Not at all. "the government" only refers to the UK government.
Of course it doesn't. Suppose I travel to Canada and start discussing "the government"; to which government will people most likely think I refer - Canadian or British?
I'll grant you that the meaning is highly contextual, and that in the particular context you quote the only possible interpretation is the British Government. But that doesn't mean that the variable stays bound when you re-contextualise the definition; if you want to change the discussion to Palestine, the definition becomes
attempts to influence the Palestinian government or the public or a section of the public.
Now if we were drafting laws, it might be different. But you appear to be arguing that the definition is semantically null outside the United Kingdom,
and frankly I think that's completely unsupportable.
Why are we, probably the ones most capable of hacking said machines, complaining?
Do I take it then that you are a Diebold employee, and that when you say "we" you are referring to your employer?
I'm not advocating doing so
Good, because it would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do. Especially in the current political climate. Which is probably why "we" (by which I mean a lot of people who read Slashdot) are complaining.
Sorry for the late reply: I've been away for a couple of days. Anyway...
I think that ISPs should be able to provide traffic shaping in pro-competitive ways, while you do not. This seems to be the only area of our disagreement.
I don't object to traffic shaping at all. I just don't value it so highly that
I'm willing to enable predatory pricing schemes just to preserve the practice.
Secondly, I am not sure that what you have described would even be
allowed. Intentional interference with the traffic would seem to be
banned under my proposal no matter how it might be done.
In what way? All I'm proposing is a new protocol, and that ISPs be allowed to send private
data between their own nodes on their own sub-nets. Best of luck drafting a law to outlaw
that. Doubly so when it comes to prosecuting it in court.
It seems to me that legislating which RFC's can be supported by ISP's would "break the internet" as you put it.
Whoops! Not so fast, if you please. I'm not suggesting we enact legislation as to which RFCs ISPs may support. What I'm proposing
is legislation that would would make it illegal to comply with those RFCs in certain circumstances. We already have
plenty of those. For instance, suppose I had a web server containing lots of copyrighted materials that I was not
licensed to distribute. In this case, the law makes it illegal for me to comply with RFC1954, at least regard to the
unlicenced files. I don't see that breaking the Internet, however.
Perhaps we should give the FCC a mandate to ensure this sort of thing?
Hmmm... not being a US citizen, I don't have a well defined impression of the FCC. I know there's
a lot of debate as to their role, but I've never taken the time to sift through the propaganda and the faith-based-reasoning,
so I don't think I can usefully comment here. What I will say is that in the UK, having an independant regulator
seems to have worked quite well. British Telecom still own a tremendous amount of the infrastructure, but there are still
lots of independent ISPs. The ISPs moan about BT, but overall, everyone seems able to do business,
My point is that if you try to overly define what is problematic and what is not, you will likely end up causing problems...
..just as you will if your definitions are too vague and ill-defined...
... for many ISP's who are not abusing the standards...
... who are likely the first to fall if the backbones start charging non-connected mom-and-pop ISPs...
...while encouraging those who are likely to do so to look for ways around the legislation.
... not that they won't be doing that anyway. I'm sorry, but leaving a loophole just so the
bad guys don't have to break the law in order to Do Evil just doesn't seem sensible to me.
If this does become a problem, then we can legislate against it specifically. I personally see more harm than good in legislating against hypotheticals.
Well, currently the whole situation is hypothetical. We don't know for sure who Whitaker and his friends are going to charge,
and we don't how they intend to implement the scheme. But now they have the idea, it seems silly to leave loopholes to be
exploited.
So let's turn the problem around: why are you so determined to retain protocol based traffic shaping?
Do you really believe that bittorrent will destroy the Internet? Do you think that we need VOIP
badly enough to leave a loophole open? Or do you just want a weapon to attack file sharing?
I wanted to focus on the fact that it sometimes makes sense to try to solve an unsolvable problem. Yes, the dynamics are different, but this only influences when DRM makes sense -- it still doesn't mean DRM never makes sense.
Which is fair enough. Although in fairness, I don't think DRM is being marketed to the media companies as
a technology to make copying media "somewhat inconvenient" and I don't think that's what they're looking for
when they sponsor research into DRM. But that's by the by...
And, as it turns out, the dynamics between DRM media and FPSs are sometimes quite similar.
mmmm... sorry, I didn't make myself particularly clear. I meant that the social dynamics of the situation were different.
Online gamers form communities where status is largely determined by skill. A paricipant would suffer a considerable loss of respect
if all his peers were to discover his rating was due to cheating. On the other hand, take a group teens discussing music
and a participant's kudos is likely to be enhanced if they think he obtained the music by downloading it.
Additionally, most people don't like cheating their friends, but when it comes to big cheating corporations...
well I don't think that's even a consideration. What they see is another community - one of file sharers -
where status comes from sharing, and from how much stuff you make available,
That's why I think FPS watchdog programs work better than DRM. The pressures to circumvent are considerably less, while there are pressures to play fair that don't exist in the file sharing world.
So, yes, I think DRM could justify itself, even in certain "single-player" situations.
Well, OK. I'll admit that I may have got a bit carried away with my rhetoric and used a few too many absolutes:) But I still don't think the limited set of restricted uses you describe is what the media companies think they're buying when they invest in DRM, and I don't think it's ever going to support the sort of business model that they want it to support.
But if we reason to ourselves that it could never be justified, we are only fooling ourselves.)
I entirely agree. I think there are a lot of very good uses for DRM technologies. The trouble is all the ones I can think of involve giving the user control of the cryptographic keys. Trouble is, no-one seems to be in any sort of hurry to set up that sort of infrastructure.
An Internet Service Provider may not attempt to actively degrade the performance any protocols that compete with any services they offer. Banned activity includes without exclusion deprioritizing traffic below the median routing priority or blocking ports.
I think I maybe didn't make this bit very clear. See, if I was a unprincipled, greed obsessed CEO of a major telecoms company, I wouldn't do it like that. What I'd do is set up bittorrent clients on each of my nodes and torrent files filled with random noise between the nodes in the subnet. It set the traffic so the BT used 99% of the available bandwidth, meaning that only traffic that had been prioritised upwards could get past.Nothing is be prioritised downwards - I'm just artificially increasing the load on my network.
And if anyone asks why they can't use my pipes without accessing a for-pay protocol, I just say "99% of the traffic on our network is filesharing, your honour". And the chances are no one will look any closer.
Under such a proposal, the activities in your hypothetical scenario would be banned due to the wording "without exclusion."
Nothing is being excluded though. There's an excellent chance any one of your packets will get through, eventually. It's just that
other traffic (much of it using file sharing protocols) is putting such a load on out network that non-prioritised traffic can't get through. That's why need to be able to offer prioritised protocols, which we do for a very reasonable fee, by the way.
Nothing has to be de-prioritised. Nothing has to be blocked. And if enough of the big players got together on this, they could make it fly.
When I say discriminate on endpoint on a network level, what I mean is that the routers may not consider any valid (from an RFC perspective) endpoint differently than any other regardless of any business decisions
OK, I can cope with that.
Furthermore, I would ban traffic shaping only where it either degrades a competing service, or where it selectively degrades traffic based on remote end-point. I.e. you can sell better access to protocols to your subscribers, but you cannot sell better access to your customer base to content providers. I hope this makes more sense.
I think so. Let's find out - we'll design a new protocol. Let's call it BSL for Business Session Layer. It's essentially identical to SSL except that in addition to the encryption data already present in the SSL protocol, there's facility for an arbitrary number of cryptographic tickets. The idea here is that carriers can sell an encryption key to an ISP who then uses it to generate tickets for each packet then send out. At each hop, the router checks to see if the packet has a ticket authorizing
if for that particular subnet. If the ticket is absent, out of date, or invalid, the packet gets dropped.
Now suppose I'm AT&T and I offer to prioritize this protocol. It's not discriminating against anyone. We'll accept the traffic regardless of source, and give equal priority to all packets using this protocol. But unless the endpoint has paid AT&T for a key, it's useless to them. And since the protocol supports any number of tickets, all the major carriers can get in on the act.
So now we can privatize the entire Internet, save only one thing. We still have to support other forms of TCP/IP traffic and we're not allowed to de-prioritize that. What do we do? We stream junk traffic between all the nodes our subnet. Basically, the carriers all DOS themselves. Of course, the prioritized packets get through without a problem, but for all other purposes, the network is dead.
if you define "working" as "making unauthorized copying somewhat
inconvenient", then he may not be, because DRM can do this.
Which is a fair point. It's like Bruce Schneier is always telling us:
security is always a trade off
Of course, he also likes to talk about failure modes. And once someone
figures out how to break a DRM mechanism, it's pretty much useless. Look
at DVDs. Post-Johansen, copying a the major inconvenience of copying a
DVD is installing the software and waiting for the thing to rip. HD-DVD
was supposed to fix this by allowing replacement keys... but the speed
with which these keys are being found suggests that this isn't going
to help much, either.
The thing is, If the inconvenience of DRM is trivial compared to the
wait time of ripping the medium, then I'd still have to question its
value.
There's another trade off to consider as well. DRM discourages customers.
Buyers who can't play their media as they expect may less eager to buy
in future. Music downloads that won't play on Timmy's new MP3 player
may well encourage people to seek out unlicenced (but DRM free) music.
The solution many FPS companies have arrived at is to run a second program on the client to watch the game program and any other programs running at the same time, looking for cheating behavior.
I do believe Sony tried that approach with their music CDs
just recently:)
Seriously though, do you not think the dynamics are different here?
You're comparing an interactive semi-social activity that depends on
continuing real time access to a server against a recorded, network
free... let's say "single player" recreation. People have different
perception of the issues, for one thing. For another, it's easier to
cut off someone's access to the server because in this case you don't
have to give them access to they encryption keys as well as the resource.
Which, of course, is the problem with DRM as outlined in TFA.
And so you cannot, as a developer, always choose, as the original post claimed.
Of course you can. You can choose the licence you desire, and then choose from the
packages available for that licence, or else you can choose the package you desire
and then choose to abide by the terms of that package's licence. It's not a lack
of choice, it's a question of priotities. Choose which is most important to you.
If you're looking into reusing code somebody else wrote... you're stuck with their license.
And so... what, exactly?
If you're just starting development they you find a package whose licence you like better. If you're
midway in development and committed, keep on using the last version licenced under terms you found acceptable.
If none of those appeal, then yeah, write your own and release it as you see fit. If you want the benefit
of the hard work of others, the price is accepting the terms of the licence.
Yes, DRM in the form of selling individual records, tapes, or CDs. It was an old skool DRM in that there's typically only one copy out there.
I disagree. I think they made their money by enabling widespread distribution of information,
It's funny, but anyone builds a system to efficiently distribute information winds up rich.
Newspapers, publishing houses, telephone companies, Google...
I think the record companies were benefiting from the same effect when they made their money.
But with DRM they moved from enabling the transfer of information to trying to restrict it.
I sometimes wonder if the fundamental problem facing the record companies isn't a basic misunderstanding
of what it was they did that people were willing to pay for. I mean it wasn't "holding intellectual
property", I'll tell you that for nothing.
Actually, I think that's the best argument I've heard so far in favour, in a "least worst" sort of way. Maybe they could use it for their next advertising push:
Does anyone argue that car door locks should not be engineered and sold to consumers because there's a "fundamental logical flaw" (the presence of windows) that keeps them from "working?"
OK, let's look at your analogy. The car is the plaintext, the lock is the encryption algorithm, the key is the encryption key. If your
car had a DRM lock, it would have the key selloptaped to the car door, along with a notice saying
"driving this car without permission is very, very illegal".
I think any manufacturer that made car locks like that might well get some complaints.
The trouble is that with DRM the key has to be sellotaped to the car door. What you're doing is giving people cars,
trying to disguise the keys taped to the door,
and telling them they can't go for a drive unless you say so.
It might even work, for a little while at least, but once people catch on to the fact that the key has to be there somewhere,
you;re going to start seeing an awful lot of unauthorised driving. If your business model depends on people
only driving when you say so, then you're in trouble at this point.
But business models are based on data, not just editorial positions.
Successful ones may be based on data. Unsuccessful business models may be
based on anything, including editorial positions and wishful thinking.
I don't see any data to suggest that DRM is enabling any successful
business models. On the other hand the ease with which HD-DVD DRM is
being cracked at the moment suggests that the opposite may well be true
Just because the media companies have a lot of money, that doesn't mean
they owe it to DRM. I think this is a wishful thinking model, and I
think its doomed to failure.
So you're saying every single media company up until now has been a deeply irrational act?
I'm saying most of the money invested in DRM has been irrationally invested. Because it can't work long term. It's great for
people who sell DRM, but a waste of money for the people who buy it. You surely can't think this is sound long term business
practice?
Remind me not to listen to you for stock picking tips.
You think EMI made its money by buying DRM? Remind me to ignore all yours:)
... if it wasn't for DRM, I wouldn't be able to download TV shows from various TV networks online.
Which would be a good point if all Mr. Allison was saying was "DRM is evil". However, that isn't his point.
What he is saying is that it can't work, it's never going to work, and that trying build a business model
(or an economy) found on DRM is a deeply irrational act.
The problem is that for DRM to work you have to hand the customer the encrypted data, the encryption algorithm and the
encryption key. If you don't the DRMed work cannot be accessed. However, if you do, they have everything they need to
circumvent the DRM.
If it *is* a sucky situation, surely the problem isn't DRM but the economic structures in place that requires DRM to be used.
But if the DRM has a fundamental logical flow, then the problem is DRM. That's the point.
I think it'd make more sense to get our society to a place where we don't need DRM
A lot of people would agree with that. The two main approaches offered seem to be either move to a gift economy,
or indoctrinate school kids to believe that copyright infringement is a Great Evil on a par with Rape, Murder,
Genocide, and Britney Spears. Personally, I can see problems with both those strategies.
In the meantime, DRM still isn't going to work any time soon, and any exec who proposes
spending serious money on it wants his arse kicking. Not for Being Evil, but for Being Stupid.
BTW, you are not trying my patience. Any time you want, we can walk away from this interesting conversation:-).
Fair 'nuff. Just thought it worth mentioning.
I am not sure I understand. You suggest that traffic shaping of P2P
traffic within an ISP is OK. Many ISP's do block some ports (my ISP only
blocks port 22 and unblocks that upon request-- they do this because of
the number of SSH break-in attempts they see on their network). I don't
see any major complaint about that either.
Tell you what. Let's suppose we have five people, Alice, Bob, Charlie,
Dave and Emma. We'll say they live strung out along a long desert
road. Each of them sees their nearest neighbours reularly, but it's too
far to keep in direct contact with the rest.
So they decide a simple system for message passing. If one has a message
for someone down the line they tell the neighbour living closest to that
person, who passes it on. So if Alice wants to say something to Dave, she
tells Bob, and Bob tells Charlie when he sees him, and Charlie tells Dave.
Once a year Bob, Charlie and Dave's neighbours buy them each a bottle
of beer bu way of saying "thanks" for the message service. Well, no one
buys beer for Alice and Emma since they never have to carry messages.
But that's ok: they're just glad to be able to keep in touch with the
rest of the community.
That's the way the Internet is supposed to work. Bob, Charlie and Dave
are "common carriers" in that they pass on everything they are given, and
they get their recompense from their nearest neighbours. That's Network
Neutrality as I understand it.
The problem starts when one day Charlie has an epiphany: "Alice and
Emma are using my pipes for free!" he exclaims. "We'll soon put a stop
to that!" And so now Alice and Emma have to buy Charlie a been every
year as well as one for their neighbour. Charlie is no longer a common
carrier, and he's no longer network neutral, but he has just doubled his
beer income, which some people might see as justification enough.
Certainly the argument looks persuasive to Dave who can see the extra
beer Charlie is getting. So he says "in that case, Bob and Alice are
using my pipes for free!" So no Alice has to buy yet another beer.
So does Bob, but he can at least retaliate, and does so by charging Dave
and Emma for using his "pipes".
So all of a sudden, Emma and Alice find the cost of sending messages
has gone up three fold with no compensating rise in the value of the
service. Meanwhile Bob, Charlie and Dave realize that the the beer they're
getting from each other is the same as the beer they're getting from each
other, and it would make sense to just waive one another's charges,
or maybe take a bottle and pass it around between them once a year in
token satisfaction of contractual agreements.
Now the lads are getting same amount of beer bought for them as before,
but they no longer have to buy beer for anyone. While the girls on the and
are have seen their beer bill treble overnight. Obviously, Bob, Charlie and
Dave consider this to be "good business".
Yeah, but this only works if they are allowed to charge content providers
for their protection racket. If you outlaw the ability to treat any
content provider differently on a network level, the problem goes away.
OK. let's try that. Alice goes to the judge and says, "Judge, Charlie is
discriminating against me by refusing to carry my packets. That's discriminating
against my mail based on endpoint. Please make him stop",
"With respect, your honour" say Charlie, "that just isn't so. I treat
everyone the same way. It's just that I provide a service for which I
demand compensation. Anyone who fails to provide compensation is not
entitled to the service".
"That sounds fair to me" says hizzonner, "Charlie is not discriminating on
endpoint, he's discriminating based on failure to pay. O
We can agree that victimizing specific sites should be illegal.
True. Although Google and Vonage are the least of my concerns. Google in particular have the money and
lawyers to make sure they get a slice of any eventual carve up.
Neutrality to endpoint is worth considering.
mmm... I don't think I understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that third party carriers shouldn't be allowed to charge some users or final ISPs more than others? Because I don't think that's what they want to do. I think the they want to charge everyone, everywhere. If you stop them being predatory, they'll just use that as the excuse to roll out charges across the board.
Neutrality to protocol is not something I can support.
Which kills the next emergent network technology stone dead. The carriers will drop anything they don't understand, and only the big boys will be able to cut the deals needed for new protocols to be accepted. Although, in practice, I suspect we'll just see a lot more use of ssh tunnels, possible even the scenario from Cryptonomicon where endpoints stream encrypted full bandwidth white noise at one another, just so no one can do traffic analysis on them. It wouldn't exactly be an improvement, but it would get round protocol based traffic shaping. Unless of course you'd sanction shaping SSL session traffic. Mind, that might ruffle a few more feathers than you would just blocking kazar and e-donkey.
Look.. I get the feeling I'm trying your patience here, and I don't mean to do that. You seem like a decent fellow, and it's been an interesting discussion. Maybe this would be a good time to shake metaphorical hands and agree to differ?
Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes
your traffic...
Would that not be prevented in most Net Neutrality proposals?
Possibly. I must admit I've not been following the proposed legislation. But if so, it's the proposals that are broken and not the principle of Net Neutrality.
I think we share the viewpoints on these concerns. The difference is in the solution, not the question of whether the problem exists.
I think we agree a problem exists. I'm not sure we see the same problem, however. I did a bit of reading up on this, since this discussion. The whole Network Neutrality
issue seems to have kicked off with an
interview
SBC CEO Edward Whitacre gave to business week. This is the offending section:
How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband
pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like
to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because
we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's
going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes
to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use
my pipes?
As you see, he's not talking about traffic shaping, and he's not talking
about victimising specific sites. He's talking about making people pay
to use his pipes. "People" probably doesn't mean you and me directly,
but it's only a matter of time once the practice is accepted before it
means the ISPs. And if they have to pay a surcharge to use Ed's pipes
then they have to pass it on to us. So he may be talking about Google
and Vonage, but what he means (reading between the lines) is that he
wants to tax everyone using the Internet.
And... I'm not an expert on US law, but I'm not sure that anti-competitive law would
apply if they victimise everyone equally. They'd just be charging all the market would
bear, surely. And they we could look forward to cross licencing deals between the big boys
which would allow them to offer service at a lower price than the mom and pop ISPs that had to
pay a surcharge to every penny ante cableco on the face of the globe, and that would just be
"economies of scale" when it came to court. Eventually, there would be a handful of
multinational service providers, and the content companies would finally achieve their
dream of turning the Internet into Just Another TV Channel.
So, really, I'm not adverse to tightening anti-trust law, but I don't think it's going to offer
any sort of protection here. And I don't think that protecting specific sites is going to help,
because I don't think that's the plan. I think that's a bit of misdirection; what they want is to
charge everyone.
I'll even go ahead and say that I'm one of those who _will_ choose to ignore the ideology bullshit, because the alternative would be to actually get annoyed that some idiot lectures me in his half-baked misunderstood ideology.
You seem to be assuming that the political subtext will be dealt with in a one sided manner. I don't think there's really anything from TFA to support that.
Obviously, it's your choice whether to engage with the ideas behind the setting, or just to shoot stuff, and
there's nothing wrong in just shooting stuff. But it seems a bit unfair to sneer at a fellow for trying to add a bit of
depth to a genre; depth that, I think most would agree, is sorely lacking in most contemporary games.
And how many people will play the game completely oblivious to the political ideology?
Well, the mark of a good game - of any good piece of storytelling really - is that it can be appreciated on
more than one level. Those who just want a "kick-ass shooter" will play it as such and hopefully have a good time.
Those who like a bit of brain candy with their mindless violence will pick up on the politics
And yeah, some of them will probably take offence. If no-one is offended, then Levine will have had nothing to
say, and I don't think that's going to be the case after reading TFA.
All in all, this is starting to remind me of Deus Ex. That had good game play and made a top notch shooter; but
it was also crammed full of some wonderfully subversive politics. One of my favourite memories from the game is still
standing at the bar, upstairs at the Lucky Money Club, and arguing politics with the bartender.
If Levine can get the mix right, he could be on to the best game in a decade. For my money, anyhow.
FSF can't change the meaning of GPL on-the-fly with FAQs and such
Well, they can can't change the terms and conditions of the licence, certainly. Nor are they trying to do so.
On the other hand that's not what's being discussed here.
This particular sub-thread is debating the "spirit" of the GPL, as opposed to the legal obligations the GPL imposes. As such, it seems reasonable enough to refer to the web site of the GPL's governing body.
In general, as a software developer, I don't feel MS has forced anything down my throat.
It's not so much they stop you from using the tools. It's more that they put a dozen or so trivial irritations in the way of anyone wanting to use them,
yodeling all the while about the massive superiority of their own offerings. This business with TestDriven.net is a good example. Nunit + testdriven are decent tools.
me some examples. TFS vs. Subversion
Never used TFS, so I can't comment. How about Subversion vs. Visual SourceSafe? That was the greatest thing ever too. Allegedly.
I could certainly develop software for Windows using open source tools, though I would probably quit my job before doing that.
I do develop for windows using open source tools. I think I might quit if they made me use Visual Studio
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it doesn't. Suppose I travel to Canada and start discussing "the government"; to which government will people most likely think I refer - Canadian or British?
I'll grant you that the meaning is highly contextual, and that in the particular context you quote the only possible interpretation is the British Government. But that doesn't mean that the variable stays bound when you re-contextualise the definition; if you want to change the discussion to Palestine, the definition becomes attempts to influence the Palestinian government or the public or a section of the public.
Now if we were drafting laws, it might be different. But you appear to be arguing that the definition is semantically null outside the United Kingdom, and frankly I think that's completely unsupportable.
I think that in order to support that assertion, you need the word "British" in front of the words "government" and "public".
Do I take it then that you are a Diebold employee, and that when you say "we" you are referring to your employer?
Good, because it would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do. Especially in the current political climate. Which is probably why "we" (by which I mean a lot of people who read Slashdot) are complaining.
s/RFC1954/RFC1945/
After going to the trouble of looking it up, you'd think I'd check I had it spelt correctly....
Sorry for the late reply: I've been away for a couple of days. Anyway...
I don't object to traffic shaping at all. I just don't value it so highly that I'm willing to enable predatory pricing schemes just to preserve the practice.
In what way? All I'm proposing is a new protocol, and that ISPs be allowed to send private data between their own nodes on their own sub-nets. Best of luck drafting a law to outlaw that. Doubly so when it comes to prosecuting it in court.
Whoops! Not so fast, if you please. I'm not suggesting we enact legislation as to which RFCs ISPs may support. What I'm proposing is legislation that would would make it illegal to comply with those RFCs in certain circumstances. We already have plenty of those. For instance, suppose I had a web server containing lots of copyrighted materials that I was not licensed to distribute. In this case, the law makes it illegal for me to comply with RFC1954, at least regard to the unlicenced files. I don't see that breaking the Internet, however.
Hmmm... not being a US citizen, I don't have a well defined impression of the FCC. I know there's a lot of debate as to their role, but I've never taken the time to sift through the propaganda and the faith-based-reasoning, so I don't think I can usefully comment here. What I will say is that in the UK, having an independant regulator seems to have worked quite well. British Telecom still own a tremendous amount of the infrastructure, but there are still lots of independent ISPs. The ISPs moan about BT, but overall, everyone seems able to do business,
Well, currently the whole situation is hypothetical. We don't know for sure who Whitaker and his friends are going to charge, and we don't how they intend to implement the scheme. But now they have the idea, it seems silly to leave loopholes to be exploited.
So let's turn the problem around: why are you so determined to retain protocol based traffic shaping? Do you really believe that bittorrent will destroy the Internet? Do you think that we need VOIP badly enough to leave a loophole open? Or do you just want a weapon to attack file sharing?
Which is fair enough. Although in fairness, I don't think DRM is being marketed to the media companies as a technology to make copying media "somewhat inconvenient" and I don't think that's what they're looking for when they sponsor research into DRM. But that's by the by...
mmmm... sorry, I didn't make myself particularly clear. I meant that the social dynamics of the situation were different. Online gamers form communities where status is largely determined by skill. A paricipant would suffer a considerable loss of respect if all his peers were to discover his rating was due to cheating. On the other hand, take a group teens discussing music and a participant's kudos is likely to be enhanced if they think he obtained the music by downloading it. Additionally, most people don't like cheating their friends, but when it comes to big cheating corporations... well I don't think that's even a consideration. What they see is another community - one of file sharers - where status comes from sharing, and from how much stuff you make available,
That's why I think FPS watchdog programs work better than DRM. The pressures to circumvent are considerably less, while there are pressures to play fair that don't exist in the file sharing world.
Well, OK. I'll admit that I may have got a bit carried away with my rhetoric and used a few too many absolutes :) But I still don't think the limited set of restricted uses you describe is what the media companies think they're buying when they invest in DRM, and I don't think it's ever going to support the sort of business model that they want it to support.
I entirely agree. I think there are a lot of very good uses for DRM technologies. The trouble is all the ones I can think of involve giving the user control of the cryptographic keys. Trouble is, no-one seems to be in any sort of hurry to set up that sort of infrastructure.
I think I maybe didn't make this bit very clear. See, if I was a unprincipled, greed obsessed CEO of a major telecoms company, I wouldn't do it like that. What I'd do is set up bittorrent clients on each of my nodes and torrent files filled with random noise between the nodes in the subnet. It set the traffic so the BT used 99% of the available bandwidth, meaning that only traffic that had been prioritised upwards could get past.Nothing is be prioritised downwards - I'm just artificially increasing the load on my network.
And if anyone asks why they can't use my pipes without accessing a for-pay protocol, I just say "99% of the traffic on our network is filesharing, your honour". And the chances are no one will look any closer.
Nothing is being excluded though. There's an excellent chance any one of your packets will get through, eventually. It's just that other traffic (much of it using file sharing protocols) is putting such a load on out network that non-prioritised traffic can't get through. That's why need to be able to offer prioritised protocols, which we do for a very reasonable fee, by the way.
Nothing has to be de-prioritised. Nothing has to be blocked. And if enough of the big players got together on this, they could make it fly.
OK, I can cope with that.
I think so. Let's find out - we'll design a new protocol. Let's call it BSL for Business Session Layer. It's essentially identical to SSL except that in addition to the encryption data already present in the SSL protocol, there's facility for an arbitrary number of cryptographic tickets. The idea here is that carriers can sell an encryption key to an ISP who then uses it to generate tickets for each packet then send out. At each hop, the router checks to see if the packet has a ticket authorizing if for that particular subnet. If the ticket is absent, out of date, or invalid, the packet gets dropped.
Now suppose I'm AT&T and I offer to prioritize this protocol. It's not discriminating against anyone. We'll accept the traffic regardless of source, and give equal priority to all packets using this protocol. But unless the endpoint has paid AT&T for a key, it's useless to them. And since the protocol supports any number of tickets, all the major carriers can get in on the act.
So now we can privatize the entire Internet, save only one thing. We still have to support other forms of TCP/IP traffic and we're not allowed to de-prioritize that. What do we do? We stream junk traffic between all the nodes our subnet. Basically, the carriers all DOS themselves. Of course, the prioritized packets get through without a problem, but for all other purposes, the network is dead.
Tricky one, isn't it?
Of course, he also likes to talk about failure modes. And once someone figures out how to break a DRM mechanism, it's pretty much useless. Look at DVDs. Post-Johansen, copying a the major inconvenience of copying a DVD is installing the software and waiting for the thing to rip. HD-DVD was supposed to fix this by allowing replacement keys ... but the speed
with which these keys are being found suggests that this isn't going
to help much, either.
The thing is, If the inconvenience of DRM is trivial compared to the wait time of ripping the medium, then I'd still have to question its value.
There's another trade off to consider as well. DRM discourages customers. Buyers who can't play their media as they expect may less eager to buy in future. Music downloads that won't play on Timmy's new MP3 player may well encourage people to seek out unlicenced (but DRM free) music.
I do believe Sony tried that approach with their music CDs just recently :)
Seriously though, do you not think the dynamics are different here? You're comparing an interactive semi-social activity that depends on continuing real time access to a server against a recorded, network free... let's say "single player" recreation. People have different perception of the issues, for one thing. For another, it's easier to cut off someone's access to the server because in this case you don't have to give them access to they encryption keys as well as the resource.
Which, of course, is the problem with DRM as outlined in TFA.
Pshaw. The choice of licence determines the packages you can choose to implement. There's no need to bring horticulture into the debate.
Of course you can. You can choose the licence you desire, and then choose from the packages available for that licence, or else you can choose the package you desire and then choose to abide by the terms of that package's licence. It's not a lack of choice, it's a question of priotities. Choose which is most important to you.
And so... what, exactly?
If you're just starting development they you find a package whose licence you like better. If you're midway in development and committed, keep on using the last version licenced under terms you found acceptable.
If none of those appeal, then yeah, write your own and release it as you see fit. If you want the benefit of the hard work of others, the price is accepting the terms of the licence.
I disagree. I think they made their money by enabling widespread distribution of information, It's funny, but anyone builds a system to efficiently distribute information winds up rich. Newspapers, publishing houses, telephone companies, Google...
I think the record companies were benefiting from the same effect when they made their money. But with DRM they moved from enabling the transfer of information to trying to restrict it.
I sometimes wonder if the fundamental problem facing the record companies isn't a basic misunderstanding of what it was they did that people were willing to pay for. I mean it wasn't "holding intellectual property", I'll tell you that for nothing.
Actually, I think that's the best argument I've heard so far in favour, in a "least worst" sort of way. Maybe they could use it for their next advertising push:
DRM: It's not as bad as Celine Dion!
OK, let's look at your analogy. The car is the plaintext, the lock is the encryption algorithm, the key is the encryption key. If your car had a DRM lock, it would have the key selloptaped to the car door, along with a notice saying "driving this car without permission is very, very illegal".
I think any manufacturer that made car locks like that might well get some complaints.
The trouble is that with DRM the key has to be sellotaped to the car door. What you're doing is giving people cars, trying to disguise the keys taped to the door, and telling them they can't go for a drive unless you say so. It might even work, for a little while at least, but once people catch on to the fact that the key has to be there somewhere, you;re going to start seeing an awful lot of unauthorised driving. If your business model depends on people only driving when you say so, then you're in trouble at this point.
Successful ones may be based on data. Unsuccessful business models may be based on anything, including editorial positions and wishful thinking. I don't see any data to suggest that DRM is enabling any successful business models. On the other hand the ease with which HD-DVD DRM is being cracked at the moment suggests that the opposite may well be true
Just because the media companies have a lot of money, that doesn't mean they owe it to DRM. I think this is a wishful thinking model, and I think its doomed to failure.
I'm saying most of the money invested in DRM has been irrationally invested. Because it can't work long term. It's great for people who sell DRM, but a waste of money for the people who buy it. You surely can't think this is sound long term business practice?
You think EMI made its money by buying DRM? Remind me to ignore all yours :)
Which would be a good point if all Mr. Allison was saying was "DRM is evil". However, that isn't his point. What he is saying is that it can't work, it's never going to work, and that trying build a business model (or an economy) found on DRM is a deeply irrational act.
The problem is that for DRM to work you have to hand the customer the encrypted data, the encryption algorithm and the encryption key. If you don't the DRMed work cannot be accessed. However, if you do, they have everything they need to circumvent the DRM.
But if the DRM has a fundamental logical flow, then the problem is DRM. That's the point.
A lot of people would agree with that. The two main approaches offered seem to be either move to a gift economy, or indoctrinate school kids to believe that copyright infringement is a Great Evil on a par with Rape, Murder, Genocide, and Britney Spears. Personally, I can see problems with both those strategies.
In the meantime, DRM still isn't going to work any time soon, and any exec who proposes spending serious money on it wants his arse kicking. Not for Being Evil, but for Being Stupid.
Fair 'nuff. Just thought it worth mentioning.
Tell you what. Let's suppose we have five people, Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Emma. We'll say they live strung out along a long desert road. Each of them sees their nearest neighbours reularly, but it's too far to keep in direct contact with the rest.
So they decide a simple system for message passing. If one has a message for someone down the line they tell the neighbour living closest to that person, who passes it on. So if Alice wants to say something to Dave, she tells Bob, and Bob tells Charlie when he sees him, and Charlie tells Dave. Once a year Bob, Charlie and Dave's neighbours buy them each a bottle of beer bu way of saying "thanks" for the message service. Well, no one buys beer for Alice and Emma since they never have to carry messages. But that's ok: they're just glad to be able to keep in touch with the rest of the community.
That's the way the Internet is supposed to work. Bob, Charlie and Dave are "common carriers" in that they pass on everything they are given, and they get their recompense from their nearest neighbours. That's Network Neutrality as I understand it.
The problem starts when one day Charlie has an epiphany: "Alice and Emma are using my pipes for free!" he exclaims. "We'll soon put a stop to that!" And so now Alice and Emma have to buy Charlie a been every year as well as one for their neighbour. Charlie is no longer a common carrier, and he's no longer network neutral, but he has just doubled his beer income, which some people might see as justification enough. Certainly the argument looks persuasive to Dave who can see the extra beer Charlie is getting. So he says "in that case, Bob and Alice are using my pipes for free!" So no Alice has to buy yet another beer. So does Bob, but he can at least retaliate, and does so by charging Dave and Emma for using his "pipes".
So all of a sudden, Emma and Alice find the cost of sending messages has gone up three fold with no compensating rise in the value of the service. Meanwhile Bob, Charlie and Dave realize that the the beer they're getting from each other is the same as the beer they're getting from each other, and it would make sense to just waive one another's charges, or maybe take a bottle and pass it around between them once a year in token satisfaction of contractual agreements. Now the lads are getting same amount of beer bought for them as before, but they no longer have to buy beer for anyone. While the girls on the and are have seen their beer bill treble overnight. Obviously, Bob, Charlie and Dave consider this to be "good business".
OK. let's try that. Alice goes to the judge and says, "Judge, Charlie is discriminating against me by refusing to carry my packets. That's discriminating against my mail based on endpoint. Please make him stop",
"With respect, your honour" say Charlie, "that just isn't so. I treat everyone the same way. It's just that I provide a service for which I demand compensation. Anyone who fails to provide compensation is not entitled to the service".
"That sounds fair to me" says hizzonner, "Charlie is not discriminating on endpoint, he's discriminating based on failure to pay. O
True. Although Google and Vonage are the least of my concerns. Google in particular have the money and lawyers to make sure they get a slice of any eventual carve up.
mmm... I don't think I understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that third party carriers shouldn't be allowed to charge some users or final ISPs more than others? Because I don't think that's what they want to do. I think the they want to charge everyone, everywhere. If you stop them being predatory, they'll just use that as the excuse to roll out charges across the board.
Which kills the next emergent network technology stone dead. The carriers will drop anything they don't understand, and only the big boys will be able to cut the deals needed for new protocols to be accepted. Although, in practice, I suspect we'll just see a lot more use of ssh tunnels, possible even the scenario from Cryptonomicon where endpoints stream encrypted full bandwidth white noise at one another, just so no one can do traffic analysis on them. It wouldn't exactly be an improvement, but it would get round protocol based traffic shaping. Unless of course you'd sanction shaping SSL session traffic. Mind, that might ruffle a few more feathers than you would just blocking kazar and e-donkey.
Look .. I get the feeling I'm trying your patience here, and I don't mean to do that. You seem like a decent fellow, and it's been an interesting discussion. Maybe this would be a good time to shake metaphorical hands and agree to differ?
Possibly. I must admit I've not been following the proposed legislation. But if so, it's the proposals that are broken and not the principle of Net Neutrality.
I think we agree a problem exists. I'm not sure we see the same problem, however. I did a bit of reading up on this, since this discussion. The whole Network Neutrality issue seems to have kicked off with an interview SBC CEO Edward Whitacre gave to business week. This is the offending section:
As you see, he's not talking about traffic shaping, and he's not talking about victimising specific sites. He's talking about making people pay to use his pipes. "People" probably doesn't mean you and me directly, but it's only a matter of time once the practice is accepted before it means the ISPs. And if they have to pay a surcharge to use Ed's pipes then they have to pass it on to us. So he may be talking about Google and Vonage, but what he means (reading between the lines) is that he wants to tax everyone using the Internet.
And... I'm not an expert on US law, but I'm not sure that anti-competitive law would apply if they victimise everyone equally. They'd just be charging all the market would bear, surely. And they we could look forward to cross licencing deals between the big boys which would allow them to offer service at a lower price than the mom and pop ISPs that had to pay a surcharge to every penny ante cableco on the face of the globe, and that would just be "economies of scale" when it came to court. Eventually, there would be a handful of multinational service providers, and the content companies would finally achieve their dream of turning the Internet into Just Another TV Channel.
So, really, I'm not adverse to tightening anti-trust law, but I don't think it's going to offer any sort of protection here. And I don't think that protecting specific sites is going to help, because I don't think that's the plan. I think that's a bit of misdirection; what they want is to charge everyone.
You seem to be assuming that the political subtext will be dealt with in a one sided manner. I don't think there's really anything from TFA to support that.
Obviously, it's your choice whether to engage with the ideas behind the setting, or just to shoot stuff, and there's nothing wrong in just shooting stuff. But it seems a bit unfair to sneer at a fellow for trying to add a bit of depth to a genre; depth that, I think most would agree, is sorely lacking in most contemporary games.
Well, the mark of a good game - of any good piece of storytelling really - is that it can be appreciated on more than one level. Those who just want a "kick-ass shooter" will play it as such and hopefully have a good time. Those who like a bit of brain candy with their mindless violence will pick up on the politics
And yeah, some of them will probably take offence. If no-one is offended, then Levine will have had nothing to say, and I don't think that's going to be the case after reading TFA.
All in all, this is starting to remind me of Deus Ex. That had good game play and made a top notch shooter; but it was also crammed full of some wonderfully subversive politics. One of my favourite memories from the game is still standing at the bar, upstairs at the Lucky Money Club, and arguing politics with the bartender.
If Levine can get the mix right, he could be on to the best game in a decade. For my money, anyhow.
Well, they can can't change the terms and conditions of the licence, certainly. Nor are they trying to do so. On the other hand that's not what's being discussed here.
This particular sub-thread is debating the "spirit" of the GPL, as opposed to the legal obligations the GPL imposes. As such, it seems reasonable enough to refer to the web site of the GPL's governing body.
It's not so much they stop you from using the tools. It's more that they put a dozen or so trivial irritations in the way of anyone wanting to use them, yodeling all the while about the massive superiority of their own offerings. This business with TestDriven.net is a good example. Nunit + testdriven are decent tools.
Never used TFS, so I can't comment. How about Subversion vs. Visual SourceSafe? That was the greatest thing ever too. Allegedly.
I do develop for windows using open source tools. I think I might quit if they made me use Visual Studio