So that when the determined break said useless locks, the same companies can then turn round with the evidence of the broken locks and say "We need more copyright laws! We need to stop these evil hackers!"
The thing is, though people may well be deterred, I think they will probably continue to use P2P after short time anyway when they see geeks carrying on like nothing's happened.
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I can download ten songs a day for free! Joe Sixpack's friend: Cool! So am I!
One week later
Joe Sixpack: I got a letter from the record companies. They tracked me down, so I think I'll stop. Joe Sixpack's friend: Wow, guess I'd better stop too.
They stop. One week later, Joe Sixpack and Joe Sixpack's friend see a Geek using a P2P service
Joe Sixpack: Dude, I thought the record companies sued you if you shared files. Geek: Only a few people. They're just trying to scare everyone else straight. Joe Sixpack: Really?
One week later
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I'm downloading more songs than ever before, and the record companies really haven't busted me! Joe Sixpack's friend: Me too!
They all live happily ever after, except for the media giants which have to switch to a proper business model. The end.
"Mark Ishikawa, a former hacker, is the CEO of BayTSP, arguably one of the most recognised and biggest companies working in the business of patrolling the web to unmask violators of copyrighted music.
From his Silicon Valley base he told BBC News Online: "There is no lock that can't be picked and our technology ensures that there is not a rock in the world you can hide under if you are sharing files.""
It's not about whether or not there's a lock to pick, nor how strong it is; it's about the fact that there's about 30 million locks which have to be picked at any one time. That's why clamping down on P2P is going to be so hard. It's not because of the difficult of catching people - after all, most of the make virtually no effort to cover their tracks even when using centralised services - but the fact that there are simply so many of them. It's like trying to delete every single byte of data on a hard disk - it's not very easy to do at all without completely destroying the disk itself.
This article, while not specific to the topic I mentioned, did have a specific quote which describes exactly what I was trying to explain:
"Just by knowing the birth date and ZIP code of the governor of Massachusetts, Latanya Sweeney, a computer-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, was able to retrieve his health records from a supposedly anonymous database of state employee health-insurance claims. Sweeney also demonstrated that she could do the same for 69 percent of the 54,805 people on the voting list of Cambridge, Mass."
"...don't get complacent: anonymity is hard to achieve. Where once a company needed a name, address, phone number, or Social Security number to identify a person, database technology has made that unnecessary. "Eighty-seven percent of the population of the US can be uniquely identified [only] by their date of birth, gender, and five-digit zip code," says Latanya Sweeney, ALB '95 assistant professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh."
* Identifiability server -- a computational system that determines the identifiability of given data sets and/or of individuals in the United States based on either field descriptions of the data set or on actual data values. For example, combinations of values such as {date of birth, gender, 5-digit ZIP} combine to uniquely identify 87% of the population in the United States."
This will protect against one of the most effective, obvious and yet least legislated and obvious data harvesting technique of all: triangulation. Even though in general only certain data columns from detailed personal information databases is available, one can combine and merge the data from multiple such subsets of databases to reformulate the data in a coherent whole. For example:
There is a medical database, an edited down version of which is available, giving just gender, date of birth, a list of medical defects, and a list of medical injuries (with the remainder omitted for privacy). Then there is also the employment database of the company you work at, an edited version of which is available, giving name, gender, date of birth and phone number. If you were a manager at this company you could use the two databases together, using the "gender" and "date of birth" fields to merge the two. This data could then be used, say, leaked to insurance or marketing companies, or you could even use it yourself for other nefarious purposes.
Thus, it is possible to obtain a good deal of data even from just small portions if one uses a sufficiently large number of different databases. Someone did a study on this, but right now I can't find the link. I'll be greatful to anyone who replies to this comment with it. This Act can only be a good thing.
...we already have countries which trade carbon dioxide, so why not countries which trade sunlight? They're both equally impalpable, but at least light is more beneficial for the environment than the millions of tonnes of CO2 which countries exchange for cash every day. How do they get away with trading something like greenhouse gases anyway? An international distribution system for exchanging light could only be a good thing.
I think it's obvious that a great deal of the work of converting the books to HTML must be done by automated software, and sometimes I wished that a bit more had work had been put into the books. For example, Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference has a big alphabetical list of every single HTML and XHTML tags and their attributes. Useful, no? Well, yes, but not as useful as it could be in its guise as one page of 23,000 lines of HTML. The only way into this gigantic list is via the book index and there is no quicker/short list of tags with links on any other page, nor is there a faster way of doing so. However, the rest of the book is up to scratch, if a little PHP-heavy.
I like PHP as much as the next person, but I do think it a bit unwise for so many Web services, Web coding and database/SSL books to rely on PHP. There's no major flaws with the language, per se, but I think that it would be better if there were more diversity amongst these books, particularly as PHP development moves so quickly that a few of them are even out of date by the time they are published. What's wrong with a little Python now and then?
There's so many uses for this; if you've got SSH on a mobile, the possibilites are endless. If you can remotely log into any of your other networked machines then you can do all kinds of things from a sufficiently sophisticated mobile. Just imagine what you could do as a journalist or undercover Amnesty International worker!
...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.
What do you feel is the greatest threat to the open source movement? Is the threat corporate, legal, self-inflicted, or a mixture of both?
(Oh, and FP.)
LSB or POSIX, it really doesn't matter, because...
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LSB & Posix Conflicts
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· Score: 1
...no "Hello, World!" program should ever need autoconf. This is a version of "Hello, world!" which will compile on any platform and compiler worthy of doing so and is one hundred percent ANSI/ISO C89/C99, POSIX, SUSv2 and SUSv3 C:
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h>
/* Some systems suck so hard that they don't define EXIT_SUCCESS in stdlib.h */ #ifndef EXIT_SUCCESS #define EXIT_SUCCESS 0 #endif
int main(void) {
puts("Hello, world!");
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);/* Some crappy VMS machines don't do "return EXIT_SUCCESS;" right */ }
If that doesn't work, get real, get a proper operating system, compiler, and assembler, and do it again. You can't blame source code portability for all the ills of shitty software. Stop making excuses for crappy nonstandard C libraries and get with the program. Standards are important for a reason.
GNU Hello is pure bloat; no wonder it can't follow ANSI C standards. It can take five options, and it has a feature to output your mail spool. Why?!
SCO does not have any kind of intellectual property claim to UNIX. Therefore, claiming ownership of it will make them look like criminal idiots.
And as a server OS, SCO UNIXes are worse since not all of them (yes, they do have all different kinds - even worse) support such things as IPv6 or ACLs which any modern day operating system such as Linux should have. And they're attempting to sue Linux programmers? Who incidentally implemented features they don't have? Hmmm...
Besides, this article has nothing to do with the SCO lawsuit, editors. It's about comparing SCO to other Unices. (Though I presume everyone will make a comment about that anyway.)
Well, it seems like yet another of our technological networking freedoms is being quashed by the state. Seriously, why do we need to have another form of communication censored? If these mechanisms such as email and the W3 client/server system weren't a problem back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s, what is the problem with them now? Does anyone genuinely believe that there were somehow through some twist of fate absolutely no music file sharers back when Ritchie and Thompson wrote UNIX in PDP-3 assembler? Why do we need to have HTTP, FTP, P2P, SMTP, LRP and YQP regulated by outside bodies? When did we need to eliminate selfpolicing?
The Internet was founded on the propogation of information as freely as possible. This means that Web surfing, Usenet threads and MP3 files are all equally valuable and important, and removing free peer-to-peer filesharign services would remove the infrastructure of one of the Internet's most fundamental protocols. Though it is true that some P2P users are fly-by-night peculiars such as trolls and paedos, we have to understand that they provide a service not unlike those of coin-operated telephone boxes and stamp-operated postal services, and that vigorously spying on free email users is tantamount to removing phone and mail boxes or tapping them.
Besides, keeping an eye on P2P software won't reduce the problem. If broadband pirates and spammers are determinted to get their messages through, then they can just use encryption, or the Freenet protocol to make them untraceable - or both, in which case nothing can be done. Public key encryption algorithm implementations such as RSA, DES and Freenet mean that the RIAA would reqire upwards of 30,000 manhours per OGG Vorbis file to discover inappropriate content; despite being impossible, this is still a flagrant violation of our privacy rights!
In addition to this, by carrying out these actions the police are effectively stating that paid-for music download accounts are in some way superior to those not sponsored. While they may be superior, there can be no way of saying that an MP3 from someone using iTunes is more reputable than one from WinMX or any other P2P user using open source software. Just because a P2P provider happents to use UNIX/Linux servers and isn't a corporation doesn't mean that they are necessarily infested with unsavoury characters.
I could continue, but I think that with more than a cursory notice the other multitudinous incarnadine problems with this new system become clear, and we must make sure that these plans do not become widespread. Fortunately, they are quite impractical, so a few negative anecdotes should encourage most middle managers in service providers and tech support to avoid implementing it.
This is just an incarnation of the "NC" (Network computer) buzz back in the 90s where single-use computers, less flexible than a PC, would be sold for ridiculously low prices ($200) and would specialise in doing just one or two things - surfing the web, storing data, etc. etc. The trend kind of petered out but I suppose this is one of its aftereffects. More power to them for trying to introduce such a machine! It's all well and good having bagloads of functionality but I'm sure a single-purpose computer would be easier to use, cheaper and more stable.
"Beast of Brussels" makes me think of...
on
The Beast of Brussels
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
In what respect would static data regarding the citizens of Europe be processed continuously? Why would a supercomputer be needed? Is there that much data? How much data would be kept on citizens if the rumour were true? How come it hasn't been exposed? And so on and so forth. The rumour is so vague I'm surprised that anybody would have genuinely believed it on its own 'merit'. It's quite obviously wrong from even a cursory thought about some of its implications; the EU would never get away with such rampant privacy violations.
Slashdot Mirror
So that when the determined break said useless locks, the same companies can then turn round with the evidence of the broken locks and say "We need more copyright laws! We need to stop these evil hackers!"
The thing is, though people may well be deterred, I think they will probably continue to use P2P after short time anyway when they see geeks carrying on like nothing's happened.
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I can download ten songs a day for free!
Joe Sixpack's friend: Cool! So am I!
One week later
Joe Sixpack: I got a letter from the record companies. They tracked me down, so I think I'll stop.
Joe Sixpack's friend: Wow, guess I'd better stop too.
They stop. One week later, Joe Sixpack and Joe Sixpack's friend see a Geek using a P2P service
Joe Sixpack: Dude, I thought the record companies sued you if you shared files.
Geek: Only a few people. They're just trying to scare everyone else straight.
Joe Sixpack: Really?
One week later
Joe Sixpack: Wow! I'm downloading more songs than ever before, and the record companies really haven't busted me!
Joe Sixpack's friend: Me too!
They all live happily ever after, except for the media giants which have to switch to a proper business model. The end.
It's not about whether or not there's a lock to pick, nor how strong it is; it's about the fact that there's about 30 million locks which have to be picked at any one time.
That's why clamping down on P2P is going to be so hard. It's not because of the difficult of catching people - after all, most of the make virtually no effort to cover their tracks even when using centralised services - but the fact that there are simply so many of them. It's like trying to delete every single byte of data on a hard disk - it's not very easy to do at all without completely destroying the disk itself.
This is from another article, reprinted from Newsweek
And finally, from Dr. Latanya Sweeney's CV itself:
This will protect against one of the most effective, obvious and yet least legislated and obvious data harvesting technique of all: triangulation. Even though in general only certain data columns from detailed personal information databases is available, one can combine and merge the data from multiple such subsets of databases to reformulate the data in a coherent whole. For example:
There is a medical database, an edited down version of which is available, giving just gender, date of birth, a list of medical defects, and a list of medical injuries (with the remainder omitted for privacy). Then there is also the employment database of the company you work at, an edited version of which is available, giving name, gender, date of birth and phone number. If you were a manager at this company you could use the two databases together, using the "gender" and "date of birth" fields to merge the two. This data could then be used, say, leaked to insurance or marketing companies, or you could even use it yourself for other nefarious purposes.
Thus, it is possible to obtain a good deal of data even from just small portions if one uses a sufficiently large number of different databases. Someone did a study on this, but right now I can't find the link. I'll be greatful to anyone who replies to this comment with it. This Act can only be a good thing.
...we already have countries which trade carbon dioxide, so why not countries which trade sunlight? They're both equally impalpable, but at least light is more beneficial for the environment than the millions of tonnes of CO2 which countries exchange for cash every day. How do they get away with trading something like greenhouse gases anyway? An international distribution system for exchanging light could only be a good thing.
I think it's obvious that a great deal of the work of converting the books to HTML must be done by automated software, and sometimes I wished that a bit more had work had been put into the books. For example, Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference has a big alphabetical list of every single HTML and XHTML tags and their attributes. Useful, no? Well, yes, but not as useful as it could be in its guise as one page of 23,000 lines of HTML. The only way into this gigantic list is via the book index and there is no quicker/short list of tags with links on any other page, nor is there a faster way of doing so. However, the rest of the book is up to scratch, if a little PHP-heavy.
I like PHP as much as the next person, but I do think it a bit unwise for so many Web services, Web coding and database/SSL books to rely on PHP. There's no major flaws with the language, per se, but I think that it would be better if there were more diversity amongst these books, particularly as PHP development moves so quickly that a few of them are even out of date by the time they are published. What's wrong with a little Python now and then?
- Soldier
- Sex slave
- Tech support
- Actor
- Policeman
- Slashdot troll
- Truck driver
- Open source spokesperson
- Business consultant
- Middle management
- Band vocalist
- Corrupt corporate C.E.O.
- Door-to-door salesman
The possibilities are endless! I don't know why these people are complaining.The market is astute, but not that astute.
There's so many uses for this; if you've got SSH on a mobile, the possibilites are endless. If you can remotely log into any of your other networked machines then you can do all kinds of things from a sufficiently sophisticated mobile. Just imagine what you could do as a journalist or undercover Amnesty International worker!
...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.
I thought Microsoft was broken up? Or did they somehow manage to get out of it using their pecuniary might?
Isn't that an oxymoron?
(Thank God I got that joke out of the way.)
What do you feel is the greatest threat to the open source movement? Is the threat corporate, legal, self-inflicted, or a mixture of both?
(Oh, and FP.)
GNU Hello is pure bloat; no wonder it can't follow ANSI C standards. It can take five options, and it has a feature to output your mail spool. Why?!
...because I only ever program in raw ANSI C89. You can't beat it for portability. There's only, like, 100 functions.
:-)
Of course, there's no hope for me writing something as simple as id or whoami, but still, I can just laugh when people bitch about standards.
SCO does not have any kind of intellectual property claim to UNIX. Therefore, claiming ownership of it will make them look like criminal idiots.
And as a server OS, SCO UNIXes are worse since not all of them (yes, they do have all different kinds - even worse) support such things as IPv6 or ACLs which any modern day operating system such as Linux should have. And they're attempting to sue Linux programmers? Who incidentally implemented features they don't have? Hmmm...
Besides, this article has nothing to do with the SCO lawsuit, editors. It's about comparing SCO to other Unices. (Though I presume everyone will make a comment about that anyway.)
Well, it seems like yet another of our technological networking freedoms is being quashed by the state. Seriously, why do we need to have another form of communication censored? If these mechanisms such as email and the W3 client/server system weren't a problem back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s, what is the problem with them now? Does anyone genuinely believe that there were somehow through some twist of fate absolutely no music file sharers back when Ritchie and Thompson wrote UNIX in PDP-3 assembler? Why do we need to have HTTP, FTP, P2P, SMTP, LRP and YQP regulated by outside bodies? When did we need to eliminate selfpolicing?
The Internet was founded on the propogation of information as freely as possible. This means that Web surfing, Usenet threads and MP3 files are all equally valuable and important, and removing free peer-to-peer filesharign services would remove the infrastructure of one of the Internet's most fundamental protocols. Though it is true that some P2P users are fly-by-night peculiars such as trolls and paedos, we have to understand that they provide a service not unlike those of coin-operated telephone boxes and stamp-operated postal services, and that vigorously spying on free email users is tantamount to removing phone and mail boxes or tapping them.
Besides, keeping an eye on P2P software won't reduce the problem. If broadband pirates and spammers are determinted to get their messages through, then they can just use encryption, or the Freenet protocol to make them untraceable - or both, in which case nothing can be done. Public key encryption algorithm implementations such as RSA, DES and Freenet mean that the RIAA would reqire upwards of 30,000 manhours per OGG Vorbis file to discover inappropriate content; despite being impossible, this is still a flagrant violation of our privacy rights!
In addition to this, by carrying out these actions the police are effectively stating that paid-for music download accounts are in some way superior to those not sponsored. While they may be superior, there can be no way of saying that an MP3 from someone using iTunes is more reputable than one from WinMX or any other P2P user using open source software. Just because a P2P provider happents to use UNIX/Linux servers and isn't a corporation doesn't mean that they are necessarily infested with unsavoury characters.
I could continue, but I think that with more than a cursory notice the other multitudinous incarnadine problems with this new system become clear, and we must make sure that these plans do not become widespread. Fortunately, they are quite impractical, so a few negative anecdotes should encourage most middle managers in service providers and tech support to avoid implementing it.
Erm - isn't Napster supposed to have died by now?
This is just an incarnation of the "NC" (Network computer) buzz back in the 90s where single-use computers, less flexible than a PC, would be sold for ridiculously low prices ($200) and would specialise in doing just one or two things - surfing the web, storing data, etc. etc. The trend kind of petered out but I suppose this is one of its aftereffects. More power to them for trying to introduce such a machine! It's all well and good having bagloads of functionality but I'm sure a single-purpose computer would be easier to use, cheaper and more stable.
...this.
In what respect would static data regarding the citizens of Europe be processed continuously? Why would a supercomputer be needed? Is there that much data? How much data would be kept on citizens if the rumour were true? How come it hasn't been exposed? And so on and so forth. The rumour is so vague I'm surprised that anybody would have genuinely believed it on its own 'merit'. It's quite obviously wrong from even a cursory thought about some of its implications; the EU would never get away with such rampant privacy violations.
...people don't follow the mail protocols, and then they wonder why they get buggered. Oh, well, hopefully IPv6 will help alleviate these problems.