They won't come even close to something real running IOS.
Absolutely. And it's not only IOS, it is mainly the hardware architecture itself that is completely different. Even with the latest BSD / Solaris etc..., all up to date networking daemons and GigE NICS on a conventional computer, you won't reach the performance of dedicated interface processors communicating over a fast backplane.
Ultimately I would like to see a world with no use for money or intellectual property, but in the meantime we can make use of copyrights positively. Their destruction really is not required to correct the situation.
I couldn't agree more. Yet, the abuses of the original copyright concept, if not kept in check, will ultimately lead to its total demise. We're already on a slippery slope, and if copyright isn't fixed asap on a worldwide scale, it could very well collapse within less than a century from now; perhaps even less.
The question that should be asked: how can copyright be reformed in a foolproof way, so that it doesn't degenerate (again) as it did? What's there to stop the greed of multinational content-cartels from monopolizing once again reformed copyright laws and turning them upside down? Those are very hard to answer questions, and somehow I'm pessimistic that we'll be able to find a good compromise between authors' rights and the right of the general public.
Maybe, one compromise would be a personal, non-transferable copyright that is bound to the author. The point here being that it should not be transferable to corporations, thus perpetuated. Authors could temporarily grant the right to copy to publishers, but publishers wouldn't hold the copyright, which would be a personal right, bound to the author (artist, etc).
Ideally, copyright should also automatically expire for works that are out-of-print for an extended period of time, but since this is a variable amount of time, it too WILL eventually be abused and extended up to the death of the author -- if personal copyright would ever be universally adopted.
Point is, don't blame Adobe, blame yourself and those companies (and others) who require flash.
I only blame institutions that chose to go by proprietary "standards", instead of offering a no-barrier standards-compliant website, when they are in fact required by law to do so. They can use Flash as long as they like, as long as they provide an alternative path to navigate their content.
However, the idea of myself being granted a temporary group of legal protections under the law to ostensibly allow me to make a living off my creative works is not immoral, evil, indication of bad character, incorrect behavior, or outside of the norm.
Really not? Since it has the huge potential to create a copyright black hole that swallows up orphaned books and other creative works, it can be seen as detrimental to humanity's collective memory.
Just think again: by copying, we contribute to save works for posterity. How many works have been gone forever, because there was just one copy of it, and it was destroyed in a disaster or war? Library of Alexandria, or more recently the Municipal Archive in Cologne, etc. etc. etc..? Had people made copies (no matter if illicit or not), those works wouldn't have disappeared entirely, never to be seen or read again.
That's why copyright, as it is handled now, is probably deeply immoral.
What's to stop them from outlawing "illegal" encryption using mechanisms like the DMCA, i.e. only allowing crypto they have keys for on their networks?
Just send two interleaved encrypted streams: one with the escrow key, the other with a safe/secret key. Should "they" wish to snoop, they'll decrypt with the escrow key an endless stream of praises and kisses on how great our government and corporate overlords are caring for our well-being and and a lot of campaigning for the latest and greatest IFPI scheme to secure our nationally oh so vital digital economy. That will satisfy them, and they'll never come back for more.
Certainly an Iranian mole in American intelligence could not write the entire NIE, but how hard would it be to alter the placement of a single sentence?
Let's not overreact here. There are a lot more countries that are opposed to a US strike on Iran than just Iran. Me things Russia, Germany etc... all have vital economic interests in Iran, and they too could have activated a mole in the US intelligence community.
Or it was just plain incompetence, due to lack of enough HumInt in Iran. Especially US secret services are heavily reliant on ElInt, and they could have missed some vital details.
Just adding that in most countries, downloading isn't illegal (yet). Only uploading is, which is the act of illegal distribution a.k.a. copyright infringement. (Sure, P2P needs uploading too).
I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
On my main FreeBSD/amd64 desktop box, I not only make the point of not having Flash on it, I don't even have the choice, as it is not supported by Adobe. So much for accessibility.
Isn't it the fate of every (former) empire that it naturally attracts people from territories it occupied and heavily influenced earlier? That's just History repeating itself.
I'm experimenting with Freenet, and it's still a really bumpy ride from a usability perspective. I don't mind the latency, and I don't mind hooking up to opennet... but the whole environment is still extremely user-unfriendly and definitely not something for non-technical geeks.
I first thought of taking an in-depth look at the core with the intention of rewriting that mess of Java code into reasonably efficient C++ w/Boost, OpenSSL etc... for performance reasons and also to gain deeper insights; but I quickly realized that this isn't top-priority.
Freenet would only be successful if it quickly evolved a user-friendly environment (via FProxy) that integrates most current unbundled apps. Currently, there are just way too many hoops to jump through.
Having said that, Freenet's core ideas of a distributed encrypted cache, and distributed routing are GREAT. I wished more hackers would look into it and participate/contribute.
Can you imagine the Brazillian government IT department doing all the firewall and IP tables to stop this.
As a backbone network administrator, yes I can imagine that: Implementing a few ACLs on a few international choke points can be done in a matter of minutes (isn't IOS wonderful?). Forcing autonomous systems to block all kind of ports at their boundaries is also quite trivial, and enforcing a non-P2P mode inside those AS is also just a matter of reconfiguring their access routers. Since backbone and access routers config files are generated dynamically nowadays, that too would be just a matter of minutes. It would break some stuff, but Joe Sixpack won't notice anything as long as his web browsing and e-mail checking aren't blocked.
Getting an account there is super-fucking-easy. Invites are everywhere and effortless to acquire (hint hint).
I've tried for months and months to register online with them, without success. I won't try to get nor use an invite for very specific privacy reasons -- and I'm not into begging either. If they don't want to open for regular registrations, so be it.
So what? Those officials don't use the Internet like us: they have secretaries and other employees who browse the net and answer emails on their behalf. Cut off their private computers, they probably won't even notice.
Unfortunately, every time I try to uncheck the 'ads disabled' checkbox, within two-three page hits I see something in Flash that is either blinking, flashing, or moving at me.
On my Flash-unsupported FreeBSD/amd64 box, it just shows as a blanked out rectangle for which a non-existent plug-in is missing. Sometimes, being unsupported by Adobe can be a bliss.
Pay walls (even just micropayments) would lock out a lot of people living in developing countries without convertible currency. In those countries, even if you wanted to pay in your local currency, Google or anyone else wouldn't bother collecting. Is that good or bad? We're complaining that many people in the world don't understand us. Installing pay walls that they can't bypass would make this situation even worse, as it would restrict their news sources to the usual propaganda stuff promoted by their governments. Is that the idea and intention behind monetizing news?
I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders
Yes, all they need is to digitally sign those files with a (couple of) big corp's private keys, and have the media players check that signature against a fixed list of public keys.
But why stop here? They could also build CPUs and operating systems that execute only digitally signed code -- or course, only the digital signatures of "approved" developers will be accepted.
The problem is that the USA are pushing their own DMCA-like Copyright laws into other nations' laws by means of persuasion, economic coercion etc... so US Copyright laws do have a worldwide negative impact on all cultures.
I'm currently looking to build a home server and would have considered a soekris except that they're quite expensive and I'd like something with a little more grunt and disk space.
I'm running a small SoHo router/server on a first generation Soekris net4801 with FreeBSD, and a 2.5" HDD. The machine runs PPPoE, pf, postfix, imapd, lighttpd, etc... very well. I also used it as NFS, DHCP and TFTP server in addition to that, but I turned off NFS later for soekris-unrelated reasons.
All in all, I'm still very happy with the net4801 + FreeBSD combo, after all those years; though IMHO, 128 MB RAM is a bit cramped... should I need to run more daemons in the future. A net5501 would be a dream, as far as I'm concerned.
Once you lose the will of the general populace to protect your interests, you pretty much lost the battle...
Except that it won't happen. The populace has been conditioned to side with the copyright lobby in believing the "copying is stealing" lie: cf. the outrageous verdicts against Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rassett made by their peers. The frog is in boiling water already, but it won't jump out, because the heat took up gradually.
It is...but it could have done with a bit of trimming, in my view. It was meticulously researched but I get the feeling that Andrew Hodges wanted to include every single fact known about Turing's life, interesting or not.
I've read it too, and I really liked the level of detail. After all, it was clear from the start that this would become the canonical Turing biography. Any author who would have done some trimming in this particular context would have acted irresponsibly, IMHO. Other authors writing secondary biographies are free to pick and choose what they want, but the primary biography should be as complete as possible. Hadn't Andrew Hodges done such a great work, a lot of details from Alan Turing's life would have been lost forever.
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Absolutely. And it's not only IOS, it is mainly the hardware architecture itself that is completely different. Even with the latest BSD / Solaris etc..., all up to date networking daemons and GigE NICS on a conventional computer, you won't reach the performance of dedicated interface processors communicating over a fast backplane.
I couldn't agree more. Yet, the abuses of the original copyright concept, if not kept in check, will ultimately lead to its total demise. We're already on a slippery slope, and if copyright isn't fixed asap on a worldwide scale, it could very well collapse within less than a century from now; perhaps even less.
The question that should be asked: how can copyright be reformed in a foolproof way, so that it doesn't degenerate (again) as it did? What's there to stop the greed of multinational content-cartels from monopolizing once again reformed copyright laws and turning them upside down? Those are very hard to answer questions, and somehow I'm pessimistic that we'll be able to find a good compromise between authors' rights and the right of the general public.
Maybe, one compromise would be a personal, non-transferable copyright that is bound to the author. The point here being that it should not be transferable to corporations, thus perpetuated. Authors could temporarily grant the right to copy to publishers, but publishers wouldn't hold the copyright, which would be a personal right, bound to the author (artist, etc).
Ideally, copyright should also automatically expire for works that are out-of-print for an extended period of time, but since this is a variable amount of time, it too WILL eventually be abused and extended up to the death of the author -- if personal copyright would ever be universally adopted.
I only blame institutions that chose to go by proprietary "standards", instead of offering a no-barrier standards-compliant website, when they are in fact required by law to do so. They can use Flash as long as they like, as long as they provide an alternative path to navigate their content.
Really not? Since it has the huge potential to create a copyright black hole that swallows up orphaned books and other creative works, it can be seen as detrimental to humanity's collective memory.
Just think again: by copying, we contribute to save works for posterity. How many works have been gone forever, because there was just one copy of it, and it was destroyed in a disaster or war? Library of Alexandria, or more recently the Municipal Archive in Cologne, etc. etc. etc..? Had people made copies (no matter if illicit or not), those works wouldn't have disappeared entirely, never to be seen or read again.
That's why copyright, as it is handled now, is probably deeply immoral.
Just send two interleaved encrypted streams: one with the escrow key, the other with a safe/secret key. Should "they" wish to snoop, they'll decrypt with the escrow key an endless stream of praises and kisses on how great our government and corporate overlords are caring for our well-being and and a lot of campaigning for the latest and greatest IFPI scheme to secure our nationally oh so vital digital economy. That will satisfy them, and they'll never come back for more.
Let's not overreact here. There are a lot more countries that are opposed to a US strike on Iran than just Iran. Me things Russia, Germany etc... all have vital economic interests in Iran, and they too could have activated a mole in the US intelligence community.
Or it was just plain incompetence, due to lack of enough HumInt in Iran. Especially US secret services are heavily reliant on ElInt, and they could have missed some vital details.
Just adding that in most countries, downloading isn't illegal (yet). Only uploading is, which is the act of illegal distribution a.k.a. copyright infringement. (Sure, P2P needs uploading too).
On my main FreeBSD/amd64 desktop box, I not only make the point of not having Flash on it, I don't even have the choice, as it is not supported by Adobe. So much for accessibility.
Isn't it the fate of every (former) empire that it naturally attracts people from territories it occupied and heavily influenced earlier? That's just History repeating itself.
I'm experimenting with Freenet, and it's still a really bumpy ride from a usability perspective. I don't mind the latency, and I don't mind hooking up to opennet... but the whole environment is still extremely user-unfriendly and definitely not something for non-technical geeks.
I first thought of taking an in-depth look at the core with the intention of rewriting that mess of Java code into reasonably efficient C++ w/Boost, OpenSSL etc... for performance reasons and also to gain deeper insights; but I quickly realized that this isn't top-priority.
Freenet would only be successful if it quickly evolved a user-friendly environment (via FProxy) that integrates most current unbundled apps. Currently, there are just way too many hoops to jump through.
Having said that, Freenet's core ideas of a distributed encrypted cache, and distributed routing are GREAT. I wished more hackers would look into it and participate/contribute.
Is this the same Hal Abelson of SICP fame?
But which no regular users would do, as they trust the public CAs by default (if they even know what that is).
It's not a paradox if the law specifically says: "You can't do that, unless you get permission."
Why should they adapt, if they can shape the market conditions to fit their needs?
As a backbone network administrator, yes I can imagine that: Implementing a few ACLs on a few international choke points can be done in a matter of minutes (isn't IOS wonderful?). Forcing autonomous systems to block all kind of ports at their boundaries is also quite trivial, and enforcing a non-P2P mode inside those AS is also just a matter of reconfiguring their access routers. Since backbone and access routers config files are generated dynamically nowadays, that too would be just a matter of minutes. It would break some stuff, but Joe Sixpack won't notice anything as long as his web browsing and e-mail checking aren't blocked.
I've tried for months and months to register online with them, without success. I won't try to get nor use an invite for very specific privacy reasons -- and I'm not into begging either. If they don't want to open for regular registrations, so be it.
So what? Those officials don't use the Internet like us: they have secretaries and other employees who browse the net and answer emails on their behalf. Cut off their private computers, they probably won't even notice.
On my Flash-unsupported FreeBSD/amd64 box, it just shows as a blanked out rectangle for which a non-existent plug-in is missing. Sometimes, being unsupported by Adobe can be a bliss.
Pay walls (even just micropayments) would lock out a lot of people living in developing countries without convertible currency. In those countries, even if you wanted to pay in your local currency, Google or anyone else wouldn't bother collecting. Is that good or bad? We're complaining that many people in the world don't understand us. Installing pay walls that they can't bypass would make this situation even worse, as it would restrict their news sources to the usual propaganda stuff promoted by their governments. Is that the idea and intention behind monetizing news?
Yes, all they need is to digitally sign those files with a (couple of) big corp's private keys, and have the media players check that signature against a fixed list of public keys.
But why stop here? They could also build CPUs and operating systems that execute only digitally signed code -- or course, only the digital signatures of "approved" developers will be accepted.
A truly dystopian future.
The problem is that the USA are pushing their own DMCA-like Copyright laws into other nations' laws by means of persuasion, economic coercion etc... so US Copyright laws do have a worldwide negative impact on all cultures.
I'm running a small SoHo router/server on a first generation Soekris net4801 with FreeBSD, and a 2.5" HDD. The machine runs PPPoE, pf, postfix, imapd, lighttpd, etc... very well. I also used it as NFS, DHCP and TFTP server in addition to that, but I turned off NFS later for soekris-unrelated reasons.
All in all, I'm still very happy with the net4801 + FreeBSD combo, after all those years; though IMHO, 128 MB RAM is a bit cramped... should I need to run more daemons in the future. A net5501 would be a dream, as far as I'm concerned.
Except that it won't happen. The populace has been conditioned to side with the copyright lobby in believing the "copying is stealing" lie: cf. the outrageous verdicts against Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rassett made by their peers. The frog is in boiling water already, but it won't jump out, because the heat took up gradually.
Well, couldn't paste it here, but you know what's in it.
I've read it too, and I really liked the level of detail. After all, it was clear from the start that this would become the canonical Turing biography. Any author who would have done some trimming in this particular context would have acted irresponsibly, IMHO. Other authors writing secondary biographies are free to pick and choose what they want, but the primary biography should be as complete as possible. Hadn't Andrew Hodges done such a great work, a lot of details from Alan Turing's life would have been lost forever.