The server just stores a bunch of indexes into your data and searches them when you supply the keywords. It sounds like what you really need is an efficient index (it requires few reads to determine whether what you are searching for is there, or that it isn't anywhere). Then you can build and encrypt the index and store it online in chunks, and download the pieces of it that you need to search for your keywords, and then retrieve the encrypted data that the index entries points to.
For instance, if you want to do keyword searches you build a word index from all the keywords in your documents and then put links to the documents into buckets for each keyword. You could make this relatively efficient by creating the following structure for each bucket: "document1,document2,document3,..." and then storing it by encrypting the structure and naming it with the encrypted value of the keyword. E.g. for "slashdot" create a bucket named "fynfuqbg" and in it store links to any of your documents containing the string "slashdot".
To perform a keyword search, encrypt all the keywords separately and ask the online storage for all the files named with the set of encrypted keywords, and then once you have the index entries do a simple intersection on them to find links to documents containing all the keywords. If you want to support searching for variations in the spelling of a keyword, just generate and encrypt all the possible variations that you want to search for and see if there are index buckets for any of those variations.
Obviously the online storage facility will know that you are performing searches, and can figure out what your most popular searches are in terms of the buckets you access, and they could statistically determine what likely plaintext keyword belongs to a bucket based on the common word frequencies in documents, and the general frequency of searches for particular keywords. One way to obfuscate your searches is to always include several requests for other blocks, using a statistical method to try to make all your searches obey a uniform distribution. Storing keyword buckets in a uniform size is also imperative to prevent statistical analysis as you build the index (otherwise watching index buckets grow would allow the online storage facility to associate the indexes that grew with recently added documents).
Except, of course, that youtube is implying that he never published it, since they refuse to admit that he owns it. One of two things happens; youtube is stubborn and says he's never owned the thing and he shows proof that he created it and wins, or youtube apologizes for forgetting that he uploaded it years ago and reverts ownership to him.
Sure, it's not a perfect strategy, but it only has to be plausible enough to scare either youtube or the retards who stole his video.
I'd say it's probably even worse than that. I don't think any other company on earth could conceivably provide the unpublished books at a lower fee than Google, simply because of the way Google does business. If they could, I might be concerned about the seemingly unfair ruling, but in my estimation Google Books will turn out to be the closest thing to an Internet public library the world has yet seen. To me, that is vastly more important than the mere capitalistic concerns of other companies. If anyone else wants to put all their books online, then they should just *do* it, and settle their own lawsuit with the Authors Guild. They'll have precedent on their side.
Besides, Google is only being forced into an end-run around copyright law because of the insanely long terms Congress has legislated and the removal of renewal fees that, if left intact, would have at least ensured that out of print books returned to the public domain before they molded away to dust.
Let them pay to scan tons of dusty old books in the basements of university libraries and then work out a class action lawsuit with all the people representing the authors.
Of course Google has a monopoly; no one else wanted to take the time or money or risk. Nothing prevents any other company from doing exactly what Google has done, except of course the things that could have prevented Google from doing it, but didn't.
Blaming the columnist is stupid. The editor who allowed the article to be published is responsible for ensuring that articles adhere to the company policies, and if there was a policy the article should have stopped at that level. The fact that it was published implies that either the editor is incompetent (hey, it's Fox) or that in actuality there was no company policy regarding this (other than a vague "don't break any laws doing your job" sort of policy).
Have you tried to get a federal prosecutor to charge them under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 and have them thrown in jail for 3 years for stealing unpublished works? That would be quite funny.
Additionally, the OP is going to *look* like a patent troll if he doesn't actually have a patent application in hand along with a free, non revocable license for it. Remember RAMBUS? They pushed their invention for everyone to use as an "open" standard, claiming it would be a great idea, and only afterward started hitting everyone up for money with their submarine patent.
Not patenting the original invention will also make it much easier for the first company who researches a cost effective implementation to obtain an over-broad patent on their method and process, which will practically cover the whole invention since there are no prior patents.
Fly the data center above the arctic circle in the northern hemisphere's summer, and fly it down below the antarctic circle in the southern hemisphere's summer, and you could do the solar thing 24 hours a day with cheaper cooling.
Whenever you talk to official IBM folks, it's a good idea to ask them when the next name change for your particular hardware is scheduled.
Re:Let me be the first critic
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The basic problem is that most Linux advocates are not themselves developers. They have to support the developers through bug reports, free hardware, bugging manufacturers for documentation, etc.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
The set of Linux developers does not completely (or even greatly) overlap the set of Linux advocates. It is the advocates' problem when hardware doesn't work, not the developers'. The key to getting your unsupported hardware worked on is to find the subset of developers and advocates who overlap and will work for free to help you out, or buy some hardware for a developer and help them reverse engineer it and debug the drivers.
I think it's your problem, and you have to either fix it yourself or help someone else fix it. That's always been how free/open source development worked.
Buy a copy of your hardware for a developer, bug the hell out of the manufacturers for as many technical specs you can get, reverse engineer as much as you can on your own, test the bleeding edge, and file useful bug reports.
Linux developers often do not have access to the hardware and documentation they need, and their goals are probably not "Make every (possibly undocumented) device work for every user's every purpose", but "Make what we need to do easier, and if someone asks nicely and provides us with some support, we'll help them out". Some people's goal is to get as many people using Linux as possible; in general I don't think that's the primary goal of most developers. You may have confused the two groups of people, since it is clearly the Linux advocates' problem that your hardware doesn't work, not the developers.
The same command structure, driver package, installation routine often has to be "tweaked" to work - if it works at all - on any given random distribution or even between versions of the same distribution.
I agree that there is no common command syntax across utilities, but at least it's getting slightly better. GNU utilities are probably the most consistent, although they always have to support backward compatibility with the Unix utilities which would make unification of interfaces a major change. Basically, anyone has the option to take the Linux kernel and replace the libc and standard utilities with something consistent (and non-Unix), but so far I haven't heard of any project doing that. Unix's heritage is too useful to throw out all the standard utilities or make them incompatible with older versions.
Most packages use autoconf, and many can be installed with "configure ; make ; make install". The exceptions can't detect all the options that you might want or need, and require you do read either README or INSTALL and pass some options to configure. For the rare packages without autoconf, most of them at least come with generic make files for different platforms. Again, if you would like installation to be easier, help projects move to autoconf and write some test cases to detect your special situation that required configuration options.
There is no quick answer to dependencies; the nature of free/open source software is continual development with many releases and patches floating around, making it impossible to force every distribution to standardize on the exact same version of every library. Your best bet if you don't want to deal with dependency hell is to stick strictly to one version of one distribution, and only use their packages.
It's interesting to read the article linked on Petit's blog, Cost Allocations and Copyright Orphans, which points out that orphan works are considered from the point of view of person wanting to obtain rights to a particular orphan work. Petit appears to believe that this is contrary to the definition of copyright, which primarily defines the rights of authors. I think it merely showcases the absurd distance from the intention of the U.S. constitution that Congress has taken copyright terms. A term of 95 years after the death of an author or an indefinite term in the case of corporate ownership of a copyright makes the legal "progress of science and useful arts" virtually impossible due to the potentially high cost of licensing orphan (or otherwise) works. The removal of the requirement for timely copyright renewal destroyed the only obvious path for users to obtain licenses to orphan works; it is ludicrous to require anyone to search through nearly a century worth of documents in order to track down a rights holder.
I think this case may prove to be a practical fix to the copyright laws; a recognition that the ultimate purpose of copyright is to promote society's progress in science and the arts and not to allow the creation of commercial empires of tangled and impenetrably complex rights at the expense of the general public. If only the legislature would see the light and just fix the problems on their own...
So far, Google is the only company doing this. But what if another company starts doing this in China, another one in Russia, another one in South America, another one in South Africa, one in Israel, etc., how many web forms in how many languages are you prepared to fill in for each of your books? You go on from saying how simple it is to then say that other companies should be able to get into the same game, but you don't seem to have thought it through.
Much easier than tracking down every single unauthorized publisher in the world. I am certain that publishers in many countries are printing copyrighted books and not paying the royalties, but *no one* can track all of them down. Tracking down the most popular online book services is a cake walk compared to actually finding and tracking physical books back to their publisher. The online publishers will push out any localized black market that caters to physical books today.
Find a legal definition that says so. A person can be convicted of possession of child porn with absolutely no child abuse involved. Children can create child porn of themselves doing things that will be perfectly legal for them to do in a couple years, or even a single day. Children can create child porn that is only illegal because they took a picture of the activity they were engaging in, not because the activity was illegal (or even immoral by the strictest standards; most places let children under 18 get married), but because they were under 18.
The "violence is ok, sex is not" idea appears most common in the US.
Except that this article is about a foolish law in Britain, and the articles from last week were about the Great Firewall of China^WAustralia.
Comic books where children are ripped apart would apparently be fine and dandy (as long as their body parts remained modestly clothed) according to the British law.
Where we have problems are when we take a blob that can't see, hear, or feel and it magically decides that it needs to see when it has no concept of sight.
All the blobs that could see a tiny bit worse, move a tiny bit slower, or feel a tiny bit less than their competitors in their niche died a long time ago.
Evolution in a nutshell.
As evidence, just look at all the various light sensing organs that organisms on Earth have today. Everything from simple eye spots or single photosensitive cells to Mantis Shrimp eyes exist, and obviously the organisms derive benefit from the eye configuration they currently have. would have definite advantages. Almost all the intermediate stages you'd try to find in evolutionary history are being used right now by some critter. There are many possible evolutionary pathways from simple eyes to more complex ones, using all the existing eyes as examples of the intermediate stages with pretty obvious interpolation between them.
I don't think *anyone* can be the go-to person for what's obscene. There's no point in trying to regulate things that exist solely in the mind of the beholder. They might as well make it illegal to draw anything except fine art, or only allow fine music to be played on radio stations.
If some people are allowed to revel in what they consider the best things that society can produce, why can't other people revel in the worst of society?
If it hasn't happened already, I imagine that pretty soon the number of "child" porn (by the legal definition) images on social networking sites and cell phones will out-number all the other child porn images ever created.
There's just no sense in laws that make images of naked people under the age of 18 illegal. Punish the people who actually commit crimes of child abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all
our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea;
Christians should swim in the ocean on cloudy days?
The server just stores a bunch of indexes into your data and searches them when you supply the keywords. It sounds like what you really need is an efficient index (it requires few reads to determine whether what you are searching for is there, or that it isn't anywhere). Then you can build and encrypt the index and store it online in chunks, and download the pieces of it that you need to search for your keywords, and then retrieve the encrypted data that the index entries points to.
For instance, if you want to do keyword searches you build a word index from all the keywords in your documents and then put links to the documents into buckets for each keyword. You could make this relatively efficient by creating the following structure for each bucket: "document1,document2,document3,..." and then storing it by encrypting the structure and naming it with the encrypted value of the keyword. E.g. for "slashdot" create a bucket named "fynfuqbg" and in it store links to any of your documents containing the string "slashdot".
To perform a keyword search, encrypt all the keywords separately and ask the online storage for all the files named with the set of encrypted keywords, and then once you have the index entries do a simple intersection on them to find links to documents containing all the keywords. If you want to support searching for variations in the spelling of a keyword, just generate and encrypt all the possible variations that you want to search for and see if there are index buckets for any of those variations.
Obviously the online storage facility will know that you are performing searches, and can figure out what your most popular searches are in terms of the buckets you access, and they could statistically determine what likely plaintext keyword belongs to a bucket based on the common word frequencies in documents, and the general frequency of searches for particular keywords. One way to obfuscate your searches is to always include several requests for other blocks, using a statistical method to try to make all your searches obey a uniform distribution. Storing keyword buckets in a uniform size is also imperative to prevent statistical analysis as you build the index (otherwise watching index buckets grow would allow the online storage facility to associate the indexes that grew with recently added documents).
Except, of course, that youtube is implying that he never published it, since they refuse to admit that he owns it. One of two things happens; youtube is stubborn and says he's never owned the thing and he shows proof that he created it and wins, or youtube apologizes for forgetting that he uploaded it years ago and reverts ownership to him.
Sure, it's not a perfect strategy, but it only has to be plausible enough to scare either youtube or the retards who stole his video.
The settlement agreement
I'd say it's probably even worse than that. I don't think any other company on earth could conceivably provide the unpublished books at a lower fee than Google, simply because of the way Google does business. If they could, I might be concerned about the seemingly unfair ruling, but in my estimation Google Books will turn out to be the closest thing to an Internet public library the world has yet seen. To me, that is vastly more important than the mere capitalistic concerns of other companies. If anyone else wants to put all their books online, then they should just *do* it, and settle their own lawsuit with the Authors Guild. They'll have precedent on their side.
Besides, Google is only being forced into an end-run around copyright law because of the insanely long terms Congress has legislated and the removal of renewal fees that, if left intact, would have at least ensured that out of print books returned to the public domain before they molded away to dust.
Let them pay to scan tons of dusty old books in the basements of university libraries and then work out a class action lawsuit with all the people representing the authors.
Of course Google has a monopoly; no one else wanted to take the time or money or risk. Nothing prevents any other company from doing exactly what Google has done, except of course the things that could have prevented Google from doing it, but didn't.
Blaming the columnist is stupid. The editor who allowed the article to be published is responsible for ensuring that articles adhere to the company policies, and if there was a policy the article should have stopped at that level. The fact that it was published implies that either the editor is incompetent (hey, it's Fox) or that in actuality there was no company policy regarding this (other than a vague "don't break any laws doing your job" sort of policy).
The Chinese and Thai governments thank you for your support.
Honestly, he should have put the blame on someone else and used his "journalistic integrity" to protect his anonymous source's identity.
Isn't it obvious that ads come from the Other Place?
Have you tried to get a federal prosecutor to charge them under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 and have them thrown in jail for 3 years for stealing unpublished works? That would be quite funny.
Additionally, the OP is going to *look* like a patent troll if he doesn't actually have a patent application in hand along with a free, non revocable license for it. Remember RAMBUS? They pushed their invention for everyone to use as an "open" standard, claiming it would be a great idea, and only afterward started hitting everyone up for money with their submarine patent.
Not patenting the original invention will also make it much easier for the first company who researches a cost effective implementation to obtain an over-broad patent on their method and process, which will practically cover the whole invention since there are no prior patents.
Fly the data center above the arctic circle in the northern hemisphere's summer, and fly it down below the antarctic circle in the southern hemisphere's summer, and you could do the solar thing 24 hours a day with cheaper cooling.
AS/400 -> iSeries -> SystemI.
Whenever you talk to official IBM folks, it's a good idea to ask them when the next name change for your particular hardware is scheduled.
The basic problem is that most Linux advocates are not themselves developers. They have to support the developers through bug reports, free hardware, bugging manufacturers for documentation, etc.
The set of Linux developers does not completely (or even greatly) overlap the set of Linux advocates. It is the advocates' problem when hardware doesn't work, not the developers'. The key to getting your unsupported hardware worked on is to find the subset of developers and advocates who overlap and will work for free to help you out, or buy some hardware for a developer and help them reverse engineer it and debug the drivers.
and therefore it is their problem.
I think it's your problem, and you have to either fix it yourself or help someone else fix it. That's always been how free/open source development worked.
Buy a copy of your hardware for a developer, bug the hell out of the manufacturers for as many technical specs you can get, reverse engineer as much as you can on your own, test the bleeding edge, and file useful bug reports.
Linux developers often do not have access to the hardware and documentation they need, and their goals are probably not "Make every (possibly undocumented) device work for every user's every purpose", but "Make what we need to do easier, and if someone asks nicely and provides us with some support, we'll help them out". Some people's goal is to get as many people using Linux as possible; in general I don't think that's the primary goal of most developers. You may have confused the two groups of people, since it is clearly the Linux advocates' problem that your hardware doesn't work, not the developers.
The same command structure, driver package, installation routine often has to be "tweaked" to work - if it works at all - on any given random distribution or even between versions of the same distribution.
I agree that there is no common command syntax across utilities, but at least it's getting slightly better. GNU utilities are probably the most consistent, although they always have to support backward compatibility with the Unix utilities which would make unification of interfaces a major change. Basically, anyone has the option to take the Linux kernel and replace the libc and standard utilities with something consistent (and non-Unix), but so far I haven't heard of any project doing that. Unix's heritage is too useful to throw out all the standard utilities or make them incompatible with older versions.
Most packages use autoconf, and many can be installed with "configure ; make ; make install". The exceptions can't detect all the options that you might want or need, and require you do read either README or INSTALL and pass some options to configure. For the rare packages without autoconf, most of them at least come with generic make files for different platforms. Again, if you would like installation to be easier, help projects move to autoconf and write some test cases to detect your special situation that required configuration options.
There is no quick answer to dependencies; the nature of free/open source software is continual development with many releases and patches floating around, making it impossible to force every distribution to standardize on the exact same version of every library. Your best bet if you don't want to deal with dependency hell is to stick strictly to one version of one distribution, and only use their packages.
It's interesting to read the article linked on Petit's blog, Cost Allocations and Copyright Orphans, which points out that orphan works are considered from the point of view of person wanting to obtain rights to a particular orphan work. Petit appears to believe that this is contrary to the definition of copyright, which primarily defines the rights of authors. I think it merely showcases the absurd distance from the intention of the U.S. constitution that Congress has taken copyright terms. A term of 95 years after the death of an author or an indefinite term in the case of corporate ownership of a copyright makes the legal "progress of science and useful arts" virtually impossible due to the potentially high cost of licensing orphan (or otherwise) works. The removal of the requirement for timely copyright renewal destroyed the only obvious path for users to obtain licenses to orphan works; it is ludicrous to require anyone to search through nearly a century worth of documents in order to track down a rights holder.
I think this case may prove to be a practical fix to the copyright laws; a recognition that the ultimate purpose of copyright is to promote society's progress in science and the arts and not to allow the creation of commercial empires of tangled and impenetrably complex rights at the expense of the general public. If only the legislature would see the light and just fix the problems on their own...
So far, Google is the only company doing this. But what if another company starts doing this in China, another one in Russia, another one in South America, another one in South Africa, one in Israel, etc., how many web forms in how many languages are you prepared to fill in for each of your books? You go on from saying how simple it is to then say that other companies should be able to get into the same game, but you don't seem to have thought it through.
Much easier than tracking down every single unauthorized publisher in the world. I am certain that publishers in many countries are printing copyrighted books and not paying the royalties, but *no one* can track all of them down. Tracking down the most popular online book services is a cake walk compared to actually finding and tracking physical books back to their publisher. The online publishers will push out any localized black market that caters to physical books today.
Child porn IS child abuse
Find a legal definition that says so. A person can be convicted of possession of child porn with absolutely no child abuse involved. Children can create child porn of themselves doing things that will be perfectly legal for them to do in a couple years, or even a single day. Children can create child porn that is only illegal because they took a picture of the activity they were engaging in, not because the activity was illegal (or even immoral by the strictest standards; most places let children under 18 get married), but because they were under 18.
The "violence is ok, sex is not" idea appears most common in the US.
Except that this article is about a foolish law in Britain, and the articles from last week were about the Great Firewall of China^WAustralia.
Comic books where children are ripped apart would apparently be fine and dandy (as long as their body parts remained modestly clothed) according to the British law.
Who'll be the go-to person for what's fine art?
Metrosexuals.
Where we have problems are when we take a blob that can't see, hear, or feel and it magically decides that it needs to see when it has no concept of sight.
All the blobs that could see a tiny bit worse, move a tiny bit slower, or feel a tiny bit less than their competitors in their niche died a long time ago.
Evolution in a nutshell.
As evidence, just look at all the various light sensing organs that organisms on Earth have today. Everything from simple eye spots or single photosensitive cells to Mantis Shrimp eyes exist, and obviously the organisms derive benefit from the eye configuration they currently have. would have definite advantages. Almost all the intermediate stages you'd try to find in evolutionary history are being used right now by some critter. There are many possible evolutionary pathways from simple eyes to more complex ones, using all the existing eyes as examples of the intermediate stages with pretty obvious interpolation between them.
I don't think *anyone* can be the go-to person for what's obscene. There's no point in trying to regulate things that exist solely in the mind of the beholder. They might as well make it illegal to draw anything except fine art, or only allow fine music to be played on radio stations.
If some people are allowed to revel in what they consider the best things that society can produce, why can't other people revel in the worst of society?
If it hasn't happened already, I imagine that pretty soon the number of "child" porn (by the legal definition) images on social networking sites and cell phones will out-number all the other child porn images ever created.
There's just no sense in laws that make images of naked people under the age of 18 illegal. Punish the people who actually commit crimes of child abuse.