it's not reasonable to assume that they would prosecute you unless you published the information you obtained (indeed, how would they know?).
Right. But if you're a researcher, publication is part of the job. Those people can't say, "well, I'm only at risk if I share my data." That's like a programmer thinking, "well, I'm only at risk if I add code to the repository."
Imagine if everyone at Adobe had to write Photoshop independently, owing to a law that prevented the sharing of source code. You have a hundred employees that need to produce a hundred independent, complete binaries. That's how absurd it is to expect scientists to not share data.
Personally, I think it's great that people with no grasp of what "open source" means are using it as a buzzword. You've arrived when what you do becomes a buzzword.
Decades ago, phrases like "hi fi" (and many decades before that, "electric") were used as meaningless buzzwords. Hi-fi hula hoops! Electric combs! It's a natural cultural response to something that has made a big dent.
"Although I agree that Johnson is not explicit in his views, the rantings of genocide on his blog are normally entertained wholeheartedly by the other commentors to his posts."
Mine is a controversial view, but I've long ago decided that you can judge a political blog by its reader comments.
There are some politically slanted blogs whose authors claim to have no slant. But reading the comments, you can see what type of people resonate with the content. Since that is out of your control as a blogger, and since there are some really stupid people out there, it might upset you that I judge your blog by the people who comment on it. However, when it comes to political views, your exact words matter less than the theme of what you're saying. Posters carry the theme in different words.
If someone rants about "African Americans," can he defend himself on the grounds that Africa and America are contintents rather than races?
You don't have to explicitly cite the exact race you are bashing to be racist. In fact, many racists are not exactly clear on taxonomy anyway. And a lot of racist remarks are suggestive rather than explicit.
In this case, and in many cultures, religion is tied to race, language etc. The dispute in Northern Ireland, for example, may seem on the surface level to be about Protestant vs Catholic, but it is not a theological dispute: these are groups separated by political views, culture, socioeconomic class, language, and ethnicity.
One summer I worked at a startup, and sat in on the meeting to think up a good name for the product/company.
There was me, the CEO, the VP of marketing, and my own boss. People tossed out ideas and the VP would Google the names right away. A simple and obvious strategy to avoid such a namespace collision.
My own "net savvy" was useful as well. Someone suggested calling the product "stormfront" for example (for some reason, people in the tech sector like badass weather names) and I told 'em that stormfront dot org was a neo-nazi website. They looked at me funny after that. Glad nobody suggested "goatse"!
Anyways, my point is that these OSM people don't sound pretty tech savvy themselves if they didn't do the simple step of Googling their own name while thinking it up. And it's not just a silly HAW HAW mistake: tech companies are not competitive if everyone in charge is too out of touch to know what is on the Internet.
Is Google down? Okay, I updated the faq to tell you who we are.
Also, we never said anything about hackers. Nowhere have we associated hacking with malicious behavior. And I sincerly hope this will be a learning experience for all involved. I, in particular, will probably learn a thing or two about running next year's contest.
Correct, making it look valid is the main purpose of the contest.
Please check out the contest page: the "evil" behavior is not something java would prevent you from doing. We're not talking about crashing a computer or gaining root access, but performing a data processing task incorrectly. It's entirely problem state.
That being said, I chose C because it does permit more tricks along the lines of stack smashing and type mismatches. The winners of the obfuscated V contest used techniques like this to conceal their evil behavior, so I feel this would give people more freedom to get creative.
Finally, this is not meant to slam C, or open source, or any such like. I can't imagine how anyone can look at this contest and see it as an argument for less openness.
Have you ever been to a university? And even more important, have you ever been part of the faculty at one?
Yes, I am. Could you elaborate on this groupthink you describe? Could you for example provide some examples of things you yourself have experienced? Personally?
I hear a lot about how PC we allegedly are, but it's mostly stories people have heard about some unnamed university somewhere. Not direct experience, but things people have heard or read. Seriously, I have encountered no "groupthink" or hegemony to which I am forced to subscribe to keep my job.
No offense, but your post sounds like the standard vague rant I hear from people who learn about colleges by reading John Leo columns in US News. No, I don't have to dedicate myself to some accepted philosophy. Nor do my colleagues. From my limited experience, my colleagues are free to speak their mind and criticize the status quo, and they do.
Perhaps some concrete examples would help me see your point of view,
They don't have to convince anyone of anything, because they are the legal owners of the content
Remember the Napster trial? Twenty bucks says they don't own jack. The industry is apparently convinced that they hold the copyrights which properly belong to musicians.
If these people are the legal owners of anytyhing, I'd like to see some proof.
You also have the opposite problem with color histograms: two very similar images, even two images taken of the same static scene, seconds apart, can have substantially different color histograms.
I used to do research in CBIR, and in my image library I had 5 photos of a christmas tree. By any efficient metric, one of them was always way far away from the others.
The short answer is, it doesn't matter who owns the copyright to the data in question, or whether you have permission in certain instances.
That matters if *you* are trying to make a copy or if *you* are trying to circumvent the protection.
But now, suppose I'm a software vendor who wants to sell or give away the circumvention tool. That is also illegal under the DMCA, and that's what Adobe is afraid of. Not circumvention itself, but distributing circumvention tools.
Remember, the DMCA outlaws (a) certain kinds of circumvention, and (b) the tools to do so. It's a standard canard by DMCA apologists to say that you can get permission to do (a). Okay, so who can legally sell me the equipment I need to do it?
Xcott
The problem here is not the actual circumvention, but the manufacturing/selling/distribution of tools to perform the circumvention. That's what Adobe would get sued for, not the circumvention itself.
It doesn't matter if I can legally circumvent the protection on my own works---if it is illegal for anyone to sell me or give me a circumvention tool.
I'll make sure to commemorate the day by playing some traditional tunes, which by the way are largely free as in speech: in the public domain, and which are taught, modified, arranged and played in an open, distributed, collaborative folk process.
Go to an traditional Irish music festival and you'll see hundreds of people with little recording devices, recording lessons and concerts. Nobody seems to complain about permission and copyright---it's a whole other world. The biggest complaint about recording is that the stupid MiniDisc recorders don't permit digital uploads.
(The tunes are also free as in beer, and if you play a trad instrument your beer is sometimes free as in beer too.)
However, even if the Inernet were a theory (the product of science), it would have nothing to do with consensus.
No. Technology works because scientific theories work, because they are accurate and precise in their predictions. If we were wrong about physics, your microwave oven would not exist. Yes, scientific "consensus" has something to do with your microwave oven. Yes, it demonstrates that scientific consensus is relatively trustworthy.
Science doesn't work on consensus. Science has to do with proof, theory and disproof. Anything else is social and other than being an interesting topic for research in itself, has nothing to do with science.
Science certainly does work by consensus. The whole concept of peer review, and independent verification of experiments, exemplifies this. Theories are developed and confirmed by scientists as a group; when only an individual can observe certain results, that observation is suspect. Theories and observations gain traction in the community when they are correct and useful, and hence the evolved consensus is what ends up in your physics textbooks.
It is silly to say that this networking of ideas has nothing to do with science. If you could wave a magic wand and prevent the intermingling of scientists---eliminate journals, cancel conferences, prevent publication of results and debate, so that we have not a community but a large band of highly educated individuals---we would not know squat about the universe.
Sometimes important advances in science are made against the consensus, but these are memorable because these are so rare.
Exactly. Likewise, we can name examples of skyscrapers and bridges collapsing, and we all provide the same memorable examples---precisely because skyscrapers and bridges are well-engineered.
It is also silly to say that "consensus" is just a matter of popularity or politics. Widespread peer review is what makes the scientific community work. That is why it is called the scientific community, because they compare notes and develop a consensus which is far more reliable than an individual's conclusions.
Of course, anyone who doesn't agree can put his/her money where his/her mouth is. Accept the vocal minority over the consensus. Don't forget all that pesky technology that seems to imply the evil politicized consensus is right about light and electricity and mass and gravity.
Crichton can provide examples of the scientific consensus being wrong now and then, but who does he recommend we trust more?? Who is more authoritative, who makes better predictions about climate change, than an entire scientific community of climatologists?
The last bit of his quote is just silly, and smacks of anti-intellecutalism:
"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."
It would be less silly if you weren't reading this quote on a computer screen, thanks to the Internet, integrated circuits, electricity, and a host of other "consensus" claptrap.
In contrast, the majority of climatologists put together have one single degree in basket weaving from Waubonsee community college.
If you're going to compare credentials, that nasty "consensus" beats the living crap out of any single person.
Furthermore: if you do not trust the scientific consensus (meaning: the view among the majority of scientists in a given field), who do you trust more?
The only way steganography will work is if you keep the way you hide it a secret because if it's public knowledge how your steganography program works it's trivially easily to tell if a message is hidden in something (even if you can't read it) which defeats the purpose of hiding it in the first place.
There are plenty of stego algorithms which use a secret key, and it is not "trivially easy" to detect some stego algorithms.
There are bad algorithms that can be detected by various statistical tests, and I suppose stego has not reached the level of security we expect in crypto, where we may expect an attack success rate of 2^-128 per attempt.
However, it is a common misconception that steganography equals obscurity. I guess laypeople confuse the literal obscurity of data hiding, with the utterly unrelated obscurity of relying on a secret algorithm. But there is no reason why you can't have a good stego algorithm that can be published.
Steganography is typically used within a closed group. It is typically not used between strangers. Therefore, you don't need to publicize your steganographic protocols beyond a small group of people.
Says who?
No, no, relying on obscurity is no different in stego than it is in crypto. It is not wise to home-brew either of these things; making a genuinely good cipher, or a genuinely good stego algorithm, is genuinely hard.
And by the way, if stego really was used typically in a closed group, how would you know?
Wait now, the Library can build and own its own tools?
Suppose you had legal permission to break the lock on your own garden shed, provided you forged your own pair of bolt cutters.
Realistically, they will not have tools unless it is legal, in general, to sell or distribute them. No economy will spring up around one legal customer.
I think the lack of a line-in jack is a pretty big deal, and a bad idea for a computer targeted to any large demographic (not just "prosumers.")
New Mac users are going to want to at least try the audio-related features before buying a 40-dollar USB line-in capture device. And for many applications, a line-in or mic-in is sufficient.
That is not pot, but very very long hours spent coding.
Huge bags under the eyes are the mark of a real programmer---at least, they were in the days before you could display pornography on a personal computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. But if you're a researcher, publication is part of the job. Those people can't say, "well, I'm only at risk if I share my data." That's like a programmer thinking, "well, I'm only at risk if I add code to the repository."
Imagine if everyone at Adobe had to write Photoshop independently, owing to a law that prevented the sharing of source code. You have a hundred employees that need to produce a hundred independent, complete binaries. That's how absurd it is to expect scientists to not share data.
Xcott
Decades ago, phrases like "hi fi" (and many decades before that, "electric") were used as meaningless buzzwords. Hi-fi hula hoops! Electric combs! It's a natural cultural response to something that has made a big dent.
X
Mine is a controversial view, but I've long ago decided that you can judge a political blog by its reader comments.
There are some politically slanted blogs whose authors claim to have no slant. But reading the comments, you can see what type of people resonate with the content. Since that is out of your control as a blogger, and since there are some really stupid people out there, it might upset you that I judge your blog by the people who comment on it. However, when it comes to political views, your exact words matter less than the theme of what you're saying. Posters carry the theme in different words.
Caj
If someone rants about "African Americans," can he defend himself on the grounds that Africa and America are contintents rather than races?
You don't have to explicitly cite the exact race you are bashing to be racist. In fact, many racists are not exactly clear on taxonomy anyway. And a lot of racist remarks are suggestive rather than explicit.
In this case, and in many cultures, religion is tied to race, language etc. The dispute in Northern Ireland, for example, may seem on the surface level to be about Protestant vs Catholic, but it is not a theological dispute: these are groups separated by political views, culture, socioeconomic class, language, and ethnicity.
Caj
There was me, the CEO, the VP of marketing, and my own boss. People tossed out ideas and the VP would Google the names right away. A simple and obvious strategy to avoid such a namespace collision.
My own "net savvy" was useful as well. Someone suggested calling the product "stormfront" for example (for some reason, people in the tech sector like badass weather names) and I told 'em that stormfront dot org was a neo-nazi website. They looked at me funny after that. Glad nobody suggested "goatse"!
Anyways, my point is that these OSM people don't sound pretty tech savvy themselves if they didn't do the simple step of Googling their own name while thinking it up. And it's not just a silly HAW HAW mistake: tech companies are not competitive if everyone in charge is too out of touch to know what is on the Internet.
Caj
Yeah, and I'm a woman on my grandmother's side.
Xcott
Well, I guess they did prepare us for more serious infrastructure threats, e.g. information warfare, organized crime etc.
I'd rather have an army of citizen-lamers spend decades breaking into our computers for fun, prompting us to build up an immune system.
Xcott
Is Google down? Okay, I updated the faq to tell you who we are.
Also, we never said anything about hackers. Nowhere have we associated hacking with malicious behavior. And I sincerly hope this will be a learning experience for all involved. I, in particular, will probably learn a thing or two about running next year's contest.
Xcott
Please check out the contest page: the "evil" behavior is not something java would prevent you from doing. We're not talking about crashing a computer or gaining root access, but performing a data processing task incorrectly. It's entirely problem state.
That being said, I chose C because it does permit more tricks along the lines of stack smashing and type mismatches. The winners of the obfuscated V contest used techniques like this to conceal their evil behavior, so I feel this would give people more freedom to get creative.
Finally, this is not meant to slam C, or open source, or any such like. I can't imagine how anyone can look at this contest and see it as an argument for less openness.
Xcott
Yes, I am. Could you elaborate on this groupthink you describe? Could you for example provide some examples of things you yourself have experienced? Personally?
I hear a lot about how PC we allegedly are, but it's mostly stories people have heard about some unnamed university somewhere. Not direct experience, but things people have heard or read. Seriously, I have encountered no "groupthink" or hegemony to which I am forced to subscribe to keep my job.
No offense, but your post sounds like the standard vague rant I hear from people who learn about colleges by reading John Leo columns in US News. No, I don't have to dedicate myself to some accepted philosophy. Nor do my colleagues. From my limited experience, my colleagues are free to speak their mind and criticize the status quo, and they do.
Perhaps some concrete examples would help me see your point of view,
X
Remember the Napster trial? Twenty bucks says they don't own jack. The industry is apparently convinced that they hold the copyrights which properly belong to musicians.
If these people are the legal owners of anytyhing, I'd like to see some proof.
X
I used to do research in CBIR, and in my image library I had 5 photos of a christmas tree. By any efficient metric, one of them was always way far away from the others.
Xcott
The short answer is, it doesn't matter who owns the copyright to the data in question, or whether you have permission in certain instances. That matters if *you* are trying to make a copy or if *you* are trying to circumvent the protection. But now, suppose I'm a software vendor who wants to sell or give away the circumvention tool. That is also illegal under the DMCA, and that's what Adobe is afraid of. Not circumvention itself, but distributing circumvention tools. Remember, the DMCA outlaws (a) certain kinds of circumvention, and (b) the tools to do so. It's a standard canard by DMCA apologists to say that you can get permission to do (a). Okay, so who can legally sell me the equipment I need to do it? Xcott
You're forgetting, however:
The problem here is not the actual circumvention, but the manufacturing/selling/distribution of tools to perform the circumvention. That's what Adobe would get sued for, not the circumvention itself.
It doesn't matter if I can legally circumvent the protection on my own works---if it is illegal for anyone to sell me or give me a circumvention tool.
Xcott
Yes Bill, but: I believe we will not get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.
Ted, It's pointless to have a triumphant video when we don't even have any decent instruments.
But how can we have decent instruments when we don't know how to play?
That is why we need Eddie Van Halen.
And that is why we need a triumphant video.
Excellent!
Go to an traditional Irish music festival and you'll see hundreds of people with little recording devices, recording lessons and concerts. Nobody seems to complain about permission and copyright---it's a whole other world. The biggest complaint about recording is that the stupid MiniDisc recorders don't permit digital uploads.
(The tunes are also free as in beer, and if you play a trad instrument your beer is sometimes free as in beer too.)
Xcott
No. Technology works because scientific theories work, because they are accurate and precise in their predictions. If we were wrong about physics, your microwave oven would not exist. Yes, scientific "consensus" has something to do with your microwave oven. Yes, it demonstrates that scientific consensus is relatively trustworthy.
Science certainly does work by consensus. The whole concept of peer review, and independent verification of experiments, exemplifies this. Theories are developed and confirmed by scientists as a group; when only an individual can observe certain results, that observation is suspect. Theories and observations gain traction in the community when they are correct and useful, and hence the evolved consensus is what ends up in your physics textbooks.
It is silly to say that this networking of ideas has nothing to do with science. If you could wave a magic wand and prevent the intermingling of scientists---eliminate journals, cancel conferences, prevent publication of results and debate, so that we have not a community but a large band of highly educated individuals---we would not know squat about the universe.
Xcott
Exactly. Likewise, we can name examples of skyscrapers and bridges collapsing, and we all provide the same memorable examples---precisely because skyscrapers and bridges are well-engineered.
It is also silly to say that "consensus" is just a matter of popularity or politics. Widespread peer review is what makes the scientific community work. That is why it is called the scientific community, because they compare notes and develop a consensus which is far more reliable than an individual's conclusions.
Of course, anyone who doesn't agree can put his/her money where his/her mouth is. Accept the vocal minority over the consensus. Don't forget all that pesky technology that seems to imply the evil politicized consensus is right about light and electricity and mass and gravity.
Xcott
The last bit of his quote is just silly, and smacks of anti-intellecutalism:
It would be less silly if you weren't reading this quote on a computer screen, thanks to the Internet, integrated circuits, electricity, and a host of other "consensus" claptrap.
Xcott
If you're going to compare credentials, that nasty "consensus" beats the living crap out of any single person.
Furthermore: if you do not trust the scientific consensus (meaning: the view among the majority of scientists in a given field), who do you trust more?
Xcott
There are plenty of stego algorithms which use a secret key, and it is not "trivially easy" to detect some stego algorithms.
There are bad algorithms that can be detected by various statistical tests, and I suppose stego has not reached the level of security we expect in crypto, where we may expect an attack success rate of 2^-128 per attempt.
However, it is a common misconception that steganography equals obscurity. I guess laypeople confuse the literal obscurity of data hiding, with the utterly unrelated obscurity of relying on a secret algorithm. But there is no reason why you can't have a good stego algorithm that can be published.
Xcott
Says who?
No, no, relying on obscurity is no different in stego than it is in crypto. It is not wise to home-brew either of these things; making a genuinely good cipher, or a genuinely good stego algorithm, is genuinely hard.
And by the way, if stego really was used typically in a closed group, how would you know?
Xcott
Suppose you had legal permission to break the lock on your own garden shed, provided you forged your own pair of bolt cutters.
Realistically, they will not have tools unless it is legal, in general, to sell or distribute them. No economy will spring up around one legal customer.
Xcott
New Mac users are going to want to at least try the audio-related features before buying a 40-dollar USB line-in capture device. And for many applications, a line-in or mic-in is sufficient.
X
Huge bags under the eyes are the mark of a real programmer---at least, they were in the days before you could display pornography on a personal computer.
Xcott