What if a U.S. state passes a law regulating what sort of material it is permissible to transmit to their citizens. Assuming the law were not struck down as unconstitutional, should everyone in the U.S. now have to follow this state law, to make sure that they don't accidentally transmit banned material to residents of that state (for example, by placing it on a website where a resident of that state could access it)? This would end up with the result that everyone must follow the union of all state laws (thus the most restrictive in each category). Which is already happening with spam laws, which I don't see as a good precedent.
This is true, and actually the precedent was already set in the Amateur Action BBS case nearly a decade ago, when BBS owners in California were jailed for three years for violating obscenity laws in Tennessee after a Memphis-based postal inspector downloaded images over a modem connection.
Its cooler to say "Im a Linux user" I guess. Even in geek-dom do we have social classes. Sad and pathetic. Clinging to something as if it were religion. Maybe these people and the "Amiga-rulez!" crowd ought to get together. Here's an idea, people - be your own person. Dont be sheep for Redhat and Co. either...
I don't know why I'd want to switch back, as I don't do games and Linux is a much better software development platform and comes with all the toys I could ask for. I think that's the difference between being a geek and a wannabe. I can't remember the last time I even looked at Red Hat install disk (RH5.2? 1999?) I have found Debian more suited to my personal needs, but that's the thing about Linux, you don't have to depend on Red Hat or anybody else. If you're not satisfied with any existing distribution, you can roll your own. That's another thing about being a geek, I guess.
It's bad enough our country is destroying its technology sector with special-interest legislation
Which country would that be? Please remember that internet discussions span many countries and most continents. The current discussion concerns a small European nation, apparently, I have no idea which continent or country you are referring to.
I know this is going to bring up glass comparisons, so we'll head those off: glass is not a fluid.
So, not content with making people look at the scientific equivalent of paint drying, you've decided to Slashdot every "flass glows" website on the planet! <g>
I agree - SCART feels crappy and isn't satisfying to use at all.
On the other hand, I've never seen one fail
I've never known one to work well. The connections are so cheap and nasty they are sensitive to vibration, which is lurking death in consumer equipment.
You can't proscute somebody for watching a pirate video. You Can prosecute them for distributing it.
IANAL, but:
You can be prosecuted for the act of copying material whose copyright does not belong to you and which you don't have permission to make that particular copy. This is any act that can be construed as producing an identical or derived copy of the material. Saving fair use (and good look trying to apply that to pirated copies!) you can thus be prosecuted for placing a copy of a pirated movie on a hard drive or even streaming it directly into a codec from an external source. You can also be prosecuted for causing this to happen, even if someone else or some piece of software actually performed the copy.
That prosecutable act could be as simple as joining #twotowerswarez on irc and accepting a subsequent DCC send. If that happened and the file was pirated software, you'd have the burden of proving your innocence. That's civil law.
Britain changed the length of patents to 100 years, to protect some key industries.
This seems a little far-fetched. Could you give a specific period for this, or some kind of external citation? I'm having trouble tracing evidence of such legislation.
These guys [scientology.org] have a lot of trademarks: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. And if you use one of them you'll get sued.
At last, the truth about what happened to Sesame Street.
If we WANT to preserve the wildness and the freedom of the frontier, we'll have to work for it.
Teach everyone you know, how to take control of their computer, and why its important
Teach people to read. Keep their minds and eyes open.
Teach people how to find GOOD free content. Explain to them how and why this content is threatened.
Of course you're right, and my apologies if I gave you the impression that I was referring to someone other than coders. As the people whose activities have been criminalised, we're on the front line. But the Dilberts are the shock troops. Don't underestimate their propaganda value. People with the mentality and sophistication of Homer Simpson, but the ability _en masse_ to say a very convincing no, even if it may be a rather muted one.
When people find the security problems with these "tamper proof" boxes, it would pretty much end the game.
In other words, there is no techie solution for the content distributor. I have some sympathy with them because content distribution is the engine that drives a lot of very good content (they made FOTR, and did a great job of it, for instance; OTOH they also made a lot of other stuff I'd be less proud of, but part of the reason for that is the diversity of public taste).
They're driven to these legal fixes because they have money and they're in an unwinnable race with an unscrupulous enemy (Fred Bloggs armed with a chip he bought for a few quid down at the pub).:)
What annoyed me was when they made a law that said I couldn't write a program that had a particular use. They can't win that fight, either. If I'm bright enough to write the program, I'm also bright enough to avoid being criminalized. And if I'm not, then the guy in the next cube along is. Welcome to the Hotel Hilbert, no need to book, just contribute the algorithm of your choice at reception and remember that all our rooms are equipped with fast ethernet. Such a lovely place!
General purpose components (processors, memory, storage) without DRM enforcement will be readily available until it is governmentally mandated otherwise, and at that point open hardware without DRM would be illegal. This discussion leads to a dead end.
The existence of general purpose components is the key, at least for now. It is easy enough to obtain transducers and whatnot to read digital signals from inert media like DVDs, and if you can channel the signal to a computer and decrypt the data stream (sorry, but making it illegal to write a certain kind of program will only make criminals of programmers, it will not stop anyone) then the data stream escapes and free copies will be available.
The more DRM is implemented to limit the use to which the legitimate copies can be put by their lawful owners, the more attractive it will be to obtain and disseminate the means to restore the use that DRM takes away.
The more that DRM is implemented in hardware, the more attractive will be illegal trade in copies ripped off by third parties who can afford the initial investment.
The more hardware and software technology advances, the lower the financial threshold will become.
It's a probably question of how the judges will interpret the laws. Would a judge ever convict on the evidence of possession of an unfettered general purpose computer?
In the long run, the rights holders may work out a tamper-proof closed distribution system (eg: distribute closed-box hardware free or at low end-user cost) and stop selling their product in the same way that books are sold. If the book model doesn't work for them, then they should invent a new model that doesn't give the user the opportunity to treat the product like a book. Then they will be able to go after those who break their closed distribution loops, legitimately. And we will go back to our legally sanctioned (at least in US law) videotape collections.:)
Sounds really great.. anyone care to write one that doesn't require the Judy libraries?
That would be pretty good, anybody know an existing c-bindable high performance free sparse array math package?
The original technique is defined in common lisp, and it occurs to me that perhaps that language may be better suited to this kind of task than raw C. I wonder if you could get reasonable performance out of a CL or SCM implementation running as a server like the spamd of SpamAssassin.
Before anyone acts on my premature statements, there are some problems:
debsigs is not (as I assumed) the key list, which is in fact available from the Debian site as a tarball), but a tool for signing packages.
Debian Policy has not yet rolled out its package signing system, Debian packages are as yet unsigned, so there's little point in normal users installing debsig-verify.
This is not quite up to the standard I had come to expect from Debian.
My apologies go to anyone who was misled by my earlier statements.
Yes, apt-get uses MD5 checksums, and I'm not sure about gpg signs but Debian's build system uses them to check the sources.
I checked out this FAQ: http://www.linuxsecurity.com/docs/harden-doc/html/ securing-debian-howto/ch7.en.html
In current Debian stable (Woody) there is a package called debsigs, containing the gpg signatures of the package maintainers, and another called debsig-verify, which when installed will cause all package installations to be conditional on checking against the keys in debsigs.
I ran an install on debsigs and debsig-verify in aptitude, but having installed debsig-verify _first_ apt refused to install debsigs on account of the fact that it could not verify the signature on the package. Silly, but kinda reassuring. Easily fixed by removing debsig-verify and explicitly reinstalling in debsigs _first_.
I hope they'll make debsigs a required main package in future, so that installation of debsig-verify will be completely painless.
Through "the media" I alway have gotten the impression that Stallman was steadfast to the idea that IP is always wrong, but I guess maybe his media converage is not very broad when it comes to his view.
If you thought Stallmann was against all IP, what did you imagine the concepts of Copyleft and the terms of the GPL are? This is the use of the software developer's copyright to impose (not very onerous) conditions on what others can do with the product--specifically, the conditions under which derived works can be distributed. Without that copyright, the licence would be unenforcable.
you're seldom required to prove your identity because it's already being done multiple times each day without your permission.
I don't think anybody needs my permission to attempt to identify me, though I could be wrong.
London has an extensive network of hidden camera's; it's estimated that on an average day in the city your image is captured by thirty unique cameras. Many of these cameras are linked to what is perhaps the most powerful facial recognition system in existence.
This sounds a little far-fetched, though I don't doubt that there are many not-so-hidden cameras that could capture my image as I walk down the street or enter and leave buildings. And since most British people carry mobile phones it's possible to track us to individual cells--which in a busy city is often a fairly small area.
I do think there is potential cause for concern, here, but not as much as in requiring people to prove their identity, which is intrusive and can be used as a pretext for arrest.
"shutter" device that fits on top of license plate, and can "open" and "close"... controllable from inside the car. Simply "close" the shutter" to prevent picture of license plate from being snapped.:-)
That would defeat the purpose of carrying plates, which is to make the vehicle identifiable. I don't see any privacy issues here, I'm more worried about the proposals for compulsory ID cards. I'm seldom required to prove my identity at present, and I'm not comfortable with the idea that the presumption that I must do so may become entrenched.
I only use it for personal communications and never for buying goods at stores - I let hotmail get all my spam. Anyway, with the belts getting tightened the world over I really don't mind ponying up $19 for a year's worth of spam-free email.
It does sound like a good deal, but if that one address is ever compromised you will be out $19 and back on square one (though at least you're spam-free in the meantime).
You can go to sneakemail.com and get as many forwarding mailboxes as you like (they do smtp forwarding). If an address is ever compromised, you can start a new one from the website or using their simple perl command-line client. The neat thing about this service is that it also processes replies and pseudo-anonymizes them, in a manner similar to the old anon.penet.fi system. So you have a two-way mailbox that protects your true email address from spammers.
This system would enable you to give out an email address whilst minimising disclosure of your paid-for mailbox.
Yes, one way to fight this would be simply to put up a page containing a copy of the list of links sent by the cult to Google, and ensure that this page gets googled. If enough people do this then there will be as much coverage as before, albeit defered. There are different ways in which Google could deal with this, but I don't think they'd feel vulnerable enough to go further than they have in complying with the cult's demands.
John Gilmore is widely quoted as saying "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around
it."[1] This has applied to previous attacks by the cult. The owners of xenu.net are right not to try to give the cult any toehold by attempting to fight it--others can take up the torch simply by mirroring the pages, legally.
The Google search engine is useful, but this case demonstrates a vulnerability that arises from widespread reliance on one very good centralized system.
[1] For what it's worth, he agrees that it's the kind of thing he might have said!:)
The difference is that the electricity cost is the same if I am IM'ing somebody in Korea or somebody two blocks away.
This isn't a lot of good to you if your friend doesn't need the extra functionality, so you end up having to phone her. Perhaps she doesn't have any friends in Korea, or Kansas for that matter, so the economics work out differently in her case, and this has a knock-on effect for everybody who needs to contact her. That's the bottom line of an emerging communications technology--it has an uphill struggle to reach the point where its ubiquity makes it near-essential.
I don't know much about MoFo except that the last time I heard about them was when they took on the Dennis Erlich case pro bono. Dennis, the BBS he used, and the ISP Netcom that the BBS used for connectivity, were all sued under copyright and trade secrets law by the Scientology cult when Dennis posted some cult "scriptures" that read more like science fiction.
Somebody had to fight for the public interest in that case, and MoFo stepped up to the plate. Good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
The Slashdot interface told me:
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
That just about says it all. No further comments.
This is true, and actually the precedent was already set in the Amateur Action BBS case nearly a decade ago, when BBS owners in California were jailed for three years for violating obscenity laws in Tennessee after a Memphis-based postal inspector downloaded images over a modem connection.
I don't know why I'd want to switch back, as I don't do games and Linux is a much better software development platform and comes with all the toys I could ask for. I think that's the difference between being a geek and a wannabe. I can't remember the last time I even looked at Red Hat install disk (RH5.2? 1999?) I have found Debian more suited to my personal needs, but that's the thing about Linux, you don't have to depend on Red Hat or anybody else. If you're not satisfied with any existing distribution, you can roll your own. That's another thing about being a geek, I guess.
Which country would that be? Please remember that internet discussions span many countries and most continents. The current discussion concerns a small European nation, apparently, I have no idea which continent or country you are referring to.
So, not content with making people look at the scientific equivalent of paint drying, you've decided to Slashdot every "flass glows" website on the planet! <g>
On the other hand, I've never seen one fail
I've never known one to work well. The connections are so cheap and nasty they are sensitive to vibration, which is lurking death in consumer equipment.
IANAL, but:
You can be prosecuted for the act of copying material whose copyright does not belong to you and which you don't have permission to make that particular copy. This is any act that can be construed as producing an identical or derived copy of the material. Saving fair use (and good look trying to apply that to pirated copies!) you can thus be prosecuted for placing a copy of a pirated movie on a hard drive or even streaming it directly into a codec from an external source. You can also be prosecuted for causing this to happen, even if someone else or some piece of software actually performed the copy.
That prosecutable act could be as simple as joining #twotowerswarez on irc and accepting a subsequent DCC send. If that happened and the file was pirated software, you'd have the burden of proving your innocence. That's civil law.
This seems a little far-fetched. Could you give a specific period for this, or some kind of external citation? I'm having trouble tracing evidence of such legislation.
At last, the truth about what happened to Sesame Street.
Haven't they heard that Desktop Linux Is Dead? I read it on Slashdot, so it must be true!
</sarcasm>
Of course you're right, and my apologies if I gave you the impression that I was referring to someone other than coders. As the people whose activities have been criminalised, we're on the front line. But the Dilberts are the shock troops. Don't underestimate their propaganda value. People with the mentality and sophistication of Homer Simpson, but the ability _en masse_ to say a very convincing no, even if it may be a rather muted one.
In other words, there is no techie solution for the content distributor. I have some sympathy with them because content distribution is the engine that drives a lot of very good content (they made FOTR, and did a great job of it, for instance; OTOH they also made a lot of other stuff I'd be less proud of, but part of the reason for that is the diversity of public taste).
They're driven to these legal fixes because they have money and they're in an unwinnable race with an unscrupulous enemy (Fred Bloggs armed with a chip he bought for a few quid down at the pub). :)
What annoyed me was when they made a law that said I couldn't write a program that had a particular use. They can't win that fight, either. If I'm bright enough to write the program, I'm also bright enough to avoid being criminalized. And if I'm not, then the guy in the next cube along is. Welcome to the Hotel Hilbert, no need to book, just contribute the algorithm of your choice at reception and remember that all our rooms are equipped with fast ethernet. Such a lovely place!
The existence of general purpose components is the key, at least for now. It is easy enough to obtain transducers and whatnot to read digital signals from inert media like DVDs, and if you can channel the signal to a computer and decrypt the data stream (sorry, but making it illegal to write a certain kind of program will only make criminals of programmers, it will not stop anyone) then the data stream escapes and free copies will be available.
It's a probably question of how the judges will interpret the laws. Would a judge ever convict on the evidence of possession of an unfettered general purpose computer?
In the long run, the rights holders may work out a tamper-proof closed distribution system (eg: distribute closed-box hardware free or at low end-user cost) and stop selling their product in the same way that books are sold. If the book model doesn't work for them, then they should invent a new model that doesn't give the user the opportunity to treat the product like a book. Then they will be able to go after those who break their closed distribution loops, legitimately. And we will go back to our legally sanctioned (at least in US law) videotape collections. :)
That would be pretty good, anybody know an existing c-bindable high performance free sparse array math package?
The original technique is defined in common lisp, and it occurs to me that perhaps that language may be better suited to this kind of task than raw C. I wonder if you could get reasonable performance out of a CL or SCM implementation running as a server like the spamd of SpamAssassin.
This is not quite up to the standard I had come to expect from Debian.
My apologies go to anyone who was misled by my earlier statements.
I checked out this FAQ:/ securing-debian-howto/ch7.en.html
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/docs/harden-doc/html
In current Debian stable (Woody) there is a package called debsigs, containing the gpg signatures of the package maintainers, and another called debsig-verify, which when installed will cause all package installations to be conditional on checking against the keys in debsigs.
I ran an install on debsigs and debsig-verify in aptitude, but having installed debsig-verify _first_ apt refused to install debsigs on account of the fact that it could not verify the signature on the package. Silly, but kinda reassuring. Easily fixed by removing debsig-verify and explicitly reinstalling in debsigs _first_.
I hope they'll make debsigs a required main package in future, so that installation of debsig-verify will be completely painless.
If you thought Stallmann was against all IP, what did you imagine the concepts of Copyleft and the terms of the GPL are? This is the use of the software developer's copyright to impose (not very onerous) conditions on what others can do with the product--specifically, the conditions under which derived works can be distributed. Without that copyright, the licence would be unenforcable.
I don't think anybody needs my permission to attempt to identify me, though I could be wrong.
London has an extensive network of hidden camera's; it's estimated that on an average day in the city your image is captured by thirty unique cameras. Many of these cameras are linked to what is perhaps the most powerful facial recognition system in existence.
This sounds a little far-fetched, though I don't doubt that there are many not-so-hidden cameras that could capture my image as I walk down the street or enter and leave buildings. And since most British people carry mobile phones it's possible to track us to individual cells--which in a busy city is often a fairly small area.
I do think there is potential cause for concern, here, but not as much as in requiring people to prove their identity, which is intrusive and can be used as a pretext for arrest.
That would defeat the purpose of carrying plates, which is to make the vehicle identifiable. I don't see any privacy issues here, I'm more worried about the proposals for compulsory ID cards. I'm seldom required to prove my identity at present, and I'm not comfortable with the idea that the presumption that I must do so may become entrenched.
It does sound like a good deal, but if that one address is ever compromised you will be out $19 and back on square one (though at least you're spam-free in the meantime).
You can go to sneakemail.com and get as many forwarding mailboxes as you like (they do smtp forwarding). If an address is ever compromised, you can start a new one from the website or using their simple perl command-line client. The neat thing about this service is that it also processes replies and pseudo-anonymizes them, in a manner similar to the old anon.penet.fi system. So you have a two-way mailbox that protects your true email address from spammers.
This system would enable you to give out an email address whilst minimising disclosure of your paid-for mailbox.
Yes, one way to fight this would be simply to put up a page containing a copy of the list of links sent by the cult to Google, and ensure that this page gets googled. If enough people do this then there will be as much coverage as before, albeit defered. There are different ways in which Google could deal with this, but I don't think they'd feel vulnerable enough to go further than they have in complying with the cult's demands.
The Google search engine is useful, but this case demonstrates a vulnerability that arises from widespread reliance on one very good centralized system.
[1] For what it's worth, he agrees that it's the kind of thing he might have said! :)
This isn't a lot of good to you if your friend doesn't need the extra functionality, so you end up having to phone her. Perhaps she doesn't have any friends in Korea, or Kansas for that matter, so the economics work out differently in her case, and this has a knock-on effect for everybody who needs to contact her. That's the bottom line of an emerging communications technology--it has an uphill struggle to reach the point where its ubiquity makes it near-essential.
Plus electricity costs. You can get a lot of long distance phone calls for that price.
Phones are universal, the internet isn't, yet. It'll still be a long time before messaging systems overtake the phone system.
Somebody had to fight for the public interest in that case, and MoFo stepped up to the plate. Good guys.