Just as White House gives blogger press pass.
on
Is Blogging Journalism?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
According to CNN , the White House just gave a blogger, Garrett M. Graff (of Fishbowl DC) a press pass. If blogging doesn't count as journalism, it will soon.
Great, so the people who have paid nothing for the specific "copy" that you have "stolen" can sue you for millions, but the people who have actually paid something for the particular copy that you have stolen can sue you for thousands.
It's an issue of intent. The court did not rule that it is illegal to link to copyrighted material. It is still legal to link to copyrighted works that are published legally.
The court found that the uploaders of the MP3s were effectively making an unauthorized performance. The guy publishing the links knew that the original upload was illegal. He thought, "it's nice that they are 'performing' via the Internet - I'll try to get them a bigger audience by making more people know about the 'performance'." He was trying to make someone else's copyright violation reach more people and thus cause more damage. You may argue that illegal performance doesn't cause damage, but the court accepts that it does, with precident. It also assumes that the larger the audience the greater the damage, which again you may argue.
Unfortunately, the rights holders did not have to do much to prove damage; that's the problem with IP violation claims - it's really hard to measure damages as it's all about predicting the future.
My WAP is connected to an 'untrusted' interface on my firewall, such that users can access the web and DNS only. The SSID is, with "addr" replaced with my street address, "come_4_beer_at_addr". Haven't had any takers, yet.:)
They're not saying that these are problems - they're gotchas! They are behaviors that you would not normally expect. Once you understand them, you can work with them, but before then, they will not be what you expect.
People do not view a computer as a specific component of a system, they see it as the system. If the system fails because of a power sag, that's a system problem. He's saying that computer systems should always ship with some kind of UPS solution, but ideally more elegant and specialized than what is currently available. We can't ignore room for improvement just because we can technically solve the problem with a current tech UPS.:)
A doctor shouldn't say, "you don't have some horrible medical illness" if the patient has symptoms that (s)he believes are significant. Being unable to explain symptoms does not mean that there is no cause for the symptoms. If a doctor runs out of ideas, they should be honest about that and help to find another professional who may have useful ideas. This is the way to help people - giving up does not help and causes doctor shopping.
If a patient comes to you who has seen other professionals, who have done tests, I hope that doctors don't start at the top of the diagnoses tree... Doctors should phone the other professional and get the patient's history.
Security is about mitigating risks. Users can not be asked to mitigate risks that they don't understand or believe in. Users must either a) choose to mitigate the risks or b) be forced to mitigate the risks.
If a user places them self at risk they should have the option to have that risk mitigated. If mitigating the risk causes the user no pain (no extra user action) then automatically mitigating the risk is fine; otherwise, risk mitigation should be opt-in/out-able.
If a system exposes some other entity which has control of the system to risk, that entity may require that if the system is used, the risks to that entity be mitigated. Thus users will be forced to accept the security measures. While some users will try to work around the measures, the measures are required. The measures should be made as easy as possible to accept, though education, reduction of overhead to the user, etc.
This applies to all kinds of security, including law. Drug laws are a good example. "Society" feels at risk from drugs, imposes security measures against drugs, and some "users of society" work around those measures to do drugs anyway. Society tries to make the laws easier to obey through education (propaganda?), by limiting access to drugs, by making drug use riskier, etc. The people that have problems with these laws are those people which do not agree with the risk assessment by society (many) and those which do not care about society but do agree with the risk assessment (few).
Computer security is the same. People have problems with measures when the measures pain them without convincing them of the worth of the cost. You can convince the user by: - Reducing the cost of the measure to the user (that's UI work). - Increasing the "return on investment" of the measure perceived by the user (that's education).
So: - DON'T force security measures on users when the measures only protect the user and when the user doesn't want them. - DO make the purpose of measures clear. - DO make the measures as unobtrusive as possible.
Now a lot of risks involving computers do impact more than just the user. Consider worms where local host security hurts your neighbors (as your machine attacks them). This complicates things.
As a human being, you must decide whether you want to force measures on someone that they don't want, to protect only them. I don't like other people forcing decisions on me, so I would implore developers to make such measures optional (on by default if the cost is low and benefit high). You must also decide, whether you will force measures on users that don't want them, for the good of someone other than the user. As an application developer, you must consider that any measure that you force on a user, when they don't want the measure, will be seen by that user as a pain in the ass and will help support competing applications. Also, implementation measures will be criticized for usability just as any part of your application is criticized. There's nothing special about security in terms of usability. UI components for features that users don't understand are distracting and confusing, and bad UI components for features that users do understand are just plain frustrating.
It has always been cool, to a lot of people, to follow the crowd. Why else is GAP popular? It's cool to belong. No one likes the kid who just stands there screaming for attention, and that's just about as different and in your face as you can get.:)
But I know what you mean - if everyone had creative ideas, and took them to fruition the world would be a lot more interesting.
Well, yah I cringe too. But I think that I cringe out of elitism, to be honest, because what I do isn't special any more. I've had a web page since optimizing for Mosaic was useful and have used a personal web site as an outlet for a long time. It used to be special to have a web site. I've published art, journals, photography, etc.
But putting my own insecurity asside, I can see how blogging or photo blogging is important. It enables people to publish. Most people can't be bothered to learn about publishing - even using frontpage is too much - forget about W3C valid XHTML, CSS, etc. Requiring that content authors also handle publishing excludes a lot of people from having content on the web. Blogs allow more people access to a voice in the medium that is the Internet.
Now, of course, more voices do make sifting through the noise to find what you're interested in a little more difficult. However, that cost is something that will decrease over time as more means of social moderation/networking become available. Given that the cost of more voices approaches zero, the net benefit to the richness and bounty of communication will be positive by far. I would argue that the benefit is already net positive.
I do miss the days when I was special for having a web page though. But remember, the specialness was in being at the bleeding edge of the Internet - if you want to stay special you've got to stay on the edge. Keeping up with change is hard. That shouldn't be news to anyone.
Oh man, that's awesome. I'm finally getting to watch the Crossfire episode... the "sniff his throne" remark seems to be metaphorical:) But hey, I didn't claim to watch the Daily show regularly.:)
To be fair, the, "it was on Comedy Central", defense was in response to criticism that Stewart apparently sniffed the chair of Kerry after interviewing him; it was not in response to criticism of the points that he was making on Crossfire . His point was simply that not every remark/action on the Daily show was serious political commentary supporting Stewart's viewpoint.
It's a good thing that the switch didn't attempt to detect acceleration as well (for some other purpose). It would could have been pretty disastrous (even more so?) to have the shoot fire during take off.:)
Well, lets see... based on my experience, pretty good (based on downloads from P2P networks) A/V quality for a 1 hour show (45 min vid post commercials) occupies ~250 megs. That means that you could fit ~3500 1h shows on a TB. If you have 50 channels that you want to record with a pretty high repeat rate (lets say, 90% repeats), recordable shows would be running concurrently. So, 5 shows per hour, you could fill a 1 TB disk in 700 hours (about 1 month). So, if he'd need at least 10 TB/year for that video project. Say it costs him $1/GB for that (hardware and maintenance)... that'd be 10,000 dollars a year in storage costs. Given a customer base, the cost could be past to customers as:
So, he doesn't really need THAT many customers to make it workable. Decoding from the sat and decoding to a user's coax would be an interesting problem. Maintaining a cluster of boxes and keeping the data index/available would be somewhat painful too.
Now, how much would he need to store most of the popular shows of history? Going by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_pr ograms that's at least 1000 series. If each series has 5 seasons of 25 episodes, and most are half are half hour shows, thats... 93750 hours of TV, or ~135 TB. That's like 550 250GB hard disks.:) Maybe a few years down the road...
I have to say that passing objects instead of streams of untyped bytes is neat. They may have screwed up the implementation, but having typed data passing in and out of command line tools would be awesome. Consider how cool it'd be if you had command line tools that spit out things like image, HTML, and music objects, etc. The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data; you could do a lot more on the normal command line, especially with a framebuffer. Also, apps could do input validation through type checking.
We do use heirarchies to organize some concepts, but there's a lot more to it. There are aspects of context, relation, inheritance, etc that are not expressable via simple heirarchy.
Check out the "protege" project - it's an ontology editor. Ontology is a related problem. http://protege.stanford.edu/
There are a lot of problems in file system design, many of which are unsolved. The field is still really very young.
They say Friday -> Memorial day weekend. That sounds like they're suggesting an 8 day availability. It's interesting to read that over 8 days about 600,000 downloads occured. I would assume that security update downloads are a bit more frequent. How many XP installs are there out there? I'd be interested to see about how many people don't apply security patches.:)
SARS is a nasty flu like illness, and I do think that too much hysteria is being generated over the problem; however, SARS is very dangerous. SARS is not so much dangerous because it has a high mortality rate, but rather because it is very contagious and likely to require medical support; imagine how the health care systems of the world would handle a full out spread of SARS. Hospitals would be overloaded and it would be impossible to treat immune suppressed people like AIDS, cancer and transplant patients. The mortality rate of SARS would likely also rise as it would become more difficult to support the infected. Exposure to the elderly - those most likely to die from the disease - would also rise (the elderly don't get to China as often as business people, but they sure go to the mall).
It's perfectly legal. You have to pay to talk to a consultant? What's wrong with having to pay to talk to Joe Blow?
It would go like this:
You attempt to send an email, but you get a bounce saying, "In order to send me an email, you need to put X amount into the account Y." Upon receiving such a bounce, you would be prompted, "do you want to pay and send again?". If you hit, "yes", your email client would, via some payment scheme, pay the X amount into Y account. The payment server would issue you a digital, cryptographically signed, receipt. You would attach the reciept to the message and send it again.
People could choose to accept messages without payment from specific addresses, etc.
If the recipient, after having been paid, refused to accept the message, you could theoretically take them to small claims court or something.
This scheme presents two problems: - We don't have an established micropayment scheme - Can we handle so many bounces from an infrastructure perspective? We may want to build a more optimized email delivery protocol for this.
Pay the recipient. That way, recipients can charge whatever they like, and can authorize some sources to send for free.
This depends on a well established micropayment system and could be done without changing much in the way of the current system. You'd need a micropayment service, a new email header field and some client side modifications (or server side to be more smooth). The email header field would contain a token that would be given to the sender upon payment to the micropayment server. The account on the micropayment server could implement various policies - like, allow this sender to send me mail for free, give 20% of my earnings to my ISP, etc. The email client (or server on which the account lives) could just drop mail that doesn't have a valid payment token when it is received. Senders could have a configuration setting in their client that says, "auto pay any per message price that's less than 5 cents". Of course, email viruses could become more expensive given such an autopay option:)
That's just one possible implementation, but I think that the receiving mail server should receive the payment - to whom the mail server gives the payment would be an agreement between the ISP and the recipient.
I'm just saying that with the complete contrast in technology, training and supplies, much of the American forces stand much less risk than even Iraqi civilians.
I agree that a true democracy, especially a world one, is infeasable. My point was more that the United States, which often claims to promote democracy, is actually working against the democratic ideal on the world stage by ignoring the opinion of much of the world's population. Know what I mean?
Wow, at ~800 comments, I doubt that anyone will read this, but, what the hell:)
I think that most people will acknowledge that the removal of Saddam (and other unstable leaders/organizations) is something to be strived for. The decision to take military action towards that goal is not what concerns me. My concern lays in the fact that the current US administration has shown contempt and arrogence when dealing with other nations and has not exhausted oportunities for a non-lethal solution to their problems. Diplomacy was attempted only as a PR mechanism - not as a genuine attempt to involve the rest of the population of the world in important decisions. In this war, the United States is choosing to sacrifice Iraqis towards the goal of liberation/stability; the noble thing to do would be to sacrifice Americans or willing allies, including some Iraqis (lets look at Iraqis killed VS Americans killed).
The United States, being a proponent of democracy, should promote democracy for the world - not just for nations. The United States is a citizen of the world; money and power shouldn't give it a stronger voice than anyone else. The actions of the United States reminds me of the recent elections in Iraq - a ballot with only one option. The rest of the world shouldn't be ignored; the rest of the world wants to be involved and respected as citizens of the world. Refusing to acknowledge the value offered by the rest of the world is insulting and alienating. Please, hear us, United States.
Slashdot Mirror
According to CNN , the White House just gave a blogger, Garrett M. Graff (of Fishbowl DC) a press pass. If blogging doesn't count as journalism, it will soon.
Great, so the people who have paid nothing for the specific "copy" that you have "stolen" can sue you for millions, but the people who have actually paid something for the particular copy that you have stolen can sue you for thousands.
It's an issue of intent. The court did not rule that it is illegal to link to copyrighted material. It is still legal to link to copyrighted works that are published legally.
The court found that the uploaders of the MP3s were effectively making an unauthorized performance. The guy publishing the links knew that the original upload was illegal. He thought, "it's nice that they are 'performing' via the Internet - I'll try to get them a bigger audience by making more people know about the 'performance'." He was trying to make someone else's copyright violation reach more people and thus cause more damage. You may argue that illegal performance doesn't cause damage, but the court accepts that it does, with precident. It also assumes that the larger the audience the greater the damage, which again you may argue.
Unfortunately, the rights holders did not have to do much to prove damage; that's the problem with IP violation claims - it's really hard to measure damages as it's all about predicting the future.
It is not the same logic. This would be the same logic as a person funding robbers to buy guns for a cut of the proceeds.
My WAP is connected to an 'untrusted' interface on my firewall, such that users can access the web and DNS only. The SSID is, with "addr" replaced with my street address, "come_4_beer_at_addr". Haven't had any takers, yet. :)
Don't be so sure about nursing homes!
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http://www.ntnews.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,
http://www.walnet.org/csis/news/wo
They're not saying that these are problems - they're gotchas! They are behaviors that you would not normally expect. Once you understand them, you can work with them, but before then, they will not be what you expect.
People do not view a computer as a specific component of a system, they see it as the system. If the system fails because of a power sag, that's a system problem. He's saying that computer systems should always ship with some kind of UPS solution, but ideally more elegant and specialized than what is currently available. We can't ignore room for improvement just because we can technically solve the problem with a current tech UPS. :)
A doctor shouldn't say, "you don't have some horrible medical illness" if the patient has symptoms that (s)he believes are significant. Being unable to explain symptoms does not mean that there is no cause for the symptoms. If a doctor runs out of ideas, they should be honest about that and help to find another professional who may have useful ideas. This is the way to help people - giving up does not help and causes doctor shopping.
If a patient comes to you who has seen other professionals, who have done tests, I hope that doctors don't start at the top of the diagnoses tree... Doctors should phone the other professional and get the patient's history.
Security is about mitigating risks. Users can not be asked to mitigate risks that they don't understand or believe in. Users must either a) choose to mitigate the risks or b) be forced to mitigate the risks.
If a user places them self at risk they should have the option to have that risk mitigated. If mitigating the risk causes the user no pain (no extra user action) then automatically mitigating the risk is fine; otherwise, risk mitigation should be opt-in/out-able.
If a system exposes some other entity which has control of the system to risk, that entity may require that if the system is used, the risks to that entity be mitigated. Thus users will be forced to accept the security measures. While some users will try to work around the measures, the measures are required. The measures should be made as easy as possible to accept, though education, reduction of overhead to the user, etc.
This applies to all kinds of security, including law. Drug laws are a good example. "Society" feels at risk from drugs, imposes security measures against drugs, and some "users of society" work around those measures to do drugs anyway. Society tries to make the laws easier to obey through education (propaganda?), by limiting access to drugs, by making drug use riskier, etc. The people that have problems with these laws are those people which do not agree with the risk assessment by society (many) and those which do not care about society but do agree with the risk assessment (few).
Computer security is the same. People have problems with measures when the measures pain them without convincing them of the worth of the cost. You can convince the user by:
- Reducing the cost of the measure to the user (that's UI work).
- Increasing the "return on investment" of the measure perceived by the user (that's education).
So:
- DON'T force security measures on users when the measures only protect the user and when the user doesn't want them.
- DO make the purpose of measures clear.
- DO make the measures as unobtrusive as possible.
Now a lot of risks involving computers do impact more than just the user. Consider worms where local host security hurts your neighbors (as your machine attacks them). This complicates things.
As a human being, you must decide whether you want to force measures on someone that they don't want, to protect only them. I don't like other people forcing decisions on me, so I would implore developers to make such measures optional (on by default if the cost is low and benefit high). You must also decide, whether you will force measures on users that don't want them, for the good of someone other than the user. As an application developer, you must consider that any measure that you force on a user, when they don't want the measure, will be seen by that user as a pain in the ass and will help support competing applications. Also, implementation measures will be criticized for usability just as any part of your application is criticized. There's nothing special about security in terms of usability. UI components for features that users don't understand are distracting and confusing, and bad UI components for features that users do understand are just plain frustrating.
It has always been cool, to a lot of people, to follow the crowd. Why else is GAP popular? It's cool to belong. No one likes the kid who just stands there screaming for attention, and that's just about as different and in your face as you can get. :)
But I know what you mean - if everyone had creative ideas, and took them to fruition the world would be a lot more interesting.
Well, yah I cringe too. But I think that I cringe out of elitism, to be honest, because what I do isn't special any more. I've had a web page since optimizing for Mosaic was useful and have used a personal web site as an outlet for a long time. It used to be special to have a web site. I've published art, journals, photography, etc.
But putting my own insecurity asside, I can see how blogging or photo blogging is important. It enables people to publish. Most people can't be bothered to learn about publishing - even using frontpage is too much - forget about W3C valid XHTML, CSS, etc. Requiring that content authors also handle publishing excludes a lot of people from having content on the web. Blogs allow more people access to a voice in the medium that is the Internet.
Now, of course, more voices do make sifting through the noise to find what you're interested in a little more difficult. However, that cost is something that will decrease over time as more means of social moderation/networking become available. Given that the cost of more voices approaches zero, the net benefit to the richness and bounty of communication will be positive by far. I would argue that the benefit is already net positive.
I do miss the days when I was special for having a web page though. But remember, the specialness was in being at the bleeding edge of the Internet - if you want to stay special you've got to stay on the edge. Keeping up with change is hard. That shouldn't be news to anyone.
Oh man, that's awesome. I'm finally getting to watch the Crossfire episode... the "sniff his throne" remark seems to be metaphorical :) But hey, I didn't claim to watch the Daily show regularly. :)
To be fair, the, "it was on Comedy Central", defense was in response to criticism that Stewart apparently sniffed the chair of Kerry after interviewing him; it was not in response to criticism of the points that he was making on Crossfire . His point was simply that not every remark/action on the Daily show was serious political commentary supporting Stewart's viewpoint.
It's a good thing that the switch didn't attempt to detect acceleration as well (for some other purpose). It would could have been pretty disastrous (even more so?) to have the shoot fire during take off. :)
Well, lets see... based on my experience, pretty good (based on downloads from P2P networks) A/V quality for a 1 hour show (45 min vid post commercials) occupies ~250 megs. That means that you could fit ~3500 1h shows on a TB. If you have 50 channels that you want to record with a pretty high repeat rate (lets say, 90% repeats), recordable shows would be running concurrently. So, 5 shows per hour, you could fill a 1 TB disk in 700 hours (about 1 month). So, if he'd need at least 10 TB/year for that video project. Say it costs him $1/GB for that (hardware and maintenance)... that'd be 10,000 dollars a year in storage costs. Given a customer base, the cost could be past to customers as:
r ograms that's at least 1000 series. If each series has 5 seasons of 25 episodes, and most are half are half hour shows, thats... :) Maybe a few years down the road...
(loose calcs)
10 customer houses = $85/month/customer
100 customer houses = $8/month/customer
1000 customer houses = $1/month/customer
So, he doesn't really need THAT many customers to make it workable. Decoding from the sat and decoding to a user's coax would be an interesting problem. Maintaining a cluster of boxes and keeping the data index/available would be somewhat painful too.
Now, how much would he need to store most of the popular shows of history? Going by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_p
93750 hours of TV, or ~135 TB. That's like 550 250GB hard disks.
I used to have a site in 1997 at matman.megaepic.com. My email address was matman@megaepic.com. Woooo.
I have to say that passing objects instead of streams of untyped bytes is neat. They may have screwed up the implementation, but having typed data passing in and out of command line tools would be awesome. Consider how cool it'd be if you had command line tools that spit out things like image, HTML, and music objects, etc. The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data; you could do a lot more on the normal command line, especially with a framebuffer. Also, apps could do input validation through type checking.
We do use heirarchies to organize some concepts, but there's a lot more to it. There are aspects of context, relation, inheritance, etc that are not expressable via simple heirarchy.
Check out the "protege" project - it's an ontology editor. Ontology is a related problem. http://protege.stanford.edu/
There are a lot of problems in file system design, many of which are unsolved. The field is still really very young.
They say Friday -> Memorial day weekend. That sounds like they're suggesting an 8 day availability. It's interesting to read that over 8 days about 600,000 downloads occured. I would assume that security update downloads are a bit more frequent. How many XP installs are there out there? I'd be interested to see about how many people don't apply security patches. :)
SARS is a nasty flu like illness, and I do think that too much hysteria is being generated over the problem; however, SARS is very dangerous. SARS is not so much dangerous because it has a high mortality rate, but rather because it is very contagious and likely to require medical support; imagine how the health care systems of the world would handle a full out spread of SARS. Hospitals would be overloaded and it would be impossible to treat immune suppressed people like AIDS, cancer and transplant patients. The mortality rate of SARS would likely also rise as it would become more difficult to support the infected. Exposure to the elderly - those most likely to die from the disease - would also rise (the elderly don't get to China as often as business people, but they sure go to the mall).
It's perfectly legal. You have to pay to talk to a consultant? What's wrong with having to pay to talk to Joe Blow?
It would go like this:
You attempt to send an email, but you get a bounce saying, "In order to send me an email, you need to put X amount into the account Y." Upon receiving such a bounce, you would be prompted, "do you want to pay and send again?". If you hit, "yes", your email client would, via some payment scheme, pay the X amount into Y account. The payment server would issue you a digital, cryptographically signed, receipt. You would attach the reciept to the message and send it again.
People could choose to accept messages without payment from specific addresses, etc.
If the recipient, after having been paid, refused to accept the message, you could theoretically take them to small claims court or something.
This scheme presents two problems:
- We don't have an established micropayment scheme
- Can we handle so many bounces from an infrastructure perspective? We may want to build a more optimized email delivery protocol for this.
Pay the recipient. That way, recipients can charge whatever they like, and can authorize some sources to send for free.
:)
This depends on a well established micropayment system and could be done without changing much in the way of the current system. You'd need a micropayment service, a new email header field and some client side modifications (or server side to be more smooth). The email header field would contain a token that would be given to the sender upon payment to the micropayment server. The account on the micropayment server could implement various policies - like, allow this sender to send me mail for free, give 20% of my earnings to my ISP, etc. The email client (or server on which the account lives) could just drop mail that doesn't have a valid payment token when it is received. Senders could have a configuration setting in their client that says, "auto pay any per message price that's less than 5 cents". Of course, email viruses could become more expensive given such an autopay option
That's just one possible implementation, but I think that the receiving mail server should receive the payment - to whom the mail server gives the payment would be an agreement between the ISP and the recipient.
I'm just saying that with the complete contrast in technology, training and supplies, much of the American forces stand much less risk than even Iraqi civilians.
I agree that a true democracy, especially a world one, is infeasable. My point was more that the United States, which often claims to promote democracy, is actually working against the democratic ideal on the world stage by ignoring the opinion of much of the world's population. Know what I mean?
Wow, at ~800 comments, I doubt that anyone will read this, but, what the hell :)
I think that most people will acknowledge that the removal of Saddam (and other unstable leaders/organizations) is something to be strived for. The decision to take military action towards that goal is not what concerns me. My concern lays in the fact that the current US administration has shown contempt and arrogence when dealing with other nations and has not exhausted oportunities for a non-lethal solution to their problems. Diplomacy was attempted only as a PR mechanism - not as a genuine attempt to involve the rest of the population of the world in important decisions. In this war, the United States is choosing to sacrifice Iraqis towards the goal of liberation/stability; the noble thing to do would be to sacrifice Americans or willing allies, including some Iraqis (lets look at Iraqis killed VS Americans killed).
The United States, being a proponent of democracy, should promote democracy for the world - not just for nations. The United States is a citizen of the world; money and power shouldn't give it a stronger voice than anyone else. The actions of the United States reminds me of the recent elections in Iraq - a ballot with only one option. The rest of the world shouldn't be ignored; the rest of the world wants to be involved and respected as citizens of the world. Refusing to acknowledge the value offered by the rest of the world is insulting and alienating. Please, hear us, United States.