Lies Incorporated springs to mind. Another PKD novel.
First few chapters are relatively sane. As are the last few chapters. In the middle is pure PKD weirdness, only even more directionless and bizarre than usual (IMHO). Then I noticed that the weirdness and the last few sane chapters start with the same paragraph.
So then I finally read the introduction, that says the book was originally published after a brutal pruning by the editor. Later, when PKD got a bit more famous, he managed to get the middle stuffed back in for future print runs.
That's pretty much how it works AFAICT, so good guess. But the lock down in phone OS can't really be explained away by the lockdown in the radio units, otherwise open units would be more or less illegal, and I don't see the FCC going after Nokia for the N900, or google for the nexus phones.
Indeed, marcan and a bunch of others (kakarotoks IIRC) are named in the geohot lawsuit. graf_chokolo has the privilege of being on the receiving end of a separate suit in germany, hence needing separate representation (and thus funding).
There are a variety of others named in the suit, though mostly they are not based in the US and so aren't involved so much.
However there is also graf_chokolo, who has been thoroughly deconstructing the hypervisor and (unlike geo) publishing his work in a very community-oriented way. The guy's fascinaction is complete control of the PS3 and hypervisor from linux (not piracy).
A week or so back he was raided by the German police and much of his equipment confiscated. Now he is being sued by Sony for almost a million dollars.
Please go here and donate if you would like to support the efforts to fend off Sony - http://grafchokolo.com/
The guy just doesn't have the public profile that geohot does, but he deserves public support every bit as much.
They're just using this to try and argue that money came from California, and therefore their crazy insistence that everything be tried there (when Geohot lives and hacks thousands of miles away) must be valid!
I know it's an oft-trotted out meme, that it's hard to know where an act is committed in a case like this. But to me the answer is easy. It was committed where the guy was sitting at the time.
It's pretty damned poor, yup. I figured the onboard software was probabl crap so I hacked mine to hell:
Managed to find the onboard serial pins and solder on a line-levelling serial adaptor, downloaded the WD GPL source, translated the needed Orion/Marvell code tree settings to modern/mainline kernel initialisation code, built a whole bunch of custom kernels, figured out the internal flash layout and how to create u-boot kernel images and initiramfs images and eventually got it to boot debian squeeze.
And it still sucks!
They basically just totally underpowered the machine on the processor front.
I think GPL'd stuff is A Good Thing(TM) and and any open source work I do as part of a hobby is made GPL. It's not a lot, but I do contribute some stuff. That's because if I'm giving it away for free as part of my spare time I want other people that use and enhance it to have to give back their changes in a share and share-alike way. I like this arrangement and am perfectly happy to deny people use of that code if they don't reciprocate.
My views diverge from RMS in about the same place yours do - I don't for a second believe that everything that's not free and open source is immoral or evil, or that GPL'd stuff should be made the only show in town. If I did then I wouldn't be working on proprietary software for a huge multinational!
The choice is down to the user, their own ideas, ideals and competencies. As others have pointed out, it would make no difference whatsoever to my mother if the systems she use came encrypted and burnt into ROM, as she probably doesn't even know what the term "source code" means, let alone what to do with it.
Agreed, but without removing the battery it is not possible to fully turn some phones 'off' by the absolute definition. For instance - my nokia N900 will wake up (into some form of simplified shell OS, not booting fully) for an alarm even if the system is nominally off and the battery is otherwise dead.
And porting to a different architecture is just a matter of trapping the right errors and individually interpreting the instructions? Or run in an emulated environment?
I get your point, if one is truly in control of the machine, with enough effort one can make many things happen. It's not exactly easy though!
Hey, I never said it was easy, generally applicable or even necessarily useful, I'm just explaining that that's what the attitude is!
FWIW I agree that in practice adaptation is the preserve of those with the skill to do so (or the money to pay others), and checking every line of code is impractical and unlikely.
But they are still freedoms that RMS finds to be important to the point of being moral imperatives in his view on the world.
I resisted getting one for years because there was a phone in the house, and if I wasn't in the house I didn't want to be called.
Of course later I realised it was useful for calling other people too. And sending/receiving SMS. And then everything else a mobile computer can do because where I ended up (N900) is basically a computer with an antenna.
If you're going to rant about this, at least understand what the man is on about. It's not "OMG FOSS is just so better and Miscro$oft is teh evils!!!11!1ONE!!!"
His position is basically that if you don't have the source you don't have the freedom to control your own computing.
With closed source programs you are:
Never sure what they're doing
Unable to adapt them to your needs
Unable to share them with other people (sharing being a virtue, not a vice)
He considers those points (and at least one other, and possibly wider points than I have made) to be essential for a person to be free and to be in control of the device they are using. A computer is a general purpose device, shouldn't a user/owner be able (within their technical bounds) to make it do what they want?
Now, you may or may not agree with his stance (I don't agree with all of it, certainly), but for him and people like him this is not a question of utility.
Saying "where's the software" is therefore totally irrelevant to RMS and people of his views, because it becomes a moral issue. They wish to control their computing devices, they believe that it is their right to do so. Therefore they will not give money or time to those that promote a different agenda. Just like some people don't buy DRM, or Sony.
So yes, for them, being open source is enough reason. Or rather the reverse, something being closed source is enough reason to avoid it.
As I say, I do not necessarily buy into his stance, the guy has some views I don't agree with, but if you're going to rubbish him at least try to understand it instead of mindlessly bleating about how proprietary software is better. That's may be so, but it isn't the point.
You need to watch out with them also though. The WD Sharespace I have uses a 500MHz chip which is totally inadequate for decent throughput between the 4-disk array and the GigE interface.
And I had to write my own device support into the kernel to get it running a modern OS! It came with 2.6.12!
"This is a retail device, sold for profit. You are NOT encouraged to take it apart. This entitlement attitude of being able to reverse engineer everyone elses IP is starting to piss me off."
Because learning is bad children!
What's inside there is magic that belongs to the Apple corporation, and if you look inside to see how it works that's STEALING!
Jesus fscking christ, what is the world coming to?
Not quite. A dutch/english friend of mine told me that "Holland" is really the largest part, and only people from a few, small, rural areas get pissed off when you confuse the two.
I guess like 80%(ish) of the British are English and aren't going to care that much when you confuse the two. But the Scots, oh the Scots get angry!
Slashdot Mirror
Lies Incorporated springs to mind. Another PKD novel.
First few chapters are relatively sane. As are the last few chapters. In the middle is pure PKD weirdness, only even more directionless and bizarre than usual (IMHO). Then I noticed that the weirdness and the last few sane chapters start with the same paragraph.
So then I finally read the introduction, that says the book was originally published after a brutal pruning by the editor. Later, when PKD got a bit more famous, he managed to get the middle stuffed back in for future print runs.
The editor was definitely right that time.
Dean Koontz.... literary genius....
ROFL.
That's pretty much how it works AFAICT, so good guess. But the lock down in phone OS can't really be explained away by the lockdown in the radio units, otherwise open units would be more or less illegal, and I don't see the FCC going after Nokia for the N900, or google for the nexus phones.
I think the answer there is "not any more".
it used to be, in the time before people became interested in competition law, ethics in business and not supporting corrupt governments overseas.
But now we apparently care about all those things. IMHO that is a very good thing.
Indeed, marcan and a bunch of others (kakarotoks IIRC) are named in the geohot lawsuit. graf_chokolo has the privilege of being on the receiving end of a separate suit in germany, hence needing separate representation (and thus funding).
Whether found legal or not, the guy has been raided and is on the wrong end of a million dollar lawsuit, so he could use the help.
Not just Geohot.
There are a variety of others named in the suit, though mostly they are not based in the US and so aren't involved so much.
However there is also graf_chokolo, who has been thoroughly deconstructing the hypervisor and (unlike geo) publishing his work in a very community-oriented way. The guy's fascinaction is complete control of the PS3 and hypervisor from linux (not piracy).
A week or so back he was raided by the German police and much of his equipment confiscated. Now he is being sued by Sony for almost a million dollars.
Please go here and donate if you would like to support the efforts to fend off Sony - http://grafchokolo.com/
The guy just doesn't have the public profile that geohot does, but he deserves public support every bit as much.
They're just using this to try and argue that money came from California, and therefore their crazy insistence that everything be tried there (when Geohot lives and hacks thousands of miles away) must be valid!
I know it's an oft-trotted out meme, that it's hard to know where an act is committed in a case like this. But to me the answer is easy. It was committed where the guy was sitting at the time.
It's pretty damned poor, yup. I figured the onboard software was probabl crap so I hacked mine to hell:
Managed to find the onboard serial pins and solder on a line-levelling serial adaptor, downloaded the WD GPL source, translated the needed Orion/Marvell code tree settings to modern/mainline kernel initialisation code, built a whole bunch of custom kernels, figured out the internal flash layout and how to create u-boot kernel images and initiramfs images and eventually got it to boot debian squeeze.
And it still sucks!
They basically just totally underpowered the machine on the processor front.
Bugger, hit submit by accident!
To finish - to the likes of me it's not only useful and free (as in beer) but allows me to alter, customise and port stuff, which is awesome.
I think GPL'd stuff is A Good Thing(TM) and and any open source work I do as part of a hobby is made GPL. It's not a lot, but I do contribute some stuff. That's because if I'm giving it away for free as part of my spare time I want other people that use and enhance it to have to give back their changes in a share and share-alike way. I like this arrangement and am perfectly happy to deny people use of that code if they don't reciprocate.
My views diverge from RMS in about the same place yours do - I don't for a second believe that everything that's not free and open source is immoral or evil, or that GPL'd stuff should be made the only show in town. If I did then I wouldn't be working on proprietary software for a huge multinational!
The choice is down to the user, their own ideas, ideals and competencies. As others have pointed out, it would make no difference whatsoever to my mother if the systems she use came encrypted and burnt into ROM, as she probably doesn't even know what the term "source code" means, let alone what to do with it.
To the likes of me it's
It's not bad, a couple of bottles of that one knocK me for six though. Brewed to about 7 or 8% isn't it?
There's also an export strength version from Dublin I'm quite partial too.
"Foreign Extra" those are the words they use!
Right, a quick google sets me straight as usual.
Faraday.
Knew it was an F!
Agreed, but without removing the battery it is not possible to fully turn some phones 'off' by the absolute definition. For instance - my nokia N900 will wake up (into some form of simplified shell OS, not booting fully) for an alarm even if the system is nominally off and the battery is otherwise dead.
Removing the battery does stop this, yes.
Is it it not a fourier cage?
Bugger... who's cage is it? I forget!
The one where you space the bars about a wavelength apart (if my physics from over a decade ago isn't betraying me) and it blocks the waves?
And porting to a different architecture is just a matter of trapping the right errors and individually interpreting the instructions? Or run in an emulated environment?
I get your point, if one is truly in control of the machine, with enough effort one can make many things happen. It's not exactly easy though!
Hey, I never said it was easy, generally applicable or even necessarily useful, I'm just explaining that that's what the attitude is!
FWIW I agree that in practice adaptation is the preserve of those with the skill to do so (or the money to pay others), and checking every line of code is impractical and unlikely.
But they are still freedoms that RMS finds to be important to the point of being moral imperatives in his view on the world.
Certainly, just slip it between the fourier-cage and the inner foil layer of your standards-compliant tinfoil headgear!
Then all you have to worry about is metal oxidation from any unfortunate protocol leaks of overhead RFC 1149 carriers.
I totally empathise with that.
I resisted getting one for years because there was a phone in the house, and if I wasn't in the house I didn't want to be called.
Of course later I realised it was useful for calling other people too. And sending/receiving SMS. And then everything else a mobile computer can do because where I ended up (N900) is basically a computer with an antenna.
Actually, there has been a history of this, some phones can indeed enter a listen and transmit mode even when switched off. Google it.
Removing the battery, of course, would mitigate that. No iPhones then...
If you're going to rant about this, at least understand what the man is on about. It's not "OMG FOSS is just so better and Miscro$oft is teh evils!!!11!1ONE!!!"
His position is basically that if you don't have the source you don't have the freedom to control your own computing.
With closed source programs you are:
He considers those points (and at least one other, and possibly wider points than I have made) to be essential for a person to be free and to be in control of the device they are using. A computer is a general purpose device, shouldn't a user/owner be able (within their technical bounds) to make it do what they want?
Now, you may or may not agree with his stance (I don't agree with all of it, certainly), but for him and people like him this is not a question of utility.
Saying "where's the software" is therefore totally irrelevant to RMS and people of his views, because it becomes a moral issue. They wish to control their computing devices, they believe that it is their right to do so. Therefore they will not give money or time to those that promote a different agenda. Just like some people don't buy DRM, or Sony.
So yes, for them, being open source is enough reason. Or rather the reverse, something being closed source is enough reason to avoid it.
As I say, I do not necessarily buy into his stance, the guy has some views I don't agree with, but if you're going to rubbish him at least try to understand it instead of mindlessly bleating about how proprietary software is better. That's may be so, but it isn't the point.
Wow, that is *awesome* compared to the max transfer of around 24MB (bytes at least, not bits) I get out of the sharespace.
That's over vanilla ftp and the processor is max'd at that point. Not the drives or the network interface, the processor. Dammit so much...
You need to watch out with them also though. The WD Sharespace I have uses a 500MHz chip which is totally inadequate for decent throughput between the 4-disk array and the GigE interface.
And I had to write my own device support into the kernel to get it running a modern OS! It came with 2.6.12!
"This is a retail device, sold for profit. You are NOT encouraged to take it apart. This entitlement attitude of being able to reverse engineer everyone elses IP is starting to piss me off."
Because learning is bad children!
What's inside there is magic that belongs to the Apple corporation, and if you look inside to see how it works that's STEALING!
Jesus fscking christ, what is the world coming to?
Not quite. A dutch/english friend of mine told me that "Holland" is really the largest part, and only people from a few, small, rural areas get pissed off when you confuse the two.
I guess like 80%(ish) of the British are English and aren't going to care that much when you confuse the two. But the Scots, oh the Scots get angry!