers of software, who usually expect their work to be enhanced and improved over the years, whether by themselves or by other people.
The GFDL is an attempt to manage the compromise between the freedom of software users to distribute derived works, and the need for literature writers to preserve the integrity of their works.
This compromise, of course is incompatible with the strict DFSG-type rights regarding software, and when a package contains code and documentation, the same requirements are applied to Debian by both.
I feel the answer is for Debian to relax the DFSG as they apply to non-program code. That's not simple to do, however. This is a fairly new problem, as it only comes from trying to make complete working distributions with professional quality documentation under GPL-like conditions, and it's going to take probably a few years to totally work it out.
I don't think anyone involved in this is insane.
Like almost all articles on privacy, this glosses over the distinction between data that was never private, but in the old days was not widely accessible, and true privacy.
Your address, your occupation and the approximate value of your house are not private information: lots of people know them.
The contents of your personal diary, your conversations with your SO in your bedroom, and how you voted at the last election are private information: no-one else can get them unless the government forces you to reveal them, someone burgles your house or a trusted person breaches your confidentiality.
We are approaching the point where all non-private data are easily accessible. That has some unfortunate effects (and many fortunate effects), but there's nothing that can be done about it.
There is however no reason why truly private information should become less private. The only cause of this loss of privacy is a growth in the ambition and power of government which has nothing to do with technology and which needs to be fiercely resisted.
There's more to information than facts you can use to answer multiple-choice questions.
"Rewrite" is rhetoric here. He is making large changes to the existing codebase, which he says will involve modifying about 30% of the code. He's not throwing it all away and starting again. Calm down, or RTFA.
What he's talking about is taking advantage of "exotic" filesystems. Currently Samba just assumes it has a plain-old Posix filesystem like ext2 behind it, and does things less efficiently than might be possible
I'm not sure ext3 is a good example, but let's imagine it has a concept of transactions. Samba might be able to take advantage of that to provide a better implementation of CIFS, but to do that it has to know about ext3, more than that it's compatible with Posix.
Other examples: ACLs, case-sensitivity, multiple streams in files (like Macintosh resource forks), stuff like that.
You're Alan Partridge, and you work in TV
I think you mean you used to work in TV
And even The Day Today's brilliant graphic effects weren't that advanced from a hardware standpoint...
A Snow Crash reference, methinks.
a thick rubber ring, often filled with air, which is fitted around the outer edge of the wheel of a vehicle, allowing the vehicle to stick to the road surface and to travel over the ground more easily
Good question.
The advantages Linux has for a desktop user:
Against those, you have the drawbacks that
I don't know: I'm giving you the perspective from a country where "Murdoch" is virtually a synonym for "the media" in the popular mind.
At a guess, and it's no more than that, I'd say it's for the same reason that his Chinese media interests are so pro-government: You can't reach the kind of dominant position he has in Britain without earning the support of some group in the government.
If you wish to disagree further, do you think you could do it politely?
You're missing the point if you think the purpose of News Corp is to advance any political position
Politics comes a distant second to business in News Corporation. In the UK, Murdoch is seen as the very definition of a dangerous monopolist, controlling all satellite TV (which is more popular than cable) as well as several of the most popular newspapers (The Sun, The News of the World, The Times, The Sunday Times). The Murdoch media are generally populist right-wing, but they pretty soon slotted in behind Blair when they saw which way the wind was blowing. They are populist right-wing because it sells, that's all.
This is consistent with my experience working for a small telco in the UK when portability was coming in for non-geographic numbers (0800 etc)
We were strongly in favour of it, as it made it easier for us to take business from competitors, but it was a lot of work -- I was working on the issue for more than 6 months, plus a lot of bedding in afterwards, and that was just the billing and inter-company charging infrastructure. If exchange upgrades are needed, that's a very large delay and expense.
Obviously that's not much excuse for opposing it, and consumers need to keep pushing for it, but it's worth hanging on to a reasonable amount of patience...
Sorry to jump into this discussion late, but the above piece nicely crystallises the central error of the "Global Warming" debate
Your logic is fine, but the following statement is simply wrong
The temperature has risen steadily this century, but that does not mean that it will continue to do so. But it means that we are leaving the equilibrum position that the global climate has been in since the last ice age.
The climate has not been in equilibrium since the last Ice Age, or for that matter at any other time. It was much warmer than it is now a thousand years ago, and a good deal colder than it is now three hundred years ago. We can't say with confidence what the causes of these continuing large fluctuations are, but the most obvious possibilities are solar variations and vulcanism.
My conclusions:
Well put. As another poster has pointed out, this legal action is (fortunately) a non-starter (Sega vs Accolade).
The key difference between your two examples is that in case 1 the owner of the computer which receives the mail is the one who would want to take action, and in case 2 the owner of the printer which recieves the cartridge would not want to take action (since he's the one who chose to insert the cartridge anyway -- or if not he has a valid complaint).
The ideal set-up would use my intellectual property or confidential data to send mail to me, not some remote third party's, so that it would be up to me to decide whether it was actually something I objected to or not
Spam is a small-to-moderate problem. It's big enough to attract attention, but not big enough to justify the sensible solutions.
It's a spin-off of anonymous internet use. The SMTP mail infrastructure allows anyone to anonymously send email to anyone. The solution to spam is to replace the system with a new one that accepts mail only from satisfactorily identifiable people. With that in place, all sorts of mechanisms -- technical, commercial and legal -- can be used against spam. Without it, all measures will be at best ameliorative.
Once the problem gets bad enough -- and it almost certainly will -- these steps will be taken. Very few people need to be able to receive mail from anonymous sources, and they will be able to use other arrangements.
Incidentally, in terms of punishing my inbox, Windows viruses are as big a problem than commercial spam. If all commercial spammers were wiped out, I would still get about 80% as many Kilobytes of unwanted mail as I do now.
Absolutely right. We're all more or less anti-spam, but this is actually a frightening development. The same sort of tricks have been tried before, I believe, for example requiring console game cartridges to print a specific copyright message in order to have them run. I would like to see this lawsuit fail, on the grounds that the spammers are simply "reverse engineering" the interface of the anti-spam tools.
A better mechanism would seek to apply anti-cracking laws rather than IP laws. (I don't know US law, but for example the Computer Misuse Act in the UK outlaws unauthorised access to systems.) If someone could work out the details of a scheme that forced the spammers into breaking that kind of law it would be much healthier than this operation.
The crucial difference is that in this case the purported legal victim is a more-or-less unrelated third party. If unauthorised access laws are being used, then the legal victim is the real victim -- the recipient of the spam, whose systems have been accessed in a manner they do not approve of.
Ah, but if I do not say that my people are objectively more important than other people, that is not the same as saying that objectively they are not more important.
In my opinion, importance has no objective meaning in that sense. People (and things) are important only to other people.
Morality is easier than some things. The hardest question is always "What would happen if I did that?"
The notion that all human lives are equal, and I should care as much for a remote starving child as for my own countryman or even as for my own family, has become widely parroted, largely due to Christianity. However, it is insane.
I am not saying that my people are "better" or objectively more important than foreigners, only that they are more important to me.
It is desirable that people have some respect for all human beings, and ascribe some value to their lives and happiness -- such principles can gain wide acceptance, and make everyone's lives better. But I would not expect any sane American to shrug their shoulders at the WTC and say "worse things happen at sea".
If the US government is going to act to protect it's own intersts, than individuals must act to protect their own.
That's fair enough, of course. I think the question is what sorts of privacy can be practically and usefully defended (see my other comment
There are two kinds of "privacy advocates".
One kind demands the right to prevent information being collected about them, or in milder advocates to restrict collection of information. These people are fighting the same essentially doomed fight as the RIAA etc. The information is available, it has always been available, and the tools now exist to collect and distribute it. It is not going to be practical in the long run to prevent the tools being used. (That is not to say that the tide cannot be slowed in the short term, only eventually).
The other level of privacy is the right to withhold information. Defense of ths privacy is exhibited in objections to compulsory ID cards, compulsory escrowing of encryption keys, and many other areas where the government demands information from individuals.
There is some grey area between the two, where government gets access, with varying or unclear levels of coercion, to information held by third parties about individuals.
The intermediate cases notwithstanding, these are two essentially unrelated struggles. The first one has a hint of Luddism, but the second is an onging battle between authoritarians and small-l libertarians which has been going on for centuries and is not fundamentally altered by any new technologies.
Every problem ... has a logical explanation. However, sometimes that explanation eludes us. So we tend to attribute that to "neurosis" or some other "human" issue. I guess it's easier than just admitting that we can't figure the damn thing out.
And that differs from psychiatry how?
I wonder if background programs and spyware are the digital equivalent of having voices in one's head?
That's really cool.
Anthropomorphism is dangerous, but it can be useful too, particularly when instructing non-technical users. That one strikes me as quite a good analogy
Note I said instructing. If time and brain cells are available, it is better to educate them, which would involve telling more of the truth, and fewer iffy metaphors.
(If you're not careful, metaphors can jump out and bite you) ducks
Computers haven't got any more complex
wtf?
In a sense, computers are made up of the same logical building-blocks that they always were. I don't think that's very significant. After all, a computer is made of the same electronics as a 1960's radio, but it's a lot more complex. And this year's computers are more complex than last year's (or last decade's). And their behaviour is more complex. And their modes of failure are more complex.