What I don't understand is why do religions get special treatment from any other philosophy?
Maybe because other philosophies seldom attracts so many fanatics who would wreak havoc if you dared to question their theories... and in order to protect society, they get special treatment a la "be nice to the 800lb gorilla out there, he's easily provoked to commit violent acts."?
Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
Move your servers to a more free-speech friendly country.
Yes... except that we are quickly running out of free-speech friendly countries (Canada was one of the most free). Soon we'll have to seriously think about putting pirate senders in orbit, just like the old off-shore pirate radio stations of the last century.
What do we do when bandwidth is not enough? We outsource the data and post only magnet links. I could easily imagine a server in space continuously broadcasting nothing more than pages and pages full of magnet links.
Very sound advice for non-cryptographers.
BTW, I'm wondering if stacking many stream ciphers on top of each other would make cryptanalysis harder. i.e. is E_1(E_2(...(E_n(plaintext,k_n),...),k_2),k_1) stronger than just E_1(plaintext,k_1)? Of course, where all the keys k_i are independent, and all ciphers E_i are different -- and not just the reverse or the same so that they will cancel themselves out. Any cryptanalyst out there who could answer this?
this decade Hurd's been all about switching microkernels like they are systematically proving that microkernels suck by attempting to implement hurd on each one.
No, it sucks only on Mach. On top of L4, it was unportable.
The GPL allows you to modify the original work. The bible, however, clearly states that it is the word of God and should not be modified. It is therefore not GPL-compatible.
Because C++ lacks garbage collection, people end up retaining far more memory than they need to.
Not so with smart pointers: they are part of TR1 already.
Because algorithms are far harder to express in C++, people end up using brute force algorithms (linear search, etc.) a lot.
STL provides excellent containers, and with TR1/Boost, you have hashed containers, regexp etc...
Because templates need specially compiled versions for each combination of template arguments, you end up with dozens of different instances of basically the same code.
You don't need to over-templify your code. In fact, for web apps, you'd be using POCO or similar libraries that are rather light on templates (though they use them too, of course).
IMHO, many C++ developers write bad code, because they don't use current techniques and libraries. That's the problem with C++ development. C++ used properly can be extremely efficient.
You're right, of course. But so what? Piracy is WAY cooler than boring copyright infrin...euhh...what? Anyone who didn't want to be a cool pirate as a kid? Any girl who hasn't dreamed of a romance with a handsome fearless pirate?
Industries that generate significant export dollars are guaranteed a hearing in Washington.
True.
Bonus points also for an industry that has the power to sway public opinion at home. MPAA and RIAA can easily make and destroy politicians.
Bonus points for cultural exports.
Not so many anymore. In the 70-ies and 80-ies, a LOT more US films and series were available in third world countries. Due to insane licensing costs nowadays, US cultural exports have dropped significantly there.
Bonus points for clean industries.
To decrypt Blu-Ray DRM in consumer players requires significantly more electricity than, say, DVD. Maybe they're not so green after all?
Google makes no data available, they just link to it.
This is the defense line of every bittorrent indexing site too, since.torrent files (and more recently magnet links) contain no copyrighted data at all. Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Even Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay, has been hard pressed to change their Copyright Law by adding "making available" to the list of taboos, which they did, thereby outlawing TPB, but also potentially every site like Google and Bing that fail to comply with DMCA takedown notices (even if DMCA is a US-only law... for now).
What this speaks -- loudly and clearly -- to me is that the national tapping of any and all communication lines is complete.
Not necessarily. They could have been tracking a CP ring for quite some time in a focused manner, and the poor 22yo dude was just at the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught in the trap. A constant monitoring was probably not in place.
I'm sure that both the EFF and the ACLU will jump in here any minute now...
Unlikely. It's way too unpopular to jump to the rescue of alleged CPers. EFF and ACLU may also think: hey, if we did that, we'd lose a lot of potential donations and it would harm us. Unfortunately, it's eminently political, and in no way related to objective guilt or innocence.
It just makes the case for using cryptography in everything you do online.
Yes, it does.
But using crypto still inconveniences people and security is hard. Sadly, people are lazy when it comes to security, so they won't move en masse to more secure computing anytime soon.
It may be that they finally laid off Zimmerman because they have enough horsepower to break anything that bubbles up to the surface as potentially interesting.
Horsepower is irrelevant, if all you have is brute force. However, if NSA mathematicians managed to solve the problem behind factoring big integers in efficient time, then yes, every (AES-) ephemeral key protected by public key crypto would be visible in real-time. But that's very unlikely. Should it become known, we'll quickly switch over to elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
What's more interesting: how long until they ban cryptography, or make using crypto a crime, unless you have a government license?
Perhaps even the FBI is posting it as well, who knows.
Who knows indeed. But as a store-and-forward network, there's so much decoupling between upload and download that I fail to see the use of the FBI using entrapment there, as it simply won't work.
But what's not impossible: people who constantly deal with forbidden stuff can end up being hooked to it. DEA drug addicts, or perhaps FBI CP addicts could exist, hopefully in isolated rare cases. But those won't be wearing their DEA or FBI hat when acting against the law; it would be their private wrongdoing.
Secondly, the internet has become more centralised. Despite the hype behind Web 2.0, the majority of new internet technologies and sites are controlled by a smaller number of huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
That's not what I'm worried about, as nothing prevent people from choosing alternatives for hosting their stuff, including putting it on their own local servers/routers @home.
The real issue, IMHO, is the centralized nature of the IP infrastructure herself, i.e. the tiered Internet with a couple of major backbones, followed up downstream by many ISPs. Way back during BBS and UUCP days, we could connect directly via modems, using nothing more than a POTS land line. No need for backbones nor ISP middlemen who could be coerced by law to implement all kinds of restrictive or surveillance measures.
In the analog days, you couldn't prevent people or modems from whistling on the phone, today you can filter all kinds of digital traffic rather efficiently (unless it's encrypted, but governments may ban encryption for the sake of saving the Holy Copyright).
The idea that the president can't veto a law, and that the only checks against parliamentary power are the constitution itself kind of bugs me a little.
Unlike France and the US, Germany doesn't have a presidential democracy. Moreover, the German President is not directly elected by the people but by a group of electors called "Bundesversammlung", which itself (unlike the electors in the US) is NOT elected by the people, but nominated by parties in the Parliament (Bundestag).
So, the German President's legitimacy is weaker than that of a French or US president which is elected much more directly by the people. Think of the German President's role as a kind of emergency fallback, in case the Government was disabled... or goes crazy (it's all clearly defined in the German Basic Law).
The reason for this strange setup is historical: those who drafted the German Basic Law were still under the impression of the disaster that an almighty Fuehrer (Hitler) can cause, and wanted to curb Government's power a little bit, without giving too much power to the President either. Furthermore, they were also deeply distrustful of the People (who voted NSDAP a decade and a half ago, let's not forget that), so they added a level of indirection in the election of the President. Take all this together, and you can understand German Basic Law a little better. It's still strange, though.
A good system would let me switch on a new system/pc and it would automatically share all it's resources (storage, ram, cpu, I/O) with a defined cluster of other systems/PCs.
right there in 5.3(a):... download... any material that is...pornographic.
Seen from the outside, it is quite remarkable how anti-pr0n / prudish most of the Commonwealth (still) is... at least officially. Yet most sex scandals involve their law makers, ministers etc. That's just... weird.
Yes, it works perfectly, but it still allows for 1) traffic analysis (IPs are not hidden through encryption) and 2) entrapment (you don't know the reputability of your peers). What we need is all this on top of an anonymising layer that routes traffic through many intermediate hosts. Maybe something like I2P, Gnunet or Freenet...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because other philosophies seldom attracts so many fanatics who would wreak havoc if you dared to question their theories... and in order to protect society, they get special treatment a la "be nice to the 800lb gorilla out there, he's easily provoked to commit violent acts."?
Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
Yes... except that we are quickly running out of free-speech friendly countries (Canada was one of the most free). Soon we'll have to seriously think about putting pirate senders in orbit, just like the old off-shore pirate radio stations of the last century.
What do we do when bandwidth is not enough? We outsource the data and post only magnet links. I could easily imagine a server in space continuously broadcasting nothing more than pages and pages full of magnet links.
Very sound advice for non-cryptographers. BTW, I'm wondering if stacking many stream ciphers on top of each other would make cryptanalysis harder. i.e. is E_1(E_2(...(E_n(plaintext,k_n),...),k_2),k_1) stronger than just E_1(plaintext,k_1)? Of course, where all the keys k_i are independent, and all ciphers E_i are different -- and not just the reverse or the same so that they will cancel themselves out. Any cryptanalyst out there who could answer this?
Just fly to Canada, and then cross the border to the US. That's a lot faster than with the Queen Mary II. And cheaper too.
No, it sucks only on Mach. On top of L4, it was unportable.
So is it cc-by-nd (non-derivative-works)?
Except that Latin was the English of the time, and a kind of common language (not really, but sort of). Only later did it die of obsolescence.
Not so with smart pointers: they are part of TR1 already.
STL provides excellent containers, and with TR1/Boost, you have hashed containers, regexp etc...
You don't need to over-templify your code. In fact, for web apps, you'd be using POCO or similar libraries that are rather light on templates (though they use them too, of course). IMHO, many C++ developers write bad code, because they don't use current techniques and libraries. That's the problem with C++ development. C++ used properly can be extremely efficient.
It's not surprising that the occur less frequently, but that the exponent is the same across different wars and cultures did come as a surprise.
Must we always wait until we have no other alternative than to become creative? How about concentrating on this important project right now?
You're right, of course. But so what? Piracy is WAY cooler than boring copyright infrin...euhh...what? Anyone who didn't want to be a cool pirate as a kid? Any girl who hasn't dreamed of a romance with a handsome fearless pirate?
True.
Bonus points also for an industry that has the power to sway public opinion at home. MPAA and RIAA can easily make and destroy politicians.
Not so many anymore. In the 70-ies and 80-ies, a LOT more US films and series were available in third world countries. Due to insane licensing costs nowadays, US cultural exports have dropped significantly there.
To decrypt Blu-Ray DRM in consumer players requires significantly more electricity than, say, DVD. Maybe they're not so green after all?
And what's wrong with code sharing and code reusing? Aren't we all but standing on the shoulders of giants (scientists and coders alike)?
Pirates use WMD (weapons of mass dissemination) too...
This is the defense line of every bittorrent indexing site too, since .torrent files (and more recently magnet links) contain no copyrighted data at all. Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Even Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay, has been hard pressed to change their Copyright Law by adding "making available" to the list of taboos, which they did, thereby outlawing TPB, but also potentially every site like Google and Bing that fail to comply with DMCA takedown notices (even if DMCA is a US-only law... for now).
Not necessarily. They could have been tracking a CP ring for quite some time in a focused manner, and the poor 22yo dude was just at the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught in the trap. A constant monitoring was probably not in place.
Unlikely. It's way too unpopular to jump to the rescue of alleged CPers. EFF and ACLU may also think: hey, if we did that, we'd lose a lot of potential donations and it would harm us. Unfortunately, it's eminently political, and in no way related to objective guilt or innocence.
Yes, it does.
But using crypto still inconveniences people and security is hard. Sadly, people are lazy when it comes to security, so they won't move en masse to more secure computing anytime soon.
Horsepower is irrelevant, if all you have is brute force. However, if NSA mathematicians managed to solve the problem behind factoring big integers in efficient time, then yes, every (AES-) ephemeral key protected by public key crypto would be visible in real-time. But that's very unlikely. Should it become known, we'll quickly switch over to elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
What's more interesting: how long until they ban cryptography, or make using crypto a crime, unless you have a government license?
Who knows indeed. But as a store-and-forward network, there's so much decoupling between upload and download that I fail to see the use of the FBI using entrapment there, as it simply won't work.
But what's not impossible: people who constantly deal with forbidden stuff can end up being hooked to it. DEA drug addicts, or perhaps FBI CP addicts could exist, hopefully in isolated rare cases. But those won't be wearing their DEA or FBI hat when acting against the law; it would be their private wrongdoing.
That's not what I'm worried about, as nothing prevent people from choosing alternatives for hosting their stuff, including putting it on their own local servers/routers @home.
The real issue, IMHO, is the centralized nature of the IP infrastructure herself, i.e. the tiered Internet with a couple of major backbones, followed up downstream by many ISPs. Way back during BBS and UUCP days, we could connect directly via modems, using nothing more than a POTS land line. No need for backbones nor ISP middlemen who could be coerced by law to implement all kinds of restrictive or surveillance measures.
In the analog days, you couldn't prevent people or modems from whistling on the phone, today you can filter all kinds of digital traffic rather efficiently (unless it's encrypted, but governments may ban encryption for the sake of saving the Holy Copyright).
Unlike France and the US, Germany doesn't have a presidential democracy. Moreover, the German President is not directly elected by the people but by a group of electors called "Bundesversammlung", which itself (unlike the electors in the US) is NOT elected by the people, but nominated by parties in the Parliament (Bundestag). So, the German President's legitimacy is weaker than that of a French or US president which is elected much more directly by the people. Think of the German President's role as a kind of emergency fallback, in case the Government was disabled... or goes crazy (it's all clearly defined in the German Basic Law). The reason for this strange setup is historical: those who drafted the German Basic Law were still under the impression of the disaster that an almighty Fuehrer (Hitler) can cause, and wanted to curb Government's power a little bit, without giving too much power to the President either. Furthermore, they were also deeply distrustful of the People (who voted NSDAP a decade and a half ago, let's not forget that), so they added a level of indirection in the election of the President. Take all this together, and you can understand German Basic Law a little better. It's still strange, though.
They test it?
It's not entirely hopeless though: things like AFS, various distributed shared memory systems with a good API, task and process migration and so on have been around for quite some time.
Seen from the outside, it is quite remarkable how anti-pr0n / prudish most of the Commonwealth (still) is... at least officially. Yet most sex scandals involve their law makers, ministers etc. That's just... weird.
Yes, it works perfectly, but it still allows for 1) traffic analysis (IPs are not hidden through encryption) and 2) entrapment (you don't know the reputability of your peers). What we need is all this on top of an anonymising layer that routes traffic through many intermediate hosts. Maybe something like I2P, Gnunet or Freenet...