The solution to fight big pharma is reducing patent monopolies to the point they are really maximizing innovation, and easing access of generics on the market. Chinese online stores that sell counterfeit Viagra are not part of the solution.
The main point is that it's impossible for a politician to know if he's spammed by a large part of his voters as opposed to a noisy minority employing automated tools. As such, any repetitive mail will be ignored. And rightfully so, else we will quickly end up with the "Subsidized Penile Enhancement act of 2010" - it's clearly what the people want.
There are basically two types of interesting classified information that Wikileaks can leak:
1. Classified information that should really remain classified for everyone's safety
2. Classified information information that's actually just cover-up for government's abuses
If they leak the first type, I expect the government to act quickly and change those atomic launch codes - if an unprofessional spy organisation like Wikileaks can find them, you can be quite sure North Korea has them for a while. I also expect the persons responsible for keeping such info secret be fired/jailed/shot, and I expect democracy to act in that direction. If they leak the second type, I also expect democracy to act and the abuses curbed. In both cases, Wikileaks has a valid reason to exist, and the mere fact they are breaking the law to do so it's not unethical - they exist precisely to point out flaws in the law or they way it's enforced. The primary sources for the leaks will also exercise some form of personal judgement and are much likely to release type 2 info - the percentage of people with anti-social disorders is low.
It's gonna be a refrigerator-shaped device containing the actual hardware.
You will never see, in your lifetime, successful emulation of the latest generation of consoles. The decryption keys, internal architecture and DRM protections are virtually impossible to reverse engineer.
i'm assuming that wireless protocols used in the white-space spectrum (i think WiMax has an unlicensed spectrum profile, though i don't know what frequency range it's in) will account for potential interference and frequency conflicts from other devices.
I would extend the question further: what happens in a competitive environment where: - providers compete among each other to serve as much customers as possible over whitespace ? - customers compete among each other to maximize their own download speed ?
I realize the devices are themselves approved by FCC, but what happens when you can improve the quality of service by hacking the firmware ? How many people will refuse to install the "double your bandwidth" hacked firmware, that just so happens to disable any spectrum sensing and pump out bits at the hight power level available, and also disables FCC's ability to patch remotely ?
If two providers are operating in an area, and they have similar base stations, but have a different number of customers, how will the free spectrum be divided to avoid a destructive arms-race: - each base station receives a fair share, so the ISP with fewer customers offers better service; In this case would setting up more base-stations offer a competitive edge, although they are not technically required ? - each customer receives a fair share ? What's a "customer" ? Bridging more devices will increase my bandwidth ?
How can different service levels be enforced, assuming the only limitation is the available spectrum, not the fiber-optic backbone ?
Per Shannon's law, the bandwidth is proportional with available spectrum and power level, and decreases with distance (noise). What about remote users, who necessarily require more power/spectrum for the same bandwidth ? Is it worth to sacrifice 5Mbps from a near user, to give 50Kbps to a distant user ? More importantly, who makes that trade-off when the two customers are served by different ISPs ?
And opening this spectrum doesn't stop the existing non-broadcast users from utilizing it... and for free... it just allows everyone else to do the same thing. Oh, wait, now other devices are going to stomp on those frequencies? Well... bone up... because those microphones have been doing it others for awhile.
Not quite. Wireless mics will continue to use the spectrum illegally, and they will continue to cause whatever interference they were causing. Whitespace devices will do spectrum sensing, they will detect wireless mics (and TV stations, and everybody else) as non-whitespace devices, and will avoid that spectrum. During the licensing effort for WS, a great deal of focus was put on the issue of not causing interference with existing devices, be they licensed or not, and wireless mics were often mentioned. White-space devices assume all used spectrum is used legally, so they are far from being on equal footing with the mics.
How about this: don't get drunk, don't use drugs. Side effects include, but are not limited to:
- sending stupid emails you will later regret
- driving right into the next tree
- chopping up your neighbor with an axe because it seems like a fun thing to do
- nausea, headaches and a general crappy existence
The whole idea of broadcasting overtop of reserved television channels is stupid.
The whole idea of analog TV is stupid. Or 50-years obsolete, whichever you prefer. At 20dB S/N ratio an analog transmission is barely acceptable, with heavy snowing and at the verge of loosing sync. While your 25dB antenna is required for reception, the actual detection of a transmission can be done at much lower S/N ratios: even at a noise level much exceeding the signal level, simply detecting incurs a straightforward statistical analysis of multiple signal samples.
I can understand your concern that the detection threshold will be set at a level incompatible to DX-TV, but this is a political, rather then technical limitation. If your high gain antenna can pick-up enough signal at 25 meters into the air to make analog reception possible, then the low gain antenna of an indoor white space device can certainly pick up enough signal to just detect the transmission. So the regulatory bodies should field test and impose realistic detection sensitivities to prevent interference, instead of faking the tests to the advantage of the lobbyists.
On the other hand you must accept that you and your high gain antenna constitute a minor part of society. Not everybody dedicates their lives to receiving faint television signals. By any reasonable judgment your area is not served by said television stations, because few individuals will go to such lengths as yourself. For all practical purposes that bandwidth is wasted, and it's the interest of society to reassign it to local, short distance communications, thereby greatly increasing the spectrum efficiency, by having multiple simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency, at different geographical locations.
The argument over devices loosing their sensitivity over time is spurious: the FTC device was sabotaged. The type of defect you describe (gradual loss of sensitivity) is very improbable in a real device. Let's not forget you need TWO desensitized devices to have a communication, assuming the protocol is not completely brain-dead. Finally, if interference caused by loss of sensitivity is a real issue, then let's move the debate there, with real numbers. What I'm hearing instead is how the technology can't work because it's stupid.
I never needed a wireless mic. 99% of the general population will never use a professional wireless mics. The very limited niche of baby-mics and things like that can be easily served by a single spectrum, 10-20KHz wide. When white-space internet becomes available, it will be easy to make wireless mics work on it. So put a cork in it, wireless mics are NOT a real issue. The real issue here is the fear of traditional broadcast of new technology in general, and Internet in particular. You know you have an ethics problem when Microsoft calls you on it:
The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology released a report dated July 31, 2007 with results from its investigation of two preliminary devices submitted. The report concluded that the devices did not reliably sense the presence of television transmissions or other incumbent users, hence are not acceptable for use in their current state and no further testing was deemed necessary.[4] However, on August 13, 2007 Microsoft filed a document with the FCC in which it described a meeting that its engineers had with FCC engineers from the Office of Engineering and Technology on August 9 and 10. At this meeting the Microsoft engineers showed results from their testing done with identical prototype devices and using identical testing methods that "detected DTV signals at a threshold of -114 dBm in laboratory bench testing with 100 percent accuracy, performing exactly as expected." In the presence of FCC engineers, the Microsoft engineers took apart the device that the FCC had tested to find the cause of the poor performance. They found that "the scanner in the device had been damaged and operated at a severely degraded level" which explained the FCC unit's inability to detect when channels were occupied. It was also pointed out that the FCC was in possession of an identical backup prototype that was in perfect operating condition that they had not tested.
That's quite true indeed. The major corporation are interested in profit, and they are the only ones who will lose when (not if) the paradigm shifts. That's because there will always be a marginal value attached to authorship that no copyright law must protect: a musician can tour, a famous author can give lectures etc. I don't think the world will be starved of artistic masterpieces if copyright falls, because I don't think money is the prime motivator for top authors. Even when it comes to technical works, writing a land-mark, TAOCP-level book that is considered a reference in it's field brings enormous professional gain to it's author even if not a single copy is sold. So at least for music and printed text, I don't think the number and quality of published works will drop significantly when there is no more copyright protection. To address the GP's point, it's irrelevant if the author themselves are concerned with people enjoying their works for free: this is only important in as much as it would stop them from sharing their work in the first place, and I assert it does not. It's really a problem of "for the money" or "for the fame", and I think authors will settle for the later if they can't have both, especially if they can make a sustainable, decent living out of it. When it comes to high-cost productions like the movies then some type of movies will not be possible in copyright-free world, but then again I think the world it's better off without another Hollywood disaster movie. There will be plenty of room for tasteful, "artsy" type of cinema because that's cheap enough to make.
Thank you, but my devices already interoperate perfectly in my "domain": it's the free domain. Nothing beats freedom, you know. Someone needs to spell it out for these guys: selling digital media will cease to be a business in the near future. The digital ecosystem does not need the middle-man, the printing press or recording studio of days gone by. You might keep some control over software or things like that by means of DRM (think consoles), but selling audio/video media is a dying business.
In the case of wireless, the role of the switch could be fulfilled by beamforming: a breakthrough that allows the same spectrum to be used by multiple transmitters simultaneously, as long as they are physically separated. Unfortunately the math there is harry, and one of the upcoming technologies making use of beamforming, namely WiFi has failed to deliver thus far.
I've always thought that if you allocute, we should electrocute...
The effect would be that no one will ever confess to a murder, to avoid death. This is exactly the opposite of how it works now, for example in Mr. Reiser's case: confessions reduce your penalty, to give an incentive for them. While it might seem unfair that a confessed criminal gets a lighter sentence - he's clearly a criminal, he should fry ! - you must factor other issues, like the prolonged agony of the family and the cost for the society to continue prosecution.
I wonder whether "identity theft" is not just an utterly brilliant public relations tactic used by the credit card companies to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
The artificial distinction of allowing trusted people (banks, the phone company) access to your identity, while keeping it a secret for the general public (that includes identity thieves) is childish. As it is the attempt to criminalize the act of compiling a list of people's identity using public data - all identity data is public to some extent, by definition; if it's not public, it does not identify you. Compiling lists of public information is a clear example of free speech.
The term of "identity theft" is a copious misnomer perpetrated on the public by the credit industry. The identity of a person cannot be stolen, only duplicated or impersonated. The real crime here is identity fraud. The distinction might not seem much, but it's of key importance: it shifts the victimization from the impersonated person to the banker/stock agent/realtor/whatever that accepts the fake identity.
After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ? The bank has little incentive to properly authenticate the guy: they want as much customers as possible, and be competitive: they reduce fraud to acceptable levels, until fighting against it is more costly than the actual money saved. The devastating consequences that "ID theft" has over an individual's live becomes an externality for banks. Meanwhile, I can do nothing to protect myself: my identity is in hundreds of public and private databases, out of my control: it's how I register to vote, how I get medical care, and how I install an Internet connection. I cannot function in this society without making my identity public, so It's unreasonable to require me to protect my identity from "theft".
The solution against identity fraud is making the enablers pay for it, breaking the externality. For example, a maximal 15-day clearing period of any wrong information on your credit report, after which the bank can be charged with libel. Devising more intricate ways to keep our identity data "secret" is just band-aid.
(I fully agree there are other reasons to wanting to have your data private, such as, well... privacy; ID "theft" should not be one of them)
They've already licensed it to NEC for commercial use.
They might have a patent for an actual implementation of the compression algorithm, but those kind of patents are a dime a dozen: http://www.gzip.org/#faq11 For the actual technique and there's copious prior art, for example here:
In this paper we discuss the use of compression techniques to make a more eective use of the available RAM, thus reducing the need for secondary storage. We show that in many cases memory pages contain highly compressible data, with a very large amount of zero-valued elements. This suggests the use of very fast compression algorithms based on static Human codes, rather than adaptive algorithms such as LZRW1 and similar ones [...] Using the proposed compression algorithm, it becomes possible to use a small portion of the physical memory as a fast, low latency, compressed swap device. This technique can greatly reduce the latency of page faults, thus improving program's performance
If I happened to have a database of people's information, and I want to freely publish it, I don't actually think there is a statute against me doing that.
No there's not - this the "problem" the original submitter want's to solve. I personally have huge issues about criminalizing any form of free-speech. The identity of a person is not a secret, or a thing that can be stolen. The very way that identity works is by making it public: "Hello, I'm John / Oh Hi John, I'm Susan" Now if John is coy about revealing his identity for fear that Susan might open up a bank account in his name, the whole use of identity crumbles. I have nothing against anonymity, John can remain anonymous if he so desires. But the notion that you must somehow "protect" identity by keeping it a secret is a stupid trick that harms the usefulness of identity and our society as whole. The artificial distinction of allowing trusted people (banks, the phone company) access to it, while keeping it a secret for the general public (that includes identity thieves) is childish. As it is the proposal above, of criminalizing the act of compiling a list of people's identity using public data - as explained above, all identity data is public to some extent, by definition; if it's not public, it does not identify you. Far for me to claim that it's safe to post your personal data on Slashdot. In this warped world we are living in, there is the danger of so called "identity theft". The term of "identity theft" is a copious misnomer perpetrated on the public by the banking industry. The identity of a person cannot be stolen, only duplicated or impersonated. The real crime here is identity fraud. The distinction might not seem much, but it's of key importance: it shifts the victimization from the impersonated person to the banker/stock agent/realtor/whatever that accepts the fake identity. After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ? The bank has little incentive to properly authenticate the guy: they want as much customers as possible; the problem of "ID theft" is an externality. Meanwhile, I can do nothing to protect myself: my identity is in hundreds of public and private databases, out of my control: it's how I register to vote, how I get medical care, and how I install an Internet connection. I cannot function in this society without making my identity public, so It's unreasonable to require me to protect my identity from "theft". You can find an excellent written article about the distinction between identity theft and fraud here, by noted security expert Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/mitigating_iden.html The solution against identity fraud is making the enablers pay for it, breaking the externality. For example, a maximal 15-day clearing period of any wrong information on your credit report, after which the bank can be charged with libel. Devising more intricate ways to keep our identity data "secret" is just band-aid.
(I have only approached the problem from the identity fraud perspective; I fully agree there are other reasons to wanting to have your data private, such as, well... privacy)
I think we often see these things as a modern luxury and forget the actual utility they can provide.
Let's not forget how adequate a cell phone is as a status symbol: a small, expensive toy that is paraded in public view during normal use. Cells stopped fulfilling the status-symbol role in the western world (for the most part *), which returned to more traditional things like jeweleries and sport cars. But in a country where the poor people live on a few dollars a month, a 50$ toy is an excellent status symbol.
I would be very careful with that. Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on. Just sniff a bit and see exactly what people are doing over your IP - you will be appalled. There are also all kinds of spiders that keep black lists of TOR proxyes (even non-exit nodes !). So I recommend running a TOR server only if you either have a dynamic IP, or you can dedicate a separate static IP to it.
Also note carefully what the parent said, namely, "Use Tor to access the trackers". Tor is, by default, set up to disable bittorrent transfers, since it heavily loads the Tor network.
To emphasize the GP's point, he was talking about setting the tracker (http announce) connection over TOR; this is totally negligible in terms of load (a few 1KB connections per hour, per active torrent) and perfectly effective against the mafia block. Running the actual bittorrent file transfer across TOR is quite a pointless thing to do: most exit nodes allow a very small white list of ports to connect to, so there's little chance of getting decent download speeds - you will only connect to very few peers or only over the very overloaded exit nodes with a more relaxed policy. All this aside from the implicit slowness of TOR. Simply put, I don't think you could download anything (thankfully - we need TOR for other things than piracy).
Slashdot Mirror
Now if he was scanning them and making torrents, that would be shameless.
In fact, it would be fucking awsome.
The solution to fight big pharma is reducing patent monopolies to the point they are really maximizing innovation, and easing access of generics on the market.
Chinese online stores that sell counterfeit Viagra are not part of the solution.
The main point is that it's impossible for a politician to know if he's spammed by a large part of his voters as opposed to a noisy minority employing automated tools. As such, any repetitive mail will be ignored. And rightfully so, else we will quickly end up with the "Subsidized Penile Enhancement act of 2010" - it's clearly what the people want.
There are basically two types of interesting classified information that Wikileaks can leak:
1. Classified information that should really remain classified for everyone's safety
2. Classified information information that's actually just cover-up for government's abuses
If they leak the first type, I expect the government to act quickly and change those atomic launch codes - if an unprofessional spy organisation like Wikileaks can find them, you can be quite sure North Korea has them for a while. I also expect the persons responsible for keeping such info secret be fired/jailed/shot, and I expect democracy to act in that direction.
If they leak the second type, I also expect democracy to act and the abuses curbed.
In both cases, Wikileaks has a valid reason to exist, and the mere fact they are breaking the law to do so it's not unethical - they exist precisely to point out flaws in the law or they way it's enforced.
The primary sources for the leaks will also exercise some form of personal judgement and are much likely to release type 2 info - the percentage of people with anti-social disorders is low.
It's gonna be a refrigerator-shaped device containing the actual hardware.
You will never see, in your lifetime, successful emulation of the latest generation of consoles. The decryption keys, internal architecture and DRM protections are virtually impossible to reverse engineer.
The number of accounts is not relevant. What matters is the traffic, double for face book, with Myspace slowly decreasing:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2C+myspace.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
i'm assuming that wireless protocols used in the white-space spectrum (i think WiMax has an unlicensed spectrum profile, though i don't know what frequency range it's in) will account for potential interference and frequency conflicts from other devices.
I would extend the question further: what happens in a competitive environment where:
- providers compete among each other to serve as much customers as possible over whitespace ?
- customers compete among each other to maximize their own download speed ?
I realize the devices are themselves approved by FCC, but what happens when you can improve the quality of service by hacking the firmware ? How many people will refuse to install the "double your bandwidth" hacked firmware, that just so happens to disable any spectrum sensing and pump out bits at the hight power level available, and also disables FCC's ability to patch remotely ?
If two providers are operating in an area, and they have similar base stations, but have a different number of customers, how will the free spectrum be divided to avoid a destructive arms-race:
- each base station receives a fair share, so the ISP with fewer customers offers better service; In this case would setting up more base-stations offer a competitive edge, although they are not technically required ?
- each customer receives a fair share ? What's a "customer" ? Bridging more devices will increase my bandwidth ?
How can different service levels be enforced, assuming the only limitation is the available spectrum, not the fiber-optic backbone ?
Per Shannon's law, the bandwidth is proportional with available spectrum and power level, and decreases with distance (noise).
What about remote users, who necessarily require more power/spectrum for the same bandwidth ? Is it worth to sacrifice 5Mbps from a near user, to give 50Kbps to a distant user ? More importantly, who makes that trade-off when the two customers are served by different ISPs ?
And opening this spectrum doesn't stop the existing non-broadcast users from utilizing it ... and for free ... it just allows everyone else to do the same thing. Oh, wait, now other devices are going to stomp on those frequencies? Well ... bone up ... because those microphones have been doing it others for awhile.
Not quite. Wireless mics will continue to use the spectrum illegally, and they will continue to cause whatever interference they were causing.
Whitespace devices will do spectrum sensing, they will detect wireless mics (and TV stations, and everybody else) as non-whitespace devices, and will avoid that spectrum.
During the licensing effort for WS, a great deal of focus was put on the issue of not causing interference with existing devices, be they licensed or not, and wireless mics were often mentioned.
White-space devices assume all used spectrum is used legally, so they are far from being on equal footing with the mics.
How about this: don't get drunk, don't use drugs. Side effects include, but are not limited to:
- sending stupid emails you will later regret
- driving right into the next tree
- chopping up your neighbor with an axe because it seems like a fun thing to do
- nausea, headaches and a general crappy existence
Don't underestimate no. 4, it's a real killer.
The whole idea of broadcasting overtop of reserved television channels is stupid.
The whole idea of analog TV is stupid. Or 50-years obsolete, whichever you prefer.
At 20dB S/N ratio an analog transmission is barely acceptable, with heavy snowing and at the verge of loosing sync. While your 25dB antenna is required for reception, the actual detection of a transmission can be done at much lower S/N ratios: even at a noise level much exceeding the signal level, simply detecting incurs a straightforward statistical analysis of multiple signal samples.
I can understand your concern that the detection threshold will be set at a level incompatible to DX-TV, but this is a political, rather then technical limitation. If your high gain antenna can pick-up enough signal at 25 meters into the air to make analog reception possible, then the low gain antenna of an indoor white space device can certainly pick up enough signal to just detect the transmission. So the regulatory bodies should field test and impose realistic detection sensitivities to prevent interference, instead of faking the tests to the advantage of the lobbyists.
On the other hand you must accept that you and your high gain antenna constitute a minor part of society. Not everybody dedicates their lives to receiving faint television signals. By any reasonable judgment your area is not served by said television stations, because few individuals will go to such lengths as yourself. For all practical purposes that bandwidth is wasted, and it's the interest of society to reassign it to local, short distance communications, thereby greatly increasing the spectrum efficiency, by having multiple simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency, at different geographical locations.
The argument over devices loosing their sensitivity over time is spurious: the FTC device was sabotaged. The type of defect you describe (gradual loss of sensitivity) is very improbable in a real device. Let's not forget you need TWO desensitized devices to have a communication, assuming the protocol is not completely brain-dead. Finally, if interference caused by loss of sensitivity is a real issue, then let's move the debate there, with real numbers. What I'm hearing instead is how the technology can't work because it's stupid.
I never needed a wireless mic. 99% of the general population will never use a professional wireless mics. The very limited niche of baby-mics and things like that can be easily served by a single spectrum, 10-20KHz wide. When white-space internet becomes available, it will be easy to make wireless mics work on it. So put a cork in it, wireless mics are NOT a real issue.
The real issue here is the fear of traditional broadcast of new technology in general, and Internet in particular. You know you have an ethics problem when Microsoft calls you on it:
The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology released a report dated July 31, 2007 with results from its investigation of two preliminary devices submitted. The report concluded that the devices did not reliably sense the presence of television transmissions or other incumbent users, hence are not acceptable for use in their current state and no further testing was deemed necessary.[4] However, on August 13, 2007 Microsoft filed a document with the FCC in which it described a meeting that its engineers had with FCC engineers from the Office of Engineering and Technology on August 9 and 10. At this meeting the Microsoft engineers showed results from their testing done with identical prototype devices and using identical testing methods that "detected DTV signals at a threshold of -114 dBm in laboratory bench testing with 100 percent accuracy, performing exactly as expected." In the presence of FCC engineers, the Microsoft engineers took apart the device that the FCC had tested to find the cause of the poor performance. They found that "the scanner in the device had been damaged and operated at a severely degraded level" which explained the FCC unit's inability to detect when channels were occupied. It was also pointed out that the FCC was in possession of an identical backup prototype that was in perfect operating condition that they had not tested.
That's quite true indeed. The major corporation are interested in profit, and they are the only ones who will lose when (not if) the paradigm shifts.
That's because there will always be a marginal value attached to authorship that no copyright law must protect: a musician can tour, a famous author can give lectures etc. I don't think the world will be starved of artistic masterpieces if copyright falls, because I don't think money is the prime motivator for top authors.
Even when it comes to technical works, writing a land-mark, TAOCP-level book that is considered a reference in it's field brings enormous professional gain to it's author even if not a single copy is sold.
So at least for music and printed text, I don't think the number and quality of published works will drop significantly when there is no more copyright protection.
To address the GP's point, it's irrelevant if the author themselves are concerned with people enjoying their works for free: this is only important in as much as it would stop them from sharing their work in the first place, and I assert it does not. It's really a problem of "for the money" or "for the fame", and I think authors will settle for the later if they can't have both, especially if they can make a sustainable, decent living out of it.
When it comes to high-cost productions like the movies then some type of movies will not be possible in copyright-free world, but then again I think the world it's better off without another Hollywood disaster movie. There will be plenty of room for tasteful, "artsy" type of cinema because that's cheap enough to make.
Thank you, but my devices already interoperate perfectly in my "domain": it's the free domain. Nothing beats freedom, you know.
Someone needs to spell it out for these guys: selling digital media will cease to be a business in the near future. The digital ecosystem does not need the middle-man, the printing press or recording studio of days gone by. You might keep some control over software or things like that by means of DRM (think consoles), but selling audio/video media is a dying business.
I have never actually gone to Vegas.
Neither have I. This may provide a clue as to why it's closing.
Another clue: geeks understand how probability works.
WiFi has failed to deliver thus far.
I meant WiMAX, of course. Beamforming is also included in the 802.11n, I don't know how well it implemented by the early adopters.
The solution is "the switch".
In the case of wireless, the role of the switch could be fulfilled by beamforming: a breakthrough that allows the same spectrum to be used by multiple transmitters simultaneously, as long as they are physically separated.
Unfortunately the math there is harry, and one of the upcoming technologies making use of beamforming, namely WiFi has failed to deliver thus far.
I've always thought that if you allocute, we should electrocute...
The effect would be that no one will ever confess to a murder, to avoid death. This is exactly the opposite of how it works now, for example in Mr. Reiser's case: confessions reduce your penalty, to give an incentive for them.
While it might seem unfair that a confessed criminal gets a lighter sentence - he's clearly a criminal, he should fry ! - you must factor other issues, like the prolonged agony of the family and the cost for the society to continue prosecution.
I wonder whether "identity theft" is not just an utterly brilliant public relations tactic used by the credit card companies to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
The artificial distinction of allowing trusted people (banks, the phone company) access to your identity, while keeping it a secret for the general public (that includes identity thieves) is childish. As it is the attempt to criminalize the act of compiling a list of people's identity using public data - all identity data is public to some extent, by definition; if it's not public, it does not identify you. Compiling lists of public information is a clear example of free speech.
The term of "identity theft" is a copious misnomer perpetrated on the public by the credit industry. The identity of a person cannot be stolen, only duplicated or impersonated. The real crime here is identity fraud. The distinction might not seem much, but it's of key importance: it shifts the victimization from the impersonated person to the banker/stock agent/realtor/whatever that accepts the fake identity.
After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ? The bank has little incentive to properly authenticate the guy: they want as much customers as possible, and be competitive: they reduce fraud to acceptable levels, until fighting against it is more costly than the actual money saved. The devastating consequences that "ID theft" has over an individual's live becomes an externality for banks. Meanwhile, I can do nothing to protect myself: my identity is in hundreds of public and private databases, out of my control: it's how I register to vote, how I get medical care, and how I install an Internet connection. I cannot function in this society without making my identity public, so It's unreasonable to require me to protect my identity from "theft".
You can find an excellent written article about the distinction between identity theft and fraud here, by noted security expert Bruce Schneier:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/mitigating_iden.html
The solution against identity fraud is making the enablers pay for it, breaking the externality. For example, a maximal 15-day clearing period of any wrong information on your credit report, after which the bank can be charged with libel.
Devising more intricate ways to keep our identity data "secret" is just band-aid.
(I fully agree there are other reasons to wanting to have your data private, such as, well... privacy; ID "theft" should not be one of them)
They've already licensed it to NEC for commercial use.
They might have a patent for an actual implementation of the compression algorithm, but those kind of patents are a dime a dozen: http://www.gzip.org/#faq11
For the actual technique and there's copious prior art, for example here:
In this paper we discuss the use of compression techniques to make a more eective use of the
available RAM, thus reducing the need for secondary storage. We show that in many cases memory
pages contain highly compressible data, with a very large amount of zero-valued elements. This
suggests the use of very fast compression algorithms based on static Human codes, rather than
adaptive algorithms such as LZRW1 and similar ones
[...]
Using the proposed compression algorithm, it becomes possible to use a small portion of the
physical memory as a fast, low latency, compressed swap device. This technique can greatly reduce
the latency of page faults, thus improving program's performance
If I happened to have a database of people's information, and I want to freely publish it, I don't actually think there is a statute against me doing that.
No there's not - this the "problem" the original submitter want's to solve. I personally have huge issues about criminalizing any form of free-speech.
The identity of a person is not a secret, or a thing that can be stolen. The very way that identity works is by making it public:
"Hello, I'm John / Oh Hi John, I'm Susan"
Now if John is coy about revealing his identity for fear that Susan might open up a bank account in his name, the whole use of identity crumbles. I have nothing against anonymity, John can remain anonymous if he so desires. But the notion that you must somehow "protect" identity by keeping it a secret is a stupid trick that harms the usefulness of identity and our society as whole. The artificial distinction of allowing trusted people (banks, the phone company) access to it, while keeping it a secret for the general public (that includes identity thieves) is childish. As it is the proposal above, of criminalizing the act of compiling a list of people's identity using public data - as explained above, all identity data is public to some extent, by definition; if it's not public, it does not identify you.
Far for me to claim that it's safe to post your personal data on Slashdot. In this warped world we are living in, there is the danger of so called "identity theft".
The term of "identity theft" is a copious misnomer perpetrated on the public by the banking industry. The identity of a person cannot be stolen, only duplicated or impersonated. The real crime here is identity fraud. The distinction might not seem much, but it's of key importance: it shifts the victimization from the impersonated person to the banker/stock agent/realtor/whatever that accepts the fake identity.
After all, why should *I* pay for the fact that some bank lends money to someone who says it's me ? The bank has little incentive to properly authenticate the guy: they want as much customers as possible; the problem of "ID theft" is an externality. Meanwhile, I can do nothing to protect myself: my identity is in hundreds of public and private databases, out of my control: it's how I register to vote, how I get medical care, and how I install an Internet connection. I cannot function in this society without making my identity public, so It's unreasonable to require me to protect my identity from "theft".
You can find an excellent written article about the distinction between identity theft and fraud here, by noted security expert Bruce Schneier:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/mitigating_iden.html
The solution against identity fraud is making the enablers pay for it, breaking the externality. For example, a maximal 15-day clearing period of any wrong information on your credit report, after which the bank can be charged with libel.
Devising more intricate ways to keep our identity data "secret" is just band-aid.
(I have only approached the problem from the identity fraud perspective; I fully agree there are other reasons to wanting to have your data private, such as, well... privacy)
It could.
They can be used for whatever you to. You can use a knife to spread butter on a bread. Or stick it into your wife's heart.
True, but knifes can also be used for bad things.
I think we often see these things as a modern luxury and forget the actual utility they can provide.
Let's not forget how adequate a cell phone is as a status symbol: a small, expensive toy that is paraded in public view during normal use.
Cells stopped fulfilling the status-symbol role in the western world (for the most part *), which returned to more traditional things like jeweleries and sport cars.
But in a country where the poor people live on a few dollars a month, a 50$ toy is an excellent status symbol.
*) You know what I'm iTalking iAbout iHere.
Let's party like we don't know any better!
I gather you are one of the many victims of this horrible affliction - also known as "the stupid gene".
Go one step further beyond being a leech, by downloading and setting up a Tor exit node.
I would be very careful with that. Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on. Just sniff a bit and see exactly what people are doing over your IP - you will be appalled. There are also all kinds of spiders that keep black lists of TOR proxyes (even non-exit nodes !). So I recommend running a TOR server only if you either have a dynamic IP, or you can dedicate a separate static IP to it.
Also note carefully what the parent said, namely, "Use Tor to access the trackers". Tor is, by default, set up to disable bittorrent transfers, since it heavily loads the Tor network.
To emphasize the GP's point, he was talking about setting the tracker (http announce) connection over TOR; this is totally negligible in terms of load (a few 1KB connections per hour, per active torrent) and perfectly effective against the mafia block. Running the actual bittorrent file transfer across TOR is quite a pointless thing to do: most exit nodes allow a very small white list of ports to connect to, so there's little chance of getting decent download speeds - you will only connect to very few peers or only over the very overloaded exit nodes with a more relaxed policy. All this aside from the implicit slowness of TOR. Simply put, I don't think you could download anything (thankfully - we need TOR for other things than piracy).