I'm somewhat shocked that a large portion of the slashdot community is obviously willing to abandon the GPL at the first sight of a problem. Let's check the facts here: Corel tries to sublicence GPL code from random OSS programmers to restrict its distribution, which is a clear violation of the licence under which the code has been made available to them in the first place.
There is no room for discussion here: Neither calling their distribution "beta" or the declaring the recipients as Corel internals has the slightest relevance here. (Even if a real Corel internal would give away e.g. an enhanced local version of gdb, never intended for publication, the best they could do is fire him but they could never sue him for licence violation.) Just imagine what Corel would do to you if you would publish an "internal beta release" of Corel Draw only differing from the original by a new installer and maybe a new packet format.
While I also thought at first that this might have been a mistake by some culeless lawyer who did a search-and-replace on some standard beta test licence, their own FAQ and the fact that they didn't give any response (let alone excuse) besides "this is being worked on" suggests that this is not the case.
Even if they do give in now (and I think they finally will), the impression will remain that they did so because of PR reasons and not because they felt themselves legally bound. Be sure that this precedent combined with the weak reaction of the community and the obvious lack of any serious (i.e. juristic) challenge of their licence violation will not go unnoticed, neither by other potential freeloaders nor by many OSS authors who might twice before they release their work under the GPL again.
The tragic (and somewhat ironic) point here is that Corel has not the slightest advantage from doing this. If they had restriced their licence to their own self developed products (installers, system management, etc.), they would have lost nothing: Nobody could give the whole thing away and with installers and management tools missing, a distribution is nothing more than a random collection of packages. (And most of them won't really differ from the Debian versions, anyway.)
It stikes me, that moderators get 10 M2 points per day but merely about 5 regular mod. points per month(!) to do their job in the first place. Using 98% of the pontential ressources for control and merely 2% for the actual work might be acceptable when handling nuclear weapons or biotoxins, but is IMHO total overkill when it comes to managing voluntary moderator work for an online forum, esp. since the exactly same information as provided by the M2 scheme could easily been extracted by better analysing comment moderations. Here's how:
Hypothesis 1: The majority of moderators are fair and take thir job seriously.
Hypothesis 2: If one moderator rates a certain comment up, and another moderator rates the same comment down, it is reasonable to assume, that they would equally inclined to consider the other's decision as unfair.
Conclusion 1: The ammount of mutually nullifying moderator decisions on a certain post provides a measure for the total 'unfairness' p of a comments moderation, where p = 2*min(#_of_ups,#_of_downs). If hypothesis 2 is true, then this p should be proportional to the karma penalty generated by the current moderation scheme.
Conclusion 2: Since we assume that there are more good moderators than bad ones, it is reasonable to assume that in a contoversial comment moderation the majority has a higher propability to be "right" than the minority (provided that there are more than 2 moderation decisins involved)
Proposed Solution: In the case of a controversial comment (i.e. a comment with up *and* down votes), generate a (very small) karma penalty proportional to p and distribute #ups/(#ups+#downs) of the penalty among the down-voters and #downs/(#ups+#downs) among the up-voters.
Example: A comment gets 4 votes up and 2 votes down. Each up-voter gets 1/12 (33% total) and each down voter gets 1/3 (67% total) of the total penalty which ammounts to 2*min(4,2)=4 penalty points (which should IMHO be somewhere around 1/5 to 1/10 of a current karma point)
In order for this system to work, it would be necessary to increase the total ammount of moderation points floating around and it might be reasonable to give some karma reward for each moderation to compensate for the total penalty generated by this system (so that in the end only the guys who regularily make minority decisions take the punishment).
Of course, the used formulas are only a proposal and fine tuning could certainly increase the overall efficiency of the system, once empirical data is available.
Communism as well a capitalism are both ideologies founded on the concept of material ownership, while Open Source (or Free Software) is based on the immaterial properties of software, which enables me to use my neighbor's program *without* taking it away from him an thereby excluding him from using it. Therefor (without the artificial framework of copyright including its enforcement) software can neither serve as a power-preserving means of production (whose governmental control communism is demanding), nor as a commercial medium of exchange in the capitalist sense.
While OSS opposes the artificial "materialization" of software by licensing-regulations and publicly enforced copy protection which are dominating the software industry for the last 20 years, its support for the universal availability of "means of production" (i.e. sourcecode, compilers, etc.) is in direct opposition to Marxism, which demands their total control by the proletarian government, which would likewise require a "materialization" through artificial copy-regulations. (the registration of typewriters, copiers, printing presses, etc. which is common in most communist states, illustrates this practice in the field of non-computational "software")
A comprehensive political and economic system, which extends the Open Source gift-culture to "real world" affairs, im IMHO impossible unless, of course, someone finds a cheap means to losslessly copy material goods (replicators, anyone?). Until then, comparing the OSS phenomenon to communism or capitalism is trying to answer the wrong question.
While I wouldn't doubt your good intentions, I think this time you have somewhat overdone it:
Giving any eligable moderator 10 M2-points per day to control the other moderators but only 5 M-point per month to do the the actual scoring of the articles is unbalanced to say the least and gives room to much more damaging kinds of abuse.
If the problem is that say 5% of slashdot users are "bad guys", then the solution should be obvious: vote them out of the sky! Shell out more moderator points (about 3 to 5 times the current amount) to allow for finer grained scores (e.g. in a range from -5 to 15) and higher responsiveness to abuse. Don't allow anyone to vote on the same comment twice and you should come up with a fairly robust mod-scheme.
Some additional measures which don't require too much user interaction come to mind:
Display the most recent comments first while in moderation mode
Don't allow score-based filtering while in moderation mode.
Instead, allow moderators (and users) to optionally score and filter on the criteria "new comment", "unmoderated comment", "AC post" and "controversial comment" (i.e. comments which got up and down votings) to help them to get their job done more efficiently.
Give a (very small) karma penalty to any moderator who voted on a controversial posting (someone *has* to wrong, after all;-)). Divide the penalty so that the majority get punished less (eg. 4 ups, 2 downs gets the up-voters 33% and the down-voters 66% of the beating).
Note that this amounts essentially to the same effect as the current M2 scheme as it is reasonable to assume that both groups would equally tend to judge the voting of the other side as unfair.
Quality issuses aside (streaming simply sucks when more than just a few people want to see the same content at the same time) afaik Real Networks charges huge licence fees for their proprietary servers. While the semi-free MP3 format is the agreed-on standard, why not use GSM as an alternative format. The quality for speech compression is superb (with 11025Hz (2273 b/s) there is virtually no difference from an FM transmission), the format is free and supported by sox. (My own GSM-tools can be found here.)
It's like with free software: even the slightest restriction on proliferation necessarily leads to some kind of tracking. This is even more obvious in the case of email. Since an email isn't "used" for a long period of time, but normally read and then deleted, the usual legislative measures of occasional checks (as for pirated software) won't cut it: Only an infrastructure covering all providers and mail-relais could make something like an email tax enforcable.
This essentially means that *every* communication via email would have to be reported. Even if you don't know the content, a complete record when A is communicating with B at time t is more than most intelligence agencies can dream of (the CIA/NSA is an obvious exception as they have the necessary infrastrucure up and running for years).
I don't assume that this is what the UN guy who suggested this tax had in mind (when considering issues like local email, mailing lists, etc. I don't think he has ever used email before), but with such a resolution in place once, this would serve as a great excuse for law enforcement and agencies over the world to do what they best at: control the people they are supposed to serve.
DIN A0 covers an area of 1 m^2 with height/width = sqrt(2). If you cut a DIN A0 paper in halves, you get 2 DIN A1 sheets, with an area of 1/2 m^2 each while height/width still = sqrt(2). If you cut a DIN A1 paper in halves, you get 2 DIN A2 sheets etc. - If you're a geek, this should make immediate sense to you.
Use the Source, Luke! Right in the middle of the page-source, you'll find the decision tree, (j+1) will give you the number of the corresponding question.
I wonder if such a regulation would be constitutional, since it's nothing else than forcing a defendant to accuse himself, which would not be considerd a fair process in most civilised states. (however, I think that France used to have or still has a similar regulation. - Anyone with details?)
I addition to that, you're neclecting the practical Problem Stormin mentioned: If you use standard steganographic techniques, than there is no way, they can prove that a certain audio- or graphicfile acually contains encrypted data (even the oldest pgp versions contain hooks for this very purpose).
But this all doesn't matter here, since the real purpose of crypto-regulation is not to fight crime or terrorism but to prevent the the general adoption and legal use of crypto (esp. by companies) to allow for (economic) espinonage and political control.
Our notion of "theft" and "piracy" are a all based on the concept of material ownership. Stealing a car is bad, not because of my claiming of possession of an "unearned" good, but because it deprives the former owner of using it.
OTOH, if I ask someone what time it is, he can tell me and still keep his watch. This immaterial property of information (the ability to copy it essentially for free) is what makes "stealing" information totally different form stealing goods since there is no "particle count" on the former. So if information is valuable, then by mere communication, we can increase the total amount of wealth available.
The problem is, that many people doing business aren't after wealth but after power. To them, there's simply no thrill in having a Ferrari, if everybody has one. When trading material goods, both concepts are equivalent: To aquire a good is equivalent to having the power to convince (eg. by paying) someone else to give it away and no longer have it. This equation is no longer true for information, so some way has to be found which allows the implementation of some artificial "particle count" and thereby "materializing" an otherwise immaterial good. In case of software, this is achived by licences and their publicly funded enforcement.
Note, that this is different to mere secrecy (which is of course also implemented where possible, e.g. by keeping the source closed). Secrecy would be if the guy with the watch would only tell me the time im I pay him, but copyright is telling me the time, but charge me if I make any use of this information. Yes, he would even charge me, if I get *his* time from someone else or even from my own wristwatch. With a software patent, he could even charge me for not missing the bus, because clearly, I only could have made it in time if I knew about this very concept.
Considering all the effort that is made to prevent people form making use from information available to them and all the money spent, with the sole purpose of artificially reducing the total amount of wealth available, I am amazed that the OSS revolution got away without any bloodshed so far.;-)
If noticed that the moderation scheme didn't seem to work in the last few threads: Many excellent comments got stuck with score 1 and switching threshold form 1 to 2 cut me down from 80% to as low as 10% of the total no. of messages while formerly this got me the top 20 to 40% which was exactly what I would have prefered.
No I've learned that this in not a misfuction but actually a feature. Sorry, Rob, but I totally disagree with you on that one: Moderation should be about choice and the more mod-points are around, the finer grained the possible choices will be for the readers.
Why is it, that you got the impression that moderators haven't taken their job seriously during the last weeks? From a reader's perspective, I found./ moderation to have worked better than ever before!
It is most interesting that ECHELON isn't mentioned at all in the press release. I don't think it's merely coincidence that an inititive like that is started weeks after the STOA-Report and the recent Australian admittace of it existence of the UKUSA spy alliance.
My best bet is, that they don't want to get into diplomatic troubles with the US just now while US trade sactions are discussed regarding the EU import embargo against hormone-infested meat and German troops are fighting under NATO command in the Kosovo.
Note also, that the German goverment is not only allowing but activly encouraging the use of strong crypto, which - in the case of general adoption - would make the ECHELON listing points basically useless.
We have a similar situation here in Vienna (Austria): In most districts, Telekabel is so far the only company to offer affordable DSL connections via ethernet based cable-modems and they also don't offer Linux support. However, I never considered this to be much of a problem.
In fact, I wouldn't want a service engineer to touch my machine, anyway - let alone the Linux installation on it: Paranoia issues (like mainainance backdoors in binary-only drivers) aside, would you want a stranger (whose only qualification would at best be a 4-hours Linux service crash course) to mess with your hand-crafted kernel and network-configuration?
And if there is a problem, who is better qualified to diagnose it: You yourself (with all debuging tools and logfiles at your disposal) or the telephone support guy without direct access to your box (and usually also without clue).
Most Linux users are used to supporting themselves (that's what Linux and the Linux community is all about) and this should make them better customers than the average Joe Windows User: give me the necessary specs and get out of my way! I would trade "offical support" for a 30 days money-back-no-questions-asked warranty or even a small discount any day.
You're neglecting the fact that time is working for Milosevic for several reasons:
Domestic support for Milosevic is getting stronger with evey bomb dropped over a Serbian city. (If you doubt this, then ask yourself who you'd rather hate: The guys who have just bombed your house or your local administration, which, after all, takes care that you get medical treatment and gets you quatered somewhere else)
The NATO alliance is weak, the reluctance to send ground troops and the obvious lack of political commitment nullifies any actual military advantage (strategic bombardment is pointless if not followed by an invasion)
The "marketing" problem in explaining a continued war if the self declared goal is peace (and not victory).
Every embarressing mistake like the destruction of the Chinese embassy will futher limit the alliance's political options.
With the main targets destroyed, it will be increasinly difficult to destroy military targets without unacceptable ammounts of collateral damage.
And last but not least: The cost of the campaign exceeds the caused damage by at least one order of magnitude.
Remember that the purpose of war is not the destruction of the enemy but the enforcement of a political goal and as far as politics go, Milosevic is the clear winner so far. My bet is that there will be a cease-fire RSN followed by a token peace-treaty (after all, Milosevic's political goal - the expulsion of the Albanians - is almost reached) that allows the NATO to somewhat keep it's face but will basically fix the status quo.
I think that the US again makes their usual error of judging military options on the effect they would have on themselves instead of the enemy.
While even a partial breakdown of the IT infrastrucure would have a devastating effect on a country like the US where you even pay your hambuger by creditcard and most economic transactions involve the exchange of information instead of actual goods, this clearly isn't the case with the more traditional economy of Yugoslavia.
The same hold true for the strategic bombardments: The Americans never had war on their territory and therefor react very senitive to own miltary losses (remember the 3 three captured GIs), while Europe and esp. the Balkans have a long tradition of warfare and won't get demoralised so quickly by a high-tech air campaign.
IMHO the NATO alliance would have done better in systematically arming and training the UCK (and maybe offering them tactical air support) than, after months of ineffective bombardments, being drawn into a guerilla war that they are unprepared and unwilling to deal with.
I count 1355 distict binary rpms in the ftp-version (no crypto (those lamers have their server in the US) and some commercial stuff missing) of SuSE 6.1. SuSE packages are also rather big, while RedHat rpms tend to be fine-grained (both philosophies have their advantages and drawbacks).
If you really want to compare the amount of software, you better stick with the total size or the number of CDs. But after all, the only relevant benchmark is the number of programms you have to install manually either because they are not part of the distribution or because the package is miconfigured, buggy or out of date.
This whining about "theft" of copyrighted material really gets out of of hand. Calling the FBI to prevent some hardcore fans (those kind of people besieging cinemas for hours to get a ticket) from "stealing" a giga of thumbnailed mpegs with their 56k modems is just pathetic.
If the launch of the movie would be somewhat syncronized over the world (here in Austria TPM will start in September(!)) nobody would bother for hours or days with downloading of what could at best be considerd a low quality preview. But I think Georg Lucas' marketriods can't stage the media and merchandising hype in more than one country a time.
IMHO the reason is to prevent the creation and general acceptence of secure crypto standards and the mass deployment and general use of crypto for communication. While this doesn't stop any terrorist or other criminal from communicating securely, it will prevent crypto enabled standard software (read: integration into Windows) and make large scale electronic surveillance possible.
Considering the priority shift of the US agencies form the cold war to economic espionage and warfare, the ECHELON project, whose primary target are the states of the European Union, and the explicite exception from the crypto restriction for US companies' department in foreign countries, it is obvious that besides the usual govermental desire for total power and control, there are also big economical interests.
I don't think that's the point here. Even then, the "computation power" of the tank scales polynomially with it's size (at best).
So with regard to NP-trapdoor functions, all you have acheived is to raise the stakes a bit and have to start with, say, a 2048 bit key instead of 1024. But the fundamental problem is, that still some (fixed) number l of additional bits will double the effort for cracking. Take 1000*l bits and and every single atom in the universe can work on your problem in parallel until the hell freezes over. (Quantum computers may be a different thing though, but even that remains to be proven.)
OTOH *if* you really find a polynomial algorithm for some (arbitrarily weird) specific NP-complete problem, than you can apply this very algorithm to any problem in NP because NP-complete problems can be emulated by one-another with only polynomial overhead.
The best thing would probably be a customizable AC penalty. That is, all articles start with score 0 and this is the score which gets moderated. Any/. reader can then by himself decide how much bonus points he wants to give articles for having been written by loged-in users and can set his threshold accordingly.
To keep moderaton fair and unbiased, I would suggest:
1. Disable all moderation functions if any threshold above say -100 is used
2. Don't display the current scores of the articles in moderator-mode (I disagree with you on this one - It is you job to judge the article and not the work of the other moderators)
3. Don't allow moderators to vote even on followups to their own articles
Huh... how does this differ from GPL?
on
QPL 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
The QPL is significantly more liberal than the GPL by allowing relicencing of modifications by the original author (in this case Troll Tech), but there are also some restrictions, mainly the "patch-clause" (not a big issue, since this is already supported by the packet formats of the distributions) and the obligation to submit modifications to the original author when asked (no closed in-house versions).
The German c't magazine runs it's crypto campaign for over a year now and regularily offers key signing services (with personal ID checks) at expos and other public events.
btw. what exactly do you mean by "Open Source" in this context?
The title itself is an oxymoron! Any regulation of private communication in form or content is unaccaptable. And crimialising crypto "if used to commit a secondary crime" is punishing a suspect for not accusing himself - something which is unconstitutional in any civilized state (if it doesn't happen to be the US president at some sex inquiry board, that is, but that's another story...)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm somewhat shocked that a large portion of the slashdot community is obviously willing to abandon the GPL at the first sight of a problem. Let's check the facts here: Corel tries to sublicence GPL code from random OSS programmers to restrict its distribution, which is a clear violation of the licence under which the code has been made available to them in the first place.
There is no room for discussion here: Neither calling their distribution "beta" or the declaring the recipients as Corel internals has the slightest relevance here. (Even if a real Corel internal would give away e.g. an enhanced local version of gdb, never intended for publication, the best they could do is fire him but they could never sue him for licence violation.) Just imagine what Corel would do to you if you would publish an "internal beta release" of Corel Draw only differing from the original by a new installer and maybe a new packet format.
While I also thought at first that this might have been a mistake by some culeless lawyer who did a search-and-replace on some standard beta test licence, their own FAQ and the fact that they didn't give any response (let alone excuse) besides "this is being worked on" suggests that this is not the case.
Even if they do give in now (and I think they finally will), the impression will remain that they did so because of PR reasons and not because they felt themselves legally bound. Be sure that this precedent combined with the weak reaction of the community and the obvious lack of any serious (i.e. juristic) challenge of their licence violation will not go unnoticed, neither by other potential freeloaders nor by many OSS authors who might twice before they release their work under the GPL again.
The tragic (and somewhat ironic) point here is that Corel has not the slightest advantage from doing this. If they had restriced their licence to their own self developed products (installers, system management, etc.), they would have lost nothing: Nobody could give the whole thing away and with installers and management tools missing, a distribution is nothing more than a random collection of packages. (And most of them won't really differ from the Debian versions, anyway.)
It stikes me, that moderators get 10 M2 points per day but merely about 5 regular mod. points per month(!) to do their job in the first place. Using 98% of the pontential ressources for control and merely 2% for the actual work might be acceptable when handling nuclear weapons or biotoxins, but is IMHO total overkill when it comes to managing voluntary moderator work for an online forum, esp. since the exactly same information as provided by the M2 scheme could easily been extracted by better analysing comment moderations. Here's how:
Hypothesis 1: The majority of moderators are fair and take thir job seriously.
Hypothesis 2: If one moderator rates a certain comment up, and another moderator rates the same comment down, it is reasonable to assume, that they would equally inclined to consider the other's decision as unfair.
Conclusion 1: The ammount of mutually nullifying moderator decisions on a certain post provides a measure for the total 'unfairness' p of a comments moderation, where p = 2*min(#_of_ups,#_of_downs). If hypothesis 2 is true, then this p should be proportional to the karma penalty generated by the current moderation scheme.
Conclusion 2: Since we assume that there are more good moderators than bad ones, it is reasonable to assume that in a contoversial comment moderation the majority has a higher propability to be "right" than the minority (provided that there are more than 2 moderation decisins involved)
Proposed Solution: In the case of a controversial comment (i.e. a comment with up *and* down votes), generate a (very small) karma penalty proportional to p and distribute #ups/(#ups+#downs) of the penalty among the down-voters and #downs/(#ups+#downs) among the up-voters.
Example: A comment gets 4 votes up and 2 votes down. Each up-voter gets 1/12 (33% total) and each down voter gets 1/3 (67% total) of the total penalty which ammounts to 2*min(4,2)=4 penalty points (which should IMHO be somewhere around 1/5 to 1/10 of a current karma point)
In order for this system to work, it would be necessary to increase the total ammount of moderation points floating around and it might be reasonable to give some karma reward for each moderation to compensate for the total penalty generated by this system (so that in the end only the guys who regularily make minority decisions take the punishment).
Of course, the used formulas are only a proposal and fine tuning could certainly increase the overall efficiency of the system, once empirical data is available.
Communism as well a capitalism are both ideologies founded on the concept of material ownership, while Open Source (or Free Software) is based on the immaterial properties of software, which enables me to use my neighbor's program *without* taking it away from him an thereby excluding him from using it. Therefor (without the artificial framework of copyright including its enforcement) software can neither serve as a power-preserving means of production (whose governmental control communism is demanding), nor as a commercial medium of exchange in the capitalist sense.
While OSS opposes the artificial "materialization" of software by licensing-regulations and publicly enforced copy protection which are dominating the software industry for the last 20 years, its support for the universal availability of "means of production" (i.e. sourcecode, compilers, etc.) is in direct opposition to Marxism, which demands their total control by the proletarian government, which would likewise require a "materialization" through artificial copy-regulations. (the registration of typewriters, copiers, printing presses, etc. which is common in most communist states, illustrates this practice in the field of non-computational "software")
A comprehensive political and economic system, which extends the Open Source gift-culture to "real world" affairs, im IMHO impossible unless, of course, someone finds a cheap means to losslessly copy material goods (replicators, anyone?). Until then, comparing the OSS phenomenon to communism or capitalism is trying to answer the wrong question.
Giving any eligable moderator 10 M2-points per day to control the other moderators but only 5 M-point per month to do the the actual scoring of the articles is unbalanced to say the least and gives room to much more damaging kinds of abuse.
If the problem is that say 5% of slashdot users are "bad guys", then the solution should be obvious: vote them out of the sky! Shell out more moderator points (about 3 to 5 times the current amount) to allow for finer grained scores (e.g. in a range from -5 to 15) and higher responsiveness to abuse. Don't allow anyone to vote on the same comment twice and you should come up with a fairly robust mod-scheme.
Some additional measures which don't require too much user interaction come to mind:
Note that this amounts essentially to the same effect as the current M2 scheme as it is reasonable to assume that both groups would equally tend to judge the voting of the other side as unfair.
Quality issuses aside (streaming simply sucks when more than just a few people want to see the same content at the same time) afaik Real Networks charges huge licence fees for their proprietary servers.
While the semi-free MP3 format is the agreed-on standard, why not use GSM as an alternative format. The quality for speech compression is superb (with 11025Hz (2273 b/s) there is virtually no difference from an FM transmission), the format is free and supported by sox. (My own GSM-tools can be found here.)
It's like with free software: even the slightest restriction on proliferation necessarily leads to some kind of tracking. This is even more obvious in the case of email. Since an email isn't "used" for a long period of time, but normally read and then deleted, the usual legislative measures of occasional checks (as for pirated software) won't cut it: Only an infrastructure covering all providers and mail-relais could make something like an email tax enforcable.
This essentially means that *every* communication via email would have to be reported. Even if you don't know the content, a complete record when A is communicating with B at time t is more than most intelligence agencies can dream of (the CIA/NSA is an obvious exception as they have the necessary infrastrucure up and running for years).
I don't assume that this is what the UN guy who suggested this tax had in mind (when considering issues like local email, mailing lists, etc. I don't think he has ever used email before), but with such a resolution in place once, this would serve as a great excuse for law enforcement and agencies over the world to do what they best at: control the people they are supposed to serve.
DIN A0 covers an area of 1 m^2 with height/width = sqrt(2). If you cut a DIN A0 paper in halves, you get 2 DIN A1 sheets, with an area of 1/2 m^2 each while height/width still = sqrt(2). If you cut a DIN A1 paper in halves, you get 2 DIN A2 sheets etc. - If you're a geek, this should make immediate sense to you.
Try *that* with US letter.
> "Oh yeah, well my distro is supported in my
... (sigh)
> native language, at least!"
US citizen? oh well
FYI: non-US citizens *hate* US letter paper format, not supporting ISDN, transatlantic keyboards and the American way of Life.
Use the Source, Luke! Right in the middle of the page-source, you'll find the decision tree, (j+1) will give you the number of the corresponding question.
I wonder if such a regulation would be constitutional, since it's nothing else than forcing a defendant to accuse himself, which would not be considerd a fair process in most civilised states. (however, I think that France used to have or still has a similar regulation. - Anyone with details?)
I addition to that, you're neclecting the practical Problem Stormin mentioned: If you use standard steganographic techniques, than there is no way, they can prove that a certain audio- or graphicfile acually contains encrypted data (even the oldest pgp versions contain hooks for this very purpose).
But this all doesn't matter here, since the real purpose of crypto-regulation is not to fight crime or terrorism but to prevent the the general adoption and legal use of crypto (esp. by companies) to allow for (economic) espinonage and political control.
Our notion of "theft" and "piracy" are a all based on the concept of material ownership. Stealing a car is bad, not because of my claiming of possession of an "unearned" good, but because it deprives the former owner of using it.
;-)
OTOH, if I ask someone what time it is, he can tell me and still keep his watch. This immaterial property of information (the ability to copy it essentially for free) is what makes "stealing" information totally different form stealing goods since there is no "particle count" on the former.
So if information is valuable, then by mere communication, we can increase the total amount of wealth available.
The problem is, that many people doing business aren't after wealth but after power. To them, there's simply no thrill in having a Ferrari, if everybody has one. When trading material goods, both concepts are equivalent: To aquire a good is equivalent to having the power to convince (eg. by paying) someone else to give it away and no longer have it. This equation is no longer true for information, so some way has to be found which allows the implementation of some artificial "particle count" and thereby "materializing" an otherwise immaterial good. In case of software, this is achived by licences and their publicly funded enforcement.
Note, that this is different to mere secrecy (which is of course also implemented where possible, e.g. by keeping the source closed). Secrecy would be if the guy with the watch would only tell me the time im I pay him, but copyright is telling me the time, but charge me if I make any use of this information. Yes, he would even charge me, if I get *his* time from someone else or even from my own wristwatch. With a software patent, he could even charge me for not missing the bus, because clearly, I only could have made it in time if I knew about this very concept.
Considering all the effort that is made to prevent people form making use from information available to them and all the money spent, with the sole purpose of artificially reducing the total amount of wealth available, I am amazed that the OSS revolution got away without any bloodshed so far.
If noticed that the moderation scheme didn't seem to work in the last few threads: Many excellent comments got stuck with score 1 and switching threshold form 1 to 2 cut me down from 80% to as low as 10% of the total no. of messages while formerly this got me the top 20 to 40% which was exactly what I would have prefered.
./ moderation to have worked better than ever before!
No I've learned that this in not a misfuction but actually a feature. Sorry, Rob, but I totally disagree with you on that one: Moderation should be about choice and the more mod-points are around, the finer grained the possible choices will be for the readers.
Why is it, that you got the impression that moderators haven't taken their job seriously during the last weeks? From a reader's perspective, I found
It is most interesting that ECHELON isn't mentioned at all in the press release. I don't think it's merely coincidence that an inititive like that is started weeks after the STOA-Report and the recent Australian admittace of it existence of the UKUSA spy alliance.
My best bet is, that they don't want to get into diplomatic troubles with the US just now while US trade sactions are discussed regarding the EU import embargo against hormone-infested meat and German troops are fighting under NATO command in the Kosovo.
Note also, that the German goverment is not only allowing but activly encouraging the use of strong crypto, which - in the case of general adoption - would make the ECHELON listing points basically useless.
We have a similar situation here in Vienna (Austria): In most districts, Telekabel is so far the only company to offer affordable DSL connections via ethernet based cable-modems and they also don't offer Linux support. However, I never considered this to be much of a problem.
In fact, I wouldn't want a service engineer to touch my machine, anyway - let alone the Linux installation on it: Paranoia issues (like mainainance backdoors in binary-only drivers) aside, would you want a stranger (whose only qualification would at best be a 4-hours Linux service crash course) to mess with your hand-crafted kernel and network-configuration?
And if there is a problem, who is better qualified to diagnose it: You yourself (with all debuging tools and logfiles at your disposal) or the telephone support guy without direct access to your box (and usually also without clue).
Most Linux users are used to supporting themselves (that's what Linux and the Linux community is all about) and this should make them better customers than the average Joe Windows User: give me the necessary specs and get out of my way! I would trade "offical support" for a 30 days money-back-no-questions-asked warranty or even a small discount any day.
- Domestic support for Milosevic is getting stronger with evey bomb dropped over a Serbian city. (If you doubt this, then ask yourself who you'd rather hate: The guys who have just bombed your house or your local administration, which, after all, takes care that you get medical treatment and gets you quatered somewhere else)
- The NATO alliance is weak, the reluctance to send ground troops and the obvious lack of political commitment nullifies any actual military advantage (strategic bombardment is pointless if not followed by an invasion)
- The "marketing" problem in explaining a continued war if the self declared goal is peace (and not victory).
- Every embarressing mistake like the destruction of the Chinese embassy will futher limit the alliance's political options.
- With the main targets destroyed, it will be increasinly difficult to destroy military targets without unacceptable ammounts of collateral damage.
- And last but not least: The cost of the campaign exceeds the caused damage by at least one order of magnitude.
Remember that the purpose of war is not the destruction of the enemy but the enforcement of a political goal and as far as politics go, Milosevic is the clear winner so far.My bet is that there will be a cease-fire RSN followed by a token peace-treaty (after all, Milosevic's political goal - the expulsion of the Albanians - is almost reached) that allows the NATO to somewhat keep it's face but will basically fix the status quo.
I think that the US again makes their usual error of judging military options on the effect they would have on themselves instead of the enemy.
While even a partial breakdown of the IT infrastrucure would have a devastating effect on a country like the US where you even pay your hambuger by creditcard and most economic transactions involve the exchange of information instead of actual goods, this clearly isn't the case with the more traditional economy of Yugoslavia.
The same hold true for the strategic bombardments: The Americans never had war on their territory and therefor react very senitive to own miltary losses (remember the 3 three captured GIs), while Europe and esp. the Balkans have a long tradition of warfare and won't get demoralised so quickly by a high-tech air campaign.
IMHO the NATO alliance would have done better in systematically arming and training the UCK (and maybe offering them tactical air support) than, after months of ineffective bombardments, being drawn into a guerilla war that they are unprepared and unwilling to deal with.
I count 1355 distict binary rpms in the ftp-version (no crypto (those lamers have their server in the US) and some commercial stuff missing) of SuSE 6.1. SuSE packages are also rather big, while RedHat rpms tend to be fine-grained (both philosophies have their advantages and drawbacks).
If you really want to compare the amount of software, you better stick with the total size or the number of CDs. But after all, the only relevant benchmark is the number of programms you have to install manually either because they are not part of the distribution or because the package is miconfigured, buggy or out of date.
This whining about "theft" of copyrighted material really gets out of of hand. Calling the FBI to prevent some hardcore fans (those kind of people besieging cinemas for hours to get a ticket) from "stealing" a giga of thumbnailed mpegs with their 56k modems is just pathetic.
If the launch of the movie would be somewhat syncronized over the world (here in Austria TPM will start in September(!)) nobody would bother for hours or days with downloading of what could at best be considerd a low quality preview. But I think Georg Lucas' marketriods can't stage the media and merchandising hype in more than one country a time.
IMHO the reason is to prevent the creation and general acceptence of secure crypto standards and the mass deployment and general use of crypto for communication. While this doesn't stop any terrorist or other criminal from communicating securely, it will prevent crypto enabled standard software (read: integration into Windows) and make large scale electronic surveillance possible.
Considering the priority shift of the US agencies form the cold war to economic espionage and warfare, the ECHELON project, whose primary target are the states of the European Union, and the explicite exception from the crypto restriction for US companies' department in foreign countries, it is obvious that besides the usual govermental desire for total power and control, there are also big economical interests.
I don't think that's the point here. Even then, the "computation power" of the tank scales polynomially with it's size (at best).
So with regard to NP-trapdoor functions, all you have acheived is to raise the stakes a bit and have to start with, say, a 2048 bit key instead of 1024. But the fundamental problem is, that still some (fixed) number l of additional bits will double the effort for cracking. Take 1000*l bits and and every single atom in the universe can work on your problem in parallel until the hell freezes over. (Quantum computers may be a different thing though, but even that remains to be proven.)
OTOH *if* you really find a polynomial algorithm for some (arbitrarily weird) specific NP-complete problem, than you can apply this very algorithm to any problem in NP because NP-complete problems can be emulated by one-another with only polynomial overhead.
The best thing would probably be a customizable AC penalty. That is, all articles start with score 0 and this is the score which gets moderated. /. reader can then by himself decide how much bonus points he wants to give articles for having been written by loged-in users and can set his threshold accordingly.
Any
To keep moderaton fair and unbiased, I would suggest:
1. Disable all moderation functions if any threshold above say -100 is used
2. Don't display the current scores of the articles in moderator-mode (I disagree with you on this one - It is you job to judge the article and not the work of the other moderators)
3. Don't allow moderators to vote even on followups to their own articles
The QPL is significantly more liberal than the GPL by allowing relicencing of modifications by the original author (in this case Troll Tech), but there are also some restrictions, mainly the "patch-clause" (not a big issue, since this is already supported by the packet formats of the distributions) and the obligation to submit modifications to the original author when asked (no closed in-house versions).
The German c't magazine runs it's crypto campaign for over a year now and regularily offers key signing services (with personal ID checks) at expos and other public events.
btw. what exactly do you mean by "Open Source" in this context?
The title itself is an oxymoron! Any regulation of private communication in form or content is unaccaptable. And crimialising crypto "if used to commit a secondary crime" is punishing a suspect for not accusing himself - something which is unconstitutional in any civilized state (if it doesn't happen to be the US president at some sex inquiry board, that is, but that's another story ...)