In July 2000, at the H2K conference in New York (2600's Hope conference), Jello Biafra gave the keynote speech. Later that day, he sat on a panel about intellectual property.
He suggested there should be something like an "equal exchange" for artists (equal exchange is the organization that, among other things, makes sure people are being paid fairly to grow coffee). This seems pretty close to the OAL idea from the EFF. It's definitely an idea whose time has come (even though the GNU Artistic License, and other licenses, have been available for years).
On a side note, Jello was/is really pissed that his Vegas song got used in a car ad. He fought a long and very costly legal battle with the rest of the Dead Kennedys, and lost. He wrote the song, but in the end did not control its destiny.
On a side side note, there's a new Dead Kennedys album of live takes from the bay area. It's fantastic! Sorry I don't recall the title right now...
I have the supposedly vulnerable versions of ssh running on two systems, a Solaris 8 box and an AlphaLinux system running RedHat 6.4. On both, I am unable to login to usernames with encrypted passwords of 2 or 1 characters. I tried this with/etc/shadow passwords and non-/etc/shadow.
In short, the trivial vulnerability doesn't seem to exist on these systems. Of course, I'll upgrade (or sidegrade?) to OpenSSH, which I already have on most of my other systems.
Has anyone actually had the trivial case of logging into lp or adm or some other username with an arbitrary password? I'm not doubting the vulnerability exists, but it seems that on systems withOUT any of the recommended workarounds, I'm still not vulnerable.
There has been lots of work on information visualization. It's not really like The Matrix, but attempts to be. Check out PNL's visualization team's work. In Citeseer, look for articles about Bead and Lyberworld.
I've done some work on this with a system called Yavi; can send a reference if you want. It's not hard to find lots of work on this. For an historical bibliography (1993 + prior), see my references here.
I'll submit this as a story, in case/. wants to run it, but suspect they won't. But at least people who find this thread will also be able to get the fix.
I didn't see people mentioning that there is a lot of optimization code for Pentium-type CPUs (how well it works, I can't attest to). There is. Someone mentioned the optimization also works well for Sparcs. The reason, of course, is this is what more of the gcc developers have access to.
As to Alphas, and 64-bit code: Like another postedr, I have great success on my Alpha DP264 system and gcc/g++. gcc has NO problem with 64-bit code. One of the problems that is probably confounded with perceptions of gcc performance is that the Linux kernel has only recently (e.g., 2.2.18 and beyond) been reasonably bug-free in 2GB+ memory. Again, it's a byproduct of more developers (and end-users/testers) having access to 64-bit CPUs on large memory machines.
Read Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man Month." Read Beck's "Extreme Programming." Then, turn around and read Thompson's (1917) "Scientific Management."
The lesson learned is that programming is more like art than like an industry. "Regular" measures of productivity don't apply well, nor do standard reward systems. I agree with AC: take a page from sourceforge.net and other locations, and implement peer-review. Bug tracking etc. are other approaches.
The biggest danger I see is turning the reward system into a popularity contest. Careful that the evaluation measures are consistent with what you want (e.g., if there's no customer interaction, then things like working hours and dress shouldn't play a role. But if there IS customer interaction... get the idea?).
We did our first Unicode etext last year (Mommsen, in German, which also uses Greek!). These days, any work that requires non-ASCII gets an appropriate character set (as long as the volunteers are willing).
I'm not sure why the Aeneid wasn't done in an 8-bit character set (it was released in 1995, not that long ago).
One thing that Michael fights with scholars and librarians about is whether the PG books are suitable for scholarly work (such as Shakespeare analysis, which he uses as an example). Basically, they're not, and not intended to be.
No excuses for Aeneid missing the accents, but I wanted to give a bit of background on how things are usually done today. Of course, Unicode wasn't an option in 1995, but plenty of other solutions were available to keep the accents (even if an additional plain 7-bit ASCII version were generated as a lowest-common-denominator).
The NY lawsuit against 2600 was based on the DMCA (1201 et al.), and is currently being appealed at the NY appellate court.
The CA lawsuit against 500 or so people (including John Does) hasn't completed yet, and is much more about trade secret. Trade secret is a different body of law, but there are some DMCA components.
The content on DVDs is copyrighted, but the "normal" (pre-DMCA) aspects of copyright aren't an issue since nobody's been charged with illegally copying DVDs. It's the new aspects of copyright - the DMCA - that is at issue. The problem is, the new copyright takes away rights that people used to have. This is the crux of the 2600 appeal.
The current issue of 2600 magazine has an opening editorial mentioning that thanks to high-definition TV (coming Really Soon Now), regular TV broadcasts will enjoy the same protection that DVD's are getting, thanks to the DMCA. This could easily remove our right to time-shift by videotaping content, as well as make enforcable whatever restrictions the content owners want to dream up (for example, what if bars need to pay a big license fee for showing sports shows? The DMCA could make this enforceable).
I sent the below as feedback to wired.com. The Internet
Archive doesn't have a nearly complete Usenet archive, but they've got some and could accept more from other sources. They're NOT the place to run a search engine, but ARE the place to hold the content that could go into a search engine.
--------
Nice article, but you need to use your own resources
a little better. Wired has had several articles
about Brewster Kahle and The Internet Archive
(archive.org).
TIA is *already* archiving Usenet, although its
coverage has been less thorough than Deja. They're
a.org with the clear mission and mandate to
archive Usenet, and make it available to those who
want it. They're not in the search-engine
business, but would supply the content to those who
want to build one.
Hopefully this info will be good for a follow-up
article.
First, let me mention that The Times should stick to buying maps, not drawing their own. Fairbanks is in Alaska, folks, not the Yukon...and Prince George is not ~300 miles inland.
That said, Alaskans (at least the environmental ones) will not be keen to have a road, or even a rail, from Nome to Fairbanks. Alaska includes an immense amount of undeveloped and inaccessible land, and even pro-oil folk want to see this continue.
Reading between the lines, the real benefit wouldn't be to tunnel cars, but trains. I can't imagine lots of immediate tourism, but trade would certainly develop.
The thing is, someone needs to do some analysis: is this really better than shipping by sea or air freight? (Anchorage is already one of the world's busiest cargo airports.)
The bottom line, as usual, is money. The Alaskan Oil Pipeline was an incredible feat of engineering, but was built for money. Who's going to see the money in a Trans-Bering tunnel?
(Aside: looks like only the trolls and the sysadmins are online during New Year 2001. We should all get a life).
Quick story: there were some DNS problems related to Y2K. Or, more accurately, related to faulty Y2K fixes. Something indeterminate happened to a domain that I purchase Web hosting for, evidently due to someone making some DNS changes a day or so before the end of the year.
The story isn't that this was really a problem (it was a minor screw-up), but that NetworkSolutions evidently turned off their DNS updates for at least a day or two, perhaps longer. Normally, NSI does host table updates twice per day.
Nobody ever fessed up to any of this, but I was tracerouting and whois'ing etc. for days after the new year waiting for the changes to take effect. The "last update" from NSI's DNS stayed in 1999 for several days.
Bottom line, which I think is a common story, is that the problem (no DNS updates by NetworkSolutions) was caused by paranoia that there might be Y2K problems...
As some of you might recall, I'm one of the Project Gutenberg directors (I stand in for Michael Hart when he's out of town. Last month he was gone; we published 85 NEW books, and updated another 15. We also did MP3s of Janis Ian's Society's Child. It's a productive little project thanks to many great volunteers).
I wanted to mention a few items:
The real PG etext of Alice is available
at ibiblio, as well as other places.
All PG etexts include an extensive license at the top of the file. This is not the GPL, though it was written at about the same time. It basically says that you can do what you want with the book, but must also provide plain text copies. AND, if you want to use the Project Gutenberg trademark, the whole header needs to stay intact.
The "Alice" that Adobe distributes appears to be in violation of the license. However, the book seems to have been produced by a separate party in Chicago. I didn't see other Project Gutenberg books at the Adobe site, but under the license they could use the text (which is public domain) and discard the header/license legitimately.
To the guy who offered a Perl script: I don't recall seeing this, and I'm the guy it should have gone to. Contact me if you're still interested.
Donations are a very slight problem because we just got a trust foundation started with 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status in the US. The problem is that not all states are officially tax exempt yet. See the license in one of today's books (like Short Stories by G. de Maupassant) for a list of states and where to donate. (We have a Web form for credit cards that's waiting for all states before going live. Sorry 'bout that).
XML for Project Gutenberg: I hope this will be in place by mid-2001. I am working with someone on a DTD, and my goal is to do conversion on the fly from XML to text, HTML & other formats. Ideas? Pls. get in touch.
For front-ends: the challenge is the irregular structure of documents (including the ever-changing header & lack of structured metadata). That's the main reason we don't distribute any on the official Web page: none seem to work properly (including header display) for the entire collection. I hope this is a problem that XML will solve.
Both fair use and the doctrine of first sale are superseded in the US by the DMCA. At least according to Judge Kaplan in MPAA v. 2600 et al.
The various levels of screens, end-user license (regardless of UCITA) and encoding of the document itself into an electronic format is more than enough, IMHO, to constitute an access control device.
Therefore, circumventing the access device to, say, print or do anything else not permitted would be a crime under the DMCA! Stupid? You bet! But essentially, that's US copyright law. No, these restrictions don't pertain to print books (unless they have an access control device...).
Dude, I'm Canadian. You're doing the implying, not me. Of course taxes pay for health care, just like for all government services: what else?
I disagree that it's a deal compared with the US system, at least all the time. Taxes in Canada are quite a bit higher than the US, so whether health care is "cheaper" for an individual or family in the US versus Canada depends on what tax bracket they're in. Whether it's better is also an open question: certainly there are lots of negative aspects to both systems.
Anyway, I appreciated your comments about the story really being about privatization. That is enlightening news, and certainly wasn't obvious from the thread so far.
Read David Brin's Transparent Society. His basic argument is that if there are no secrets (including all personal data and all events except those in your house), the world will be a better place. I believe Brin would in favor of EVERYONE's medical records being completely accessible to anyone.
Canada has a nationalized health service. This means that the government is (at least partially) paying for nearly everyone's health care. This gives the issue in this thread a somewhat different flavor, to me, than the U.S. case where most health services are paid for (at least partially) by insurance companies, HMOs or other big business.
Yes, the USPTO is clueless. But it sounds like the patent (filed July 1999, granted May 2000) applies to a wide variety of applications that link metadata to content on the Internet.
The patent description is actually more specific than some of the drivel the USPTO has granted (like one-click shopping). It clearly applies to multimedia content (e.g., music), and linking "complementary entertainment content" (e.g., most anything including ads, metadata, external links, etc.).
Yes, boys and girls: they've applied for international patents as well under the EU and WIPO. So, don't plan on getting relief from moving offshore. Although a naive (aka reasonable) point of view would think it's more expensive to pursue non-US infringers by US patent owners, in fact WIPO makes it (a) cheap; (b) biased; and (c) fast.
ICANN is fitting in quite nicely with their buddies from WIPO (who helps them to make it easy for international domain hijacking) and the World Trade Organization )of frequent protests over the past year).
It's quite clear that big business has woken up to the value of the Internet. And when the laws of their own nation don't work, or are two slow, ICANN and their partners in trans-national beyond-law crime exist to help those with money and power use the Net to grow -- at the expense of individuals and innovators.
The main difference is that it took years for the WTO and their brethren organizations to become the subject of international protest. This was shorter than, say, Nike and other multi-national corporations took to get strung up for anti-human labor practices. Can we expect a similar awakening about ICANN and the absurdly large scope of power it has?
I teach INLS 183, "Distributed Systems and Analysis." This is essentially a class in Linux administration, with an emphasis on software installation, configuration and management.
Strictly speaking, the materials are copyrighted by me and UNC. But help yourself to anything useful, and feel free to ask if you want to make more extensive use.
As covered on slashdot and elsewhere, I was forced to retroactively change my class notes, change my syllabus, and forbidden from demonstrating DeCSS for my Linux Administration Class at UNC-Chapel Hill. Note this was months and months before DeCSS was found to be illegal.
Although at least one deposition taken in the 2600 case identified me and 2 other uses of DeCSS in higher education, I believe I was the only person who actually demonstrated its use in a legitimate classroom context. Or tried to...
Note that the LoC's recent exceptions have done nothing to change UNC's interpretation that it's illegal for me to demonstrate anti-circumvention devices (or DeCSS, anyway) in my class, regardless of how clearly it related to my class content.
From the article: "Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack," he says. Huh? Ridiculous!
It sounds like they have a news feed, and are able to mine Usenet articles to try to determine the earliest signs of things like viruses. This is nice, but not particularly advanced information retrieval.
The other part is that they characterize sites/hosts' Web content. Identifying a porn site is not really that hard since most WANT you to know they're porn so you're (a) interested, and (b) ready to enter your credit card number.
From what I could see, the only interesting part is that they claim to have uncovered a kiddie porn ring by analyzing some sort of net traffic. This doesn't sound all that different than the firm that monitored Napster traffic to find ~300K Metallica fans^H^H^H^Hcriminals. As others have pointed out, monitoring the whole net is certifiably impossible to do except for targeted sites.
Bottom line: the article is inflammatory and doesn't separate out "real" feats of the company from fear, uncertainty and doubt. About par for the Financial Times, I guess.
P.S.: Anyone find a URL for Actis? (it's not actis.co.uk).
K-12 schools work hard to spot gifted children and support their development. What would you do about school-age children who appear to have a gift for working creatively with computers?
In the positive sense, "hackers" are people with strong technical skills, curiousity and persistence. Yet, some people with these characteristics (and many more without them) commit crimes, acts of vandalism, and engage in otherwise anti-social behavior.
The Clinton administration and Congress, notably through its extraordinary funding of the NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative, has very soundly backed the notion that there needs to be a significant investment in (relatively high-risk) high-tech research -- and a fostering of potential scientists, software developers and other key people who will help move technology forward.
So, again: what do you propose for K-12 schools and other institutions to help develop these "good" hackers? Conversely, what do you propose to do about people who might use computers anti-socially?
An integrated system of network devices and physical cabling infrastructure in which each node (e.g. computing device) has a unique network address number. A distributed hierarchical database of paths (routes) between addresses may be used to dynamically determine how to get data from one node to another, based on the existence or speed of available network paths. By utilizing the same infrastructure within an organizational boundary, an entity (e.g., a business or educational institution) may interconnect their internal set of network devices and infrastructure with the outside world. Potential socially beneficial applications for this multi-scale network interconnect include e-commerce and massive direct marketing based on electronic text messages.
Remember the Lorenz butterfly, one of the most populate demonstrations of a strange attractor?
In weather, like other phenomena governed largely by chaotic forces (read your Mandelbrot), transitional periods from one stable state to another involve highly erratic behaviour.
What I believe we're seeing now is the erratic behaviour in global weather patterns that will result in more long-term stability. Whether that will be warmer, colder, or whatever remains to be seen.
If you want evidence of erratic behaviour, just look at the number of records (record storms, droughts, cold, hot, rain, forest fires, locusts, etc.) that are set every year - we've had more extremes recently than in the past, even for this century when weather records are fairly complete.
Despite the MPAA's inability in 10 months to find an example of illegal Internet-based redistribution of one of their DVDs, this is not actually hard to do. Many campus dorm rooms have the bandwidth to enable this easily -- at either DIVX:-) compression or the full original DVD data. 4GB is just not very much.
Would it be helpful for people to start making movies, or portions of movies, in any format (including the "raw" DeCSS output) available on the Internet for download? Is there any reason why this would hurt the appeal?
It seems to me that a big part of the argument of the case was that there had been no piracy, and that DeCSS wasn't needed anyway. What if instead, in time for the appeal, there is rampant and uncontrollable piracy and illicit distribution on the Internet? (This is something like the "cat is out of the bag" argument, I suppose.)
We already have the means for providing shared directories to this type of content via the various Napster-like technologies. What we'd need to do is add better facilities to insure that it's much more difficult to trace back to who's actually made what movie available; also a way of obfuscating the actual data so there's no easy to tell that a particular bit stream on the Internet is a particular movie (something like winnowing & chaffing would work for this).
Slashdot Mirror
In July 2000, at the H2K conference in New York (2600's Hope conference), Jello Biafra gave the keynote speech. Later that day, he sat on a panel about intellectual property.
He suggested there should be something like an "equal exchange" for artists (equal exchange is the organization that, among other things, makes sure people are being paid fairly to grow coffee). This seems pretty close to the OAL idea from the EFF. It's definitely an idea whose time has come (even though the GNU Artistic License, and other licenses, have been available for years).
On a side note, Jello was/is really pissed that his Vegas song got used in a car ad. He fought a long and very costly legal battle with the rest of the Dead Kennedys, and lost. He wrote the song, but in the end did not control its destiny.
On a side side note, there's a new Dead Kennedys album of live takes from the bay area. It's fantastic! Sorry I don't recall the title right now...
In short, the trivial vulnerability doesn't seem to exist on these systems. Of course, I'll upgrade (or sidegrade?) to OpenSSH, which I already have on most of my other systems.
Has anyone actually had the trivial case of logging into lp or adm or some other username with an arbitrary password? I'm not doubting the vulnerability exists, but it seems that on systems withOUT any of the recommended workarounds, I'm still not vulnerable.
There has been lots of work on information visualization. It's not really like The Matrix, but attempts to be. Check out PNL's visualization team's work. In Citeseer, look for articles about Bead and Lyberworld.
I've done some work on this with a system called Yavi; can send a reference if you want. It's not hard to find lots of work on this. For an historical bibliography (1993 + prior), see my references here.
I'll submit this as a story, in case /. wants to run it, but suspect they won't. But at least people who find this thread will also be able to get the fix.
I didn't see people mentioning that there is a lot of optimization code for Pentium-type CPUs (how well it works, I can't attest to). There is. Someone mentioned the optimization also works well for Sparcs. The reason, of course, is this is what more of the gcc developers have access to.
As to Alphas, and 64-bit code: Like another postedr, I have great success on my Alpha DP264 system and gcc/g++. gcc has NO problem with 64-bit code. One of the problems that is probably confounded with perceptions of gcc performance is that the Linux kernel has only recently (e.g., 2.2.18 and beyond) been reasonably bug-free in 2GB+ memory. Again, it's a byproduct of more developers (and end-users/testers) having access to 64-bit CPUs on large memory machines.
The lesson learned is that programming is more like art than like an industry. "Regular" measures of productivity don't apply well, nor do standard reward systems. I agree with AC: take a page from sourceforge.net and other locations, and implement peer-review. Bug tracking etc. are other approaches.
The biggest danger I see is turning the reward system into a popularity contest. Careful that the evaluation measures are consistent with what you want (e.g., if there's no customer interaction, then things like working hours and dress shouldn't play a role. But if there IS customer interaction... get the idea?).
I get 100 hits (the max) for Britney Spears, as well as for Metallica. I just downloaded "No Leaf Clover" from one of many available copies.
If Napster is publicizing who/what is blocked, I didn't see it. But right now, it seems that they're not blocking much at all.
I'm not sure why the Aeneid wasn't done in an 8-bit character set (it was released in 1995, not that long ago).
One thing that Michael fights with scholars and librarians about is whether the PG books are suitable for scholarly work (such as Shakespeare analysis, which he uses as an example). Basically, they're not, and not intended to be.
No excuses for Aeneid missing the accents, but I wanted to give a bit of background on how things are usually done today. Of course, Unicode wasn't an option in 1995, but plenty of other solutions were available to keep the accents (even if an additional plain 7-bit ASCII version were generated as a lowest-common-denominator).
The NY lawsuit against 2600 was based on the DMCA (1201 et al.), and is currently being appealed at the NY appellate court.
The CA lawsuit against 500 or so people (including John Does) hasn't completed yet, and is much more about trade secret. Trade secret is a different body of law, but there are some DMCA components.
The content on DVDs is copyrighted, but the "normal" (pre-DMCA) aspects of copyright aren't an issue since nobody's been charged with illegally copying DVDs. It's the new aspects of copyright - the DMCA - that is at issue. The problem is, the new copyright takes away rights that people used to have. This is the crux of the 2600 appeal.
The current issue of 2600 magazine has an opening editorial mentioning that thanks to high-definition TV (coming Really Soon Now), regular TV broadcasts will enjoy the same protection that DVD's are getting, thanks to the DMCA. This could easily remove our right to time-shift by videotaping content, as well as make enforcable whatever restrictions the content owners want to dream up (for example, what if bars need to pay a big license fee for showing sports shows? The DMCA could make this enforceable).
--------
Nice article, but you need to use your own resources a little better. Wired has had several articles about Brewster Kahle and The Internet Archive (archive.org).
TIA is *already* archiving Usenet, although its coverage has been less thorough than Deja. They're a .org with the clear mission and mandate to
archive Usenet, and make it available to those who
want it. They're not in the search-engine
business, but would supply the content to those who
want to build one.
Hopefully this info will be good for a follow-up article.
First, let me mention that The Times should stick to buying maps, not drawing their own. Fairbanks is in Alaska, folks, not the Yukon...and Prince George is not ~300 miles inland.
That said, Alaskans (at least the environmental ones) will not be keen to have a road, or even a rail, from Nome to Fairbanks. Alaska includes an immense amount of undeveloped and inaccessible land, and even pro-oil folk want to see this continue.
Reading between the lines, the real benefit wouldn't be to tunnel cars, but trains. I can't imagine lots of immediate tourism, but trade would certainly develop.
The thing is, someone needs to do some analysis: is this really better than shipping by sea or air freight? (Anchorage is already one of the world's busiest cargo airports.)
The bottom line, as usual, is money. The Alaskan Oil Pipeline was an incredible feat of engineering, but was built for money. Who's going to see the money in a Trans-Bering tunnel?
(Aside: looks like only the trolls and the sysadmins are online during New Year 2001. We should all get a life).
Quick story: there were some DNS problems related to Y2K. Or, more accurately, related to faulty Y2K fixes. Something indeterminate happened to a domain that I purchase Web hosting for, evidently due to someone making some DNS changes a day or so before the end of the year.
The story isn't that this was really a problem (it was a minor screw-up), but that NetworkSolutions evidently turned off their DNS updates for at least a day or two, perhaps longer. Normally, NSI does host table updates twice per day.
Nobody ever fessed up to any of this, but I was tracerouting and whois'ing etc. for days after the new year waiting for the changes to take effect. The "last update" from NSI's DNS stayed in 1999 for several days.
Bottom line, which I think is a common story, is that the problem (no DNS updates by NetworkSolutions) was caused by paranoia that there might be Y2K problems...
Both fair use and the doctrine of first sale are superseded in the US by the DMCA. At least according to Judge Kaplan in MPAA v. 2600 et al.
The various levels of screens, end-user license (regardless of UCITA) and encoding of the document itself into an electronic format is more than enough, IMHO, to constitute an access control device.
Therefore, circumventing the access device to, say, print or do anything else not permitted would be a crime under the DMCA! Stupid? You bet! But essentially, that's US copyright law. No, these restrictions don't pertain to print books (unless they have an access control device...).
Dude, I'm Canadian. You're doing the implying, not me. Of course taxes pay for health care, just like for all government services: what else?
I disagree that it's a deal compared with the US system, at least all the time. Taxes in Canada are quite a bit higher than the US, so whether health care is "cheaper" for an individual or family in the US versus Canada depends on what tax bracket they're in. Whether it's better is also an open question: certainly there are lots of negative aspects to both systems.
Anyway, I appreciated your comments about the story really being about privatization. That is enlightening news, and certainly wasn't obvious from the thread so far.
Bye for now...
The patent description is actually more specific than some of the drivel the USPTO has granted (like one-click shopping). It clearly applies to multimedia content (e.g., music), and linking "complementary entertainment content" (e.g., most anything including ads, metadata, external links, etc.).
Yes, boys and girls: they've applied for international patents as well under the EU and WIPO. So, don't plan on getting relief from moving offshore. Although a naive (aka reasonable) point of view would think it's more expensive to pursue non-US infringers by US patent owners, in fact WIPO makes it (a) cheap; (b) biased; and (c) fast.
It's quite clear that big business has woken up to the value of the Internet. And when the laws of their own nation don't work, or are two slow, ICANN and their partners in trans-national beyond-law crime exist to help those with money and power use the Net to grow -- at the expense of individuals and innovators.
The main difference is that it took years for the WTO and their brethren organizations to become the subject of international protest. This was shorter than, say, Nike and other multi-national corporations took to get strung up for anti-human labor practices. Can we expect a similar awakening about ICANN and the absurdly large scope of power it has?
Probably not...too geeky.
The homepage is http://ils.unc.edu/inls183.
Strictly speaking, the materials are copyrighted by me and UNC. But help yourself to anything useful, and feel free to ask if you want to make more extensive use.
As covered on slashdot and elsewhere, I was forced to retroactively change my class notes, change my syllabus, and forbidden from demonstrating DeCSS for my Linux Administration Class at UNC-Chapel Hill. Note this was months and months before DeCSS was found to be illegal.
Although at least one deposition taken in the 2600 case identified me and 2 other uses of DeCSS in higher education, I believe I was the only person who actually demonstrated its use in a legitimate classroom context. Or tried to...
Note that the LoC's recent exceptions have done nothing to change UNC's interpretation that it's illegal for me to demonstrate anti-circumvention devices (or DeCSS, anyway) in my class, regardless of how clearly it related to my class content.
It sounds like they have a news feed, and are able to mine Usenet articles to try to determine the earliest signs of things like viruses. This is nice, but not particularly advanced information retrieval.
The other part is that they characterize sites/hosts' Web content. Identifying a porn site is not really that hard since most WANT you to know they're porn so you're (a) interested, and (b) ready to enter your credit card number.
From what I could see, the only interesting part is that they claim to have uncovered a kiddie porn ring by analyzing some sort of net traffic. This doesn't sound all that different than the firm that monitored Napster traffic to find ~300K Metallica fans^H^H^H^Hcriminals. As others have pointed out, monitoring the whole net is certifiably impossible to do except for targeted sites.
Bottom line: the article is inflammatory and doesn't separate out "real" feats of the company from fear, uncertainty and doubt. About par for the Financial Times, I guess.
P.S.: Anyone find a URL for Actis? (it's not actis.co.uk).
K-12 schools work hard to spot gifted children and support their development. What would you do about school-age children who appear to have a gift for working creatively with computers?
In the positive sense, "hackers" are people with strong technical skills, curiousity and persistence. Yet, some people with these characteristics (and many more without them) commit crimes, acts of vandalism, and engage in otherwise anti-social behavior.
The Clinton administration and Congress, notably through its extraordinary funding of the NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative, has very soundly backed the notion that there needs to be a significant investment in (relatively high-risk) high-tech research -- and a fostering of potential scientists, software developers and other key people who will help move technology forward.
So, again: what do you propose for K-12 schools and other institutions to help develop these "good" hackers? Conversely, what do you propose to do about people who might use computers anti-socially?
Remember the Lorenz butterfly, one of the most populate demonstrations of a strange attractor?
In weather, like other phenomena governed largely by chaotic forces (read your Mandelbrot), transitional periods from one stable state to another involve highly erratic behaviour.
What I believe we're seeing now is the erratic behaviour in global weather patterns that will result in more long-term stability. Whether that will be warmer, colder, or whatever remains to be seen.
If you want evidence of erratic behaviour, just look at the number of records (record storms, droughts, cold, hot, rain, forest fires, locusts, etc.) that are set every year - we've had more extremes recently than in the past, even for this century when weather records are fairly complete.
(related to SMN's comment in this thread)
:-) compression or the full original DVD data. 4GB is just not very much.
Despite the MPAA's inability in 10 months to find an example of illegal Internet-based redistribution of one of their DVDs, this is not actually hard to do. Many campus dorm rooms have the bandwidth to enable this easily -- at either DIVX
Would it be helpful for people to start making movies, or portions of movies, in any format (including the "raw" DeCSS output) available on the Internet for download? Is there any reason why this would hurt the appeal?
It seems to me that a big part of the argument of the case was that there had been no piracy, and that DeCSS wasn't needed anyway. What if instead, in time for the appeal, there is rampant and uncontrollable piracy and illicit distribution on the Internet? (This is something like the "cat is out of the bag" argument, I suppose.)
We already have the means for providing shared directories to this type of content via the various Napster-like technologies. What we'd need to do is add better facilities to insure that it's much more difficult to trace back to who's actually made what movie available; also a way of obfuscating the actual data so there's no easy to tell that a particular bit stream on the Internet is a particular movie (something like winnowing & chaffing would work for this).