I really can't say I blame the guy... developing software is more fun than most types of work out there, but it's still work. I always wondered what would motivate somebody to work at their regular job (which, if you're a programmer, is likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 hrs/week) and then go home and work on another bit of software which you plan to turn around and give away for free. Are they hoping for a flood of donations? Are they hoping that their open-source experience will be good "resume stuffer" when they apply for their next job? Or are there really just that many philanthropists out there willing to work for the sheer pleasure of a job well done?
I was often tempted, back in my bad-old DOS/Windows 3.1 programming days, to try to port some of the Unix tools I had grown to love and rely on (such as grep, sed, awk, etc.) to the DOS platform just so that I would have a slightly more usable environment. Unfortunately for me, I'm too lazy... imagine my surprise when I came across Cygwin years later - Not only had they done ten times what I had envisioned, they were giving it away for free!
Today, my whole setup is open source software; I try to donate money to projects when they provide a way to donate to it (for example, I still can't figure out how to donate to the Linux kernel), but I get the distinct impression I'm in the minority.
Honestly... what really motivates an open source developer? I have a few patches I'd love to submit to CVS (if they'd ever approve the observer access I requested two weeks ago), but I can't even begin to imagine how many hours of effort went into, say, the XFree86 server that's hosting the WindowMaker window manager that's supporting the Mozilla browser I'm typing this on right now. Why do they do it?
... and I wonder... where were the CDs actually manufactured? I'm sure that the CDs that the BPI-approved CDs that British citizens are allowed to buy were manufactured in a CD-manufacturing plant right in the middle of downtown London, and certainly not in a sweatshop in Indonesia...
I've often wondered how truly possible this would really be. As some other posters pointed out, this would disconnect the US from the global internet; but our government doesn't give a flying $#@* about our well-being anyway, so they'd happily do so. So, on the home front, what could they really, actually, do?
Whatever they do at the internet level will be circumvented. Let's say they pass a law requiring ISP's to disallow communications on any port other than port 80. Ok, it's easy enough to write a P2P app that communicates over port 80, or even tunnels through HTTP (if the gateways are very clever).
So, they have to restrict who can advertise a server on port 80. Step one is to establish a national registry of "approved" web sites (again, we've cut ourselves off from the world, but that's what we do best). Only entities willing to pay large registration fees are allowed to listen on port 80. File sharers probably won't pay $500/year to advertise their file sharing app on port 80.
But how do they enforce it? A port scanner in each ISP that actively monitors port 80 on each connected host to verify that the response is a bona-fide website? Even then, a clever tunneling protocol could fool the port scanner. Comparing the returned port scan results against the national registry? (i.e. if IP address 1.2.3.4 is advertising a web server, is it in the registry?) This sounds like something our government might do to combat the malicious evil of file sharing. After all, there are recording industry executives out there who have only one helicopter!
But they'd probably err toward a cheaper solution. The most likely I can imagine is a modification in the Windows operating system that makes it impossible for the home version to listen on any port whatsoever. I.e. you can only initiate connections, not receive them. This doesn't really require any modifications to TCP/IP, just the implementation of the OS stack. (Don't implement the "listen" system call, and you're done).
Ok, what about non-M$ users? Require the inclusion of special hardware in everything sold as a "computer" that detected non-M$ operating systems and rejected it. ("Trusted Computing", perhaps?) Make it illegal to sell or distribute "modchips" that circumvent the hardware ("Xbox", perhaps?).
Now, ISP's must include a check for "government-approved" OSes. In your hardware, and on the ISP side, M$ needs to have a way to "digitally sign" their software so that it can't be faked by a rogue OS (somebody like me, who hangs onto his old hardware, for example). It goes like this:
M$ creates a keypair and embeds the public key in the OS
They sign the OS itself with the private key
The ISP creates another keypair and transmits the public key to you
Your M$ OS now uses the public key (embedded in your OS where you can't see it) to encrypt the OS signature to be sent to the ISP
The ISP decrypts the signature (still encrypted for M$) and sends it on to Redmond for approval
Redmond decrypts the signature and compares it to a database
This all hinges around "embedded in your OS where you can't see it", but with the right kind of hardware support, they could get away with anything.
So, where does that leave us? 99% of users would just go along with it (look how fast people started taking off their shoes in the airports - "we're safer!" they proclaimed with a sigh of relief). So the 1% of us who still beleive in freedom can no longer connect to any ISP in what is still called the "internet" (but no longer resembles it in any way, shape or form).
With government regulation of telecommunications, we couldn't start up our own, "competing" internet (any company big enough to provide internet service is big enough to get government attention, and forced to comply with the new laws). They shut down ham radio broadcasters, so wi-fi is probably out, too. So what's left? Does/. have the readership to set up a
This has struck me as a particularly insidious side effect of more and more legislation. There was a movie a few years back called "Final Fantasy" (the first, I think, fully computer-animated film) where the Earth had been taken over by malicious phantoms. Every time the government attacked the phantoms, they just got stronger and burrowed even deeper into the Earth.
It seems like P2P is responding in much the same way . Napster is shut down, so a decentralized solution appears. RIAA starts monitoring the downloads on the decentralized networks, encrypted decentralized, anonymizing solutions (i.e. FreeNet, MUTE, etc.) appear. They're really shooting themselves in the foot here.
But the really insidious side effect is that, according to the news at least (and you can beleive *everything* you read on the news) kiddie-porn peddlers have been using P2P networks to distribute their wares; if this is true, the RIAA's attempts to control all of this will drive well-intentioned programmers to make it even easier for *these* people to hide. At least when MP3 trading was on Napster, a court order could reveal a search of folks using the network for something truly harmful.
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I really can't say I blame the guy... developing software is more fun than most types of work out there, but it's still work. I always wondered what would motivate somebody to work at their regular job (which, if you're a programmer, is likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 hrs/week) and then go home and work on another bit of software which you plan to turn around and give away for free. Are they hoping for a flood of donations? Are they hoping that their open-source experience will be good "resume stuffer" when they apply for their next job? Or are there really just that many philanthropists out there willing to work for the sheer pleasure of a job well done?
I was often tempted, back in my bad-old DOS/Windows 3.1 programming days, to try to port some of the Unix tools I had grown to love and rely on (such as grep, sed, awk, etc.) to the DOS platform just so that I would have a slightly more usable environment. Unfortunately for me, I'm too lazy... imagine my surprise when I came across Cygwin years later - Not only had they done ten times what I had envisioned, they were giving it away for free!
Today, my whole setup is open source software; I try to donate money to projects when they provide a way to donate to it (for example, I still can't figure out how to donate to the Linux kernel), but I get the distinct impression I'm in the minority.
Honestly... what really motivates an open source developer? I have a few patches I'd love to submit to CVS (if they'd ever approve the observer access I requested two weeks ago), but I can't even begin to imagine how many hours of effort went into, say, the XFree86 server that's hosting the WindowMaker window manager that's supporting the Mozilla browser I'm typing this on right now. Why do they do it?
... and I wonder... where were the CDs actually manufactured? I'm sure that the CDs that the BPI-approved CDs that British citizens are allowed to buy were manufactured in a CD-manufacturing plant right in the middle of downtown London, and certainly not in a sweatshop in Indonesia...
I've often wondered how truly possible this would really be. As some other posters pointed out, this would disconnect the US from the global internet; but our government doesn't give a flying $#@* about our well-being anyway, so they'd happily do so. So, on the home front, what could they really, actually, do?
Whatever they do at the internet level will be circumvented. Let's say they pass a law requiring ISP's to disallow communications on any port other than port 80. Ok, it's easy enough to write a P2P app that communicates over port 80, or even tunnels through HTTP (if the gateways are very clever).
So, they have to restrict who can advertise a server on port 80. Step one is to establish a national registry of "approved" web sites (again, we've cut ourselves off from the world, but that's what we do best). Only entities willing to pay large registration fees are allowed to listen on port 80. File sharers probably won't pay $500/year to advertise their file sharing app on port 80.
But how do they enforce it? A port scanner in each ISP that actively monitors port 80 on each connected host to verify that the response is a bona-fide website? Even then, a clever tunneling protocol could fool the port scanner. Comparing the returned port scan results against the national registry? (i.e. if IP address 1.2.3.4 is advertising a web server, is it in the registry?) This sounds like something our government might do to combat the malicious evil of file sharing. After all, there are recording industry executives out there who have only one helicopter!
But they'd probably err toward a cheaper solution. The most likely I can imagine is a modification in the Windows operating system that makes it impossible for the home version to listen on any port whatsoever. I.e. you can only initiate connections, not receive them. This doesn't really require any modifications to TCP/IP, just the implementation of the OS stack. (Don't implement the "listen" system call, and you're done).
Ok, what about non-M$ users? Require the inclusion of special hardware in everything sold as a "computer" that detected non-M$ operating systems and rejected it. ("Trusted Computing", perhaps?) Make it illegal to sell or distribute "modchips" that circumvent the hardware ("Xbox", perhaps?).
Now, ISP's must include a check for "government-approved" OSes. In your hardware, and on the ISP side, M$ needs to have a way to "digitally sign" their software so that it can't be faked by a rogue OS (somebody like me, who hangs onto his old hardware, for example). It goes like this:
This all hinges around "embedded in your OS where you can't see it", but with the right kind of hardware support, they could get away with anything.
So, where does that leave us? 99% of users would just go along with it (look how fast people started taking off their shoes in the airports - "we're safer!" they proclaimed with a sigh of relief). So the 1% of us who still beleive in freedom can no longer connect to any ISP in what is still called the "internet" (but no longer resembles it in any way, shape or form).
With government regulation of telecommunications, we couldn't start up our own, "competing" internet (any company big enough to provide internet service is big enough to get government attention, and forced to comply with the new laws). They shut down ham radio broadcasters, so wi-fi is probably out, too. So what's left? Does /. have the readership to set up a
This has struck me as a particularly insidious side effect of more and more legislation. There was a movie a few years back called "Final Fantasy" (the first, I think, fully computer-animated film) where the Earth had been taken over by malicious phantoms. Every time the government attacked the phantoms, they just got stronger and burrowed even deeper into the Earth. It seems like P2P is responding in much the same way . Napster is shut down, so a decentralized solution appears. RIAA starts monitoring the downloads on the decentralized networks, encrypted decentralized, anonymizing solutions (i.e. FreeNet, MUTE, etc.) appear. They're really shooting themselves in the foot here. But the really insidious side effect is that, according to the news at least (and you can beleive *everything* you read on the news) kiddie-porn peddlers have been using P2P networks to distribute their wares; if this is true, the RIAA's attempts to control all of this will drive well-intentioned programmers to make it even easier for *these* people to hide. At least when MP3 trading was on Napster, a court order could reveal a search of folks using the network for something truly harmful.