We're asking the wrong question here. The problem is not how to fit all those features into a small package, but how to exploit the myriad features that are already available in your environment, but that you can't integrate with.
Small devices basically provide: a keyboard, a display, a communications link. Everything else is part of the "lifeboat" package--necessary to make the whole thing work, but otherwise deadweight.
It would be nice to have a more opportunistic device that can sense its environment and make good use of what's already there as a "host". If there is a computer in the room, why do I need memory and CPU cycles? If there is a T1 internet connection, why do I need to use radio bandwidth?
I'll bet the security agencies, including Iran's, have already figured out how to break PDF without Cryptome's help.:) This document was compromised when it was published, if not long before.
Let's spell it out: the only thing anyone learned by this "egregious endangering of lives" was a bunch of people learned that What You See Is NOT What You Get. That is a correct function of the press.
Of course, defeating the PDF "black box" protection mechanism is probably a DMCA violation.
I once saw a bicycle path that had a gate across it. The owner of a house adjacent to the park had to close the gate once a year to assert his right to back his car out over the driveway.
I think this approach would work for closed-source community: close your source once a year to assert your rights--shut down your website on New Year's Eve--and leave it open the rest of the time.
Most of what Meyer writes is an illogical rant and doesn't require response,however he raises one serious point:
Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your livelihood and that of your family.
Following his Moral Relativism, we can pick any philosophy we want to answer, and we choose Neo-Platonism, and can give him the exact and philosophical the answer he wants:
Software Patents embody Mathematical Forms, which Neo-Platonism locates as Ideas in the Mind of the second hypostatis ("person") of its Trinity. Preventing others from participating in the illumination provided by the Ideas, by claiming to own and license pieces of the Mind of the Demiurge (a.k.a. the Creator), is both blashpemous and morally repugnant.
Copyright is a lesser crime, since it merely restricts particular emanations of the Ideas ("my form of expressing them").
In short, "Information wants to be Free" because the Ideas underlying the creation of the universe cannot be owned by any one collection of material particles.
Traditional (Chaldedonian-descended, such as Orthodox, Catholic, and most Protestand) Christianity, and also some Jewish and Islamic philosophies, adopt the Neo-Platonic stance, and so would have similar theological and philosophical/ethical objections to software patents.
I hope that clarifies the philosophical underpinnings for Dr. Meyer. If he elects to ignore Neo-Platonism, he will, of course, have to rephrase his argument without recourse to Western religious, ethical, and scientific notions, since it is impossible to use these without entwining oneself in Neo-Platonism.
I think what I am talking about will become clearer when someone tells you that you can't use the "xor" operator in your program, because they hold the rights to that logical bit combination in that context.
Like fiat money, "intellectual property" is mostly an pleasant fiction or convention that we all agree on.
Yes, that is what legal concepts say today and yes that is how we earn our living today. Other bases for earning a living can and will be found, just as people figured out how to do commerce without collecting tolls.
We must invent that society, because information will out, our toys notions of Intellectual Property or not.
=googol= in mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi.
In a world where everyone is a slave, only those who hack apart [their chains] are free.
If it were possible to xerox land--if I could create land somewhere else by scanning your land--people would argue that part of their rights in their land included there right to enjoy the uniqueness of the particular contours and structures on their land and demand that you license them.
The situation might look very different if you had no land of your own and could only get it by copying existing land.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this case has a very 18th Century view of which Rights should be asserted.
The critical issue is balancing Public Good and Private Good. This balance needs to be re-thought in the light of technology that makes it possible to produce copies at no cost.
I think this clause of the UDHR says to much here about property rights and not enough about intellectual freedom. The balancing point has changed.
Remember that before "Free Trade" in the 18th/19th Century, certain people, Guilds, local Governments, etc. had a "Right" to collect tolls and intercept commerce. Then society (in a series of Revolutions) decided those "rights" were a bad thing.
=googol= in mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi
The democratic and legal tradition of the Western Democracies treats Property and Ideas as two very different things. Property is treated as a scarce resource (object) that can be transferred from a buyer to a seller, whereas Ideas are treated as private and not shareable at a distance, except via expensive, tangible media--themselves a form of Property.
Electronic media blur the underlying assumptions built into our Society and its Laws. The new technologies make Ideas (in the form of mathematical algorithms) tangible and transferable; at the same time, they make intellectual property--licenses, copyrights--less scarce and hence less like objects and more like Ideas.
The net result is that Ideas are becoming more like Property. If we start with the assumption that copying is hard, then "violating intellectual property rights" looks like a form of theft. But Property itself is theft of a sort, as is well known, albeit a regulated and social form of theft. We tolerate this denial of the right we would otherwise have to use our common resources, in order to secure each for ourselves the scare, tangible resources we need to live. But when there is no harm in my thinking or saying something, other than the fact you have have had the same thought or said the same thing, then Intellectual Property has become the theft--it steals my right to think and say what I want.
Where is the Greater Theft? Is it in making a copy, in my mind or speech, or is it in denying my right to do so?
The notion of Property makes no sense where there is no scarcity. Society's right to limit what I say or do ends when saying-or-doing ceases to become harmful. All that is left for "Intellectual Property Rights" to protect is a residual right (Intellectual Rent) that is leftover from a former state of affairs.
We need to re-assert that the right to share ideas and thoughts takes primacy over these residual Intellectual Rents. In less than a year, events--an increase in software patent rates from hundred per year to tens of thousands, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the legal actions of certain large corporations--have conspired to create a very chilling environment for Freedom of the Intellect, much less Freedom of Speech.
Outside the Western Democracies, all the issues that have arisen in the past over Property rights will re-surface. The Thoraeu/Ghandi/King style of resistance to the inequitable and entrenched rights of Idea Owners will have to be re-invented--only this time, non-violent resistance will be the Act of Thinking or Saying what you want to, or for some, Thinking and Doing what you need to do in order to make a living! =googol= In mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi
This community needs to put on our cryptographic thinking caps *right now* and figure out a way to store high-risk documents on the web, immediately they are brought under attack.
Boundry conditions for the algorithm:
(1) Any document can be recovered in N tries, with increasing certainty for each iteration.
(2) The probability that any of the N sites was "responsible" for delivering the document can be shown to be (a) reasonably doubtful [criminal], (b) less than 50% [perponderance of evidence], or (c) vanishingly small [for high risk].
(3) It is computationally infeasible to figure out which site did the dirty.
Give each kid a floppy (50 cents a piece in bulk?) with one of the micro-linux distributions. They can boot up whatever machine they can find lying around and have a better crack at the future than we did.
The advantages of being a parasite are that the upgrades are free.:)
Sounds like the Brits should create lots of scram disks with innoncent data (and a trivial passphrase) and superencypher them with a one time pad--save those pads on your hard disk, please. Then, for your real secret data, put it in a scram disk file (with a different passphrase) and pair it with a scram disk of the same size containing innoncent files (and the weak passphrase). Now calculate the one time pad that converts the guilty cache to the innocent one. Throw away the innoncent files.
Your guilty data is now just one of many one-time-pads (stored on your hard disk with its purported encrypted data, all the better for the secret police to recover your innocent files). Every file can be demonstrably de-encrypted on demand with the same passphrase to yield innocent data.
Or something like that. You get the idea--cryptographic experts step in here and help me!
Everyone does it as a protest--wasted Megabytes for Freedom! Now the secret police have to sift through millions of Megabytes of bogus one time pads. It's a moot point now--good time to get started before the next wave hits!
Let's start with the realistic assumption that we loose the war. Web browsers work only on Windows. They are a proprietary technology that we have to work around. You cannot exist as a modern human being--do your shopping, banking, whatever, without a Windows box.
...that take our cookie files and replace those cute hex digits with random numbers? Run your program once a day as a public service to privacy.
Here is a chance for "passive cracking". I change a file on my own machine and it trashes an ad company's data base. Naturally, they would try hard to identify such efforts, but it ups the cost of invading my privacy.
It is better to *keep cookies on and falsify* the information that to opt out!
We might even succeed in creating a new demographic segment: "people who screw up demographic databases for fun".
Slashdot Mirror
:)
Small devices basically provide: a keyboard, a display, a communications link. Everything else is part of the "lifeboat" package--necessary to make the whole thing work, but otherwise deadweight.
It would be nice to have a more opportunistic device that can sense its environment and make good use of what's already there as a "host". If there is a computer in the room, why do I need memory and CPU cycles? If there is a T1 internet connection, why do I need to use radio bandwidth?
I'll bet the security agencies, including Iran's, have already figured out how to break PDF without Cryptome's help. :) This document was compromised when it was published, if not long before.
Let's spell it out: the only thing anyone learned by this "egregious endangering of lives" was a bunch of people learned that What You See Is NOT What You Get. That is a correct function of the press.
Of course, defeating the PDF "black box" protection mechanism is probably a DMCA violation.
I once saw a bicycle path that had a gate across it. The owner of a house adjacent to the park had to close the gate once a year to assert his right to back his car out over the driveway.
I think this approach would work for closed-source community: close your source once a year to assert your rights--shut down your website on New Year's Eve--and leave it open the rest of the time.
Can anyone think of a scenario where a virus signs lots of documents?
...as soon as they can handle punctuation and typing (age 9 or 10)
:- likes(X,soccer). :- girl(X),boy(Y),brownhair(Y).
I've actually tried this--sit the kid down in front of a prolog interpreter (there are several free-beer ones).
From 3rd Grade on they love making up predicates about their friends.
dork(X)
likes(X,Y)
?-likes(susan,_).
=googol=
It has been a binding obligation on some Christians ever since. This obligation is not related to the Sabbath commandment, as you point out.
Software Patents embody Mathematical Forms, which Neo-Platonism locates as Ideas in the Mind of the second hypostatis ("person") of its Trinity. Preventing others from participating in the illumination provided by the Ideas, by claiming to own and license pieces of the Mind of the Demiurge (a.k.a. the Creator), is both blashpemous and morally repugnant.
Copyright is a lesser crime, since it merely restricts particular emanations of the Ideas ("my form of expressing them").
In short, "Information wants to be Free" because the Ideas underlying the creation of the universe cannot be owned by any one collection of material particles.
Traditional (Chaldedonian-descended, such as Orthodox, Catholic, and most Protestand) Christianity, and also some Jewish and Islamic philosophies, adopt the Neo-Platonic stance, and so would have similar theological and philosophical/ethical objections to software patents.
I hope that clarifies the philosophical underpinnings for Dr. Meyer. If he elects to ignore Neo-Platonism, he will, of course, have to rephrase his argument without recourse to Western religious, ethical, and scientific notions, since it is impossible to use these without entwining oneself in Neo-Platonism.
=googol=
I think what I am talking about will become clearer when someone tells you that you can't use the "xor" operator in your program, because they hold the rights to that logical bit combination in that context.
Like fiat money, "intellectual property" is mostly an pleasant fiction or convention that we all agree on.
Yes, that is what legal concepts say today and yes that is how we earn our living today. Other bases for earning a living can and will be found, just as people figured out how to do commerce without collecting tolls.
We must invent that society, because information will out, our toys notions of Intellectual Property or not.
=googol=
in mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi.
In a world where everyone is a slave, only those who hack apart [their chains] are free.
If it were possible to xerox land--if I could create land somewhere else by scanning your land--people would argue that part of their rights in their land included there right to enjoy the uniqueness of the particular contours and structures on their land and demand that you license them.
The situation might look very different if you had no land of your own and could only get it by copying existing land.
=googol=
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this case has a very 18th Century view of which Rights should be asserted.
The critical issue is balancing Public Good and Private Good. This balance needs to be re-thought in the light of technology that makes it possible to produce copies at no cost.
I think this clause of the UDHR says to much here about property rights and not enough about intellectual freedom. The balancing point has changed.
Remember that before "Free Trade" in the 18th/19th Century, certain people, Guilds, local Governments, etc. had a "Right" to collect tolls and intercept commerce. Then society (in a series of Revolutions) decided those "rights" were a bad thing.
=googol=
in mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi
Electronic media blur the underlying assumptions built into our Society and its Laws. The new technologies make Ideas (in the form of mathematical algorithms) tangible and transferable; at the same time, they make intellectual property--licenses, copyrights--less scarce and hence less like objects and more like Ideas.
The net result is that Ideas are becoming more like Property. If we start with the assumption that copying is hard, then "violating intellectual property rights" looks like a form of theft. But Property itself is theft of a sort, as is well known, albeit a regulated and social form of theft. We tolerate this denial of the right we would otherwise have to use our common resources, in order to secure each for ourselves the scare, tangible resources we need to live. But when there is no harm in my thinking or saying something, other than the fact you have have had the same thought or said the same thing, then Intellectual Property has become the theft--it steals my right to think and say what I want.
Where is the Greater Theft? Is it in making a copy, in my mind or speech, or is it in denying my right to do so?
The notion of Property makes no sense where there is no scarcity. Society's right to limit what I say or do ends when saying-or-doing ceases to become harmful. All that is left for "Intellectual Property Rights" to protect is a residual right (Intellectual Rent) that is leftover from a former state of affairs.
We need to re-assert that the right to share ideas and thoughts takes primacy over these residual Intellectual Rents. In less than a year, events--an increase in software patent rates from hundred per year to tens of thousands, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the legal actions of certain large corporations--have conspired to create a very chilling environment for Freedom of the Intellect, much less Freedom of Speech.
Outside the Western Democracies, all the issues that have arisen in the past over Property rights will re-surface. The Thoraeu/Ghandi/King style of resistance to the inequitable and entrenched rights of Idea Owners will have to be re-invented--only this time, non-violent resistance will be the Act of Thinking or Saying what you want to, or for some, Thinking and Doing what you need to do in order to make a living!
=googol= In mundo, omnibus servibus, concidentes soli liberi
This community needs to put on our cryptographic thinking caps *right now* and figure out a way to store high-risk documents on the web, immediately they are brought under attack.
Boundry conditions for the algorithm:
(1) Any document can be recovered in N tries, with increasing certainty for each iteration.
(2) The probability that any of the N sites was "responsible" for delivering the document can be shown to be (a) reasonably doubtful [criminal], (b) less than 50% [perponderance of evidence], or (c) vanishingly small [for high risk].
(3) It is computationally infeasible to figure out which site did the dirty.
=Googol=
Give each kid a floppy (50 cents a piece in bulk?) with one of the micro-linux distributions. They can boot up whatever machine they can find lying around and have a better crack at the future than we did.
:)
The advantages of being a parasite are that the upgrades are free.
Sounds like the Brits should create lots of scram disks with innoncent data (and a trivial passphrase) and superencypher them with a one time pad--save those pads on your hard disk, please. Then, for your real secret data, put it in a scram disk file (with a different passphrase) and pair it with a scram disk of the same size containing innoncent files (and the weak passphrase). Now calculate the one time pad that converts the guilty cache to the innocent one. Throw away the innoncent files.
Your guilty data is now just one of many one-time-pads (stored on your hard disk with its purported encrypted data, all the better for the secret police to recover your innocent files).
Every file can be demonstrably de-encrypted on demand with the same passphrase to yield innocent data.
Or something like that. You get the idea--cryptographic experts step in here and help me!
Everyone does it as a protest--wasted Megabytes for Freedom! Now the secret police have to sift through millions of Megabytes of bogus one time pads. It's a moot point now--good time to get started before the next wave hits!
Let's start with the realistic assumption that we loose the war. Web browsers work only on Windows. They are a proprietary technology that we have to work around. You cannot exist as a modern human being--do your shopping, banking, whatever, without a Windows box.
Now what do we do?
...that take our cookie files and replace those cute hex digits with random numbers? Run your program once a day as a public service to privacy.
Here is a chance for "passive cracking". I change a file on my own machine and it trashes an ad company's data base. Naturally, they would try hard to identify such efforts, but it ups the cost of invading my privacy.
It is better to *keep cookies on and falsify* the information that to opt out!
We might even succeed in creating a new demographic segment: "people who screw up demographic databases for fun".