* Ban the programatic detection and elimination of ads. Do this either with laws, or de-facto, by owning media "browsers"
* Make ads use non-standard and random time lengths, sizes, volumes, ect., so that ads cannot be programatically detected
* Interrupt TV, web pages, and even music CDs and movies with ads at irregular intervals so that ads cannot be even generally anticipated
* Supperimpose ads on the sidelines of shows, web pages, CD covers etc. with a constant, nagging presence so that it is difficult to escape from ads even after they have been identified
* Work ads into the background of the action of shows, web pages, etc. to make it more difficult to mentally "tune out" the ads' presenece
* Work ads into the hearts of the plots of fictions, the comments of characters, and the opinions of pundits so that it becomes difficult to even distinguish ads from non-ads
* Replace entertainment, information, opinion, and art with ads wholesale; completely removes the troubling burden of somehow "integrating" ads with non-ads
* Attempt to ban the use of all mass media except for ads; eliminates non-ad competition
The FreeNet website does a good job of explaining to a semi-technically-literate person like me how FreeNet is or can be resistant to many technological attcks. But what about broad legal attacks? I can envision a scenario where a series of laws are passed and enforced in various countries (ones like China, UK, USA):
1) It is, obviously but now explicitly, illegal to access or make available any sort of illegal materials on FreeNet. This can include child porn, other sexually-related expression, copyright infringement, privacy violations, harassment, libel, racism, some forms of political dissent or political security violations...etc.
2) If a Freenet user is suspected of violating (1), search warrents will be served, and the suspect will be made to make their private keys available to law enforcement. All node operators will fall under the same warrents.
3) Public anonymous communication is declaired illegal (since the amount of illegal activity is so high, and since the cost of weeding out the illegal is so great). Suspected violators and any node operators must make available their private keys.
4) Freenet users are automaticly suspected of anonymous communication, therefore, standing warrents are issued against all Freenet users.
From there it's a short jump to just say that Freenet is illegal, and it's use is punishable.
"FreeWeb Agent is a small proxy server which allows you to surf FreeWeb sites on any browser. It forwards mainstream web requests like www.yahoo.com out to the mainstream web, but directs FreeWeb requests (to sites on the.free domain) to FreeNet.
"FreeWeb Publisher gives you an easy and convenient way to publish websites to FreeWeb. It keeps private records of all the files of your websites, so that each time you publish a website, only changed files get re-inserted to Freenet. FreeWeb publisher is easy to choose - just drop a folder onto the window, choose a domain name, click the 'update' button, and wait a couple of minutes - your site is then live and visible to others."
Identical twins are geneitically MORE simmilar than current cloning methods will allow (because, in the case of twins, they share their mother's Midocondrial DNA).
Which is the "real" child and which is the "twin?" Which the "original" and which the "clone?"
"Clones" will be regular people, like twins, like bastards, like test-tube babies, like adopted children, like suragate-mothered children...
It will be a small step to pass laws forbidding DVD players without region encoding and hdds without copy protection. These laws will be bought and paid for like the DMCA. And they have the potential of being effective.
It seems on shows like NYPD Blue that they can now say some of the curses that George Carlin proved were indeed the "7 words you can't say on TV." Specifically, they say "asshole" "bitch" "bullshit" and "whore". (I know these don't match perfectly with the original 7.) I've noticed though, that if they "asshole" early in an episode, they'll say it again later in that episode, but they won't say "bullshit." Likewize, if they say "bullshit" they'll repeat it, but they won't say "asshole." They'll never have a character call someone a "bitch-whore" or say something like "you bullshit whore"...
My guess is that TV/movie/book lawyers, in cohoots with producers, writers, and FCC/MPAA/PMRC contacts, have begun to contruct an elaborate rule book of what can be said/shown where. The S. Park movie would've gotten an NC-17 if they showed a website about necrophelia, but shit-eating was okay. There seem to be rules that allow one or two "shit" words, but not 3 or more. We all know that an erect cock pushes it into "hard core" but flacid penises are okay.
It's absurd, and insulting. Artists are pressured to make their works conform to these twisted standards. It's a big load of shitty bullshit fucked-up crap by whore-bitch motherfucking (erect) cocksuckers.
Also, since when is "harmful to minors" unprotected speech? I know obscenity and child-pornography have high-profile supreme court decisions supporting their lack of free-speech protection. but "harmful to minors?" What the fuck is that? Does that relate dto the "7 words you can't say on TV" thing? (Which by the way, you now apparently can say on TV...maybe).
1) Limit the width that the text can flow -- do not allow it to expand to full browser width. Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.
2) Use style sheets to make the LINE-HEIGHT at least 1.2 if not 1.3 or 1.4. The extra leading will be appreciated as it will make for easier reading.
3) Do NOT put large amounts of text into a single, monolithic table. This may cause a user's browser to have to wait for the whole page to be loaded until they see any text. This may seem contrary to #1, where text is required to be in a table. The solution -- put blocks of text (maybe on a paragraphy-by paragraph basis) into their own separate tables of fixed width. This will allow the text to load progressively. (see search results on Half.com for a good example.)
4) Use sans-serif fonts -- verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif -- specified in style sheets. This improves readability, and will cut down on page size by not requiring a million *font* tags.
5) Give links for a zip-file of all text in a plain format. Users can then open it in their favorite word processor to print, copy to pda, etc.
I work for a smallish web design company in NYC, so I get to see the Internet strategies of a lot of companies. Here are my impressions:
* Even though the Fucked Companies are many and growing, the web design industry itself is still HUGE and growing. Organic and Razor Fish, etc. seem to have tried too hard to cash in on the Dot Com phenomena, so they may crash a bit. But there are other companies and organizatons, besides Dot Coms, that want websites. All kinds of websites, not just ones that are meant to make billions.
* The so-called "dot coms" can be either good or bad, depending on the same things any businesses depend on. We have one client that has millions in investment from big venture capital firms and big tech players. But their site (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty) is the worst piece of crap imaginable. Why? Because no one there has any idea that they need a real plan. They hear that "medical sites" are going to be big, so they start a medical site. On the other hand, we have another client who is meticulously trying to do everything the "right" way...with lots of planning, slow steps, aliances, hiring appropriate talent at appropriate moments...they will potentially be big. Not Amazon, but many millions of dollars in revenue.
* The tech industry is everywhere. Why work at a Dot Com when you can do your wizz-bang computer stuff elsewhere? Even if you work at a sleezy bar, they may well be willing to pay you to set up a good computer accounting system, a website, or something else.
So now I finally get to experiment with the 2.2 kernals, October Gnome, XFree 3.33, and KDE 1.2 from the "non-free" section? RIGHT ON! I just hope they're stable...
How much would Troll Tech sell QT for? Or how much would Troll Tech cost? Or how much would it cost for them to GPL QT? Every day they're probably getting more and more expensive. You could score a lot of points.
People express random and silly opinions. That's fine (it's always been like that). But those people who work for the biggest companies get their random, silly, uninformed opinions heard.
The only times I'm aware of ABC.com news.com msnbc.com suck.com slate.com salon.com etc are when Slashdot talks about them. Why should we pay them ANY mind at all? Why not have an article that says "Michael Low thinks that Windows 98 should have a different backgoround color"?
CT: your first instinct was right: don't bother with this crap. Don't bother ME witht his crap.
"XUL, the Extensible User-Interface Language, gives any [one] the ability to completely redesign the program's GUI. Why?... A cross-platform widget set?"
Because this allows developers to make Mozilla on at least 3 platforms simaltaneously (BeOS, OS2, ect, ports are pretty far along). It's not just that one can make the GUI look different, though. One can write cross platform network apps quickly (like XMLTerm, ChatZilla, Aphodite, and Zope).
"Does the world need another HTML editor?"
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
"Chat and instant messaging?"
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
"Vector graphics?... An XML parser?"
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
"MathML?... XSLT transformations?"
Done by outside developers.
Personally, I'm excited about Mozilla. Contrary to this Sucky writer, I see strong planning from the ground up: Cross platorm; extensable; standards compliant; component-based; pretty well documented...The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works. But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other products/standards? There are a tremendous number of outside developers who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here. Why should anyone stop?
At this point, there are native-looking Windows and Mac widgets (and "plain" gtk widgets), skin-switching is in, fairly good image and cookie managing, pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use.
MathML, XSLT, and SVG are not yet in the daily compiled binaries.
IANOL, but I think the strategy is here isn't to try to blast MS for their bad monopolistic practices, or to distract them from the "matter at hand."
MS's strategy is to try to make this case fall under the DMCA. Slashdot wants it to fall under the First Amendment and fair use.
From the POV of MS's argument, Slashdot is making copyrighted materials available on their site.
From Slashdot's POV, they are providing a forum where relevent and contentious technology issues are being discussed openly. Reading MS's spec is necessary to evaluate the issues it raises in the larger context of technology, the court cases, free software, etc. -- hence fair use.
IMHO, this isn't just a clever defense by the Slashdot lawyers...it goes straight to the heart of the problem with the DMCA: it can be in direct conflict with freedom of speech.
At first I was overcome with conspiracy theories, too...but I now think its because the initial implementation was not so good, and the the interested coders are doing something much more ambitious...
I read all the news.mozilla.org newsgroups pretty regularly (IANAP: "I am not a programmer"). Around a year or a year and a half ago there was debate about an image-blocking feature. Many developers took the attitude of "Banner ads are how many many sites make money; we think that including this feature would result in sites that we support losing money."
I, and others, disagreed with this: it was debateable who was making money with banner ads in the first place, and furthermore we felt that their argument could be made about cookies and a dozen other technologies. Users clamor for the the ability to control their browsing experience, and Mozilla, an org with users, not a corporate strategies, as their motive, was refusing to implement this feature.
Time passed. The double-click scandal broke. Image filtering shareware/add-ons appeared in earnest. Icab (a great Mac web-browser) appeared with amazing image-filtering capabilities.
And then, one day, image filtering appeared in Mozilla! There were almost no discussions of it in the newsgroups, and my attempts to start threads failed. But I was VERY happy.
The functionality was part of the cookie-filtering scheme they had in place. You could check "ask before accepting a cookie" and "ask before accepting an image" from the prefs, and then you'd get a dialog box saying "the site images.slashdot.org wants to load an image..." You could accept this one time, refuse this one time, or have your decision remembered for the future. I quickly refused for all time "doubleclick.com" images and cookies, and quite a few others. I didn't only block banner images; I found that a site like moviefone.com works MUCH faster with no images, so I perminantly rejected them.
Then, one day, the image-blocking functionality was gone. I asked and asked why on the UI newsgroups, but no one responded, excpet with the standard "If you want it, you do it." I finnally decided I WAS going to try to add the functionality back, if I could. (I was hoping that any C++ programming was still in place, and that the only code that was removed were the XML and JavaScript files that make up Mozilla's user interface.)
I poked around, and learned a bunch. (Mozilla is going to be really good, I think.) Before I got deeply into it, I found a post by Mike Shaver on the LAYOUT newsgroup (I think Netscape pays him to work on Mozilla). I include most of his message below becaue I think it points out a few things about Mozilla:
* Mozilla is composed mostly of developers who are working, not bothing to explain their thoughts to other people who aren't familiar with their projects;
* Different people involved with building Mozilla disagree about different stuff...after watching them, I'm convinced that their heirarchical structure is sound, that is, good, open minded, smart-as-shit people who seem to be good at managing other contributors are Module Owners;
* The pace of development is fast as shit.
I asked Mike to clarify his thoughts and he did. It seems to me that he wants to make "content blocking" broader than "image blocking;" that this fucntionality will be part of a general "zones" pref where users can block according to zones. There has been MUCH discussion about this in Mozilla for a while, and it seems like it's going to get done "the RIGHT WAY."
I dislike a number of things about the current image-blocking infrastructure, namely:
- it causes core layout functionality (imagelib) to depend on the ``cookie'' extension,
- the control interfaces are mushed into the cookie manager, which seems to me to be unrelated, and
- it's insufficiently general: I might well want to block or or or the same way.
So I spent some time thinking about this, because it's really not helpful to just bitch (thought I confess that I did a fair bit of that, too), and came up with the attached.
Basically, I have a general interface for controlling the loading of certain kinds of out-of-line content, and for controlling the processing of certain kinds of in-line content. (I'm not so sure the latter is useful, but it's nagging at me that I'd like to do something with it, and I with the current state of API pressure I'd rather get it in and have it be unused or disabled later than have to champion it during more conservative times.)
I will add to this by providing an implementation of nsIContentPolicy, which will in turn load all the registered policy widgets (via a "content-policy" category). The attached patch is not by any means complete, and is probably not worth applying, but it shows where I'm headed. I'm going to hack more on this week's SFO round trip, batteries willing, and see if I can't get it ready to land. I hope to adapt split the cookie manager into a new extensions/content-policy component, but I might need some help with that.
There are the laws, on the one hand, and then there is what people DO. More and more, people are going to trade digital music, video, etc. The courts and companies will catch up once it's a fait acompli.
Maybe we'll have to switch to Gnutella for a while. Maybe Freenet. Maybe some stuff will be hard to find for a while. But we will continue to share electronic data.
Napster should set up a system whereby anyone alleging infringment can enter a user name or IP address and have that user blocked.
Re:This is truer than you may think
on
The Eroded Self
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· Score: 3
I used to hang out on a newsgroup about a rock band I liked a lot. One of the members of the band would post occasionally. I did a usenet search on his email to see what he had written earlier. While purusing the results, I found that he had, very early (like 1995), used a different email for his REPLY TO. I did a search on that email address and found that he had "anonymously" posted to a bunch of other newsgroups about WAREZ, SERIALZ, etc., and that he had discussed suicidal thoughts and VERY personal stuff about his relationship with his wife.
I felt excited and guilty reading this stuff. I hadn't set out to really investigate him, and I'm not nearly adept enough to search in tricky ways.
>>Something smells fishy about Slashdot >>covering Napster so much.
Napster is a very big example of the way technology is challenging our ideas about what we thought were settled cultural issues about intelectual property, government control over information/expression, and mass media.
The bad:
1) Napster is a company who control their product and hence, may take it in directions that we don't want them to.
2) Some artists and others may lose some money.
The good:
1) Some artists and others may gain money, if they only figure out a way to do so without copyright.
2) More music and art for everyone from everyone.
Certain cultural forms die off and others are born.
>>....but is this guy going to start >> giving out Public Enemy music as MP3's?
By supporting Napster, he is supporting our right to give out (and maybe even sell) PE stuff. Distributions, a la Linux, maybe? He can release his own distro, and offer a great print manual, 1 month of phone support, and maybe even a small, propietary binary.
I'm sort of like a musican. I record songs that I make up with my $7 mic, my $20 N-Track (www.fasoft.com), and my old, crappy PC. Then I make MP3s and burn CDs, and when I'm onlne, make the shit available through Napster.
No one really listens to my stuff except me, my girlfriend, and a few old friends who get value-added (read: with lovingly put together cover art and liner notes) copies of my latest releases.
I'm starting to do the same with movies.
I am not looking for distributions deals. I am not even looking to make money. But I do consider myself to be involved in making art, and thus, an artist.
Slashdot Mirror
* Ban the programatic detection and elimination of ads. Do this either with laws, or de-facto, by owning media "browsers"
* Make ads use non-standard and random time lengths, sizes, volumes, ect., so that ads cannot be programatically detected
* Interrupt TV, web pages, and even music CDs and movies with ads at irregular intervals so that ads cannot be even generally anticipated
* Supperimpose ads on the sidelines of shows, web pages, CD covers etc. with a constant, nagging presence so that it is difficult to escape from ads even after they have been identified
* Work ads into the background of the action of shows, web pages, etc. to make it more difficult to mentally "tune out" the ads' presenece
* Work ads into the hearts of the plots of fictions, the comments of characters, and the opinions of pundits so that it becomes difficult to even distinguish ads from non-ads
* Replace entertainment, information, opinion, and art with ads wholesale; completely removes the troubling burden of somehow "integrating" ads with non-ads
* Attempt to ban the use of all mass media except for ads; eliminates non-ad competition
What will they think of next?
The FreeNet website does a good job of explaining to a semi-technically-literate person like me how FreeNet is or can be resistant to many technological attcks. But what about broad legal attacks? I can envision a scenario where a series of laws are passed and enforced in various countries (ones like China, UK, USA):
1) It is, obviously but now explicitly, illegal to access or make available any sort of illegal materials on FreeNet. This can include child porn, other sexually-related expression, copyright infringement, privacy violations, harassment, libel, racism, some forms of political dissent or political security violations...etc.
2) If a Freenet user is suspected of violating (1), search warrents will be served, and the suspect will be made to make their private keys available to law enforcement. All node operators will fall under the same warrents.
3) Public anonymous communication is declaired illegal (since the amount of illegal activity is so high, and since the cost of weeding out the illegal is so great). Suspected violators and any node operators must make available their private keys.
4) Freenet users are automaticly suspected of anonymous communication, therefore, standing warrents are issued against all Freenet users.
From there it's a short jump to just say that Freenet is illegal, and it's use is punishable.
Are there any reasons that this won't happen?
From the website:
.free domain) to FreeNet.
"FreeWeb Agent is a small proxy server which allows you to surf FreeWeb sites on any browser. It forwards mainstream web requests like www.yahoo.com out to the mainstream web, but directs FreeWeb requests (to sites on the
"FreeWeb Publisher gives you an easy and convenient way to publish websites to FreeWeb. It keeps private records of all the files of your websites, so that each time you publish a website, only changed files get re-inserted to Freenet. FreeWeb publisher is easy to choose - just drop a folder onto the window, choose a domain name, click the 'update' button, and wait a couple of minutes - your site is then live and visible to others."
Identical twins are geneitically MORE simmilar than current cloning methods will allow (because, in the case of twins, they share their mother's Midocondrial DNA).
Which is the "real" child and which is the "twin?" Which the "original" and which the "clone?"
"Clones" will be regular people, like twins, like bastards, like test-tube babies, like adopted children, like suragate-mothered children...
It will be a small step to pass laws forbidding DVD players without region encoding and hdds without copy protection. These laws will be bought and paid for like the DMCA. And they have the potential of being effective.
It seems on shows like NYPD Blue that they can now say some of the curses that George Carlin proved were indeed the "7 words you can't say on TV." Specifically, they say "asshole" "bitch" "bullshit" and "whore". (I know these don't match perfectly with the original 7.) I've noticed though, that if they "asshole" early in an episode, they'll say it again later in that episode, but they won't say "bullshit." Likewize, if they say "bullshit" they'll repeat it, but they won't say "asshole." They'll never have a character call someone a "bitch-whore" or say something like "you bullshit whore"...
My guess is that TV/movie/book lawyers, in cohoots with producers, writers, and FCC/MPAA/PMRC contacts, have begun to contruct an elaborate rule book of what can be said/shown where. The S. Park movie would've gotten an NC-17 if they showed a website about necrophelia, but shit-eating was okay. There seem to be rules that allow one or two "shit" words, but not 3 or more. We all know that an erect cock pushes it into "hard core" but flacid penises are okay.
It's absurd, and insulting. Artists are pressured to make their works conform to these twisted standards. It's a big load of shitty bullshit fucked-up crap by whore-bitch motherfucking (erect) cocksuckers.
Also, since when is "harmful to minors" unprotected speech? I know obscenity and child-pornography have high-profile supreme court decisions supporting their lack of free-speech protection. but "harmful to minors?" What the fuck is that? Does that relate dto the "7 words you can't say on TV" thing? (Which by the way, you now apparently can say on TV...maybe).
Just a few ideas:
If you have a lot of text:
1) Limit the width that the text can flow -- do not allow it to expand to full browser width. Text should be in a table with a width of approx 200 - 500 pxls.
2) Use style sheets to make the LINE-HEIGHT at least 1.2 if not 1.3 or 1.4. The extra leading will be appreciated as it will make for easier reading.
3) Do NOT put large amounts of text into a single, monolithic table. This may cause a user's browser to have to wait for the whole page to be loaded until they see any text. This may seem contrary to #1, where text is required to be in a table. The solution -- put blocks of text (maybe on a paragraphy-by paragraph basis) into their own separate tables of fixed width. This will allow the text to load progressively. (see search results on Half.com for a good example.)
4) Use sans-serif fonts -- verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif -- specified in style sheets. This improves readability, and will cut down on page size by not requiring a million *font* tags.
5) Give links for a zip-file of all text in a plain format. Users can then open it in their favorite word processor to print, copy to pda, etc.
I work for a smallish web design company in NYC, so I get to see the Internet strategies of a lot of companies. Here are my impressions:
* Even though the Fucked Companies are many and growing, the web design industry itself is still HUGE and growing. Organic and Razor Fish, etc. seem to have tried too hard to cash in on the Dot Com phenomena, so they may crash a bit. But there are other companies and organizatons, besides Dot Coms, that want websites. All kinds of websites, not just ones that are meant to make billions.
* The so-called "dot coms" can be either good or bad, depending on the same things any businesses depend on. We have one client that has millions in investment from big venture capital firms and big tech players. But their site (which will remain nameless to protect the guilty) is the worst piece of crap imaginable. Why? Because no one there has any idea that they need a real plan. They hear that "medical sites" are going to be big, so they start a medical site. On the other hand, we have another client who is meticulously trying to do everything the "right" way...with lots of planning, slow steps, aliances, hiring appropriate talent at appropriate moments...they will potentially be big. Not Amazon, but many millions of dollars in revenue.
* The tech industry is everywhere. Why work at a Dot Com when you can do your wizz-bang computer stuff elsewhere? Even if you work at a sleezy bar, they may well be willing to pay you to set up a good computer accounting system, a website, or something else.
So now I finally get to experiment with the 2.2 kernals, October Gnome, XFree 3.33, and KDE 1.2 from the "non-free" section? RIGHT ON! I just hope they're stable...
:)
How much would Troll Tech sell QT for? Or how much would Troll Tech cost? Or how much would it cost for them to GPL QT? Every day they're probably getting more and more expensive. You could score a lot of points.
People express random and silly opinions. That's fine (it's always been like that). But those people who work for the biggest companies get their random, silly, uninformed opinions heard.
The only times I'm aware of ABC.com news.com msnbc.com suck.com slate.com salon.com etc are when Slashdot talks about them. Why should we pay them ANY mind at all? Why not have an article that says "Michael Low thinks that Windows 98 should have a different backgoround color"?
CT: your first instinct was right: don't bother with this crap. Don't bother ME witht his crap.
"XUL, the Extensible User-Interface Language, gives any [one] the ability to completely redesign the program's GUI. Why? ... A cross-platform widget set?"
... An XML parser?"
... XSLT transformations?"
Because this allows developers to make Mozilla on at least 3 platforms simaltaneously (BeOS, OS2, ect, ports are pretty far along). It's not just that one can make the GUI look different, though. One can write cross platform network apps quickly (like XMLTerm, ChatZilla, Aphodite, and Zope).
"Does the world need another HTML editor?"
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
"Chat and instant messaging?"
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
"Vector graphics?
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
"MathML?
Done by outside developers.
Personally, I'm excited about Mozilla. Contrary to this Sucky writer, I see strong planning from the ground up: Cross platorm; extensable; standards compliant; component-based; pretty well documented...The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works. But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other products/standards? There are a tremendous number of outside developers who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here. Why should anyone stop?
At this point, there are native-looking Windows and Mac widgets (and "plain" gtk widgets), skin-switching is in, fairly good image and cookie managing, pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use.
MathML, XSLT, and SVG are not yet in the daily compiled binaries.
I think its evidence of bad parenting to trust AOL to plan your child's intellectual diet.
IANOL, but I think the strategy is here isn't to try to blast MS for their bad monopolistic practices, or to distract them from the "matter at hand."
MS's strategy is to try to make this case fall under the DMCA. Slashdot wants it to fall under the First Amendment and fair use.
From the POV of MS's argument, Slashdot is making copyrighted materials available on their site.
From Slashdot's POV, they are providing a forum where relevent and contentious technology issues are being discussed openly. Reading MS's spec is necessary to evaluate the issues it raises in the larger context of technology, the court cases, free software, etc. -- hence fair use.
IMHO, this isn't just a clever defense by the Slashdot lawyers...it goes straight to the heart of the problem with the DMCA: it can be in direct conflict with freedom of speech.
I think its going to run on Linux...no?
At first I was overcome with conspiracy theories, too...but I now think its because the initial implementation was not so good, and the the interested coders are doing something much more ambitious...
I read all the news.mozilla.org newsgroups pretty regularly (IANAP: "I am not a programmer"). Around a year or a year and a half ago there was debate about an image-blocking feature. Many developers took the attitude of "Banner ads are how many many sites make money; we think that including this feature would result in sites that we support losing money."
I, and others, disagreed with this: it was debateable who was making money with banner ads in the first place, and furthermore we felt that their argument could be made about cookies and a dozen other technologies. Users clamor for the the ability to control their browsing experience, and Mozilla, an org with users, not a corporate strategies, as their motive, was refusing to implement this feature.
Time passed. The double-click scandal broke. Image filtering shareware/add-ons appeared in earnest. Icab (a great Mac web-browser) appeared with amazing image-filtering capabilities.
And then, one day, image filtering appeared in Mozilla! There were almost no discussions of it in the newsgroups, and my attempts to start threads failed. But I was VERY happy.
The functionality was part of the cookie-filtering scheme they had in place. You could check "ask before accepting a cookie" and "ask before accepting an image" from the prefs, and then you'd get a dialog box saying "the site images.slashdot.org wants to load an image..." You could accept this one time, refuse this one time, or have your decision remembered for the future. I quickly refused for all time "doubleclick.com" images and cookies, and quite a few others. I didn't only block banner images; I found that a site like moviefone.com works MUCH faster with no images, so I perminantly rejected them.
Then, one day, the image-blocking functionality was gone. I asked and asked why on the UI newsgroups, but no one responded, excpet with the standard "If you want it, you do it." I finnally decided I WAS going to try to add the functionality back, if I could. (I was hoping that any C++ programming was still in place, and that the only code that was removed were the XML and JavaScript files that make up Mozilla's user interface.)
I poked around, and learned a bunch. (Mozilla is going to be really good, I think.) Before I got deeply into it, I found a post by Mike Shaver on the LAYOUT newsgroup (I think Netscape pays him to work on Mozilla). I include most of his message below becaue I think it points out a few things about Mozilla:
* Mozilla is composed mostly of developers who are working, not bothing to explain their thoughts to other people who aren't familiar with their projects;
* Different people involved with building Mozilla disagree about different stuff...after watching them, I'm convinced that their heirarchical structure is sound, that is, good, open minded, smart-as-shit people who seem to be good at managing other contributors are Module Owners;
* The pace of development is fast as shit.
I asked Mike to clarify his thoughts and he did. It seems to me that he wants to make "content blocking" broader than "image blocking;" that this fucntionality will be part of a general "zones" pref where users can block according to zones. There has been MUCH discussion about this in Mozilla for a while, and it seems like it's going to get done "the RIGHT WAY."
Here's Mike's post:
Subject: lighting a candle: nsIContentPolicy
Date: 26 Apr 2000 01:44:16 GMT
From: shaver@zeroknowledge.com (Mike Shaver)
Organization: evil evil evil men
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.layout
I dislike a number of things about the current image-blocking infrastructure, namely:
- it causes core layout functionality (imagelib) to depend on the ``cookie'' extension,
- the control interfaces are mushed into the cookie manager, which seems to me to be unrelated, and
- it's insufficiently general: I might well want to block or or or the same way.
So I spent some time thinking about this, because it's really not helpful to just bitch (thought I confess that I did a fair bit of that, too), and came up with the attached.
Basically, I have a general interface for controlling the loading of certain kinds of out-of-line content, and for controlling the processing of certain kinds of in-line content. (I'm not so sure the latter is useful, but it's nagging at me that I'd like to do something with it, and I with the current state of API pressure I'd rather get it in and have it be unused or disabled later than have to champion it during more conservative times.)
I will add to this by providing an implementation of nsIContentPolicy, which will in turn load all the registered policy widgets (via a "content-policy" category). The attached patch is not by any means complete, and is probably not worth applying, but it shows where I'm
headed. I'm going to hack more on this week's SFO round trip, batteries willing, and see if I can't get it ready to land. I hope to adapt split
the cookie manager into a new extensions/content-policy component, but I
might need some help with that.
Comments welcome, of course.
{patch snipped}
There are the laws, on the one hand, and then there is what people DO. More and more, people are going to trade digital music, video, etc. The courts and companies will catch up once it's a fait acompli.
Maybe we'll have to switch to Gnutella for a while. Maybe Freenet. Maybe some stuff will be hard to find for a while. But we will continue to share electronic data.
Napster should set up a system whereby anyone alleging infringment can enter a user name or IP address and have that user blocked.
I used to hang out on a newsgroup about a rock band I liked a lot. One of the members of the band would post occasionally. I did a usenet search on his email to see what he had written earlier. While purusing the results, I found that he had, very early (like 1995), used a different email for his REPLY TO. I did a search on that email address and found that he had "anonymously" posted to a bunch of other newsgroups about WAREZ, SERIALZ, etc., and that he had discussed suicidal thoughts and VERY personal stuff about his relationship with his wife.
I felt excited and guilty reading this stuff. I hadn't set out to really investigate him, and I'm not nearly adept enough to search in tricky ways.
Ironic how the NY Time article on the web has a Double-click banner.
>>Something smells fishy about Slashdot
>>covering Napster so much.
Napster is a very big example of the way technology is challenging our ideas about what we thought were settled cultural issues about intelectual property, government control over information/expression, and mass media.
The bad:
1) Napster is a company who control their product and hence, may take it in directions that we don't want them to.
2) Some artists and others may lose some money.
The good:
1) Some artists and others may gain money, if they only figure out a way to do so without copyright.
2) More music and art for everyone from everyone.
Certain cultural forms die off and others are born.
>>Napster is a tool that is used
>>exclusively to steal from legitimate artists.
I wish was a "legitimate" artist. If I was, people would pay companies like Sony, Columbia, and Time Warner big money to listen to my songs.
Sadly, as it is now, I have to settle for MP3s, Napster, and the like.
Tell me how to go "legit" and I'll sign (in blood, right?).
>>....but is this guy going to start
>> giving out Public Enemy music as MP3's?
By supporting Napster, he is supporting our right to give out (and maybe even sell) PE stuff. Distributions, a la Linux, maybe? He can release his own distro, and offer a great print manual, 1 month of phone support, and maybe even a small, propietary binary.
I'm sort of like a musican. I record songs that I make up with my $7 mic, my $20 N-Track (www.fasoft.com), and my old, crappy PC. Then I make MP3s and burn CDs, and when I'm onlne, make the shit available through Napster.
No one really listens to my stuff except me, my girlfriend, and a few old friends who get value-added (read: with lovingly put together cover art and liner notes) copies of my latest releases.
I'm starting to do the same with movies.
I am not looking for distributions deals. I am not even looking to make money. But I do consider myself to be involved in making art, and thus, an artist.