Why is it that governments and all forget the fundamental problem with encryption? No matter how good the cypher, how good the encryption, whether it be Enigma, DES, or even a OTP..... It is breakable.
All encryption is breakable, it MUST be in cleartext before its being sent and it MUST be in cleartext when its read. Encryption won't help if they have a bug in the keyboard, they have compromised the machine, or if they have a bug on the display device.
Of course, thats inconvienent, perhaps a little dangerous. Its not easy to put dozens of bugs all over the place like that, to monitor many people. It requires effort, money, work..
So here's the interesting question. *Why* do they want it to be so easy, so cheap, so convienent to monitor tens, thousands, or millions of encrypted communications all at the same time? Why is the old-fashioned bug so bad? Why do they want the extreme convienence of monitoring the nation? Why do they want to build an infrastructure that makes it possible to monitor the entire nation's communication network?
Hey! I am all the hell for crypto! It was satire against the person I was responding to.
Regardless, no matter how unbreakable the encryption is, it can ALWAYS be broken at either endpoint. The police may not be able to anonymously sniff the airwaves, but they can put a bug in the cellular phone, or in the phone its calling.
You're right... Cryptography in the hands of criminals does no good to society. But, so does.....
Cryptography in the hands of Chinese dissidents does no good to society. Cryptography in the hands of people like Timothy McVeigh does no good to society. Cryptography in the hands of communists in the united states does no good to society. Cryptography in the hands of unions does not good to society. Cryptography in the hands of employees does no good to society. Cryptography in the hands of geeks does no good to society. Cryptography in the hands of ANYONE does no good to society.
You bet! Us analysists were predicting that we would have to kill around 30% of the Japenese population before they would surrender, thats millions of their lives alone, plus millions of Allied lives would be lost in that process. So the use of those two bombs saved over 100x as many lives as they cost, 50x the number of japenese lives that were lost.
The Japenese were training their civilans to man the beaches with spears and axes for gods sake! Which would have been better, to mow down millions 'armed' civilians with artilary and machine guns, or the nuclear weapons?
Regardless, in terms of raw total damage, the firebombing of Tokyo did much more damage than the nuclear fireballs did.
Nobody deserves an expectation of being paid for any artistic work. I cough on a sheet of paper, is my expectation to be paid $1000 for my effort warranted?
You have already lost, see my other comments, you are using RIAA/SPA-speak for talking about artistic works. Calling something with the words 'Intellectual Property' imply that you believe that intellectual products can be owned, which is opposite from patent law and copyright law.
Copyright law is the ownership of the RIGHT TO COPY, Patent law is the ownership of the RIGHT TO USE an invention.
There is a huge step from this to OWNERSHIP OF THE IDEA. You, and most others, have taken it, your words give you away.
Here, I'm going to shit in a bottle. This is art, I demand a return on my investment, you have to buy it from me for $1000 as a beautiful artistic work. You have to do this because no one else is fool enough to, and I have a right for return on investment.
Send me email and/or a credit card number so that we may finish the sale.
Artists aren't obligated any more than executives, programmers, or lazy bums for getting a return on investment.
No artistic work can be owned, ever. No patented idea is owned either.
The government doesn't and cannot grant ownership of an artistic work or an idea. They grant something different.
A Copyright is the exclusive right to copy a work, it makes duplication by anyone not sanctioned by the artist illegal. It is not ownership of the artistic work, but ownership of the [exclusive] right to duplicate. There is a huge difference between the two. That is SPA/RIAA speak, that silliness that any type of intellectual 'work' can be owned or stolen.
Patents likewise aren't ownership of an invention, but the granting of an exclusive (and transferable) right for the inventor being the only one to use that invention. That same difference applies here.
The RIAA/SPA has already won, even their enemies are calling ideas and artistic works what the RIAA/SPA wish to have them called: 'property'. 'Copy' has become a synonym for 'theft', or 'piracy'.
Compare the two sentences following:
XYZ was convicted of theft for pirating intellectual property for use in his small, barely surviving business.
XYZ was convicted of copyright violation for duplicating software [artistic works] for use in his small, barely surviving business.
HEH!!! The developer owns it? What are you smoking man?
The developer of ANY copyrighted work doesn't own the work at all, the only thing they posess is an exclusive 'right to copy'. Without this right, anyone would be free to copy. The ONLY thing being broken is the law stating that the developer has the exclusive right to duplicate his work.
Yes, its dependent on the fact that a given pad is only used once. But whats more important is that the pad is unpredictable. If I create successive 1024-bit pieces of the pad by counting up in binary. using a 1024-bit wordsize, and I start at a 'random number', I will not use the same key twice, but the key is predictable, and so its bad.
In their case, its trash, there are very very few fast ways of generating such pads, The only convinenent one I can think of is/dev/random, which is about 20-100 bits a second. Since they are not using any of the right techniques, they are doing it wrong.
Using OTP is easy, whats hard is generating the pad and getting it to the other recipient.
I notice one small problem: All human encryption algorithms (excluding one time pads) may be cracked in a known bounded time, because the size of the keys can be bounded and a brute force search may be done. So yes, I can always crack IDEA, DES, PGP, Twofish in a known amount of work. (2^128, 2^56, 2^2048, 2^256). Here, the security comes because, given an unknown password it is 'very difficult' to determine the plain text from the cypher text. More critically, it must be 'nearly impossible' to determine the password from a (small) known set of plaintext/cyphertext pairs.
Of course, the above excludes side-channel attacks, those attacks on the mechanisms, the endpoints, on the implementation, on the protocol. The worlds greatest encryption algorithm is useless to someone if you can sniff their keyboard, or analyze radio emissions from their monitor, or the power usage characteristics of their smartcard.
Is Microsoft the first company to bring an innovative technology to market, or the first to popularize the technology so that the majority *are* first introduced to it as coming from Microsoft and thus perpetuate the myth that Microsoft actually inventes and innovates technology?
When is copying now known as stealing? I will not mince words, Slashdot has stolen my comments by copying them and sending them to servers all over the planet, your netscape has STOLEN my words by copying them to your harddrive.
Or perhaps it is you who is mincing words, by making the word 'duplicate' or 'copy' a synonym for 'theft'.
What is being done is duplication and distribution. You may call that stealing, robbery, or theft. I prefer to call it what it is. Piracy is unauthorized duplication and distribution, but why does the RIAA cause it piracy? Piracy has wonderful connotations to pirates on the open seas. Perfect for fooling the populace.
Would you call connecting two wires together, 'theft'? Well, its being called theft in newspapers and public forums all across the country. Its called theft when those two wires are 'cable television'. When is duplication called theft? When is duplication (not removing the origional) called theft? Is photocopying an article out of a magazine now theft? Ideas and artistic works are unique endeavors, because they CAN be duplicated for no cost, are (for some reason) treated specially. There is no 'fair use' guidelines for using someone elses car, house, or other property. Yet there is fair use for copyright, why is this type of duplication not stealing, yet other types are? The line between free duplication, and all duplication being theft is arbitrary and drawable anywhere? I dislike arbitrary lines for this very reason, they may be moved infinitely often.
Note that Macrovision discourages 'petty (at-home) duplication', but that is not strongly against the will of the populace.
It is the same thing, most people would contribute to the artist, even if it were not manditory, because they feel the dialog, the artistic creations are worth the contribution.
It is the same reason people give to charity.
Control is never good, once an idea has a string tied to it, or rather the majority of people think it has a string attached to it, those strings can be used to lure, to fish, to steal, to hoard, to control. They may also be sold, bought, and collected, twined into ropes, ropes to bind all enemies, to bind individuals, to bind a culture.
If people are not honest, then they can never be thwarted. It is the very fact of honesty of the majority that makes the culture survive, it is that most are honest that the fiction of copyright, the fiction of the ownership if ideas/artistic works, is obeyed. No government, no legistlation can EVER go strongly against the general will of the entire populace. The only way GPL, copyright, or anything else can be 'Enforced' is if the public is willing to let it happen to them.
So ending copyright, or signifigantly shortening it to a few years, loses nothing, the same people will still duplicate, the same people will continue to purchase, except it will not be a monopoly (though many would still purchase the 'official' or 'artist-sanctioned' version.) The gains are all you mention, artists are not stuck and screwed by publishers, the public is enriched like never before.
Wrong, anytime there is a demand, anytime a service is desired, money can be made. Money can be made by offering a huge archive of free software (ftp.cdrom.com), or a search service.
Fans are an artists greatest asset. Fans buy t-shirts, attend concerts, talk to other fans. Most music groups make NO money in royalties until they sell a quarter-million copies.
Just as an illustration, why did you post your words to slashdot? You gave them away for free, why did you do something so stupid? Why am I posting my words to slashdot? Because I wish to enrich humanity with my words, not because I wish to enrich myself with monetary compensation.
I am an artist, like many other artists, I do my work for itself, because I wish to enrich humanity or my friends, to give them the gift of my opinions, my perspective, my aid. Not to make money. I do not make 'intellecual property', which may be posessed, hoarded, stolen. I make ideas, I make artistic works, my words here, my programming, my art, my works, the algorithms I design.
Do you believe that nobody is honest? That if you offered something for free, everyone would leech off of it, that there would be no contributors to the creators? I have sent bug reports in, made (and attempted to submit) patches, and such. I also help out on IRC occasionally. I gift others whom I will never meet again my time, my human labor, that which money only a measurment for.
There is lunacy on both sides of the issue, a gift culture will not work, nor is a purely capatilistic culture good.
I try to strike a reasonable balance. I gift my labor to others as I wish, with the only requirement that if they give it to others, that they give reasonable attributation to me. I also accept orders for where to direct my labor for my job.
Which is why there may be good odds that ext3fs will be ReiserFS, a filesystem designed for small files, though it is faster across the board..
One test (which it IHMO flunks) is a directory with 50,000,000 (yes, 50 million) files. It isn't creating that directory fast, though you can pull it off if you create it in chunks of 50,000 files or so. (Create a directoy with 50,000 files, thenk copy it over. Repeat)
Overall, its at most 10% slower (in some operations) than ext2fs on benchmarks for files around 10-20k, but faster in every other benchmark. 10%-60 faster on large files, 2-4x the speed on small files (200 bytes) Not sure if the benchmarks have been fully repeated with the newer version, or how old they are. But if you have either very large directories, or a large number of files, ReiserFS will be the way to go.
Wrong, there is a continuity in the internet (see my other post)
Whats the qualitative difference between posting on a site, sending to a mailing list, sending to a bunch of friends/contacts, sending to a close friend, or sending to your mother?
Whats the difference between that and posting notices up on (paper-baed) bulletin boards accros the country?
The libel (and copyright) law is to protect the little guy from the publisher. It assumes that the dichotomy exists, that doesn't exist on the internet.
Is posting on the internet publishing? How about email?
I can put up on a webpage a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can post to Yahoo a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can post to usenet a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can spam to a very large number of people a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send email to a large mailing list a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send email to a private mailing list a story that claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send an email to all of my friends a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the stoy is false?
I can send an email to my close friends a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story if false?
I can send an email to my mother a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing? Is it libel if the story is false?
--
Where is the line drawn here?
The internet is not like 'broadcast media' where there is a line between the radio station or the newspaper, whos voice can reach thousands, and the little guy, whos voice can only reach one person.
The law is obsolete in this aspect, it assumes a dichotomy, publisher and individual. That doesnt exist anymore in the internet world. It is a continous spectrum. Everything is fair in the internet world. There is an audience of hundreds of millions, though they are not compelled to listen. Anyone can publish to that body, a single individual can reach tens of thousands (Slashdot for example).
It is this fundamental aspect of the internet that makes publishing, and its associated laws (Copyright, Libel, 'community availability',...) obsolete and in need of change. When any single author or artist can cheaply offer their product to hundreds of millions, what is the purpose in copyright or libel law?
Think of what Y2k lawyers could do to the software landscape. Given the patterns of ignorance I see in the public, much less that shown by lawyers, I would not be surprised if the y2k lawyers attempted to attack linux, it does have so many large, tempting targets attached to it, SGI, IBM, and so forth. Linux can also be devilified, afterall, because its distributed with full source code, any hacker can scan it to find bugs to exploit.
Even if they don't attack linux, I would lay good odds that they could change the software landscape where one cannot use linux or any other OSS in a corporate environment because it hasn't been 'audited' and studied by a VLO (Very Large Organization) for ISO complaince (or some such garbage). That alone limits software so that it may only be created and sold by a large organization. If that happens, then any corporation cannot obtain insurance and would be susceptable to a huge liability for using OSS.
On another foot, any commercial entity that supports or distributes OSS coould be hit with liability?
OSS as distributed now requires that the origional authors have no liability for any effects, planned, or unplanned on it. They won't distribute OSS if it opens them up to liability. If it opens them up to being sued any time in the future, they won't take that risk and will never release it.
Excellent suggestion. Only you only rerun (say) 1/128 of the blocks submitted by someone, if they disagree, run it three times more, whoever is not in the majority gets their stats auto-nuked, (and a log entry so that teams with many players get their team stats auto-nuked tool.)
Its almost fully automatic, only requires wasting at most 5% of the processing time. and cheaters will eventually get automatically caught.
Oh, I agree, the patent alludes to ideas that are non-obvious and very interesting.
But the patent is supposed to describe the mechanism to a degree sufficient for someone else to recreate it. This patent does not seem to follow that requirement.
If it was actually explicit in what it is describing, and also non-obvious, then I would agree. Now its just vagueness.
Should vagueness that implies interesting things be sufficient for obtaining a patent?
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I stand corrected.
Poor choice of words on my part.
Why is it that governments and all forget the fundamental problem with encryption? No matter how good the cypher, how good the encryption, whether it be Enigma, DES, or even a OTP..... It is breakable.
All encryption is breakable, it MUST be in cleartext before its being sent and it MUST be in cleartext when its read. Encryption won't help if they have a bug in the keyboard, they have compromised the machine, or if they have a bug on the display device.
Of course, thats inconvienent, perhaps a little dangerous. Its not easy to put dozens of bugs all over the place like that, to monitor many people. It requires effort, money, work..
So here's the interesting question. *Why* do they want it to be so easy, so cheap, so convienent to monitor tens, thousands, or millions of encrypted communications all at the same time? Why is the old-fashioned bug so bad? Why do they want the extreme convienence of monitoring the nation? Why do they want to build an infrastructure that makes it possible to monitor the entire nation's communication network?
Please, enlighten me..
More accurately, there's a shortage of cheap AND good workers.
Hey! I am all the hell for crypto! It was satire against the person I was responding to.
Regardless, no matter how unbreakable the encryption is, it can ALWAYS be broken at either endpoint. The police may not be able to anonymously sniff the airwaves, but they can put a bug in the cellular phone, or in the phone its calling.
You're right... Cryptography in the hands of criminals does no good to society. But, so does .....
Cryptography in the hands of Chinese dissidents does no good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of people like Timothy McVeigh does no good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of communists in the united states does no good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of unions does not good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of employees does no good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of geeks does no good to society.
Cryptography in the hands of ANYONE does no good to society.
Ya know what, you're completely stupid and wrong.
You bet! Us analysists were predicting that we would have to kill around 30% of the Japenese population before they would surrender, thats millions of their lives alone, plus millions of Allied lives would be lost in that process. So the use of those two bombs saved over 100x as many lives as they cost, 50x the number of japenese lives that were lost.
The Japenese were training their civilans to man the beaches with spears and axes for gods sake! Which would have been better, to mow down millions 'armed' civilians with artilary and machine guns, or the nuclear weapons?
Regardless, in terms of raw total damage, the firebombing of Tokyo did much more damage than the nuclear fireballs did.
Nobody deserves an expectation of being paid for any artistic work. I cough on a sheet of paper, is my expectation to be paid $1000 for my effort warranted?
BTW, have you noticed that the way it works is fascinatingly doublespeak.
Freedom is Slavery, Duplication is Theft, Words are Property.
You have already lost, see my other comments, you are using RIAA/SPA-speak for talking about artistic works. Calling something with the words 'Intellectual Property' imply that you believe that intellectual products can be owned, which is opposite from patent law and copyright law.
Copyright law is the ownership of the RIGHT TO COPY, Patent law is the ownership of the RIGHT TO USE an invention.
There is a huge step from this to OWNERSHIP OF THE IDEA. You, and most others, have taken it, your words give you away.
See my other comments.
Here, I'm going to shit in a bottle. This is art, I demand a return on my investment, you have to buy it from me for $1000 as a beautiful artistic work. You have to do this because no one else is fool enough to, and I have a right for return on investment.
Send me email and/or a credit card number so that we may finish the sale.
Artists aren't obligated any more than executives, programmers, or lazy bums for getting a return on investment.
No artistic work can be owned, ever. No patented idea is owned either.
The government doesn't and cannot grant ownership of an artistic work or an idea. They grant something different.
A Copyright is the exclusive right to copy a work, it makes duplication by anyone not sanctioned by the artist illegal. It is not ownership of the artistic work, but ownership of the [exclusive] right to duplicate. There is a huge difference between the two. That is SPA/RIAA speak, that silliness that any type of intellectual 'work' can be owned or stolen.
Patents likewise aren't ownership of an invention, but the granting of an exclusive (and transferable) right for the inventor being the only one to use that invention. That same difference applies here.
The RIAA/SPA has already won, even their enemies are calling ideas and artistic works what the RIAA/SPA wish to have them called: 'property'. 'Copy' has become a synonym for 'theft', or 'piracy'.
Compare the two sentences following:
XYZ was convicted of theft for pirating intellectual property for use in his small, barely surviving business.
XYZ was convicted of copyright violation for duplicating software [artistic works] for use in his small, barely surviving business.
HEH!!! The developer owns it? What are you smoking man?
The developer of ANY copyrighted work doesn't own the work at all, the only thing they posess is an exclusive 'right to copy'. Without this right, anyone would be free to copy. The ONLY thing being broken is the law stating that the developer has the exclusive right to duplicate his work.
Yes, its dependent on the fact that a given pad is only used once. But whats more important is that the pad is unpredictable. If I create successive 1024-bit pieces of the pad by counting up in binary. using a 1024-bit wordsize, and I start at a 'random number', I will not use the same key twice, but the key is predictable, and so its bad.
/dev/random, which is about 20-100 bits a second. Since they are not using any of the right techniques, they are doing it wrong.
In their case, its trash, there are very very few fast ways of generating such pads, The only convinenent one I can think of is
Using OTP is easy, whats hard is generating the pad and getting it to the other recipient.
I notice one small problem: All human encryption algorithms (excluding one time pads) may be cracked in a known bounded time, because the size of the keys can be bounded and a brute force search may be done. So yes, I can always crack IDEA, DES, PGP, Twofish in a known amount of work. (2^128, 2^56, 2^2048, 2^256). Here, the security comes because, given an unknown password it is 'very difficult' to determine the plain text from the cypher text. More critically, it must be 'nearly impossible' to determine the password from a (small) known set of plaintext/cyphertext pairs.
Of course, the above excludes side-channel attacks, those attacks on the mechanisms, the endpoints, on the implementation, on the protocol. The worlds greatest encryption algorithm is useless to someone if you can sniff their keyboard, or analyze radio emissions from their monitor, or the power usage characteristics of their smartcard.
Is Microsoft the first company to bring an innovative technology to market, or the first to popularize the technology so that the majority *are* first introduced to it as coming from Microsoft and thus perpetuate the myth that Microsoft actually inventes and innovates technology?
How can you steal an idea from me?
When is copying now known as stealing? I will not mince words, Slashdot has stolen my comments by copying them and sending them to servers all over the planet, your netscape has STOLEN my words by copying them to your harddrive.
Or perhaps it is you who is mincing words, by making the word 'duplicate' or 'copy' a synonym for 'theft'.
What is being done is duplication and distribution. You may call that stealing, robbery, or theft. I prefer to call it what it is. Piracy is unauthorized duplication and distribution, but why does the RIAA cause it piracy? Piracy has wonderful connotations to pirates on the open seas. Perfect for fooling the populace.
Would you call connecting two wires together, 'theft'? Well, its being called theft in newspapers and public forums all across the country. Its called theft when those two wires are 'cable television'. When is duplication called theft? When is duplication (not removing the origional) called theft? Is photocopying an article out of a magazine now theft? Ideas and artistic works are unique endeavors, because they CAN be duplicated for no cost, are (for some reason) treated specially. There is no 'fair use' guidelines for using someone elses car, house, or other property. Yet there is fair use for copyright, why is this type of duplication not stealing, yet other types are? The line between free duplication, and all duplication being theft is arbitrary and drawable anywhere? I dislike arbitrary lines for this very reason, they may be moved infinitely often.
Note that Macrovision discourages 'petty (at-home) duplication', but that is not strongly against the will of the populace.
It is the same thing, most people would contribute to the artist, even if it were not manditory, because they feel the dialog, the artistic creations are worth the contribution.
It is the same reason people give to charity.
Control is never good, once an idea has a string tied to it, or rather the majority of people think it has a string attached to it, those strings can be used to lure, to fish, to steal, to hoard, to control. They may also be sold, bought, and collected, twined into ropes, ropes to bind all enemies, to bind individuals, to bind a culture.
If people are not honest, then they can never be thwarted. It is the very fact of honesty of the majority that makes the culture survive, it is that most are honest that the fiction of copyright, the fiction of the ownership if ideas/artistic works, is obeyed. No government, no legistlation can EVER go strongly against the general will of the entire populace. The only way GPL, copyright, or anything else can be 'Enforced' is if the public is willing to let it happen to them.
So ending copyright, or signifigantly shortening it to a few years, loses nothing, the same people will still duplicate, the same people will continue to purchase, except it will not be a monopoly (though many would still purchase the 'official' or 'artist-sanctioned' version.) The gains are all you mention, artists are not stuck and screwed by publishers, the public is enriched like never before.
Wrong, anytime there is a demand, anytime a service is desired, money can be made. Money can be made by offering a huge archive of free software (ftp.cdrom.com), or a search service.
Fans are an artists greatest asset. Fans buy t-shirts, attend concerts, talk to other fans. Most music groups make NO money in royalties until they sell a quarter-million copies.
Just as an illustration, why did you post your words to slashdot? You gave them away for free, why did you do something so stupid? Why am I posting my words to slashdot? Because I wish to enrich humanity with my words, not because I wish to enrich myself with monetary compensation.
I am an artist, like many other artists, I do my work for itself, because I wish to enrich humanity or my friends, to give them the gift of my opinions, my perspective, my aid. Not to make money. I do not make 'intellecual property', which may be posessed, hoarded, stolen. I make ideas, I make artistic works, my words here, my programming, my art, my works, the algorithms I design.
Do you believe that nobody is honest? That if you offered something for free, everyone would leech off of it, that there would be no contributors to the creators? I have sent bug reports in, made (and attempted to submit) patches, and such. I also help out on IRC occasionally. I gift others whom I will never meet again my time, my human labor, that which money only a measurment for.
There is lunacy on both sides of the issue, a gift culture will not work, nor is a purely capatilistic culture good.
I try to strike a reasonable balance. I gift my labor to others as I wish, with the only requirement that if they give it to others, that they give reasonable attributation to me. I also accept orders for where to direct my labor for my job.
Which is why there may be good odds that ext3fs will be ReiserFS, a filesystem designed for small files, though it is faster across the board..
One test (which it IHMO flunks) is a directory with 50,000,000 (yes, 50 million) files. It isn't creating that directory fast, though you can pull it off if you create it in chunks of 50,000 files or so. (Create a directoy with 50,000 files, thenk copy it over. Repeat)
Overall, its at most 10% slower (in some operations) than ext2fs on benchmarks for files around 10-20k, but faster in every other benchmark. 10%-60 faster on large files, 2-4x the speed on small files (200 bytes) Not sure if the benchmarks have been fully repeated with the newer version, or how old they are. But if you have either very large directories, or a large number of files, ReiserFS will be the way to go.
http://www.idiom.com/~beverly/reiserfs.html
Perhaps because Rob DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT GENDER OR RACE!
I see that the most important thing for you IS race and gender, I pity you.
Wrong, there is a continuity in the internet (see my other post)
Whats the qualitative difference between posting on a site, sending to a mailing list, sending to a bunch of friends/contacts, sending to a close friend, or sending to your mother?
Whats the difference between that and posting notices up on (paper-baed) bulletin boards accros the country?
The libel (and copyright) law is to protect the little guy from the publisher. It assumes that the dichotomy exists, that doesn't exist on the internet.
Is posting on the internet publishing? How about email?
...) obsolete and in need of change. When any single author or artist can cheaply offer their product to hundreds of millions, what is the purpose in copyright or libel law?
I can put up on a webpage a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can post to Yahoo a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can post to usenet a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can spam to a very large number of people a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send email to a large mailing list a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send email to a private mailing list a story that claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
I can send an email to all of my friends a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the stoy is false?
I can send an email to my close friends a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story if false?
I can send an email to my mother a story claiming that Nike uses child labor, is this publishing?
Is it libel if the story is false?
--
Where is the line drawn here?
The internet is not like 'broadcast media' where there is a line between the radio station or the newspaper, whos voice can reach thousands, and the little guy, whos voice can only reach one person.
The law is obsolete in this aspect, it assumes a dichotomy, publisher and individual. That doesnt exist anymore in the internet world. It is a continous spectrum. Everything is fair in the internet world. There is an audience of hundreds of millions, though they are not compelled to listen. Anyone can publish to that body, a single individual can reach tens of thousands (Slashdot for example).
It is this fundamental aspect of the internet that makes publishing, and its associated laws (Copyright, Libel, 'community availability',
Think of what Y2k lawyers could do to the software landscape. Given the patterns of ignorance I see in the public, much less that shown by lawyers, I would not be surprised if the y2k lawyers attempted to attack linux, it does have so many large, tempting targets attached to it, SGI, IBM, and so forth. Linux can also be devilified, afterall, because its distributed with full source code, any hacker can scan it to find bugs to exploit.
Even if they don't attack linux, I would lay good odds that they could change the software landscape where one cannot use linux or any other OSS in a corporate environment because it hasn't been 'audited' and studied by a VLO (Very Large Organization) for ISO complaince (or some such garbage). That alone limits software so that it may only be created and sold by a large organization. If that happens, then any corporation cannot obtain insurance and would be susceptable to a huge liability for using OSS.
On another foot, any commercial entity that supports or distributes OSS coould be hit with liability?
OSS as distributed now requires that the origional authors have no liability for any effects, planned, or unplanned on it. They won't distribute OSS if it opens them up to liability. If it opens them up to being sued any time in the future, they won't take that risk and will never release it.
Excellent suggestion. Only you only rerun (say) 1/128 of the blocks submitted by someone, if they disagree, run it three times more, whoever is not in the majority gets their stats auto-nuked, (and a log entry so that teams with many players get their team stats auto-nuked tool.)
Its almost fully automatic, only requires wasting at most 5% of the processing time. and cheaters will eventually get automatically caught.
Oh, I agree, the patent alludes to ideas that are non-obvious and very interesting.
But the patent is supposed to describe the mechanism to a degree sufficient for someone else to recreate it. This patent does not seem to follow that requirement.
If it was actually explicit in what it is describing, and also non-obvious, then I would agree. Now its just vagueness.
Should vagueness that implies interesting things be sufficient for obtaining a patent?