The Data Protection Act is UK legislation. If Facebook do hold this sort of information then they probably don't process it on servers located in in the UK (or in other European countries where the EU Data Protection Directive applies).
It is a bit more than "users are saturating their own links". Jim Gettys' point is that the combination of large packet buffers at numerous points in the chain (OS, home router, routers at ISPs, etc) have effectively broken TCP's previously very effective congestion avoidance mechanisms, because the TCP stack doesn't get a timely notification of dropped packets when one particular link in a data path becomes saturated. And because you don't necessarily know where the bottleneck is going to be between any two end-points on the Internet, or what your share of the bandwidth of that link is going to be, you can't do effective bandwidth limiting in advance. It would be much better if the flow control built in your machine's TCP/IP stack could handle the situation.
But, if the original poster's speculation were true, it would put Google in the traditional role of a technology patent holder who holds a defensive arsenal of patents: if MPEG-LA makes a fuss about aspects of VP8 which they claim infringe MPEG-LA patents, then Google can threaten to retaliate by suing everyone in the world who is currently shipping an implementation of H.264 for infringement of the On2/VP8 patents (and so publicly demonstrate the fact that being an licensee of the MPEG-LA H.264 pool doesn't protect one from all patent claims, and provides no insurance or indemnity).
Stalemate. Mutually-assured-destruction stand-off. Result: VP8 available for royalty-free for use, without MPEG-LA interference.
But only if Google really have inherited some killer On2 patents as part of their acquisition. I hope they have - it would make sense of their strategy and confidence in VP8 if this kind of thing were going on in the background.
The patent holders rights in the US will be rooted in the US Constitution and US law. MPEG-LA looks after patents which originally belonged to many multi-national corporations, including many European and Japanese companies, and they attempt to enforce these licensing deals and royalty payments around the world. Anyway, my understanding was that the US Constitution authorizes the legislature to enact laws to create a patent system for the express purpose of encouraging invention and advancement - the patent system is supposed to sweeten the deal just enough to make it worth-while for inventors to properly document and disclose their ideas, not enshrine moral property right over ideas or guarantee a massive revenue stream from from them.
I don't claim to be particularly knowledgeable about patent law, either in the US or elsewhere. I basically just wanted to vent a shriek of personal outrage at the idea things are "supposed to be like that". Law needs to be felt to be fair and equitable at some level, if it is to be effective. If law simply becomes a tool of commercial interests who lobby for laws that further enrich themselves, without reference to the citizens who will be bound by those laws, then the law will fall into disrepute.
My feelings don't really alter based on the financial thresholds needed to trigger "commercial licensing" requirements on the end-user. I have a visceral objection to the idea that if I buy a camera from (say) Sony that I then have potential financial and legal obligations to MPEG-LA when using that camera for the kind of purposes that it was designed, built and sold. MPEG-LA should have extracted their pound of flesh in the form of a one-off royalty payment from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer should have factored that cost into the purchase price that I payed.
Your camera shipped with the generic end-user consumer license.
But that is the problem. You say this like it was a reasonable and explicable thing.
The idea that an end user of a consumer product needs a "license" to use the piece of hardware that they have bought in good faith, or is in the slightest way obliged to pay heed to any usage restrictions or fees that some patent holder tries to levy is completely at odds with natural justice and common sense. The patent holder's legal and commercial relationship is with the manufacturer, which involves the manufacturer's right to embody the invention. The manufacturer has a completely separate legal and commercial relationship with the consumer (or with a retailer), which involves transfer of ownership of the physical goods in return for payment.
If a patent system is going to exist at all, it should provide the legal framework for the payment of any royalties from a manufacturer to the patent holder for the right to embody the patented idea in a manufactured product, it should create a civil liability in the case that royalties for manufacture aren't payed, and that should be the end of it.
The original BBC Microcomputer stored 100kbytes on 40-track single-sided single-density 5.25" floppies, which is a reasonable match to the factor of 15 estimate if they are comparing with a 1440kbyte double-sided high-density 3.5" disk.
That struck me as really odd - publicly saying "we're going to release something that the Pentagon really doesn't want you to know in two weeks time" seems to be positively inviting attempts at suppression by the authorities.
If they really have leaked information that they think people should know about, then surely they should just "publish and be damned" - not engage in what appears to be news management in an attempt to create a sensationalist media buzz about it?
You have it backwards, surely? First the "work needs to be done", then if the port becomes consistently release quality then perhaps it will get incorporated into the official release mechanism like other first-class architectures.
The BBC report that I heard on the radio this morning didn't suggest that the "soliciting purr" sounded recognizably like a baby's cry - but if you stick a recording of it through a spectrum analyzer you find that it has some of the same frequency components as a baby cry embedded in it. So the sound puts humans on edge and plays on their subconscious in such a way that they want to satisfy the cat and make it stop.
Respectfully disagree - codifying existing practice and getting the browser developers to buy into incremental improvements to the status quo is what got us to HTML4 and the original CSS specs, which
I would suggest is basically the last time non-trivial improvements to the standards used to deliver
web pages saw wide-spread adoption.
In contrast, whenever the language designers have tried to forge a path without involving the people who
will write the web pages and develop the software the new standards have been largely ignored - for example: HTML3.0 and XHTML (and I write that as an XHTML fan).
It is intended as a consumer protection measure - it is only legal to offer to sell beer by the pint, half-pint, or third-pint (a rare measure, though it has become popular at real-ale festivals in recent years) because it makes it trivial to compare pricing from one establishment to the next. It is more difficult to gauge
value for money (especially when tipsy!) if you've got to look at the menu or a notice to find out how many centi-litres (or whatever) are supposed to be in a bar's beer glasses and then do mental arithmetic to compare that with the place down the road where the measures are different.
The fact that the mandated measure is pints rather than half-litres is mostly down to the fact that the laws regulating these things are very old (though the fact that there would be a "little Englander" backlash against
changing the traditional measures has no doubt put governments off revising and updating the legislation!).
What if the original poster has an high definition display which doesn't have HDMI inputs (many such "HD ready" TV sets were sold before HDMI was standardised a couple of years go)? The fact that he/she checked the capabilities of the analogue component output with the manufacturer and the seller before purchasing suggests this might well be the case...
The problem is that they are trying to control the "user experience", as always. The blog doesn't actually say anything about the codecs or transport streams used. It is all about the Totem plugin that lets one browse the list of programmes on offer.
Dear BBC: Use open formats. Make it easy to get at the files or streams. You will not need to worry about the diversity found in various Linux distributions and different desktop environments - the development communities associated with the various desktops and media players will write all the user interface tools for you!
For the record, mplayer on my EeePC 900 has no problem decoding H264 at
standard def PAL rates (720x576 at 25fps), which is a good match for the 600
line display that the machine actually has...
VLC is licensed under GPLv2 - surely that's not compatible with the kind of
per-copy royalties that organisations like MPEG LA want in their licensing deals?
Re:usenet spam - greencard lawyers
on
Spam Is 30 Years Old
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Canter and Siegel.
I still remember firing up trn that morning, coming across the same off-topic
message in group after group, and realizing that someone had used a newsgroups
list in conjunction with a perl script or something to post the same advert to
every USENET group in existence.
The mechanism was obvious as soon as you saw the results, but it seemed so
obviously wrong and inappropriate "why would anyone *do* that!". The beginning of the end of the golden age...
Bittorrent doesn't allow you to publish and download anonymously. If you
are seeding something (or downloading it) everyone who is allowed to connect
to the tracker can find out your IP address.
A Freenet network ideally consists of a large number of nodes connected by sparse
network of encrypted links. Many of the nodes have a big chunk of cache
associated with them. The files in the network live in the caches. To request a
file you ask your node to find a file with a specific hash signature. It passes
the request to its peers in the network, they pass it on in turn, and hopefully
it eventually it reaches a cache that has the file you asked for. Bits then
start trickling back through the chain of caches. The important thing is that
because your local node is an active part of the network and is sending and
receiving stuff all the time, nobody knows whether a particular request or
response that goes through your node relates to something that you asked for,
or whether it is just something that you've been asked to "pass on" by a 3rd party.
If everything works as intended, even people who are fully connected to the
network and participating shouldn't be able to identify the original publisher
of a particular file, or identify who has downloaded a copy (though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!).
It also has obvious undesirable applications (see the flood comments about child-porn and terrorism).
The other major practical difference to Bittorrent is that Bittorrent is designed to be fast. Freenet is definitely not the quickest way to get information from A to B...
The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) made a one-off copyright
payment of 10,000 Euros to Microsoft in return for documentation of the
protocols. The PFIF is allowed to pass on to the Samba developers information
gleaned from the documentation, and the Samba developers are allowed to release
source code based on what they have learnt.
MS were required to offer this deal to all comers after they lost their
European anti-trust legal case.
The agreement requires MS to identify any patents that they hold which
they believe relate to the protocols (this is so that the developers are not
at risk of implementing something described in the documentation and finding
themselves under legal attack based on a previously undisclosed MS patent).
http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/
MS offers a patent licensing program to go with the copyright licensing
program, but neither the Samba developers nor anyone acting for them have
taken that up (and couldn't even if they wished to - it involves per-copy
royalties, which are GPL incompatible).
If you are going to do an upgrade by compiling sources, fetch the RELENG_7_0
sources via cvsup or similar, then have a look at/usr/src/UPDATING. Towards
the end of the file, under the heading "COMMON ITEMS:", there are instructions
on how to do upgrades along a branch or from one major version to the next.
Regarding "leftovers": the "make delete-old" and "mergemaster" steps in the
upgrading recipe should take care of those.
Note that the "world" in "compiling world" is *just* the FreeBSD base system,
and doesn't include ports (such as X.org). As noted in the release announcement,
you *also* need to recompile all your ports (or replace them with 7.0 binary
packages from the 7.0 CDs). If you are currently running FreeBSD 6.0 then I think that you also face an X.org 6.9 -> X.org 7.2 transition? It is possible
to do that by recompiling from source, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it if
you aren't familiar with all the various processes.
I think that I would recommend a full backup, followed by a from scratch
installation of 7.0-RELEASE. If you want to do source updates from then, you
could get your security fixes by tracking the RELENG_7 ("7-STABLE")
or RELENG_7_0 (7.0 + essential fixes only) source trees using cvsup and rebuilding world and kernel. You can track updates and security fixes to ports
tree using cvsup too, and recompile your ports with portupgrade or similar. If
you practice on-going source based upgrades this way through the life of FreeBSD 7 then perhaps you'll feel more confident
about tacking a source based upgrade to FreeBSD 8.0 when it comes out in a couple of years time.
Or you could just do a binary install of 7.0 and then use the new
freebsd-update mechanism patch and update your system from now on. Unfortunately it seems as though one can't binary upgrade from 6.0 to 7.0 (the release notes
only mention binary upgrades from 6.3 to 7).
IPv4 packets would be turned into IPv6 packets in the IPv4 subset of the IPv6 address space when they left the IPv4 endpoints, and then turned back to IPv4 if the destination didn't support IPv6.
Unfortunately the IPv4 address space isn't embedded in the IPv6 address space in the way that you suggest. Dan Bernstein pointed out many years ago that this was a mistake.
The OGG container format, Vorbis audio codec, and Theora video codec are important because they don't require patent licenses. H264 and AAC do require
patent licenses.
If W3C allows patent-encumbered codecs into the baseline specification for HTML5 then the free software community will not be able to legally distribute standards-conforming browsers, in jurisdictions which enforce software
patents.
But since GNU su is Free Software, if you want group wheel restrictions in su then there is nothing to stop you adding them yourself. And encouraging/lobbying your distributor to take your patches...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. First time in months that I've been tempted to post, and you beat me to it ... :-)
The Data Protection Act is UK legislation. If Facebook do hold this sort of information then they probably don't process it on servers located in in the UK (or in other European countries where the EU Data Protection Directive applies).
It is a bit more than "users are saturating their own links". Jim Gettys' point is that the combination of large packet buffers at numerous points in the chain (OS, home router, routers at ISPs, etc) have effectively broken TCP's previously very effective congestion avoidance mechanisms, because the TCP stack doesn't get a timely notification of dropped packets when one particular link in a data path becomes saturated. And because you don't necessarily know where the bottleneck is going to be between any two end-points on the Internet, or what your share of the bandwidth of that link is going to be, you can't do effective bandwidth limiting in advance. It would be much better if the flow control built in your machine's TCP/IP stack could handle the situation.
But, if the original poster's speculation were true, it would put Google in the traditional role of a technology patent holder who holds a defensive arsenal of patents: if MPEG-LA makes a fuss about aspects of VP8 which they claim infringe MPEG-LA patents, then Google can threaten to retaliate by suing everyone in the world who is currently shipping an implementation of H.264 for infringement of the On2/VP8 patents (and so publicly demonstrate the fact that being an licensee of the MPEG-LA H.264 pool doesn't protect one from all patent claims, and provides no insurance or indemnity).
Stalemate. Mutually-assured-destruction stand-off. Result: VP8 available for royalty-free for use, without MPEG-LA interference.
But only if Google really have inherited some killer On2 patents as part of their acquisition. I hope they have - it would make sense of their strategy and confidence in VP8 if this kind of thing were going on in the background.
The patent holders rights in the US will be rooted in the US Constitution and US law. MPEG-LA looks after patents which originally belonged to many multi-national corporations, including many European and Japanese companies, and they attempt to enforce these licensing deals and royalty payments around the world. Anyway, my understanding was that the US Constitution authorizes the legislature to enact laws to create a patent system for the express purpose of encouraging invention and advancement - the patent system is supposed to sweeten the deal just enough to make it worth-while for inventors to properly document and disclose their ideas, not enshrine moral property right over ideas or guarantee a massive revenue stream from from them.
I don't claim to be particularly knowledgeable about patent law, either in the US or elsewhere. I basically just wanted to vent a shriek of personal outrage at the idea things are "supposed to be like that". Law needs to be felt to be fair and equitable at some level, if it is to be effective. If law simply becomes a tool of commercial interests who lobby for laws that further enrich themselves, without reference to the citizens who will be bound by those laws, then the law will fall into disrepute.
My feelings don't really alter based on the financial thresholds needed to trigger "commercial licensing" requirements on the end-user. I have a visceral objection to the idea that if I buy a camera from (say) Sony that I then have potential financial and legal obligations to MPEG-LA when using that camera for the kind of purposes that it was designed, built and sold. MPEG-LA should have extracted their pound of flesh in the form of a one-off royalty payment from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer should have factored that cost into the purchase price that I payed.
But that is the problem . You say this like it was a reasonable and explicable thing .
The idea that an end user of a consumer product needs a "license" to use the piece of hardware that they have bought in good faith, or is in the slightest way obliged to pay heed to any usage restrictions or fees that some patent holder tries to levy is completely at odds with natural justice and common sense. The patent holder's legal and commercial relationship is with the manufacturer, which involves the manufacturer's right to embody the invention. The manufacturer has a completely separate legal and commercial relationship with the consumer (or with a retailer), which involves transfer of ownership of the physical goods in return for payment.
If a patent system is going to exist at all, it should provide the legal framework for the payment of any royalties from a manufacturer to the patent holder for the right to embody the patented idea in a manufactured product, it should create a civil liability in the case that royalties for manufacture aren't payed, and that should be the end of it.
The original BBC Microcomputer stored 100kbytes on 40-track single-sided single-density 5.25" floppies, which is a reasonable match to the factor of 15 estimate if they are comparing with a 1440kbyte double-sided high-density 3.5" disk.
That struck me as really odd - publicly saying "we're going to release something that the Pentagon really doesn't want you to know in two weeks time" seems to be positively inviting attempts at suppression by the authorities.
If they really have leaked information that they think people should know about, then surely they should just "publish and be damned" - not engage in what appears to be news management in an attempt to create a sensationalist media buzz about it?
Except we mess up the simplicity by being on "British Summer Time" (daylight saving time, one hour ahead of UTC) as civil time for much of the year.
Roll-on Sunday! (when we go back, and I get an extra hour in bed :-)
You have it backwards, surely? First the "work needs to be done", then if the port becomes consistently release quality then perhaps it will get incorporated into the official release mechanism like other first-class architectures.
The BBC report that I heard on the radio this morning didn't suggest that the "soliciting purr" sounded recognizably like a baby's cry - but if you stick a recording of it through a spectrum analyzer you find that it has some of the same frequency components as a baby cry embedded in it. So the sound puts humans on edge and plays on their subconscious in such a way that they want to satisfy the cat and make it stop.
But the Supreme Court has already said that it will hear the Bilski appeal:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/scotus-to-hear-bilski-may-be-huge-for-software-patents.ars
Surely that's when the precedents will be set?
Respectfully disagree - codifying existing practice and getting the browser developers to buy into incremental improvements to the status quo is what got us to HTML4 and the original CSS specs, which I would suggest is basically the last time non-trivial improvements to the standards used to deliver web pages saw wide-spread adoption.
In contrast, whenever the language designers have tried to forge a path without involving the people who will write the web pages and develop the software the new standards have been largely ignored - for example: HTML3.0 and XHTML (and I write that as an XHTML fan).
It is intended as a consumer protection measure - it is only legal to offer to sell beer by the pint, half-pint, or third-pint (a rare measure, though it has become popular at real-ale festivals in recent years) because it makes it trivial to compare pricing from one establishment to the next. It is more difficult to gauge value for money (especially when tipsy!) if you've got to look at the menu or a notice to find out how many centi-litres (or whatever) are supposed to be in a bar's beer glasses and then do mental arithmetic to compare that with the place down the road where the measures are different.
The fact that the mandated measure is pints rather than half-litres is mostly down to the fact that the laws regulating these things are very old (though the fact that there would be a "little Englander" backlash against changing the traditional measures has no doubt put governments off revising and updating the legislation!).
What if the original poster has an high definition display which doesn't have HDMI inputs (many such "HD ready" TV sets were sold before HDMI was standardised a couple of years go)? The fact that he/she checked the capabilities of the analogue component output with the manufacturer and the seller before purchasing suggests this might well be the case ...
They are doing it wrong.
The problem is that they are trying to control the "user experience", as always. The blog doesn't actually say anything about the codecs or transport streams used. It is all about the Totem plugin that lets one browse the list of programmes on offer.
Dear BBC: Use open formats. Make it easy to get at the files or streams. You will not need to worry about the diversity found in various Linux distributions and different desktop environments - the development communities associated with the various desktops and media players will write all the user interface tools for you!
For the record, mplayer on my EeePC 900 has no problem decoding H264 at standard def PAL rates (720x576 at 25fps), which is a good match for the 600 line display that the machine actually has ...
VLC is licensed under GPLv2 - surely that's not compatible with the kind of per-copy royalties that organisations like MPEG LA want in their licensing deals?
Canter and Siegel. I still remember firing up trn that morning, coming across the same off-topic message in group after group, and realizing that someone had used a newsgroups list in conjunction with a perl script or something to post the same advert to every USENET group in existence.
The mechanism was obvious as soon as you saw the results, but it seemed so obviously wrong and inappropriate "why would anyone *do* that!". The beginning of the end of the golden age ...
Bittorrent doesn't allow you to publish and download anonymously. If you are seeding something (or downloading it) everyone who is allowed to connect to the tracker can find out your IP address.
A Freenet network ideally consists of a large number of nodes connected by sparse network of encrypted links. Many of the nodes have a big chunk of cache associated with them. The files in the network live in the caches. To request a file you ask your node to find a file with a specific hash signature. It passes the request to its peers in the network, they pass it on in turn, and hopefully it eventually it reaches a cache that has the file you asked for. Bits then start trickling back through the chain of caches. The important thing is that because your local node is an active part of the network and is sending and receiving stuff all the time, nobody knows whether a particular request or response that goes through your node relates to something that you asked for, or whether it is just something that you've been asked to "pass on" by a 3rd party.
If everything works as intended, even people who are fully connected to the network and participating shouldn't be able to identify the original publisher of a particular file, or identify who has downloaded a copy (though the fact that they've added the darknet mode suggests that that they aren't 100% confident about that!).
http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html
This has obvious anti-censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to whistle-blow type applications:
http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html
It also has obvious undesirable applications (see the flood comments about child-porn and terrorism).
The other major practical difference to Bittorrent is that Bittorrent is designed to be fast. Freenet is definitely not the quickest way to get information from A to B ...
The summary is misleading or mistaken.
The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) made a one-off copyright payment of 10,000 Euros to Microsoft in return for documentation of the protocols. The PFIF is allowed to pass on to the Samba developers information gleaned from the documentation, and the Samba developers are allowed to release source code based on what they have learnt.
MS were required to offer this deal to all comers after they lost their European anti-trust legal case.
The agreement requires MS to identify any patents that they hold which they believe relate to the protocols (this is so that the developers are not at risk of implementing something described in the documentation and finding themselves under legal attack based on a previously undisclosed MS patent).
http://samba.org/samba/PFIF/
MS offers a patent licensing program to go with the copyright licensing program, but neither the Samba developers nor anyone acting for them have taken that up (and couldn't even if they wished to - it involves per-copy royalties, which are GPL incompatible).
If you are going to do an upgrade by compiling sources, fetch the RELENG_7_0 sources via cvsup or similar, then have a look at /usr/src/UPDATING. Towards
the end of the file, under the heading "COMMON ITEMS:", there are instructions
on how to do upgrades along a branch or from one major version to the next.
Regarding "leftovers": the "make delete-old" and "mergemaster" steps in the upgrading recipe should take care of those.
Note that the "world" in "compiling world" is *just* the FreeBSD base system, and doesn't include ports (such as X.org). As noted in the release announcement, you *also* need to recompile all your ports (or replace them with 7.0 binary packages from the 7.0 CDs). If you are currently running FreeBSD 6.0 then I think that you also face an X.org 6.9 -> X.org 7.2 transition? It is possible to do that by recompiling from source, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it if you aren't familiar with all the various processes.
I think that I would recommend a full backup, followed by a from scratch installation of 7.0-RELEASE. If you want to do source updates from then, you could get your security fixes by tracking the RELENG_7 ("7-STABLE") or RELENG_7_0 (7.0 + essential fixes only) source trees using cvsup and rebuilding world and kernel. You can track updates and security fixes to ports tree using cvsup too, and recompile your ports with portupgrade or similar. If you practice on-going source based upgrades this way through the life of FreeBSD 7 then perhaps you'll feel more confident about tacking a source based upgrade to FreeBSD 8.0 when it comes out in a couple of years time.
Or you could just do a binary install of 7.0 and then use the new freebsd-update mechanism patch and update your system from now on. Unfortunately it seems as though one can't binary upgrade from 6.0 to 7.0 (the release notes only mention binary upgrades from 6.3 to 7).
Unfortunately the IPv4 address space isn't embedded in the IPv6 address space in the way that you suggest. Dan Bernstein pointed out many years ago that this was a mistake.
The OGG container format, Vorbis audio codec, and Theora video codec are important because they don't require patent licenses. H264 and AAC do require patent licenses.
If W3C allows patent-encumbered codecs into the baseline specification for HTML5 then the free software community will not be able to legally distribute standards-conforming browsers, in jurisdictions which enforce software patents.
But since GNU su is Free Software, if you want group wheel restrictions in su then there is nothing to stop you adding them yourself. And encouraging/lobbying your distributor to take your patches ... :-)