Yes, I concur. This is absolutely true. I'm developing apps for government agencies, and since it is rarely possible to release such software under the GPL (BSD-like license would be fine though), I have to use GNOME/Gtk+ for this kind of stuff. This is really a pity, cause I love C++ and Qt's clean and nice API; but for licensing reasons, GNOME/Gtk+ is right now the ONLY way to go. Sadly.
In most legal systems, suspects have the RIGHT to stay silent and not be forced to incriminate themselves. This includes the right to not reveal passwords to encrypted partitions etc. Suspects or defendants must not suffer prejudice if they choose to remain silent. Such rules apply nearly everywhere in the civilized world... unless you happen to be in Guantanamo Bay or some secret CIA prison overseas. But then, you have much more important things to worry about than just passwords!
There's not always a person to put in jail. Imagine that police discovers a suspects hideout with encrypted HDDs. Just the drives, and no persons which could know how to unlock the files or partitions. What do you do then?
As for France spearheading this, it comes to no surprise. France has always been very critical of what they call "US cultural hegemony" and has been fighting many aspects of it like US movies (they have their own film industry which they like to protect), and English language (they try to save whatever has been left of the Francophonie in some parts of Africa). Among any nation fighting "cultural products" (a.k.a. Hollywood movies et. al.), I would expect France to be leading the pack.
And the lesson for Roche? Get out of the business of inventing life-saving vaccines.
Perhaps the lesson for them would have been not to poker too high with governments. In cases of emergency, any government can temporarily withdraw the priviledge of patents. It does Roche (or other patent holders) no good to gamble on emergencies like this to maximize their profit. Why didn't they come to a agreement with Taiwan? They could have reaped moderate benefits from such an agreement. Instead, they just lost completely now.
Yes, indeed. Patents are just priviledges granted by governments to inventors. In cases of emergency, it is perfectly justifiable for governemnts to temporarily revoke such priviledges. Things like this happen all the time worldwide. This is just a case of greed vs. common sense. And it's great that common sense prevailed in this case. Roche should have struck a deal with the taiwanese government while they were negotiating, but they were just too greedy. Too bad for them; and great for the general public.
Why would it be suicidal? Nothing prevents ANYBODY (not only countries, but everyone with static IPs) from setting up their own root dns, seeding it with the regular ICANN managed root zone; and then tweak it as much as they desire. Granted, it's not a sensible thing to do, but technically, it's perfectly possible.
Say, country.xz wants two things:
To censor.com,.net,.org and other tlds
To introduce new gTLDs outside their scope, say.zzz instead of zzz.xz
Nothing prevents that country (or that individual btw) from mirroring ICANN root, adding.zzz to it; and redirecting.com,.net,.org and other tlds to DNS servers they control; which would mirror most of the official original zone files, minus the ones they want to censor.
This is technically pretty well straightforward. The real difficutly would be for them to force client machines to use those alternate DNS roots instead of the current ones. That essentially means putting pressure on Microsoft and their own ISPs.
So if they want to do this, let them do it. It's their business anyway. They would be incompatible with the rest of the world, if they are not very careful with it; but that too is solely their problem.
What has censorship got to do with administering the root DNS servers? If the.cn subdomain is being delegated to a DNS server in China (which most likely it is), the chinese goverment can censor as much as they like, within their own.cn-namespace. Same for every other ccTLD out there, that is being delegated to a server located within the boundaries of a censoring country.
The ONLY issue are gTLDs like.com et. al., which are being managed from within the US but also other countries (!).
As opposed to using transparent persisting of objects, e.g. with ZODB (which doesn't use SQL at all) or other persistance frameworks (which translate everything to SQL behind the scenes).
The firmware in my DVDROM driver is supposed to be region-locked, but I've never found a DVD that won't play.
Same here under FreeBSD.
Plus: using vobcopy + DeCSS to dump the encrypted.VOB files to disk, speeding up playback AND reducing the strain on the DVDROM as well. The best MPlayer feature though is that you can skip by tiny amounts (10 secs, 1 minute,...), not by whole big "scene" or "chapter" chunks that are being forced on the rest of the world.
I'd like to see the internet fracture into many pieces so that it's more difficult to censor / regulate.
Actually, the US Government has (up to now anyways) done a pretty good job, keeping OUT of the day to day business of running the Internet: just think of IETF and other orgs that are being run mostly by volunteers based on technical merit and vendor consensus. There's not that much control the government actually exercises on the Internet.
It may do so on content providers within the US, but that has nothing to do with control over the Internet infrastructure per se.
Now, to fracturing the Internet: IF control of government(s) get too strong, the internet will fracture automatically into autonomous networks anyway. It's bound to happen, and by the same token, it won't destroy connectivity at all. Even autonomous networks can reconnect in a pretty random way. The Internet architecture is designed to survive nuclear attacks and will always route around not only destroyed areas, but also around problems (such as overly strong government control).
That's the beauty of the Internet. It's virtually unbreakable as a whole.
Seriously, who would you rather have in charge of the internet?
The US Government has done a pretty good job at running the Internet (at least the parts it still has control over, which is not as much as many may think!); as long as we forget about small mishaps like... *ahem*, *cough*,... who controls the Iraq ccTLD again?
The control of the US Government (actually the Department of Commerce) of the Internet is extremely non-intrusive: the IETF establishes standards by consensus, other standards bodies are also often run by volunteers based on technical merit (and consensus among vendors). Even ICANN is quite free to manage the namespace almost without government interference. Getting out of the way, and supervising stuff like the DoC does, is pretty smart for such a system. Granted: not always 100% perfect, but anyone remembers ISO standards thought up by a U.N. body? Yuck!
But, more important than that: the real point is accountability and political influence. If the US Government goofed something up, they will be easier to politically influence than a U.N. agency. Would we really want to deal with a burocratic monster that is backed by 190+ governments if something goes awry? Dealing with one government is already hard enough.
Actually, this is all about choosing a DNS root within or outside U.S. or U.N. jurisdiction. The whole "power" of ICANN is that We, the People^WUsers, choose to connect to ICANN controlled root servers. Nothing prevents us (in theory) picking other root servers at all.
Now comes the catch: Microsoft controls over 90% of the market share; and they configure the resolvers to query some root servers. Whatever Microsoft chooses to be the default, will effectively de facto BE the default. If they (Microsoft) choose to side with the US, the DNS will be US controlled as it is now. If they choose to side with the U.N., it will be U.N. controlled.
The vast majority of their clientele will have Windows, with the CD-ROM Autorun feature switched on.
So it's perhaps a good thing that we belong to a minority, small enough to be under their radar?
Seriously: if we had, let's say, 30% to 40% of the OS market share, would Sony & Co. try to find ways to create un-rippable "CD"s? You betcha! Will they succeed, given enough money and determination?
I used to worry that Guantanamo somehow reflected on the US.
Unfortuately, it does. It's very disturbing, when the executive branch doesn't trust the judicial branch, and tries to evade proper legal procedures (and safeguards) that way. That's certainly not the right way to do it. There's no compelling reason why those prisoners shouldn't be transferred to a prison on US soil, so they can be tried like any other people.
There's often a big difference between political prisons and regular jails for normal criminal stuff like... worm writing. Dissidents or people who are percieved as enemies by Governments are often dealt with rather harshly, compared to common law criminals.
Since that guy apparently wasn't a political opponent, I'm pretty confident that he won't be treated any better or worse than other regular inmates, once convicted. He may even get a mild sentence because of him being so young and probably rather immature. It's just a matter of luck if the judges would bow to political pressures to please Microsoft & Co., or if they resist such pressures to assert their independance as judiciary. And even then, it's also a matter of luck how computer savvy the judges are and how they react to this case.
After all, it's just like in other parts of the world, considering similar cases.
Don't e-mail your crimes. That's why we can't find Osama.
You may be actually right. The reason for this is that we're relying heavily on ElInt (electronic intelligence) and are rather poor on HumInt; esp. in countries where Osama could be hiding.
As long as people consistently avoid using electronic equipment, including phones, the net, or wiring money through the banking system,... and avoid basic mistakes in human interactions, they are unlikely to get caught any soon.
Then again, would would like to live like that? Totally cut off from The Matrix ^W^W^Wcivilization?
Turkey and Morocco are amongst America's most trusted allies. Turkey is member of NATO, and Morocco was granted by the US the status of most important ally outside NATO, and we have a free trade agreement with Morocco as well.
Oh, and btw., America's oldest friendship treaty (non broken) with a foreign nation was with... right: Morocco. Signed on our side by Thomas Jefferson himself.
I asked about getting these things into UAV's and was told they'd love to do it, but don't expect anything for another 50 years.
This is actually an energy density problem. You need to store a LOT of energy for a single blast; and the current generation of light UAVs would not be able to carry that much load.
Of course, one could power such a laser with a small tactical nuke (of course just once!), but we're still talking subnuclear smart warfare here...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I concur. This is absolutely true. I'm developing apps for government agencies, and since it is rarely possible to release such software under the GPL (BSD-like license would be fine though), I have to use GNOME/Gtk+ for this kind of stuff. This is really a pity, cause I love C++ and Qt's clean and nice API; but for licensing reasons, GNOME/Gtk+ is right now the ONLY way to go. Sadly.
In most legal systems, suspects have the RIGHT to stay silent and not be forced to incriminate themselves. This includes the right to not reveal passwords to encrypted partitions etc. Suspects or defendants must not suffer prejudice if they choose to remain silent. Such rules apply nearly everywhere in the civilized world... unless you happen to be in Guantanamo Bay or some secret CIA prison overseas. But then, you have much more important things to worry about than just passwords!
There's not always a person to put in jail. Imagine that police discovers a suspects hideout with encrypted HDDs. Just the drives, and no persons which could know how to unlock the files or partitions. What do you do then?
As for France spearheading this, it comes to no surprise. France has always been very critical of what they call "US cultural hegemony" and has been fighting many aspects of it like US movies (they have their own film industry which they like to protect), and English language (they try to save whatever has been left of the Francophonie in some parts of Africa). Among any nation fighting "cultural products" (a.k.a. Hollywood movies et. al.), I would expect France to be leading the pack.
And the lesson for Roche? Get out of the business of inventing life-saving vaccines.
Perhaps the lesson for them would have been not to poker too high with governments. In cases of emergency, any government can temporarily withdraw the priviledge of patents. It does Roche (or other patent holders) no good to gamble on emergencies like this to maximize their profit. Why didn't they come to a agreement with Taiwan? They could have reaped moderate benefits from such an agreement. Instead, they just lost completely now.
"laws are a human institution!"
Yes, indeed. Patents are just priviledges granted by governments to inventors. In cases of emergency, it is perfectly justifiable for governemnts to temporarily revoke such priviledges. Things like this happen all the time worldwide. This is just a case of greed vs. common sense. And it's great that common sense prevailed in this case. Roche should have struck a deal with the taiwanese government while they were negotiating, but they were just too greedy. Too bad for them; and great for the general public.
Unix and Microsoft can co-exist
Xenix?.
Of course they can coexist -- in a technical sense. But can they coexist, when they compete for the same market?
That's rather suicidal, of course,
Why would it be suicidal? Nothing prevents ANYBODY (not only countries, but everyone with static IPs) from setting up their own root dns, seeding it with the regular ICANN managed root zone; and then tweak it as much as they desire. Granted, it's not a sensible thing to do, but technically, it's perfectly possible.
Say, country .xz wants two things:
Nothing prevents that country (or that individual btw) from mirroring ICANN root, adding .zzz to it; and redirecting .com, .net, .org and other tlds to DNS servers they control; which would mirror most of the official original zone files, minus the ones they want to censor.
This is technically pretty well straightforward. The real difficutly would be for them to force client machines to use those alternate DNS roots instead of the current ones. That essentially means putting pressure on Microsoft and their own ISPs.
So if they want to do this, let them do it. It's their business anyway. They would be incompatible with the rest of the world, if they are not very careful with it; but that too is solely their problem.
Iran, China et. al *do* want to censor the net
What has censorship got to do with administering the root DNS servers? If the .cn subdomain is being delegated to a DNS server in China (which most likely it is), the chinese goverment can censor as much as they like, within their own .cn-namespace. Same for every other ccTLD out there, that is being delegated to a server located within the boundaries of a censoring country.
The ONLY issue are gTLDs like .com et. al., which are being managed from within the US but also other countries (!).
As opposed to...?
As opposed to using transparent persisting of objects, e.g. with ZODB (which doesn't use SQL at all) or other persistance frameworks (which translate everything to SQL behind the scenes).
The firmware in my DVDROM driver is supposed to be region-locked, but I've never found a DVD that won't play.
Same here under FreeBSD.
Plus: using vobcopy + DeCSS to dump the encrypted .VOB files to disk, speeding up playback AND reducing the strain on the DVDROM as well. The best MPlayer feature though is that you can skip by tiny amounts (10 secs, 1 minute, ...), not by whole big "scene" or "chapter" chunks that are being forced on the rest of the world.
I'd like to see the internet fracture into many pieces so that it's more difficult to censor / regulate.
Actually, the US Government has (up to now anyways) done a pretty good job, keeping OUT of the day to day business of running the Internet: just think of IETF and other orgs that are being run mostly by volunteers based on technical merit and vendor consensus. There's not that much control the government actually exercises on the Internet.
It may do so on content providers within the US, but that has nothing to do with control over the Internet infrastructure per se.
Now, to fracturing the Internet: IF control of government(s) get too strong, the internet will fracture automatically into autonomous networks anyway. It's bound to happen, and by the same token, it won't destroy connectivity at all. Even autonomous networks can reconnect in a pretty random way. The Internet architecture is designed to survive nuclear attacks and will always route around not only destroyed areas, but also around problems (such as overly strong government control).
That's the beauty of the Internet. It's virtually unbreakable as a whole.
Seriously, who would you rather have in charge of the internet?
The US Government has done a pretty good job at running the Internet (at least the parts it still has control over, which is not as much as many may think!); as long as we forget about small mishaps like... *ahem*, *cough*, ... who controls the Iraq ccTLD again?
The control of the US Government (actually the Department of Commerce) of the Internet is extremely non-intrusive: the IETF establishes standards by consensus, other standards bodies are also often run by volunteers based on technical merit (and consensus among vendors). Even ICANN is quite free to manage the namespace almost without government interference. Getting out of the way, and supervising stuff like the DoC does, is pretty smart for such a system. Granted: not always 100% perfect, but anyone remembers ISO standards thought up by a U.N. body? Yuck!
But, more important than that: the real point is accountability and political influence. If the US Government goofed something up, they will be easier to politically influence than a U.N. agency. Would we really want to deal with a burocratic monster that is backed by 190+ governments if something goes awry? Dealing with one government is already hard enough.
Actually, this is all about choosing a DNS root within or outside U.S. or U.N. jurisdiction. The whole "power" of ICANN is that We, the People^WUsers, choose to connect to ICANN controlled root servers. Nothing prevents us (in theory) picking other root servers at all.
Now comes the catch: Microsoft controls over 90% of the market share; and they configure the resolvers to query some root servers. Whatever Microsoft chooses to be the default, will effectively de facto BE the default. If they (Microsoft) choose to side with the US, the DNS will be US controlled as it is now. If they choose to side with the U.N., it will be U.N. controlled.
It's really that simple.
The vast majority of their clientele will have Windows, with the CD-ROM Autorun feature switched on.
So it's perhaps a good thing that we belong to a minority, small enough to be under their radar?
Seriously: if we had, let's say, 30% to 40% of the OS market share, would Sony & Co. try to find ways to create un-rippable "CD"s? You betcha! Will they succeed, given enough money and determination?
Imagine that you need a special brand of car, not just cars in general, to buy from a drive-thru...
Microsoft suing the EU in a European Courtroom...
It's not unusual for EU institutions to loose lawsuits before european courts. That's why they too employ an army of lawyers.
like *.gov
Like, say, NASA?
lets have patents for food recipes!
Here we go: 6,863,908 -- Universal sauce base.
I used to worry that Guantanamo somehow reflected on the US.
Unfortuately, it does. It's very disturbing, when the executive branch doesn't trust the judicial branch, and tries to evade proper legal procedures (and safeguards) that way. That's certainly not the right way to do it. There's no compelling reason why those prisoners shouldn't be transferred to a prison on US soil, so they can be tried like any other people.
Except now we've got Guantanamo
But the parent said: "jailed in the US"; and Guantanamo is technically outside the US.
Anyway, US prisons actually don't rank all that well internationally: International Center for Prison Studies.
Tazmamart
There's often a big difference between political prisons and regular jails for normal criminal stuff like... worm writing. Dissidents or people who are percieved as enemies by Governments are often dealt with rather harshly, compared to common law criminals.
Since that guy apparently wasn't a political opponent, I'm pretty confident that he won't be treated any better or worse than other regular inmates, once convicted. He may even get a mild sentence because of him being so young and probably rather immature. It's just a matter of luck if the judges would bow to political pressures to please Microsoft & Co., or if they resist such pressures to assert their independance as judiciary. And even then, it's also a matter of luck how computer savvy the judges are and how they react to this case.
After all, it's just like in other parts of the world, considering similar cases.
Don't e-mail your crimes. That's why we can't find Osama.
You may be actually right. The reason for this is that we're relying heavily on ElInt (electronic intelligence) and are rather poor on HumInt; esp. in countries where Osama could be hiding.
As long as people consistently avoid using electronic equipment, including phones, the net, or wiring money through the banking system,... and avoid basic mistakes in human interactions, they are unlikely to get caught any soon.
Then again, would would like to live like that? Totally cut off from The Matrix ^W^W^Wcivilization?
Turkey and Morocco are amongst America's most trusted allies. Turkey is member of NATO, and Morocco was granted by the US the status of most important ally outside NATO, and we have a free trade agreement with Morocco as well.
Oh, and btw., America's oldest friendship treaty (non broken) with a foreign nation was with... right: Morocco. Signed on our side by Thomas Jefferson himself.
I asked about getting these things into UAV's and was told they'd love to do it, but don't expect anything for another 50 years.
This is actually an energy density problem. You need to store a LOT of energy for a single blast; and the current generation of light UAVs would not be able to carry that much load.
Of course, one could power such a laser with a small tactical nuke (of course just once!), but we're still talking subnuclear smart warfare here...