Well, yes and no. Certainly the development of the networking protocols and early routing hardware that evolved into the Internet was under the auspices of the U.S. military, but the advent of the microprocessor and the personal computer were largely private-sector affairs. It began with Intel taking a part originally intended for a Japanese calculator and repurposing it as a general-purpose microprocessor. I took the parent's remark to mean: we see the same thing when government gets involved in funding and directing research. And that does get ugly, when you have politicians and bureaucrats dictating "desired" results, and suppressing results that don't go with the political flow. The Bush Administration has been repeatedly accused of such behavior, specifically regarding global warming, and it will probably only get worse. I have little doubt that China has a similar problem.
I'm sorry, but I've seen too many first-hand examples of industrial espionage performed by Chinese engineers and scientists to find this at all surprising. I'm just surprised he admitted it, that's all.
And just to be clear, I'm not referring to American citizens who happen to be of Chinese extraction, or individuals who emigrate to the U.S. with the intention of becoming American citizens. I mean personnel that come here on a visa, work for a few years or go to school here, and then take what they have learned back home. That doesn't bother me in and of itself, but often this includes taking things such as research, engineering drawings and prototypes that don't belong to them. Other nations do this as well, of course (including us) but few on as grand a scale.
Will the government be required to disclose computer breaches?
Highly unlikely. After all, telling us about it would would, in itself, be a breach of security, right?
Will the public be informed?
Probably not.
Who will get the fine or jail time when a computer breach occurs on government computer systems and no one reports it?
Well, I don't know about fines or prison terms but I'm sure a few administrators might get passed over for promotion.
Maybe this is to help fight the war on terrorism?
How, exactly? You fight terrorism by shooting the people that actually blow things up (assuming they don't succeed in blowing themselves up in the process, accidentally or on-purpose) and treating the rest of the people with respect so that they don't also become terrorists. What that has to do with our personal information I have no idea, although I'm sure the Bush Administration will find some way to link our credit card statements to terrorism.
One telling difference: as you note, in Poland they actually announced the fact that calls were being monitored.
They announced it here too. On the five o'clock news. Of course, that was after some hundreds of millions of phone calls had been sent to the NSA, but what the heck.
I have a basic problem with communications carriers being permitted to determine what types of traffic their customers use. I think that's a bad precedent any way you slice it. Give me the pipe for a reasonable fee and keep your grubby little fingers away from whatever it is I decide to do with it. This is the kind of anti-consumer, anti-competitive behavior a good government is supposed to discourage. "Common carriers" my ass. But it seems that more and more our Congress and its corporate lapdog the FCC have both lost sight of just what it is that we pay them for.
Unfortunately, they are attempting to lock the barn door far too late, and like all such technologies that are being steamrollered by the media companies they'll just go offshore to more friendly countries.
Or, in a slightly different way, it doesn't matter whether it was right, wrong, legal or illegal for Apple to go after these people, because the fact that Apple always acts in this manner justifies it completely.
Personally, I don't think a company should get better marks just for being consistently obnoxious.
Not the same thing... the Gnutella client was a response to the vulnerability of Napster's server-based search engine to legal attack. Justin Frankel's crowd very much intended Gnutella to be a moving target, and thus it was designed to have no dependence on any source of information other than the client systems themselves. Given the continued popularity of the Gnutella protocol in spite of the RIAA's best efforts, I'd say Frankel was phenomenally successful. Numerous extensions to the original protocol have since been implemented in an ongoing effort to foil the RIAA's minions and preserve anonymity.
Contrast that ideal with Bram Cohen's Bit Torrent protocol. All that Cohen wanted was a fast, efficient protocol to transfer very large files. He succeeded in this, to such a degree that the Internet hasn't been the same since. But Bit Torrent was never intended to protect its users from being monitored or tracked.
But, like the Gnutella protocol before it, Bit Torrent is also being extended in ways not envisioned by its creator and for much the same reasons.
I didn't really put that as well as I should have. What I mean is that the problems with the music industry's attempt to impose Digital Restrictions Management and restore their near-total control of content distribution pales in comparison to the damage done to the legal system, damage that is having widespread effects in areas completely unrelated to music.
But you're right... these people have already removed vast swathes of material from the public domain, in order to hold it hostage forever and keep upcharging us for it as long as they possibly can. The retroactive copyright extensions absolutely disgusted me (there are some Congressmen who should simply have been removed from office and imprisoned for that bit of malfeasance) as an example of utter disrepect for the law and the citizens of our country. Oh, and let us not forget the violation of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. There is a point where the needs of the nation as a whole trump the rights of corporations, particularly foreign corporations such as those that compose much of the RIAA's membership. This is one of those times.
You are absolutely correct that this is all about the mythical mass-man, the faceless "Joe User" who doesn't have a clue about how his computer works or what the term "peer to peer" even means but is perfectly happy to give it a try. Joes number in the hundreds of millions, which is what scares (and screws) the media companies.
I'm not too worried about P2P becoming illegal. Too many legitimate outfits distribute stuff this way, and the fundamental technology is only becoming more widespread and more ingrained into commercial products. Valve's Steam Content Delivery System uses a torrent-like architecture (developed by none less than Bram Cohen) for example. Video delivery services will have to use some form of swarming to be practical, and a lot of companies like Apple Computer, big movie studios and every major ISP are salivating at the thought of tapping into that revenue stream. Criminalizing the technology would piss off some serious contributers to various campaign coffers, and since the media companies themselves will ultimately wish to avail themselves of this, it would be foot-in-mouth-shoot scenario for them.
Still, suppose the Feds, at the behest of your favorite AA, manage to make file-sharing software illegal. What practical difference would it make? The software is already so widespread that efforts keep it out of the hands of the masses would be doomed to failure. Coding a peer-to-peer application is something can be done fairly easily by a small team of developers (or only a single developer, in the case of uTorrent) and there are a lot of smart programmers in other countries. Odd that Congress is so obstinate about not recognizing that fact. Any real success at keeping the technology under the thumb of the entertainment industry would have to involve heavy-duty filtering at the ISP level... which might very well happen. But shutting down outfits like BearShare will have no impact on the availability of client software: at best it is just more propaganda to make the masses toe the RIAA line and put the fear of God into vendors of competing products.
Hell, all they are really doing is raising the visibility of this kind of software: the net effect of that is to encourage more people to try it out. Sometimes I think the RIAA is completely out of touch with the times and with the real needs of their employers.
This is yet another high-profile "victory" in the RIAA's neverending and largely ineffective propaganda campaign. Will it have any practical effect upon the popularity of file sharing? Probably not, but the RIAA looks good, and it does set a nice precedent when it comes to suing other outfits like Limewire. Too bad there's so many nice open source multi-platform Gnutella clients out there.
If the management of the RIAA's member companies were to take a long, hard look at what the RIAA has actually accomplished (e.g., alienated the customer base, eliminated profitable new recording technologies, and given the whole business a black eye, PR-wise) they might begin to wonder about the RIAA's relevance to the modern world. Although, in truth, companies like Sony have management that is just as sleazy, and are perfectly capable of alienating customers without the RIAA's dubious assistance.
So, in other words, if you get hit by those people you could legitimately say you got a dose of the C.L.A.P. The comparison with a disease is particularly appropriate, I think.
Except when national bandwidth caps and mandated ISP filtering of P2P protocols are imposed by Congress as the behest of the MPAA and the "Justice Department".
The reason that the RIAA and the MPAA are so dangerous is not because of a bunch of lawsuits or their gangsterism (although those are bad enough) it's because of the truly bad law for which they've been largely responsible. I couldn't care less if they want to keep distribution rights to crummy modern music... I do however care when they create laws (and the DMCA didn't just happen because Congress thought it was a good idea, the media companies basically paid for it) that negatively impact everyone, in virtually every industry. That makes them reckless at best, treasonous at worst, and so far as I'm concerned they have no right to lay any claim upon me, or anyone else, when it comes to what they so inaptly term "piracy". I sincerely hope that Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen and all their successors wake up one day in a giant handbasket on final approach to Hell. It's where they belong.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes and no. Certainly the development of the networking protocols and early routing hardware that evolved into the Internet was under the auspices of the U.S. military, but the advent of the microprocessor and the personal computer were largely private-sector affairs. It began with Intel taking a part originally intended for a Japanese calculator and repurposing it as a general-purpose microprocessor. I took the parent's remark to mean: we see the same thing when government gets involved in funding and directing research. And that does get ugly, when you have politicians and bureaucrats dictating "desired" results, and suppressing results that don't go with the political flow. The Bush Administration has been repeatedly accused of such behavior, specifically regarding global warming, and it will probably only get worse. I have little doubt that China has a similar problem.
I'm sorry, but I've seen too many first-hand examples of industrial espionage performed by Chinese engineers and scientists to find this at all surprising. I'm just surprised he admitted it, that's all.
And just to be clear, I'm not referring to American citizens who happen to be of Chinese extraction, or individuals who emigrate to the U.S. with the intention of becoming American citizens. I mean personnel that come here on a visa, work for a few years or go to school here, and then take what they have learned back home. That doesn't bother me in and of itself, but often this includes taking things such as research, engineering drawings and prototypes that don't belong to them. Other nations do this as well, of course (including us) but few on as grand a scale.
Well, there's degrees of not-badness. Remember Jack Nicholson as President Dale in Mars Attacks!
... and that ain't bad!
Now, I want the people to know that they still have two out of three branches of government working for them
Is that where they first sliced it?
Will the government be required to disclose computer breaches?
Highly unlikely. After all, telling us about it would would, in itself, be a breach of security, right?
Will the public be informed?
Probably not.
Who will get the fine or jail time when a computer breach occurs on government computer systems and no one reports it?
Well, I don't know about fines or prison terms but I'm sure a few administrators might get passed over for promotion.
Maybe this is to help fight the war on terrorism?
How, exactly? You fight terrorism by shooting the people that actually blow things up (assuming they don't succeed in blowing themselves up in the process, accidentally or on-purpose) and treating the rest of the people with respect so that they don't also become terrorists. What that has to do with our personal information I have no idea, although I'm sure the Bush Administration will find some way to link our credit card statements to terrorism.
One telling difference: as you note, in Poland they actually announced the fact that calls were being monitored.
They announced it here too. On the five o'clock news. Of course, that was after some hundreds of millions of phone calls had been sent to the NSA, but what the heck.
I have a basic problem with communications carriers being permitted to determine what types of traffic their customers use. I think that's a bad precedent any way you slice it. Give me the pipe for a reasonable fee and keep your grubby little fingers away from whatever it is I decide to do with it. This is the kind of anti-consumer, anti-competitive behavior a good government is supposed to discourage. "Common carriers" my ass. But it seems that more and more our Congress and its corporate lapdog the FCC have both lost sight of just what it is that we pay them for.
Three.
You forgot to add "so there!"
Very true ... of course, a thousand people who love their work will get more work done than ten people that love their work.
Or like having no firewall ... oh forget it.
I believe you meant "sanitation engineers", for maximum PC-ness.
a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
... and you can take that to the bank.
Well ... that just means that at some point in the distant future there will be a temporary shortage of archaeologists.
Unfortunately, they are attempting to lock the barn door far too late, and like all such technologies that are being steamrollered by the media companies they'll just go offshore to more friendly countries.
Unfortunately, there was no legal "claws" that the BearShare folks could use to defend themselves.
Or, in a slightly different way, it doesn't matter whether it was right, wrong, legal or illegal for Apple to go after these people, because the fact that Apple always acts in this manner justifies it completely.
Personally, I don't think a company should get better marks just for being consistently obnoxious.
Not the same thing ... the Gnutella client was a response to the vulnerability of Napster's server-based search engine to legal attack. Justin Frankel's crowd very much intended Gnutella to be a moving target, and thus it was designed to have no dependence on any source of information other than the client systems themselves. Given the continued popularity of the Gnutella protocol in spite of the RIAA's best efforts, I'd say Frankel was phenomenally successful. Numerous extensions to the original protocol have since been implemented in an ongoing effort to foil the RIAA's minions and preserve anonymity.
Contrast that ideal with Bram Cohen's Bit Torrent protocol. All that Cohen wanted was a fast, efficient protocol to transfer very large files. He succeeded in this, to such a degree that the Internet hasn't been the same since. But Bit Torrent was never intended to protect its users from being monitored or tracked.
But, like the Gnutella protocol before it, Bit Torrent is also being extended in ways not envisioned by its creator and for much the same reasons.
I didn't really put that as well as I should have. What I mean is that the problems with the music industry's attempt to impose Digital Restrictions Management and restore their near-total control of content distribution pales in comparison to the damage done to the legal system, damage that is having widespread effects in areas completely unrelated to music.
... these people have already removed vast swathes of material from the public domain, in order to hold it hostage forever and keep upcharging us for it as long as they possibly can. The retroactive copyright extensions absolutely disgusted me (there are some Congressmen who should simply have been removed from office and imprisoned for that bit of malfeasance) as an example of utter disrepect for the law and the citizens of our country. Oh, and let us not forget the violation of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. There is a point where the needs of the nation as a whole trump the rights of corporations, particularly foreign corporations such as those that compose much of the RIAA's membership. This is one of those times.
But you're right
You are absolutely correct that this is all about the mythical mass-man, the faceless "Joe User" who doesn't have a clue about how his computer works or what the term "peer to peer" even means but is perfectly happy to give it a try. Joes number in the hundreds of millions, which is what scares (and screws) the media companies.
... which might very well happen. But shutting down outfits like BearShare will have no impact on the availability of client software: at best it is just more propaganda to make the masses toe the RIAA line and put the fear of God into vendors of competing products.
I'm not too worried about P2P becoming illegal. Too many legitimate outfits distribute stuff this way, and the fundamental technology is only becoming more widespread and more ingrained into commercial products. Valve's Steam Content Delivery System uses a torrent-like architecture (developed by none less than Bram Cohen) for example. Video delivery services will have to use some form of swarming to be practical, and a lot of companies like Apple Computer, big movie studios and every major ISP are salivating at the thought of tapping into that revenue stream. Criminalizing the technology would piss off some serious contributers to various campaign coffers, and since the media companies themselves will ultimately wish to avail themselves of this, it would be foot-in-mouth-shoot scenario for them.
Still, suppose the Feds, at the behest of your favorite AA, manage to make file-sharing software illegal. What practical difference would it make? The software is already so widespread that efforts keep it out of the hands of the masses would be doomed to failure. Coding a peer-to-peer application is something can be done fairly easily by a small team of developers (or only a single developer, in the case of uTorrent) and there are a lot of smart programmers in other countries. Odd that Congress is so obstinate about not recognizing that fact. Any real success at keeping the technology under the thumb of the entertainment industry would have to involve heavy-duty filtering at the ISP level
Hell, all they are really doing is raising the visibility of this kind of software: the net effect of that is to encourage more people to try it out. Sometimes I think the RIAA is completely out of touch with the times and with the real needs of their employers.
This is yet another high-profile "victory" in the RIAA's neverending and largely ineffective propaganda campaign. Will it have any practical effect upon the popularity of file sharing? Probably not, but the RIAA looks good, and it does set a nice precedent when it comes to suing other outfits like Limewire. Too bad there's so many nice open source multi-platform Gnutella clients out there.
If the management of the RIAA's member companies were to take a long, hard look at what the RIAA has actually accomplished (e.g., alienated the customer base, eliminated profitable new recording technologies, and given the whole business a black eye, PR-wise) they might begin to wonder about the RIAA's relevance to the modern world. Although, in truth, companies like Sony have management that is just as sleazy, and are perfectly capable of alienating customers without the RIAA's dubious assistance.
So, in other words, if you get hit by those people you could legitimately say you got a dose of the C.L.A.P. The comparison with a disease is particularly appropriate, I think.
Except when national bandwidth caps and mandated ISP filtering of P2P protocols are imposed by Congress as the behest of the MPAA and the "Justice Department".
The reason that the RIAA and the MPAA are so dangerous is not because of a bunch of lawsuits or their gangsterism (although those are bad enough) it's because of the truly bad law for which they've been largely responsible. I couldn't care less if they want to keep distribution rights to crummy modern music ... I do however care when they create laws (and the DMCA didn't just happen because Congress thought it was a good idea, the media companies basically paid for it) that negatively impact everyone, in virtually every industry. That makes them reckless at best, treasonous at worst, and so far as I'm concerned they have no right to lay any claim upon me, or anyone else, when it comes to what they so inaptly term "piracy". I sincerely hope that Jack Valenti, Hilary Rosen and all their successors wake up one day in a giant handbasket on final approach to Hell. It's where they belong.
there's plenty of places that they can encounter natural radiation that's nearly as dangerous, radon for one big example.
Yes. Or coal.