Binaries (static or not) are not such a bad idea. They may even work on a different target OS, if the emulation layer is set up correctly. Using Linux's version of GoogleEarth, Maple etc... here on FreeBSD for example.
With current broadband penetration everyone can do the same.
Done that for many years, while I had a static IP address. However, with dynamic IP ranges with forced disconnections every 24h and new IP, you'll discover that e-mail becomes more difficult... even if you use the likes of dyndns. Especially since many postmasters configure their servers to reject connections from known ranges of dynamic/residential IP blocks by default. Oh yeah, and try to get a reverse DNS entry for your dynamic IP that matches the A record of your postfix server: good luck trying.
Where does this idea of the peaceful alien come from?
And where does the idea of a hostile alien come from? Maybe we can divide Humanity in three camps: those who believe aliens are hostile until proven otherwise, those who believe aliens to be friendly until proven otherwise, and those who don't believe aliens exist -- and won't believe it even if they saw them (quoth Comical Ali: "there are no US tanks in Baghdad!" -- oh, and where those tanks actually friendly or hostile? Hmmm...).
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted?
Obviously, aliens' DRM is a lot more advanced than ours: even their signal is perfectly hidden from us humans who are too cheap to buy their premium licenses in the iAlienTV online shop on Alpha Centauri. They can't let us watch their programs for free and steal their commercials, right?
Actually, Google has been forced in many countries to censor search results. This has gone largely unnoticed. Only when $EVIL_GOVERNMENT==China do they rebel now? Wouldn't they be more credible if they refused censorship, no matter what... and threatened to move out of DMCA-land and head to a country where they could get away with it, if need be?
And expect the anonymous overlay networks (a la freenet et al.) to replace it. However, we're in a sad state in general when only anonymous speech remains truly free speech.
According to this, only Australia, Canada, USA, EU, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland are currently part of that treaty. This (currently) leaves more than enough room for a whole lot of other countries (some of them as big as Russia and China) that are not part of it.
All you say is true, and I don't see a change of constitution happening anytime soon in the current political microclimate. However, Germany also has the reputation for constantly eroding their own Grundgesetz over the decades. I wouldn't hold my breath that they won't amend one of their articles with a classic: "Das Nähere regelt ein Bundesgesetz" as with so many other fundamental rights being restricted per lower-order laws or even administrative decrees. Oh, btw, what about "Eine Zensur findet nicht statt."? That's not even restricted, but the "Zensursula" law has still just been signed by the President and therefore legally in effect (though not enforced by the current administration).
In return, we will arrange for you to have legal digital versions of the songs in question via one of the listed services (iTunes, etc)
So, basically that would be an offer to exchange perfectly usable MP3s which can be played on all devices against DRM-infested files that would be useless on most platforms? How is that offer better than rm -rf $HOME/mp3-song-collection.tar.bz2; dd if=/dev/random of=$HOME/riaa-approved-song-collection.tar.bz2 ?
If i was a botnet author, i would keep a list of my zombies and code the bots in a way they respond to a secret password.
Well, bots could in fact contact a C&C, and the C&C could send them a new password to reseed the random number generator that creates the domain names. This way, the whole sequence of C&C domains changes to something completely different and any pre-computed list of domains that the court has ordered to be blocked would soon become obsolete. However, if someone managed to knock all C&C's down before they updated the zombies with a new seed, all those zombies would be effectively orphaned... as long as the whole sequence of random domains that they could create has been locked preemptively as well (or a very long prefix of it so that it takes the zombies years to reconnect).
If a registrar pulls the domain from the registry, it doesn't help you that DNS is hosted elsewhere. Your only chance in this situation is to have backup domains with another registrar, preferably domains that are handled by a different registry altogether (i.e. a different ccTLD or gTLD), and educated your visitors to memorize those backup domains as well.
Development still hasn't been opened and there is no public repository development model.
ON sources (i.e. the base sources + kernel, something like FreeBSD's/usr/src tree) are under Mercurial though, and one can easily clone the repository. So they're moving in the right direction.
Instead of just putting checksums in your backups, why not add (block-level) reed-solomon error correcting codes? Like in parchive for files, and dvdisaster for whole DVD-R images...?
But if a virus is GPLed, shouldn't it install its source code on the target machines too (as the author doesn't provide alternative ways to download the source)?
Yes... until those neighbors get caught for copyright infringement and locked out of the Net as well. Adding to this that secured wifi will become increasingly common by default, especially in the context of hyper-severe DMCA/ACTA-like laws, how long will open wifi access remain an option in the field? If at all, we need our own backbones outside of current legislation. That ultimately means our own (pirate) network of LEO satellites, administered in a distributed manner. Just wondering how to shoot them in orbit though (building them being by far the easier part)!
If everybody encrypts everything, even just using self signed certificates, ISPs can no longer monitor the traffic.
This reminds me of a talk that Phil Zimmerman (of PGP fame) gave so many years ago, advocating the adoption of cryptography by the general public. While it was technically possible back then, though clumsy (hey, btw, why aren't we encrypting our e-mails yet on a very large scale?!), it should be totally transparent to the user nowadays. Maybe the time has indeed come to encrypt everything.
We're inching closer to a point where something has to give in this system. I say nerds unite. The internet was built on the backs of our nerd fore-bearers. Time for the nerds of today to stand up and defend it.
Amen to that brother! But looking back at reality, we nerds are a minuscule minority lost in an ocean of mediocrity. And even with all possible publicity, the best that we've reached so far are some 7.5% for the Swedish Pirate Party, and 2% for the German PP, both highly developed countries sensitive to issues such as privacy and individual rights. Everybody else votes differently and seems to condone the way copyright maximalists are killing the free exchange of ideas.
A nation-wide blacklist is what HADOPI is all about (in France). Think global-HADOPI, and you've got a worldwide (or at least ACTA-wide) blacklist... the wet dream of all "intellectual property" pundits. Good luck trying to sign up with any ISP in most parts of the "free" and not-so-free world once on that no-fly^W no-surf list. As for Freenet, how would you access it without Internet access? Sneakernet (swapping CDs -- or, more accurately TB-big HDDs -- with your friends) is an offline activity so it is out of scope of the 3-strike scheme.
You can't totally eliminate location information in a network. After all, routing tables are necessary to point to your host, which has to be physically located somewhere. And IP is a lot better than, say, plain old telephone numbers or other location-prefix based addressing schemes, because nothing prevents you from spreading an IP netblock all around the globe. But yes, evil stuff like GeoIP needs to go.
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Binaries (static or not) are not such a bad idea. They may even work on a different target OS, if the emulation layer is set up correctly. Using Linux's version of GoogleEarth, Maple etc... here on FreeBSD for example.
Done that for many years, while I had a static IP address. However, with dynamic IP ranges with forced disconnections every 24h and new IP, you'll discover that e-mail becomes more difficult... even if you use the likes of dyndns. Especially since many postmasters configure their servers to reject connections from known ranges of dynamic/residential IP blocks by default. Oh yeah, and try to get a reverse DNS entry for your dynamic IP that matches the A record of your postfix server: good luck trying.
Some think that a legal entity has no honor at all...
And where does the idea of a hostile alien come from? Maybe we can divide Humanity in three camps: those who believe aliens are hostile until proven otherwise, those who believe aliens to be friendly until proven otherwise, and those who don't believe aliens exist -- and won't believe it even if they saw them (quoth Comical Ali: "there are no US tanks in Baghdad!" -- oh, and where those tanks actually friendly or hostile? Hmmm...).
Obviously, aliens' DRM is a lot more advanced than ours: even their signal is perfectly hidden from us humans who are too cheap to buy their premium licenses in the iAlienTV online shop on Alpha Centauri. They can't let us watch their programs for free and steal their commercials, right?
Yes. In Germany Hustler Magazine would very likely have lost their case against Falwell because of this particular restriction to free speech.
Actually, Google has been forced in many countries to censor search results. This has gone largely unnoticed. Only when $EVIL_GOVERNMENT==China do they rebel now? Wouldn't they be more credible if they refused censorship, no matter what... and threatened to move out of DMCA-land and head to a country where they could get away with it, if need be?
And they'll call it gFusion?
Isn't this the Story of Mel, all over again, just on a higher level of abstraction?
And expect the anonymous overlay networks (a la freenet et al.) to replace it. However, we're in a sad state in general when only anonymous speech remains truly free speech.
According to this, only Australia, Canada, USA, EU, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland are currently part of that treaty. This (currently) leaves more than enough room for a whole lot of other countries (some of them as big as Russia and China) that are not part of it.
Yes, but ACTA is not the whole world.
All you say is true, and I don't see a change of constitution happening anytime soon in the current political microclimate. However, Germany also has the reputation for constantly eroding their own Grundgesetz over the decades. I wouldn't hold my breath that they won't amend one of their articles with a classic: "Das Nähere regelt ein Bundesgesetz" as with so many other fundamental rights being restricted per lower-order laws or even administrative decrees. Oh, btw, what about "Eine Zensur findet nicht statt."? That's not even restricted, but the "Zensursula" law has still just been signed by the President and therefore legally in effect (though not enforced by the current administration).
So, basically that would be an offer to exchange perfectly usable MP3s which can be played on all devices against DRM-infested files that would be useless on most platforms? How is that offer better than rm -rf $HOME/mp3-song-collection.tar.bz2; dd if=/dev/random of=$HOME/riaa-approved-song-collection.tar.bz2 ?
Well, bots could in fact contact a C&C, and the C&C could send them a new password to reseed the random number generator that creates the domain names. This way, the whole sequence of C&C domains changes to something completely different and any pre-computed list of domains that the court has ordered to be blocked would soon become obsolete. However, if someone managed to knock all C&C's down before they updated the zombies with a new seed, all those zombies would be effectively orphaned... as long as the whole sequence of random domains that they could create has been locked preemptively as well (or a very long prefix of it so that it takes the zombies years to reconnect).
If a registrar pulls the domain from the registry, it doesn't help you that DNS is hosted elsewhere. Your only chance in this situation is to have backup domains with another registrar, preferably domains that are handled by a different registry altogether (i.e. a different ccTLD or gTLD), and educated your visitors to memorize those backup domains as well.
ON sources (i.e. the base sources + kernel, something like FreeBSD's /usr/src tree) are under Mercurial though, and one can easily clone the repository. So they're moving in the right direction.
Instead of just putting checksums in your backups, why not add (block-level) reed-solomon error correcting codes? Like in parchive for files, and dvdisaster for whole DVD-R images...?
But if a virus is GPLed, shouldn't it install its source code on the target machines too (as the author doesn't provide alternative ways to download the source)?
Yes... until those neighbors get caught for copyright infringement and locked out of the Net as well. Adding to this that secured wifi will become increasingly common by default, especially in the context of hyper-severe DMCA/ACTA-like laws, how long will open wifi access remain an option in the field? If at all, we need our own backbones outside of current legislation. That ultimately means our own (pirate) network of LEO satellites, administered in a distributed manner. Just wondering how to shoot them in orbit though (building them being by far the easier part)!
This reminds me of a talk that Phil Zimmerman (of PGP fame) gave so many years ago, advocating the adoption of cryptography by the general public. While it was technically possible back then, though clumsy (hey, btw, why aren't we encrypting our e-mails yet on a very large scale?!), it should be totally transparent to the user nowadays. Maybe the time has indeed come to encrypt everything.
Amen to that brother! But looking back at reality, we nerds are a minuscule minority lost in an ocean of mediocrity. And even with all possible publicity, the best that we've reached so far are some 7.5% for the Swedish Pirate Party, and 2% for the German PP, both highly developed countries sensitive to issues such as privacy and individual rights. Everybody else votes differently and seems to condone the way copyright maximalists are killing the free exchange of ideas.
A nation-wide blacklist is what HADOPI is all about (in France). Think global-HADOPI, and you've got a worldwide (or at least ACTA-wide) blacklist... the wet dream of all "intellectual property" pundits. Good luck trying to sign up with any ISP in most parts of the "free" and not-so-free world once on that no-fly^W no-surf list. As for Freenet, how would you access it without Internet access? Sneakernet (swapping CDs -- or, more accurately TB-big HDDs -- with your friends) is an offline activity so it is out of scope of the 3-strike scheme.
You can't totally eliminate location information in a network. After all, routing tables are necessary to point to your host, which has to be physically located somewhere. And IP is a lot better than, say, plain old telephone numbers or other location-prefix based addressing schemes, because nothing prevents you from spreading an IP netblock all around the globe. But yes, evil stuff like GeoIP needs to go.
Not trusting "common sense" is actually very reasonable sometimes...