I am happy that Sun has stepped up to try to do this. Someone needs to step in and arbitrate p2p protocol and prevent balkanization like what has started to happen with Gnutella (iirc).
On the other hand, Sun will probably get sued for contributory infringement for attempting to be the protocol arbitrator. (Remember, the entertainment industry has sued and will sue anything that threatens to disrupt the way they do business.) On the other hand, I can't think of a better company than Sun to fight this fight. Remember that the time-and-space-shifting precedent for VCRs was established 20 years ago as the result of a hard-fought court case between corporations. Better to have someone with some money in the bank to fight this fight.
Jon Katz wrote: The state is hyperreal -- it operates like software. It seems stable enough while the power is on and it hasn't run into any major bugs, but interrupt the power supply or corrupt it, and the state falls apart.
Trying to draw a tech analogy to what is happening between the US and China is, imho, completely the wrong approach. True reality is far messier.
The behavior of nation-states is ultimately about power -- primate status in its raw form. Not electric power, not something which is well-behaved according to some scientific principle. This is about aggregations of billions of bags of meat, each seeking more resources and status on a perpetual basis.
Moral values of any kind are a means to that end as well, mainly because they serve a useful social binding function that keeps national groups coherent and thus able to get more primate status collectively. (I may personally disagree with how religion is abused in the US, where I live, but I can't deny the social binding effect it has on its adherents.)
We as a species have created technology in order to gain more primate status for ourselves, individually as well as in groups. Technology exists in the service of one or more humans. (If you think it's the other way around, remember that there's always a human at the top of whatever food chain you're in.)
I also find it fascinating that a lot of people have posted articles about how evil China is regarding human rights, the death penalty, etc. But the US also has an atrocious human rights record, in that:
We send 12 and 14-year-olds to prison to get raped in perpetuity, or to be executed. Oh, wait, that's usually only if they're black.
We house more people in prison per capita than any other country.
We have a very closed press which is owned by a very few corporations -- you can learn far more about the world by reading non-US sites than you can by reading US sites.
If the other Americans reading this start saying "well, we're a free country and China isn't", I have a few more phrases for you: "asset forfeiture", "war on drugs", "mandatory minimum sentences", "media synergy", and "Bush v. Gore".
Now don't get me wrong -- I still prefer to live in the US at this time, because I feel like I still have a good shot at helping to make this country a better place, and because at least we still give lip service to liberty and freedom, and maybe one day we'll start listening to our own rhetoric. But we had better start soon.
Enjoy --mark
PS On a totally unrelated topic, I think it's a good thing that most software ends up like a big messy ball of meat as it matures. Humans are messy, inexact things, so if a piece of software turns into a giant ball of meat, then that's a good indication that the software is accurately modeling reality.
Salon has already started to implement pop-up windows with advertising, specifically from the Red Envelope gift service. They're really annoying, because if you close the window before the ad finishes loading, the window pops up again to reload the ad.
This trend doesn't surprise me -- porn sites have been doing obnoxious things with ads for years. I've been told that porn drives all new media technology, and this seems as good a proof of that as anything.
Hi. I'm one of the developers who is working on getting the crypto stuff out of our internal tree and into the M14 branch.
It is true that for the moment, this branch will only be useful with a binary-only module that we are cranking out for both 4.x and Netscape 6 browsers.
However, as you will see here, we are in the process of getting all the source code that we legally can out there. We made tarballs available a few weeks ago, and though that code doesn't build, at least you can get an idea of how the binary piece works.
We're still working on patent issues, as you might guess, along with a number of other things, before we can have a fully working build in the mozilla tree. But we're getting there.
Mark Welch -- Crypto/PKI developer -- Sun|Netscape Alliance
I wish that what David Brin implied in the following paragraph was true:
As the Twentieth Century wanes, the notion of arranging society according to some contrived dogma has at long last begun to seem tiresome. Many of us now see that all of the radical and zealous prescriptions were part of the same feverish disease, that only time and patience could cure.
I still see a world in which religion, nationalism and ideology run rampant, bringing out the worst in us just as well as ever.
Look at the religious right in the US, preparing for (or preparing to cause) the end of the world in a week. Look at extremist Islam in Afghanistan, where women are treated worse than animals. Look at Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where people were tortured and killed simply because of their nationality or beliefs.
Even now in the supposedly educated and enlightened West, look at what unbridled corporate power has done to our ability to truly live and speak freely.
Now, I grant that no large-scale movement of the type or scale of fascism or communism has been able to take hold, but we all have our ideologies, and sadly, I don't expect them to go away anytime soon.
This was a decision local to New York, not a binding precedent on the rest of the country. Until we see a Supreme Court decision about this, there will be no case law binding on the entire US, just on the particular district in which the decision was made.
Granted, New York has a sizable chunk of people. But it won't affect the rest of us for now.
New crypto regs will help the recording industry maintain a lock on the DVD-Audio format. Given proposed new US encryption export regulations, it is entirely possible that the creators of DVD-Audio may be waiting for "retail" status in order to put 128-bit encryption into DVD-Audio discs. That will make it mathematically infeasible (for the foreseeable future) for private individuals to decrypt discs. Which leads to:
Resampling isn't the end of the world. If I wanted to tote around a copy of CDs I own (under the fair use provision, of course), I could just run the line out of the DVD-Audio box to the line in of my sound card and make mp3s from that. I wouldn't rely on mp3 to store audio at true "CD quality" anyway, so there isn't a significant loss in doing this.
Actually, we don't have a comprehensive missile defense system in place. There has been at least one test of a beam weapon designed to shoot missiles out of the sky seconds after launch, but actual deployment of that system is years off, if ever.
Having said that, the Russian and US missile commanders are setting up a joint command post of sorts in Colorado for the new year, and each side should be able to destroy its own errant rockets if the need arises. (Anyone with more knowledge care to talk about this?)
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, Sun will probably get sued for contributory infringement for attempting to be the protocol arbitrator. (Remember, the entertainment industry has sued and will sue anything that threatens to disrupt the way they do business.) On the other hand, I can't think of a better company than Sun to fight this fight. Remember that the time-and-space-shifting precedent for VCRs was established 20 years ago as the result of a hard-fought court case between corporations. Better to have someone with some money in the bank to fight this fight.
--mark
Trying to draw a tech analogy to what is happening between the US and China is, imho, completely the wrong approach. True reality is far messier.
The behavior of nation-states is ultimately about power -- primate status in its raw form. Not electric power, not something which is well-behaved according to some scientific principle. This is about aggregations of billions of bags of meat, each seeking more resources and status on a perpetual basis.
Moral values of any kind are a means to that end as well, mainly because they serve a useful social binding function that keeps national groups coherent and thus able to get more primate status collectively. (I may personally disagree with how religion is abused in the US, where I live, but I can't deny the social binding effect it has on its adherents.)
We as a species have created technology in order to gain more primate status for ourselves, individually as well as in groups. Technology exists in the service of one or more humans. (If you think it's the other way around, remember that there's always a human at the top of whatever food chain you're in.)
I also find it fascinating that a lot of people have posted articles about how evil China is regarding human rights, the death penalty, etc. But the US also has an atrocious human rights record, in that:
- We send 12 and 14-year-olds to prison to get raped in perpetuity, or to be executed. Oh, wait, that's usually only if they're black.
- We house more people in prison per capita than any other country.
- We have a very closed press which is owned by a very few corporations -- you can learn far more about the world by reading non-US sites than you can by reading US sites.
If the other Americans reading this start saying "well, we're a free country and China isn't", I have a few more phrases for you: "asset forfeiture", "war on drugs", "mandatory minimum sentences", "media synergy", and "Bush v. Gore".Now don't get me wrong -- I still prefer to live in the US at this time, because I feel like I still have a good shot at helping to make this country a better place, and because at least we still give lip service to liberty and freedom, and maybe one day we'll start listening to our own rhetoric. But we had better start soon.
Enjoy
--mark
PS On a totally unrelated topic, I think it's a good thing that most software ends up like a big messy ball of meat as it matures. Humans are messy, inexact things, so if a piece of software turns into a giant ball of meat, then that's a good indication that the software is accurately modeling reality.
This trend doesn't surprise me -- porn sites have been doing obnoxious things with ads for years. I've been told that porn drives all new media technology, and this seems as good a proof of that as anything.
Hi. I'm one of the developers who is working on getting the crypto stuff out of our internal tree and into the M14 branch.
It is true that for the moment, this branch will only be useful with a binary-only module that we are cranking out for both 4.x and Netscape 6 browsers.
However, as you will see here, we are in the process of getting all the source code that we legally can out there. We made tarballs available a few weeks ago, and though that code doesn't build, at least you can get an idea of how the binary piece works.
We're still working on patent issues, as you might guess, along with a number of other things, before we can have a fully working build in the mozilla tree. But we're getting there.
Mark Welch -- Crypto/PKI developer -- Sun|Netscape Alliance
Look at the religious right in the US, preparing for (or preparing to cause) the end of the world in a week. Look at extremist Islam in Afghanistan, where women are treated worse than animals. Look at Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where people were tortured and killed simply because of their nationality or beliefs.
Even now in the supposedly educated and enlightened West, look at what unbridled corporate power has done to our ability to truly live and speak freely.
Now, I grant that no large-scale movement of the type or scale of fascism or communism has been able to take hold, but we all have our ideologies, and sadly, I don't expect them to go away anytime soon.
--mark
This was a decision local to New York, not a binding precedent on the rest of the country. Until we see a Supreme Court decision about this, there will be no case law binding on the entire US, just on the particular district in which the decision was made.
Granted, New York has a sizable chunk of people. But it won't affect the rest of us for now.
Having said that, the Russian and US missile commanders are setting up a joint command post of sorts in Colorado for the new year, and each side should be able to destroy its own errant rockets if the need arises. (Anyone with more knowledge care to talk about this?)