With the incredible cheapness of compute cycles these days I don't understand at all the lack of certain widespread security devices. For example, why are there no inexpensive router NICs? You can buy a $40 Linksys - but that's a whole 'nother box. I have an old HP I use, but that's also another box. What do I do with my laptop when I want to use a public access point? Carry a Linksys with me?
All you need is an ARM, firmware in FLASH (so it can be upgraded when it is inevitably cracked), a PCI interface and the 10/100 guts - not substantially more than is already on a NIC, although admittedly much more than is on your $4 8139 based card. That would all fit into a chip (a small, low power chip at that), which means it could be incorporated into a laptop.
Why isn't there a more sophistacted watchdog in the motherboard chipset itself? With all those transistors there's no reason they couldn't dedicate an entire ARM or even a 386 core to the task. It doesn't have to prevent intrusions it just has to detect them and then activate some "doomsday" mechanism - like locking out the network port (which can also be on the motherboard chip, as it already is in many) or even just activating a hard reset. Through an on-board NIC it could do statefull packet analysis and it could keep a DENY list right in on-board FLASH.
I set a watchdog to monitor my connection through my firewall. If the outgoing data rate goes over a certain threshold (which would indicate an intrusion and someone mining data from my PC) then it simply hangs up the phone and rotates the autodialer to a different number. This capability requires a custom applet on my desktop and an external router.
Why? As cheap as silicon is these days this capability should be trivial to add right on the motherboard. It's not glamorous and it's not going to work in every case, but it's absolutely going to work in many of the most common cases - including substantially slowing the spread of virii, as an infected machine would instantly become trapped in a boot cycle or just knocked off the network. Yeah, that means every virus infection becomes a DDOS attack - but better for a few hundred machines to get knocked down than a few hundred thousand allowed to roam free for days or even months, eating up gigabytes of bandwidth with useless PING packets.
I wish more in the linux community didn't consider most of this technology such a flashpoint, because this is one area where the Open community has a real opportunity to make a substantial contribution and potentially drive platform design. If an open sourced core could be added to a motherboard chipset and would add only a couple of dollars, and that core would add substantial security to the platform, you have a feature that mom and dad understand and are willing to pay for.
Othrwise we just let Microsoft and AOL do it, and all it adds to the platform is a few bullets about the kneecaps.
too bad you posted AC, but I get the message. And your argument is the counter (and equally valid) to mine. I'm replying cuz I hope this thread is still getting enough traffic to get your post modded up.
Not because I'm a luddite who despised flash, but because I think standards need to be supported. And there are all sorts of open standards based on open code that can be incorporated into browsers. Flash is the first that comes to mind - there is an open scripting standard for technology that competes with this, and as such it could just as easily be incorporatd into IE and Opera as Mozilla (MS and Opera wouild, of course, have to pay their own conde monkeys to do it lest they be caught "stealing" OSS code) without having to use separate "plugins."
How would this affect Java? Java ain't inluded in windows anymore, and it's such a huge (and separate) download I don't see it being affected. But java applets aren't "plugins" - so again I see this as having the potential effect of supporting the wider adoption of standards based tech. How many who use IE don't trust it to run any activeX controls but don't feel nearly so vulnerable when leaving java enabled?
Software patents completely suck, but in this case I think the cloud may have many layers of silver linings.
I agree with you on this one, and I'll chuck in my 2p for good measure.
I think the ads can be a good thing. Many people who use mandrake are complete newbs and, coming from the windows world nopt only may not know what to expect, but also don't have a clue what they can "do with it" once its installed. If they see ads for Real and Crossover Office and Sun's paid version of OO, they're going to be left feling just a little more familiar with what's up and what they can do. And, since Md is such a popular newb OS, it gives many softhauses a reasonable ad market. if more paid software becomes available for linux it might attract some of the windows shareware stables (like my own fave, reget deluxe). Yeah, linux is supposed to be free and all that - but freedom also means free to generate profit and, so long as people play by the rules I'm 100% down with that, too.
You've completely missed my point. I want to be able to hear bands from all round the world, not just the nearest city. I"m sure musicians want to be heard al around the world. Your business model focusses purely on a small local market and quite frankly sucks for both the musician and the world.
Your comments show you are more interested in repeating (repeating) ignorant assertions than in thinking and developing a logical rebuttal. Your comments reveal you know absolutely nothing about networks, or even about music. Most of all, yoour comments reveal a complete lack of thought before hitting that "reply" button.
I will not answer your stupid arguments again as it's obvious you read nothing I said the first time...
We are talking about FREE broadband to a government subsidized facility.
No. We are talking about making further use of infrastructure that is already in place. if it's at all available, business offices are already going to have broadband.
And again you entirely miss the "free" part. If you are working to sustain an infrastructure, how the fuck is it "free?" Are the vegetables from my garden "free" because they "just sprang up from the ground?" Does my time not count because I am not on a corporate payroll? Does theirs not count because they are working for their community instead of AOL?
Our current focus is at New Englewood Terrace (NET), a 23 story, 303 unit development in the Englewood community in southwestern Chicago. We are about to close and start the redevelopment
program. Our goal is to use NET as an "idea" building, to illustrate the values to residents of service enriched housing, neighborhood connections, and the potentials of smart buildings
and neighborhoods.
Bringing broadband to the building makes many things possible. Through the combination of vertical fiber, horizontal ethernet and wireless access points (WAPs), every unit/room at NET can
have wireless broadband access to the Internet. Cisco Fellows have been key advisers. The broadband connection can also be helpful with building operating economics: replacing guards in
part with surveillance equipment, optimizing energy costs, sensing, regulating and monitoring devices, etc.
Motorola has developed a series of
Canopy products which allow NET to access a wireless broadband signal from up to 20 miles, distribute it within the building (via wires, wires/wireless, and wireless technologies), and through a smart antenna to distribute the signal for up to 2 miles from the building (where it can be further extended by wireless applications among buildings, and with wifi technoligies within buildings.
There are two remaining parts to our overall program. The first is to develop a neighborhood oriented ISP to provide connectivity to the system and all of the other provisioning, billing and service requirements. The second is to make sure that content is available that is relevant and meaningful to the interests of NET and Englewood customers. Some important research has been done in this area by the
Children's Partnership and
Contentbank.org.
Our perspective on the needs of neighborhood technology networks is shaped by the history of DSSA in government housing. In could just as easily come from a school, a library, a church, a
community media center, a CTC or a community network. But it is important to note that there are 50,000 government housing projects in the U.S., 5,000,000 units of housing, 17,500,000
residents, in neighborhoods of 60,000,000. Service enriched and technology supported government housing developments could be important parts of any community network.
The beatles were a local band - they played Liverpool for years before anyone here heard of'em. So were the stones. And I actually know someone who had Van Halen play at one of their parties - of course, that was long before they became part of a "label."
Every band begins local. Even when your dad runs a record company you still start local - just ask "..and get'em the Hell outta Detroit" Douggie Feiger. The way your band moves from "local" to "nationwide" is in lots of small steps - steps you pretty obviously are not familiar with, as this shows in your comments. Steps like playing locally as a opening act for an already established headliner, touring as an opening act, touring on "palooza" type circus shows, touring other countries to see how your stuff plays there...
All that is part of the old machine. But you don't need to be an opening act for a headliner to be heard. That's not music, that's marketing, and it's a different animal altogether. I know this is hard for some people to accept, but the simple fact is music existed long before (and was quite healthy before) corporations got hold of it. When the press releases talk about how piracy has nearly destroyed "music" in Mexico, what they're saying is it has destroyed the established music industry in Mexico. There's still music all over Mexico - just ask anyone who has been there. Why do you think record companies are so anxious to market latin acts in the US? Sure, there's a large market for it here - but there's also lots of Chinese and japanese people here, and you don't see the Asian Grammys on prime time network TV. The music industry wants to get that music selling here because they want to be able to lobby on the Hill for increased pressure on Mexico to enforce more US style crackdowns. And the way to do that is with dollar$.
That's like saying with the advent of Ethernet, fat cheap bandwidth is set to become ubiquitous.
Apaprently you know as much about networking as you know about the music biz, cuz it's nothing at all like that. I have a stack of NICs here that cost me all of three bucks each. When I put together a machine I throw one in (if it doesn't already have one) just so I can easily backup and swap files on it if I ever need to work on it at someone's house. But those cheap nics do no good at all when it comes to swapping files with my neighbor. Unless I want to either carry a box to his house or string hundreds of feet of wire between us, those cheap and ubiquitous network ports are completely useless.
Wireless requires none of that. I can share files with my neighbor all fucking year - moving gigabytes a day - and it hasn't a fucking thing to do with my ISP. My ISP won't even know about it. And because of that connection we become, in a very real sense, a community. Not just a community in the "hi charlie how's the wife" sense, but a community in the "check out this clip I found at work today" sense. And potentially a community in the free local phone service/community broadcasting/leave-the-webcam-on-and-I'll watch-your-house-while-you're-on-vacation neighborhood watch sense.
My cousin bought a laptop so he could carry stuff ("stuff" like movies and music) home from work, where they have the DSL connection. We're all on modems out here, but he has daily fatpipe access. So do Millions of americans limited to dialup access in their homes. Figure each home with a (modest) 10GB hard drive, a dozen homes in a "block" area, that's more than 100GB of potentially shared storage. And that's an exceedingly modest figure these days when even a laptop comes with 40GB or more. I would venture that in this very rural area where I am there is easily a TB of storage. Link that all together with free, loosely organized access and you have incredible "media" potential.
And none of it is available to the world unless we want it to be.
Actually, I think it's not just "shared hosts" but also the fact all da pornz is hosted on linux. And even tho many sites are kept very secure, many more of those sites (numerically, probably the vast majority of them) can easily be "hacked" by something as simple as a referer spoof. And every one of those spoofed intrusions counts - ergo it's not just the lack of security, but the utter ubiquity of hacks that certain webmasters seem to want to remain exploitable. Pretty sad when your business is so bad you have to try to give your stuff away.
So the people who construct the "center" should be forbidden from attaching a $30 wireless card to one of the machines?
How much you pay for broadband is your problem. Where I live broadband would cost me well over a hundred dollars a month and that is AFTER I invested $600 or more in the crap needed to connect and then paid the satellite installer to set it up. should I bitch about how "unfair" it is that I should work and still not be able to afford what people in the cities can get for the same price I pay for shit slow dialup access?
Of course, I could just move forty miles away so I would be near MSU where I could leech off the the campus wireless network. Or get DSL and share the cost with my neighbors. But I choose to stay in a rural area, so I have to live with the down side.
Pissing about someone living in the city at or below the poverty line and having free or low cost broadband access is not only short sighted elitism, it also shows a tremendous lack of insight about the state of the industry. What if the people in the co-op support their own connections? What if the modest fee for the wireless access itself subsidizes education and training for a service industry that is guaranteed to provide stable jobs that are impossible to migrate offshore in a community that desperately needs them? If I am sick of not having broadband and I and my neighbors organize a rural co-op is that suddenly "unfair" to those who spend all their time chasing money in the cities but still can't get fat pipe access? Get a fucking clue!
Normally I wouldn't reply to an AC, but I just have to address this elitist bullshit.
What would yo do, AC? Let them starve so we can dump their bodies in pauper's graves and then bulldoze the slum for a parking to hold all those fatass SUVs?
Yes, some public housing has broadband. It costs little when shared among dozens or hundreds of users (an 802.11b card is less expensive than a 56k modem), and it provides both edcuational and economic opportunity to help people not live in public housing any more.
In fact, there are people who are investing loads of personal resources into providing quality public housing that is rich with opportunity. Since it costs you nothing, I don't see why you should have a problem with that.
Bandwidth tends to be localized. So are musicians. You can not go to your local bar and see my friend's band play any more than I can see your local musicians at my local pub.
With the advent of wireless, fat cheap bandwidth is set to become ubiquitous. Wireless PCI and laptop cards are now often cheaper than a 56K modem, and intel's initiative to embed the "gateway" right in the motherboard will drive that nail to the head.
This means neighborhoods now can enjoy tens of megabits in a peering environment. The conneciton further out may be substantially lessened, but "close to home" file sharing networks can hav real power. This means it's even easier for my friend to hype his band, because those people who might otherwise never go to the local pub can now hear him play entirely at their convenience.
This is how the industry already works. Except now the power base can be completely decentralized. No more "gatekeepers" to beg for support. Either you have merit and grow beyond your local peers, or you don't. "The collective" becomes the gatekeeper instead of the shark skinned zoot from LA who blew into town for some local tail.
Harder for bands to get quality equipment? dude.. I just put together a machine with six channel audio and a 1.6GHz CPU and 7200RPM HD that could easily handle two dozen tracks and it cost the end user all of $320.00! Thirty years ago you could barely find a quality cassette deck for that, and today that one box can be an entire fucking studio and media distribution point and CD production facility.
The fact is we no longer need Hollywood, although Hollywood needs us. Unfortunately, too many people on both sides of the fence have yet to realize this.
P2P users need to be made more aware that file sharing is distribution. These lawsuits are double plus good in that they drive that point home and they make the music industry look bad. Most people, even if they acknowledge the RIAA has a point - don't condone suing 12 year olds living in public housing.
I'm exhausted by the duality: the people who (allegedly) most believe in file sharing seem to deny its power. And those who least understand it also don't see the power of file sharing. So long as this mindset is prevalent, the RIAA and its ilk will continue to own the media.
I have tens of thousands of MP3s and APEs. Many I downloaded from usenet, many I made myself. But nearly all the MP3s I have of RIAA controlled music are recordings I already bought. And while I absolutely love to share music, and freqently do, you're not going to find any Hollywood (or Nashville) label stuff on anything I distribute. Not because I value the RIAA, but because I so despise the RIAA there is simply no way I am going to take part in advertising for them.
File sharers desperately need to understand this. Every time you share Pink, or Madonna, or Linkin Park, you are advertising for them. Why would you risk being sued just to give even more hype to Millionaires? Would you rob a gas station to buy CDs?
The SCOTUS has sided with the right to de minmis copies on several occasions. Even in the Sony v Disney case this was mentioned and fairly well dismissed, much in the same way as teenagers swapping tapes. The reason is pretty clear: if you make a copy for your own use, you are not "distributing" it. If CBS runs an ABC (Disney) owned show and you tape it with your VCR, you are not responsible for CBS' violation of ABC's rights. Your action, while technically a violation, is considered trivial and pretty much inactionable.
You don't sue every person who records a TV show and keeps it, because the precedents you would set (violation of privacy, corporate search and seizure, etc) are greater cost to our society than letting individuals have the "right" to make copies for their own use.
This is the way the court has read things several times, and the way any thinking individual would be likely to read it as well.
Where p2p is "different" is in the peer part. Every download you make from kazaa goes into a folder that defaults to "shared" which means every song you download is made available for someone else to upload. Every reproduction of the file adds to the available bandwidth for "sharing", which technically makes you party to an act of unauthorized distribution.
The thing is, if you're a dialup user that bandwidth is probably never used, because most clients favor the lowest ping times and that ain't gonna be a dialup user who is in the act of downloading. The 12 y/o girl who was sued allegedly had "over 1000 songs" in her "shared" folder. But so what? Is it more of a "crime" if I let you choose which of my 1000 CDs you can take home to copy? Odds are great such nonsense wouldn't stand if tested, because the RIAA is suing people for actions they cannot prove ever happened rather than suing them for participating in a conspiracy to pirate works - which is technically what you are doing when you "share" on kazaa.
The problem is no one has challenged this nonsense in court. There is no "de minimis sharing" precedent (and, thanks to the DMCA, there isn't likely to be one). This is another reason I'm hopeful about the record industry suing its own customers; once they've bullied enough of them, it's a sure bet some lawyers are going to decide a(nother) class action is worth their while.
Uhhh... yeah and stuff. So basically you have NO LOGICAL BASIS for your statements so the best you can come up with is "my dad can beat up your dad?"
Hilarious.
And no one is holding up China as a "bulwark against authoritarianism." That is your misreading, not my statement. China is an incredibly paranoid nation that is going so far as to develop its own national linux based OS because they are so certain the Bill Gates is working in cahoots with the CIA (and they may well be right). This means any "authoritarian" stuff they stick in their OS is almost guaranteed not to work with "authoritarian" stuff here - that's their entire reason for doing it in the first place. But do you really believe they won't design their stuff to be able to "crack" our stuff? Do you really think they will hesitate to provide services "in the name of freedom" simply to bolster their own rhetorical propoganda opportunities?
And China is only one example. In addition to logic, you've completely avoided the whole of eastern euroupe, and most of western euroupe as well. Here is just one example. Eva is a film star in euro who has been appearing nude since she was, like, ten (her mother is a photographer - you might think of her as the twisted, drunken French Sally Mann). Much of Eva's work was done in France (a country where another well known director is still living because he would be arrested in the US) and very little of her work (no matter the age) is even available in the US (despite the fact she was on the cover of "Photo" magazine AND featured in Playboy by the time she was fifteen). Click on the english side (if you dare! Ha!) then click on the russian side and compare - one server, one site, two languages and they really couldn't be more different and still be recognizable as one site. All those "copyrighted" works that you cannot get on the english language pages suddenly appear on the russian pages! It's magic!
You think they're going to firewall in the US? Again, so fucking what if they do? Isolationism is the road this country has been travelling for years now and it's not just because of the internet. Whoopeee. That just hastens the fall of the US as a superpower in the world, which might be good for bringing back those "well paying" factory jobs but is going to royally fuck America's chances to foister such foolhardy technology off onto the rest of the world.
No matter what happens, it balances - all you gotta do is be willing to vote with your feet. This "prison" you're imagining is constructed purely of you own egocentric nationalism.
hen, it will be impossible to visit those sites with an untrusted OS. It will be impossible to build a PC, compile Linux, compile Mozilla, and use that to browse the web. The freedom of disorganized amateurs to create useful computer systems will be gone.
From Hollywood charging for content? Jessus fucking christ, get out of that chair and go outside. Or even try typing "www.google.ru" instead of just "google." There's a whole fucking world out there, and Hollywood doesn't conmtrol it. The US government doesn't even control it.
And the more pressure there is for this sort of thing, the greater will be the effort made to destabilize it, both from within and without.
Sorry, but the US doesn't own the internet. And the US doesn't make all the computers in the world - in fact, most of them come from parts made in China, a country that would love to see US dominance further destabilised.
that's why. Hollywood spends money on stories that are easy to translate into turkish and spanish and chinese and finnish. It's easier to translate and dub a movie with no talking and lots of visuals than it is to translate (and maintain) a movie where the characters sit around a table and talk for two hours. People want to be entertained, and most of us have our own tables we can sit around when we want to see people talking.
The proliferation of DRM technology would also lead existing websites to use it. Many of the free newspapers would go away. The minority of sites that remain free will probably use DRM to mandate user login accounts. The even smaller minority that don't log r users will probably engage some DRM flags to stop their files from being printed or locally stored.
Visited the NYT lately? How about LA Times? How about MIT Press? There are already hundreds, if not thousands of sites, locking their content away behind logins - they don't need DRM to do it.
So what? More handwaiving and doom and gloom. The fact is there's plenty of free sites now, and there will be then. What is of value to society activists will continue to make available no matter the policies, and what is not of substantial value (like most of those sites already barricaded behind "free accounts") will either barricade themselves in further, or not - it won't matter either way, because people will alwayas find foils IF it is worth the effort. And if it isn't, they don't matter anyway.
Fantastic example: Traci Lords. You can't buy most of her films in the US - in fact, you can be arrested for even having some of them. How long would it take you to find a place to order them on the internet? Or to find them in the newsgroups, or on p2p? Arguably not much societal value there at all, and yet no US laws can prevent anyone who wants the content from acquiring it.
It's a big world out there. When free expression is no longer possible on US soil, US dollars will make sure there's a world of domains out there where speech remains free - even english language speech. And you don't need to look far to see it's happening already...
People like you who try to mush it all up are just trying to loot other people's property.
Did your momma have any children that learned to think?
Source code gets no copyright protection: corporations keep their source as a "trade secret" and only get protection on the executable. It is illegal to redistribute (copy) the executable, and the source is entirely within their control (and their responsibility). No real "furtherance of the arts" is accomplished except within the limited scope of usage of the tool itself. If a work is infringed at the source level, therefore, it is (nearly) impossible to prove without revealing "trade secrets" and, therefore, exposing the company to further risk.
Corporations have to register the source code, and therefore are given fulll protection on both works. It is just as illegal to redistribute (share) the source beyond the scope allowed by the rights holder, and if a work is infringed there is no risk to the rights holder in defending the work. "Furtherance of the arts" is addressed, as well as the rights of the work's creator.
Corporations are allowed "copyright" on works they do not share.
It becomes nearly impossible for libeled parties to defend themselves, but "rights holders" are free to make claims as they see fit. Which gives "rights holders" basically free reign to make accusations which they may never be forced to address in court, and leaves victims nearly defenseless until the (very slow) court gets around to addressing the issue. Neither "furtherance of the arts" nor protection of (libeled) rights holders is served, since the more powerful party remains free to withold (copyrighted) "evidence" that no one is allowed to see.
How does this system serve rights holders whose works may have been infringed upon, but are forced from the marketplace by another "rights holder" with more money? How does that system serve the public interest? How does it promote progress?
Can you answer any of these questions using sound logic?
If you have a collection of AVI movies and MP3 songs, where did you get those? Is there some great archive sites I've never heard of where movie and music studios are giving away tens of thousands of high quality downloads? Is McGraw-Hill offering all their new books in PDF downloads? See, I keep hearing "content provider this" and "content provider that" but I still don't see any evidence this new scnario represents any sort of change from the one we have already...
Are there any websites that offer high quality streaming video? Or even high quality downloadable movies? How about high quality MP3s? Anything at all the publishers are offering "legally" in a format of higher quality than I have been getting (for years) absolutely free via USENET?
How about plain ol' "information" websites? Hmmm... let's see. Geocities might be a good example. No streaming video (big deal) but they host tens of thousands of home pages. So does AOL. So let's say they decided to use this Palladium-Longhorny stuff to keep their "members pages" available only to those willing to use their client software.
Uhhhh... so what? I can't recall the last time I visited a geocities page (much less an AOL members page), and I'm pretty sure if I go over the proxy logs I'll not find anything more than a few "404" pages with their name on'em. Yahoo? I used to read a couple of their groups, but they're gonna send spam to you one way or another so I quit that long ago. There's just as much content in usenet, and I get to call the shots.
See? This doomsday scenario really isn't much different than what we have now - it's just more of the same but with encryption. I really don't give a shit if universal wants to put their movies online and lock them away behind MS-centric operating systems, because I wouldn't use the service even if they slapped a Penguin on the door and made the "movie viewer" part of the RH12 base distribution. I wouldn't use it because a) I don't have broadband and b) if I want my own copy of a movie I will rent the DVD and rip it myself, or do a sneakernet trade for a copy from someone I trust to do a good job of it.
"Content providers" will lock away only as much as is economically viable. If there's no money in it, they won't lock any of it away. But right now they have it all "locked" away (at least as much as they are able). So what does any of this "evil" new technology change?
Having a system I can trust even if it's hanging out on a raw IP is a very good thing. If the tradeoff I have to accept is that Universal will use the same technology to sell movies to people with plenty of disposable income, more power to'em.
Just more mainstream crap. All too often presents one side, and that rat on Ted's head drives me to distraction.
And Jim Lehrer doesn't count... it's PBS. But even if it did count, it wouldn't count all that much. It's often just as one-sided as Nightline, and they appear waaay too lazy in matters of basic research.. or they're jsut too pressed for time. They like to say they're "in depth" but most/.ers ned only look so far as the Lessig "debate" of a month or so back to see how factual those claims are. Their coverage of the FCC ownership rules was every bit as superficial as that given on the CBS evening news - they just spent five times as much time telling the same two viewpoints - neither of which represents the interests of the public. They're just as self-serving as FOX and ABC, only they're driven by elitism instead of commerce.
No. You get copyright protection on material you publish. This is tied to the executable in that it's part of the work, but it's still different than the executable.
You prefer "not being exposed to the source" for LEGAL protection? Let's think about that: basically, Sid and Nancy would never have been made, for want of all those scenes that evoked other classics like gay Divorcee and American in Paris. Most of Steven King's work would never have been published at all (which you may argue would be a good thing) but then neither would Resevoir Dogs or even Rodney Dangerfield's classic scene in Natural Born Killers.
So how is software uniquely beyond this scope of usage and protection?
That show with the weekly MUSIC INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHST?
I grew up watching 60 minutes. Even when I was a young teen and didn't care about politics it was fun to watch the people squirm. Now we're as likely to get a twenty minute fluff piece on Tricia Yearwood, or Chicks with Dixie, or Nicole Kidman, or Sheryl fucking Crow.
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All you need is an ARM, firmware in FLASH (so it can be upgraded when it is inevitably cracked), a PCI interface and the 10/100 guts - not substantially more than is already on a NIC, although admittedly much more than is on your $4 8139 based card. That would all fit into a chip (a small, low power chip at that), which means it could be incorporated into a laptop.
Why isn't there a more sophistacted watchdog in the motherboard chipset itself? With all those transistors there's no reason they couldn't dedicate an entire ARM or even a 386 core to the task. It doesn't have to prevent intrusions it just has to detect them and then activate some "doomsday" mechanism - like locking out the network port (which can also be on the motherboard chip, as it already is in many) or even just activating a hard reset. Through an on-board NIC it could do statefull packet analysis and it could keep a DENY list right in on-board FLASH.
I set a watchdog to monitor my connection through my firewall. If the outgoing data rate goes over a certain threshold (which would indicate an intrusion and someone mining data from my PC) then it simply hangs up the phone and rotates the autodialer to a different number. This capability requires a custom applet on my desktop and an external router.
Why? As cheap as silicon is these days this capability should be trivial to add right on the motherboard. It's not glamorous and it's not going to work in every case, but it's absolutely going to work in many of the most common cases - including substantially slowing the spread of virii, as an infected machine would instantly become trapped in a boot cycle or just knocked off the network. Yeah, that means every virus infection becomes a DDOS attack - but better for a few hundred machines to get knocked down than a few hundred thousand allowed to roam free for days or even months, eating up gigabytes of bandwidth with useless PING packets.
I wish more in the linux community didn't consider most of this technology such a flashpoint, because this is one area where the Open community has a real opportunity to make a substantial contribution and potentially drive platform design. If an open sourced core could be added to a motherboard chipset and would add only a couple of dollars, and that core would add substantial security to the platform, you have a feature that mom and dad understand and are willing to pay for.
Othrwise we just let Microsoft and AOL do it, and all it adds to the platform is a few bullets about the kneecaps.
How would this affect Java? Java ain't inluded in windows anymore, and it's such a huge (and separate) download I don't see it being affected. But java applets aren't "plugins" - so again I see this as having the potential effect of supporting the wider adoption of standards based tech. How many who use IE don't trust it to run any activeX controls but don't feel nearly so vulnerable when leaving java enabled?
Software patents completely suck, but in this case I think the cloud may have many layers of silver linings.
I think the ads can be a good thing. Many people who use mandrake are complete newbs and, coming from the windows world nopt only may not know what to expect, but also don't have a clue what they can "do with it" once its installed. If they see ads for Real and Crossover Office and Sun's paid version of OO, they're going to be left feling just a little more familiar with what's up and what they can do. And, since Md is such a popular newb OS, it gives many softhauses a reasonable ad market. if more paid software becomes available for linux it might attract some of the windows shareware stables (like my own fave, reget deluxe). Yeah, linux is supposed to be free and all that - but freedom also means free to generate profit and, so long as people play by the rules I'm 100% down with that, too.
You even suck as a troll.
Your comments show you are more interested in repeating (repeating) ignorant assertions than in thinking and developing a logical rebuttal. Your comments reveal you know absolutely nothing about networks, or even about music. Most of all, yoour comments reveal a complete lack of thought before hitting that "reply" button.
I will not answer your stupid arguments again as it's obvious you read nothing I said the first time...
Bye bye!
WIRES?
We are talking about FREE broadband to a government subsidized facility.
No. We are talking about making further use of infrastructure that is already in place. if it's at all available, business offices are already going to have broadband.
And again you entirely miss the "free" part. If you are working to sustain an infrastructure, how the fuck is it "free?" Are the vegetables from my garden "free" because they "just sprang up from the ground?" Does my time not count because I am not on a corporate payroll? Does theirs not count because they are working for their community instead of AOL?
Be informed.
More from don Samuelson.Every band begins local. Even when your dad runs a record company you still start local - just ask "..and get'em the Hell outta Detroit" Douggie Feiger. The way your band moves from "local" to "nationwide" is in lots of small steps - steps you pretty obviously are not familiar with, as this shows in your comments. Steps like playing locally as a opening act for an already established headliner, touring as an opening act, touring on "palooza" type circus shows, touring other countries to see how your stuff plays there...
All that is part of the old machine. But you don't need to be an opening act for a headliner to be heard. That's not music, that's marketing, and it's a different animal altogether. I know this is hard for some people to accept, but the simple fact is music existed long before (and was quite healthy before) corporations got hold of it. When the press releases talk about how piracy has nearly destroyed "music" in Mexico, what they're saying is it has destroyed the established music industry in Mexico. There's still music all over Mexico - just ask anyone who has been there. Why do you think record companies are so anxious to market latin acts in the US? Sure, there's a large market for it here - but there's also lots of Chinese and japanese people here, and you don't see the Asian Grammys on prime time network TV. The music industry wants to get that music selling here because they want to be able to lobby on the Hill for increased pressure on Mexico to enforce more US style crackdowns. And the way to do that is with dollar$.
That's like saying with the advent of Ethernet, fat cheap bandwidth is set to become ubiquitous.
Apaprently you know as much about networking as you know about the music biz, cuz it's nothing at all like that. I have a stack of NICs here that cost me all of three bucks each. When I put together a machine I throw one in (if it doesn't already have one) just so I can easily backup and swap files on it if I ever need to work on it at someone's house. But those cheap nics do no good at all when it comes to swapping files with my neighbor. Unless I want to either carry a box to his house or string hundreds of feet of wire between us, those cheap and ubiquitous network ports are completely useless.
Wireless requires none of that. I can share files with my neighbor all fucking year - moving gigabytes a day - and it hasn't a fucking thing to do with my ISP. My ISP won't even know about it. And because of that connection we become, in a very real sense, a community. Not just a community in the "hi charlie how's the wife" sense, but a community in the "check out this clip I found at work today" sense. And potentially a community in the free local phone service/community broadcasting/leave-the-webcam-on-and-I'll watch-your-house-while-you're-on-vacation neighborhood watch sense.
My cousin bought a laptop so he could carry stuff ("stuff" like movies and music) home from work, where they have the DSL connection. We're all on modems out here, but he has daily fatpipe access. So do Millions of americans limited to dialup access in their homes. Figure each home with a (modest) 10GB hard drive, a dozen homes in a "block" area, that's more than 100GB of potentially shared storage. And that's an exceedingly modest figure these days when even a laptop comes with 40GB or more. I would venture that in this very rural area where I am there is easily a TB of storage. Link that all together with free, loosely organized access and you have incredible "media" potential.
And none of it is available to the world unless we want it to be.
It doesn't need to be - it's a community
Actually, I think it's not just "shared hosts" but also the fact all da pornz is hosted on linux. And even tho many sites are kept very secure, many more of those sites (numerically, probably the vast majority of them) can easily be "hacked" by something as simple as a referer spoof. And every one of those spoofed intrusions counts - ergo it's not just the lack of security, but the utter ubiquity of hacks that certain webmasters seem to want to remain exploitable. Pretty sad when your business is so bad you have to try to give your stuff away.
How much you pay for broadband is your problem. Where I live broadband would cost me well over a hundred dollars a month and that is AFTER I invested $600 or more in the crap needed to connect and then paid the satellite installer to set it up. should I bitch about how "unfair" it is that I should work and still not be able to afford what people in the cities can get for the same price I pay for shit slow dialup access?
Of course, I could just move forty miles away so I would be near MSU where I could leech off the the campus wireless network. Or get DSL and share the cost with my neighbors. But I choose to stay in a rural area, so I have to live with the down side.
Pissing about someone living in the city at or below the poverty line and having free or low cost broadband access is not only short sighted elitism, it also shows a tremendous lack of insight about the state of the industry. What if the people in the co-op support their own connections? What if the modest fee for the wireless access itself subsidizes education and training for a service industry that is guaranteed to provide stable jobs that are impossible to migrate offshore in a community that desperately needs them? If I am sick of not having broadband and I and my neighbors organize a rural co-op is that suddenly "unfair" to those who spend all their time chasing money in the cities but still can't get fat pipe access? Get a fucking clue!
What would yo do, AC? Let them starve so we can dump their bodies in pauper's graves and then bulldoze the slum for a parking to hold all those fatass SUVs?
Yes, some public housing has broadband. It costs little when shared among dozens or hundreds of users (an 802.11b card is less expensive than a 56k modem), and it provides both edcuational and economic opportunity to help people not live in public housing any more.
In fact, there are people who are investing loads of personal resources into providing quality public housing that is rich with opportunity. Since it costs you nothing, I don't see why you should have a problem with that.
Kazaa (and any p2p service) is no more responsible for users sharing Madonna than would Sony be for the local videostore renting TV show bootlegs.
With the advent of wireless, fat cheap bandwidth is set to become ubiquitous. Wireless PCI and laptop cards are now often cheaper than a 56K modem, and intel's initiative to embed the "gateway" right in the motherboard will drive that nail to the head.
This means neighborhoods now can enjoy tens of megabits in a peering environment. The conneciton further out may be substantially lessened, but "close to home" file sharing networks can hav real power. This means it's even easier for my friend to hype his band, because those people who might otherwise never go to the local pub can now hear him play entirely at their convenience.
This is how the industry already works. Except now the power base can be completely decentralized. No more "gatekeepers" to beg for support. Either you have merit and grow beyond your local peers, or you don't. "The collective" becomes the gatekeeper instead of the shark skinned zoot from LA who blew into town for some local tail.
Harder for bands to get quality equipment? dude.. I just put together a machine with six channel audio and a 1.6GHz CPU and 7200RPM HD that could easily handle two dozen tracks and it cost the end user all of $320.00! Thirty years ago you could barely find a quality cassette deck for that, and today that one box can be an entire fucking studio and media distribution point and CD production facility.
The fact is we no longer need Hollywood, although Hollywood needs us. Unfortunately, too many people on both sides of the fence have yet to realize this.
They will...
I'm exhausted by the duality: the people who (allegedly) most believe in file sharing seem to deny its power. And those who least understand it also don't see the power of file sharing. So long as this mindset is prevalent, the RIAA and its ilk will continue to own the media.
I have tens of thousands of MP3s and APEs. Many I downloaded from usenet, many I made myself. But nearly all the MP3s I have of RIAA controlled music are recordings I already bought. And while I absolutely love to share music, and freqently do, you're not going to find any Hollywood (or Nashville) label stuff on anything I distribute. Not because I value the RIAA, but because I so despise the RIAA there is simply no way I am going to take part in advertising for them.
File sharers desperately need to understand this. Every time you share Pink, or Madonna, or Linkin Park, you are advertising for them. Why would you risk being sued just to give even more hype to Millionaires? Would you rob a gas station to buy CDs?
You don't sue every person who records a TV show and keeps it, because the precedents you would set (violation of privacy, corporate search and seizure, etc) are greater cost to our society than letting individuals have the "right" to make copies for their own use.
This is the way the court has read things several times, and the way any thinking individual would be likely to read it as well.
Where p2p is "different" is in the peer part. Every download you make from kazaa goes into a folder that defaults to "shared" which means every song you download is made available for someone else to upload. Every reproduction of the file adds to the available bandwidth for "sharing", which technically makes you party to an act of unauthorized distribution.
The thing is, if you're a dialup user that bandwidth is probably never used, because most clients favor the lowest ping times and that ain't gonna be a dialup user who is in the act of downloading. The 12 y/o girl who was sued allegedly had "over 1000 songs" in her "shared" folder. But so what? Is it more of a "crime" if I let you choose which of my 1000 CDs you can take home to copy? Odds are great such nonsense wouldn't stand if tested, because the RIAA is suing people for actions they cannot prove ever happened rather than suing them for participating in a conspiracy to pirate works - which is technically what you are doing when you "share" on kazaa.
The problem is no one has challenged this nonsense in court. There is no "de minimis sharing" precedent (and, thanks to the DMCA, there isn't likely to be one). This is another reason I'm hopeful about the record industry suing its own customers; once they've bullied enough of them, it's a sure bet some lawyers are going to decide a(nother) class action is worth their while.
Hilarious.
And no one is holding up China as a "bulwark against authoritarianism." That is your misreading, not my statement. China is an incredibly paranoid nation that is going so far as to develop its own national linux based OS because they are so certain the Bill Gates is working in cahoots with the CIA (and they may well be right). This means any "authoritarian" stuff they stick in their OS is almost guaranteed not to work with "authoritarian" stuff here - that's their entire reason for doing it in the first place. But do you really believe they won't design their stuff to be able to "crack" our stuff? Do you really think they will hesitate to provide services "in the name of freedom" simply to bolster their own rhetorical propoganda opportunities?
And China is only one example. In addition to logic, you've completely avoided the whole of eastern euroupe, and most of western euroupe as well. Here is just one example. Eva is a film star in euro who has been appearing nude since she was, like, ten (her mother is a photographer - you might think of her as the twisted, drunken French Sally Mann). Much of Eva's work was done in France (a country where another well known director is still living because he would be arrested in the US) and very little of her work (no matter the age) is even available in the US (despite the fact she was on the cover of "Photo" magazine AND featured in Playboy by the time she was fifteen). Click on the english side (if you dare! Ha!) then click on the russian side and compare - one server, one site, two languages and they really couldn't be more different and still be recognizable as one site. All those "copyrighted" works that you cannot get on the english language pages suddenly appear on the russian pages! It's magic!
You think they're going to firewall in the US? Again, so fucking what if they do? Isolationism is the road this country has been travelling for years now and it's not just because of the internet. Whoopeee. That just hastens the fall of the US as a superpower in the world, which might be good for bringing back those "well paying" factory jobs but is going to royally fuck America's chances to foister such foolhardy technology off onto the rest of the world.
No matter what happens, it balances - all you gotta do is be willing to vote with your feet. This "prison" you're imagining is constructed purely of you own egocentric nationalism.
No one tell Lessig...
hen, it will be impossible to visit those sites with an untrusted OS. It will be impossible to build a PC, compile Linux, compile Mozilla, and use that to browse the web. The freedom of disorganized amateurs to create useful computer systems will be gone.
From Hollywood charging for content? Jessus fucking christ, get out of that chair and go outside. Or even try typing "www.google.ru" instead of just "google." There's a whole fucking world out there, and Hollywood doesn't conmtrol it. The US government doesn't even control it.
And the more pressure there is for this sort of thing, the greater will be the effort made to destabilize it, both from within and without.
Sorry, but the US doesn't own the internet. And the US doesn't make all the computers in the world - in fact, most of them come from parts made in China, a country that would love to see US dominance further destabilised.
Never fear. If Hollywood's not your bag, there's a world of hope out there.
I can't wait.
Visited the NYT lately? How about LA Times? How about MIT Press? There are already hundreds, if not thousands of sites, locking their content away behind logins - they don't need DRM to do it.
So what? More handwaiving and doom and gloom. The fact is there's plenty of free sites now, and there will be then. What is of value to society activists will continue to make available no matter the policies, and what is not of substantial value (like most of those sites already barricaded behind "free accounts") will either barricade themselves in further, or not - it won't matter either way, because people will alwayas find foils IF it is worth the effort. And if it isn't, they don't matter anyway.
Fantastic example: Traci Lords. You can't buy most of her films in the US - in fact, you can be arrested for even having some of them. How long would it take you to find a place to order them on the internet? Or to find them in the newsgroups, or on p2p? Arguably not much societal value there at all, and yet no US laws can prevent anyone who wants the content from acquiring it.
It's a big world out there. When free expression is no longer possible on US soil, US dollars will make sure there's a world of domains out there where speech remains free - even english language speech. And you don't need to look far to see it's happening already...
Did your momma have any children that learned to think?
Source code gets no copyright protection: corporations keep their source as a "trade secret" and only get protection on the executable. It is illegal to redistribute (copy) the executable, and the source is entirely within their control (and their responsibility). No real "furtherance of the arts" is accomplished except within the limited scope of usage of the tool itself. If a work is infringed at the source level, therefore, it is (nearly) impossible to prove without revealing "trade secrets" and, therefore, exposing the company to further risk.
Source code gets copyright protection (as constitutionally mandated)
Corporations have to register the source code, and therefore are given fulll protection on both works. It is just as illegal to redistribute (share) the source beyond the scope allowed by the rights holder, and if a work is infringed there is no risk to the rights holder in defending the work. "Furtherance of the arts" is addressed, as well as the rights of the work's creator.
Corporations are allowed "copyright" on works they do not share.
It becomes nearly impossible for libeled parties to defend themselves, but "rights holders" are free to make claims as they see fit. Which gives "rights holders" basically free reign to make accusations which they may never be forced to address in court, and leaves victims nearly defenseless until the (very slow) court gets around to addressing the issue. Neither "furtherance of the arts" nor protection of (libeled) rights holders is served, since the more powerful party remains free to withold (copyrighted) "evidence" that no one is allowed to see.
How does this system serve rights holders whose works may have been infringed upon, but are forced from the marketplace by another "rights holder" with more money? How does that system serve the public interest? How does it promote progress?
Can you answer any of these questions using sound logic?
Are there any websites that offer high quality streaming video? Or even high quality downloadable movies? How about high quality MP3s? Anything at all the publishers are offering "legally" in a format of higher quality than I have been getting (for years) absolutely free via USENET?
How about plain ol' "information" websites? Hmmm... let's see. Geocities might be a good example. No streaming video (big deal) but they host tens of thousands of home pages. So does AOL. So let's say they decided to use this Palladium-Longhorny stuff to keep their "members pages" available only to those willing to use their client software.
Uhhhh... so what? I can't recall the last time I visited a geocities page (much less an AOL members page), and I'm pretty sure if I go over the proxy logs I'll not find anything more than a few "404" pages with their name on'em. Yahoo? I used to read a couple of their groups, but they're gonna send spam to you one way or another so I quit that long ago. There's just as much content in usenet, and I get to call the shots.
See? This doomsday scenario really isn't much different than what we have now - it's just more of the same but with encryption. I really don't give a shit if universal wants to put their movies online and lock them away behind MS-centric operating systems, because I wouldn't use the service even if they slapped a Penguin on the door and made the "movie viewer" part of the RH12 base distribution. I wouldn't use it because a) I don't have broadband and b) if I want my own copy of a movie I will rent the DVD and rip it myself, or do a sneakernet trade for a copy from someone I trust to do a good job of it.
"Content providers" will lock away only as much as is economically viable. If there's no money in it, they won't lock any of it away. But right now they have it all "locked" away (at least as much as they are able). So what does any of this "evil" new technology change?
Having a system I can trust even if it's hanging out on a raw IP is a very good thing. If the tradeoff I have to accept is that Universal will use the same technology to sell movies to people with plenty of disposable income, more power to'em.
And Jim Lehrer doesn't count... it's PBS. But even if it did count, it wouldn't count all that much. It's often just as one-sided as Nightline, and they appear waaay too lazy in matters of basic research.. or they're jsut too pressed for time. They like to say they're "in depth" but most /.ers ned only look so far as the Lessig "debate" of a month or so back to see how factual those claims are. Their coverage of the FCC ownership rules was every bit as superficial as that given on the CBS evening news - they just spent five times as much time telling the same two viewpoints - neither of which represents the interests of the public. They're just as self-serving as FOX and ABC, only they're driven by elitism instead of commerce.
You prefer "not being exposed to the source" for LEGAL protection? Let's think about that: basically, Sid and Nancy would never have been made, for want of all those scenes that evoked other classics like gay Divorcee and American in Paris. Most of Steven King's work would never have been published at all (which you may argue would be a good thing) but then neither would Resevoir Dogs or even Rodney Dangerfield's classic scene in Natural Born Killers.
So how is software uniquely beyond this scope of usage and protection?
I grew up watching 60 minutes. Even when I was a young teen and didn't care about politics it was fun to watch the people squirm. Now we're as likely to get a twenty minute fluff piece on Tricia Yearwood, or Chicks with Dixie, or Nicole Kidman, or Sheryl fucking Crow.
Even they despise themselves.
Morely summed it up himself: "Thank God for the ratings," Safer added. "If it wasn't for the ratings, we wouldn't all be millionaires."
There is no respectable television news anymore.
None.
Apparently your reading comprehension skills are right on par with the dolt who modded the post down.