Actually, though, if one can securely distribute keys of arbitrary length, one can then apply the one-time pad result (one use pads are provably secure) to guarantee that no amount of processing can decrypt the result. One is reduced to merely guessing about the content at that point.
The original post seemed to suggest that quantum computers were somehow going to able to break QE because of their unique properties. I'm fairly sure that can't be the case, given the above.
Actually, If I understand quantum encryption correctly, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes it impossible to listen in on a quantum encrypted stream without detection, even if you can somehow manage to apply infinite computing power to decrypting it. It's not much fun listening in if they can tell you're there.
The equipment needed to perform QE isn't insanely expensive, either. The current problem is supposed to be extending the distance over which the stream can be sent.
I generally agree. However, if the pollution is being generated in a centralized location, instead of in thousands of little mobile units, one can put in heavy equipment to clean up said pollution at the nice stationary generator site. One can make a coal burning plant put out a lot less pollution per kilowatt than a car puts out.
"Fair use" is a technical term of copyright law, which is in fact where "that is written". It specifies that it is fair use of copyrighted material to quote it, parody it, or make copies for personal use.
As to fair use being some sort of natural right, the courts and legislature in the U.S. might not agree with your idea. Fair use exemptions are intended to feed a democracy with a stream of accurate and useful information about important things, and to prevent copyright holders from unduly restricting that flow. By guaranteeing the legality of appropriate uses, they're guaranteeing a healthy democracy as well. And since the Founding Fathers in the USA believed that democracy was an inalienable right, they might well assert that fair use was in fact also an inalienable right.
Well, of course, if you live in a country where expressing the wrong opinion can get you killed, you have pretty good reasons for wanting to be anonymous. Before you get too smug about living in a free country and taking responsibility for your own opinions/actions, think about how many people get shot just for being members of a minority, geeks, jocks, or whatever. Some of those folks might like a little anonymity from time to time as well.
Anonymity is important to having a free society, which is why voting booths are private.
What the FreeNet people are doing is pretty damn important if we want to have anything resembling personal freedoms in a few decades.
This notion, that a formal specification somehow implies good design and testing, has always been incomprehensible to me. I have read numerous specifications. In no case has one been sufficiently detailed that I would consider it a basis for trust of a system. I have literally never seen such a specification. Invariably, they are littered with inconsistencies, bugs, and ambiguities. Obtaining C2 trust, by following the "specification" tells me relatively little about how vulnerable the system actually is.
Reference implementations are another matter altogether. I can examine their specific semantics, find specific vulnerabilities and strengths, and in general evaluate them precisely.
Which points to the old adage - "There's no compiler for the specification" - which makes the point fairly well. Natural language is an awfully ambiguous instrument for specification, and even the most careful specifier makes errors which can go undetected in the specification for an indeterminate period.
I personally find open and available source a _far_ stronger basis for trust than any detailed specification and planning.
I've read the original white paper, and it's clear to me that most of the obvious problems have been solved with FreeNet. The combination of decay and a pull-oriented replication model prevents most simple forms of spamming and flooding the network as a whole, although individual servers may be at risk. DDoS attacks seem like a potential problem, though this is hardly unique to FreeNet. Also, clearly, the system presents good scaling behavior. I remain unclear on a few points, though.
One question is how people attempting to use FreeNet in oppressive societies might be able to hide its presence from their oppressors? This appears to be a vital component of succeeding with FreeNet. Is there a way to obfuscate the FreeNet request traffic which will make it difficult to discover that a server is being run at a given site?
Second question: One of the useful characteristics of the WWW is that it is reasonably "ennumerable", meaning that it is possible to build web crawlers which index the web and provide the major search engines that have made the web so useful. Can such elements be found in similar ways using the FreeNet protocols?
Third question: Have you decided on a URL scheme so that Mozilla can be made to browse HTML etc. provided via FreeNet? It would be an ideal addition to the protocol suites supported by Mozilla.
This is excellent news. It would appear to set precedents which cast doubt on the constitutionality of the way some companies have been trying to construe DMCA. If source is protected speech, then laws cannot be used limit the exchange of sources, only the use of the programs derived from those sources.
Of course, there's always the old "shouting fire in a crowded theater" argument, but that probably wouldn't apply here, because the sources present no immediate danger or limit to another's rights in and of themselves.
This is a subtle but important distinction. It may be illegal to compile those sources and use the result, but it will not be illegal to distribute the source. That makes it very difficult for people like MPIA or RIAA to attack the open source community.
I understand your point of view, but my own experience is that most people are not stupid. They ignore current licensing terms because they are unenforced and unenforceable.
The moment these kind of restrictions are enforced, people get a clue in short order. Consumer reporters, comsumer activists, and others spread the word pretty quickly, but only after people start to get hurt. They tend to ignore hypotheticals, and focus on real stories about real people.
So, while I don't disagree with most of your post, I stand by my original assertion. Once people start to see real business downsides, they'll act.
My feelings about UCITA are that it imposes such horrifying terms on customers that many businesses will turn to open source software to protect themselves.
Given a choice between having software that can be remotely turned off on any pretext a licensor might wish to cite, and having stable software which legally cannot be taken from them, which would a prudent business choose? One imagines the latter.
It will only take a few cases of this sort of behavior to convince businesses to either turn to open source software or build their own software in house. Either way, commercial closed source houses will lose out.
I can, however, imagine closed source vendors guaranteeing never to use the UCITA remedies available to them, as a part of their contract with customers. It may be the only way to keep customers if these laws take effect.
The anonymous nature of many web transactions has been one of the driving forces behind the web. We all know they aren't completely anonymous, but it's often not worth the effort to track down visitors, so there is a practical anonymity which works a lot of the time.
Losing that anonymity is likely to slow the spread of ideas, as people avoid visiting "subversive" web sites. That will be a pity.
Microsoft is not "just doing what everyone else does", as anyone who had read the finding of fact can easily see. In an environment where the cost of every other component of the computer has dropped by a factor of three or so, Microsoft software has held steady in price. In an open and competitive market, this is clearly an impossibility. As for being punished for being "too successful", that's even more laughable. Do you see breakup talk regarding GE, or Disney, who both bring in more revenue than Microsoft? Of course not, because they don't behave the same way that Microsoft does.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, though, if one can securely distribute keys of arbitrary length, one can then apply the one-time pad result (one use pads are provably secure) to guarantee that no amount of processing can decrypt the result. One is reduced to merely guessing about the content at that point.
The original post seemed to suggest that quantum computers were somehow going to able to break QE because of their unique properties. I'm fairly sure that can't be the case, given the above.
Actually, If I understand quantum encryption correctly, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes it impossible to listen in on a quantum encrypted stream without detection, even if you can somehow manage to apply infinite computing power to decrypting it. It's not much fun listening in if they can tell you're there.
The equipment needed to perform QE isn't insanely expensive, either. The current problem is supposed to be extending the distance over which the stream can be sent.
I generally agree. However, if the pollution is being generated in a centralized location, instead of in thousands of little mobile units, one can put in heavy equipment to clean up said pollution at the nice stationary generator site. One can make a coal burning plant put out a lot less pollution per kilowatt than a car puts out.
"Fair use" is a technical term of copyright law, which is in fact where "that is written". It specifies that it is fair use of copyrighted material to quote it, parody it, or make copies for personal use.
As to fair use being some sort of natural right, the courts and legislature in the U.S. might not agree with your idea. Fair use exemptions are intended to feed a democracy with a stream of accurate and useful information about important things, and to prevent copyright holders from unduly restricting that flow. By guaranteeing the legality of appropriate uses, they're guaranteeing a healthy democracy as well. And since the Founding Fathers in the USA believed that democracy was an inalienable right, they might well assert that fair use was in fact also an inalienable right.
Kurt
Well, of course, if you live in a country where expressing the wrong opinion can get you killed, you have pretty good reasons for wanting to be anonymous. Before you get too smug about living in a free country and taking responsibility for your own opinions/actions, think about how many people get shot just for being members of a minority, geeks, jocks, or whatever. Some of those folks might like a little anonymity from time to time as well.
Anonymity is important to having a free society, which is why voting booths are private.
What the FreeNet people are doing is pretty damn important if we want to have anything resembling personal freedoms in a few decades.
This notion, that a formal specification somehow implies good design and testing, has always been incomprehensible to me. I have read numerous specifications. In no case has one been sufficiently detailed that I would consider it a basis for trust of a system. I have literally never seen such a specification. Invariably, they are littered with inconsistencies, bugs, and ambiguities. Obtaining C2 trust, by following the "specification" tells me relatively little about how vulnerable the system actually is.
Reference implementations are another matter altogether. I can examine their specific semantics, find specific vulnerabilities and strengths, and in general evaluate them precisely.
Which points to the old adage - "There's no compiler for the specification" - which makes the point fairly well. Natural language is an awfully ambiguous instrument for specification, and even the most careful specifier makes errors which can go undetected in the specification for an indeterminate period.
I personally find open and available source a _far_ stronger basis for trust than any detailed specification and planning.
I've read the original white paper, and it's clear to me that most of the obvious problems have been solved with FreeNet. The combination of decay and a pull-oriented replication model prevents most simple forms of spamming and flooding the network as a whole, although individual servers may be at risk. DDoS attacks seem like a potential problem, though this is hardly unique to FreeNet. Also, clearly, the system presents good scaling behavior. I remain unclear on a few points, though.
One question is how people attempting to use FreeNet in oppressive societies might be able to hide its presence from their oppressors? This appears to be a vital component of succeeding with FreeNet. Is there a way to obfuscate the FreeNet request traffic which will make it difficult to discover that a server is being run at a given site?
Second question: One of the useful characteristics of the WWW is that it is reasonably "ennumerable", meaning that it is possible to build web crawlers which index the web and provide the major search engines that have made the web so useful. Can such elements be found in similar ways using the FreeNet protocols?
Third question: Have you decided on a URL scheme so that Mozilla can be made to browse HTML etc. provided via FreeNet? It would be an ideal addition to the protocol suites supported by Mozilla.
This is excellent news. It would appear to set precedents which cast doubt on the constitutionality of the way some companies have been trying to construe DMCA. If source is protected speech, then laws cannot be used limit the exchange of sources, only the use of the programs derived from those sources.
Of course, there's always the old "shouting fire in a crowded theater" argument, but that probably wouldn't apply here, because the sources present no immediate danger or limit to another's rights in and of themselves.
This is a subtle but important distinction. It may be illegal to compile those sources and use the result, but it will not be illegal to distribute the source. That makes it very difficult for people like MPIA or RIAA to attack the open source community.
I understand your point of view, but my own experience is that most people are not stupid. They ignore current licensing terms because they are unenforced and unenforceable.
The moment these kind of restrictions are enforced, people get a clue in short order. Consumer reporters, comsumer activists, and others spread the word pretty quickly, but only after people start to get hurt. They tend to ignore hypotheticals, and focus on real stories about real people.
So, while I don't disagree with most of your post, I stand by my original assertion. Once people start to see real business downsides, they'll act.
My feelings about UCITA are that it imposes such horrifying terms on customers that many businesses will turn to open source software to protect themselves.
Given a choice between having software that can be remotely turned off on any pretext a licensor might wish to cite, and having stable software which legally cannot be taken from them, which would a prudent business choose? One imagines the latter.
It will only take a few cases of this sort of behavior to convince businesses to either turn to open source software or build their own software in house. Either way, commercial closed source houses will lose out.
I can, however, imagine closed source vendors guaranteeing never to use the UCITA remedies available to them, as a part of their contract with customers. It may be the only way to keep customers if these laws take effect.
The anonymous nature of many web transactions has been one of the driving forces behind the web. We all know they aren't completely anonymous, but it's often not worth the effort to track down visitors, so there is a practical anonymity which works a lot of the time.
Losing that anonymity is likely to slow the spread of ideas, as people avoid visiting "subversive" web sites. That will be a pity.
Microsoft is not "just doing what everyone else does", as anyone who had read the finding of fact can easily see. In an environment where the cost of every other component of the computer has dropped by a factor of three or so, Microsoft software has held steady in price. In an open and competitive market, this is clearly an impossibility. As for being punished for being "too successful", that's even more laughable. Do you see breakup talk regarding GE, or Disney, who both bring in more revenue than Microsoft? Of course not, because they don't behave the same way that Microsoft does.
Honestly!