The sun causes water to evaporate and rain on the mountains. Thus the sun stores potential energy in the water by raising it. The water normally dissapates this energy as heat and gurgling noises when it falls back to the oceans, but by putting a turbine in the way, we can get it to release this energy in a more useful form: electricity. The energy comes from the sun, the gravity just helps store it.
But who is going to painstakingly inspect every line of code in every piece of open-source software he/she comes across?
People who want to exploit it, of course.
How can we trust that they will fix an exploit they find rather than use it themselves?
We can't. But we can trust that when you put software into the wild, people will try to exploit it. So why can open source be more secure? Because it's easy to find exploits if you have the source, and it's hard to find them if you have only the binary.
Imagine two identical programs, one open and one closed, each with 100 exploitable bugs. A group of crackers look for bugs in the closed version, finds 25 of them, and exploits them. The company fixes them, and they're down to 75 bugs. In a parallel universe, the crackers look for bugs in the source of the open version, and find and exploit 75 of them. The community fixes them, and there are 25 bugs left. The open version has become more secure.
You may say the company's testing would find 50 more bugs. But I don't think they can employ enough testers to out-do the entire cracker community. You may say that the open source version had three times as many exploits. That's true, but those were in the past, before the product was mature. At this point, both projects have reached an equillibrium between the bugs created and bugs found, and the open source version has fewer bugs.
Another factor is that with closed source, the only external people interested in finding bugs are those that want to exploit them. With open source, those few people who are just really bored and want to help have the tools, namely access to the source, to do so.
Companies pushing DRM don't give a damn whether you make copies for yourself, they just want to make sure you don't upload it to the net and share it with a few thousand of your closest friends.
So, this, um, well-connected individual buys an iTune, tries to share it over P2P, and it doesn't work, so he gives up and becomes a law-abiding citizen, right? Think about it. He'd break the DRM if possible. Or he'd burn it to a CD-R and rip it. Or he'd just go back to ripping and sharing CDs. Or he'd snag a old sound card and some cables on the black market.
Getting around DRM takes only knowledge and time. Pirates have that. Techies who want to make personal copies have that. But average computer users don't. Consumers are the only ones who will be seriously affected. They won't know how to make personal copies, and they'll mistakenly assume they aren't allowed to anyway. This is DRM's purpose.
"Shrugging off" spam by making your email address known may be why spam is prevalent, but it's also why email is prevalent. Imagine telephones without phonebooks or IP without DNS - they would be considerably less useful. Especially when working on a project that lives and dies by the ease with which outsiders can submit bug reports and patches, the ability to receive messages without prior arrangement is essential.
I think you're the one shrugging off spam, by saying that there's nothing we can do about it so we should all just give up and hide our addresses. Call me naive, but I think the dream of sending anyone a letter just by clicking the link by their name, yet still not getting too much spam, is achievable.
Even if the Linux binary drivers have this restriction, it wouldn't really matter. The way it works is, in order to license DVD playback technology, software must comply with a bunch of restrictions - region locking, not skipping ads or warnings, and telling the graphics card to turn on Macrovision (so you can't record the TV-out on a VCR). And now these NVidia cards won't tell the software Macrovision is on when it really isn't, so the software will refuse to play the DVD.
The upshot is, if you use an unlicensed DVD player, like MPlayer, Ogle, or VLC, it will never even try to turn on Macrovision, so the driver change will have no effect. Granted, this may be illegal, in the Land of the Free at least. (IANAL)
Aside from Star Wars IV, my favorite is Independence Day. Yes, it's not a space battle, but that gives it the advantage of a good excuse for sound and banking turns. It's only real shortcoming is the fake explosions, especially of the fighter jets. They completely stop and vaporize, leaving no debris, and well after it's vaporized, the pilot is still shown screaming. But the motion and cinematography is great.
But if *I* want to make music and sell it then at what point exactly do you think *you* have a right to take it without paying?
Exactly 15 years after you recorded it. And I can copy my copy as much as I want, so long as I don't let anyone else have it. And you can have my circumvention devices - when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
I think Apple's got several millions of songs sold that argue that DRM does work when done right.
Exactly. There were many retailers failing to sell heavily restricted files. Then Apple sold songs with practically non-existant DRM - unlimited plays, three computers, ability to burn to CD, etc. And of course this sold very well. If heavy restrictions don't sell and light restrictions sell very well, it stands to reason that no restrictions would sell even better.
You say the RIAA won't be happy without DRM. True, but why? There is no legitimate reason. DRM hinders sales and does absolutely nothing to stop mass copyright infringement.
If (and I'm not sure whether this is the case) there is no user who has privilages to do what the firewall does but no privelages to write raw data to the disks, then it partially Microsoft's fault.
I hope Apple doesn't do this, because it will make it much harder for them to drop DRM in the future. Instead of doing as they should by pressuring the RIAA members to allow DRM-free downloads, Apple would implicitly support DRM to protect their new revenue stream. The RIAA needs to realize that DRM doesn't work, and that those who purchase the music generally don't infringe anyway.
it actually detects a random physical disk and writes 64k of data to a random location every time it finishes sending a set of 20,000 packets.
It would seem that Knoppix could still come to the rescue. It wouldn't take long before the random errors make the system unbootable, so at this point, the majority of the user's data might be accessible (depending on how bad the filesystem is borked). With Knoppix (or any full featured boot cd) you could scp or samba the data to another computer or disk.
I agree. And it wouldn't even need to delay the story: wget the page (but don't publish the copy yet), post the story, email the webmaster. If he tells you to go ahead and relieve his servers, then change the links to point to your copy, otherwise keep them and throw away the local copy you made.
The problem is that you're equating P2P use with breaking the law, and it isn't. Granted, much P2P traffic, especially on the decentralized networks (read "not BitTorrent"), constitutes copyright infringement. But what is a computer network, if not a vast machine designed to copy data? The protocols you administer can all be used for copyright infringement, and most of them are.
If you want to join the fight against copyright infringement, than look and see what the users are downloading and uploading, and if they're infringing, use whatever means necessary to make them stop. This is a noble cause, though as some have said, it may increase your liability. But simply banning certain protocols is no more effective than cutting the cable would be -- you reduce infringement only at the cost of making the network less useful.
BitTorrent is the salient example - it has the scary P2P name applied to it, and it is often used to infringe copyrights. I assume you would ban it from a school network. But BitTorrent also enables cheap distribution of large amounts of data, which helps independant musicians (some of whom go to your school), Linux distros, and in the present case, Blizzard, which is part of the software industry that pays your salary. And since it's easy to find out who's hosting and downloading a torrent, BitTorrent doesn't shield copyright infringemers any more than HTTP does. And I don't see you running to ban that.
The real problem that colleges have with P2P, as you say, is that it hogs bandwidth, because the peers, not someone else's server, contribute upload bandwidth. But that problem is easily solved with quotas and throttling. Yes, it could also be "solved" by banning P2P. Bandwidth usage could be reduced even more by banning HTTP -- think how fast telnet would be! But the latter two solutions are bad because they cripple the network. The first solution, however, fairly distributes a limited resource, which is exactly what network administrators are supposed to do.
The average teeniebopper using Dad's credit card to download songs doesn't know or care what [DRM] is.
Of course they don't - if they knew or cared, they wouldn't be using iTunes. But there is a good-sized market who does care, and would use iTunes if not for the DRM.
I couldn't agree more, and wish I had mod points. But even people without them can also foster this idea, simply by using the right terminology. Don't debate P2P with your friends, don't even debate theft with them - debate copyright infringement with them. I think the names we call these things really is important.
You've artificially turned the "supply" dial to infinity, and it's wreaking havoc.
There's nothing artificial about it. The supply of copies of information, given the existance of one copy, is naturally infinite. Copyright places an artificial limit on that supply, because we arguably want creating popular information to be profitable. The extent to which we should artificially limit the supply to achieve this goal is debatable.
Don't get me wrong, I think copyrights are generally good and mass copyright infringement is bad. I also think the term should be something like 10 years, and only distributing the copies to others, not making copies for yourself, should be limited. My point is, don't think that copyright is the natural state of things, recognize it as the compromise that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
The sun causes water to evaporate and rain on the mountains. Thus the sun stores potential energy in the water by raising it. The water normally dissapates this energy as heat and gurgling noises when it falls back to the oceans, but by putting a turbine in the way, we can get it to release this energy in a more useful form: electricity. The energy comes from the sun, the gravity just helps store it.
People who want to exploit it, of course.
How can we trust that they will fix an exploit they find rather than use it themselves?
We can't. But we can trust that when you put software into the wild, people will try to exploit it. So why can open source be more secure? Because it's easy to find exploits if you have the source, and it's hard to find them if you have only the binary.
Imagine two identical programs, one open and one closed, each with 100 exploitable bugs. A group of crackers look for bugs in the closed version, finds 25 of them, and exploits them. The company fixes them, and they're down to 75 bugs. In a parallel universe, the crackers look for bugs in the source of the open version, and find and exploit 75 of them. The community fixes them, and there are 25 bugs left. The open version has become more secure.
You may say the company's testing would find 50 more bugs. But I don't think they can employ enough testers to out-do the entire cracker community. You may say that the open source version had three times as many exploits. That's true, but those were in the past, before the product was mature. At this point, both projects have reached an equillibrium between the bugs created and bugs found, and the open source version has fewer bugs.
Another factor is that with closed source, the only external people interested in finding bugs are those that want to exploit them. With open source, those few people who are just really bored and want to help have the tools, namely access to the source, to do so.
Just thought you should know about this: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/diejarjar.html. Besides that, the site has about half of Episode 4.
It should have been "Leia," not Carrie, the name of the actor.
There's hope for real-time playback, not just 80%. See here, someone is working on it again, and others think the hardware is sufficient.
So, this, um, well-connected individual buys an iTune, tries to share it over P2P, and it doesn't work, so he gives up and becomes a law-abiding citizen, right? Think about it. He'd break the DRM if possible. Or he'd burn it to a CD-R and rip it. Or he'd just go back to ripping and sharing CDs. Or he'd snag a old sound card and some cables on the black market.
Getting around DRM takes only knowledge and time. Pirates have that. Techies who want to make personal copies have that. But average computer users don't. Consumers are the only ones who will be seriously affected. They won't know how to make personal copies, and they'll mistakenly assume they aren't allowed to anyway. This is DRM's purpose.
Acutally, it was the ad blocking in your brain that jumped the gun. There was a poll, most of us hate it but adjust our clocks with NTP.
I think you're the one shrugging off spam, by saying that there's nothing we can do about it so we should all just give up and hide our addresses. Call me naive, but I think the dream of sending anyone a letter just by clicking the link by their name, yet still not getting too much spam, is achievable.
The upshot is, if you use an unlicensed DVD player, like MPlayer, Ogle, or VLC, it will never even try to turn on Macrovision, so the driver change will have no effect. Granted, this may be illegal, in the Land of the Free at least. (IANAL)
Oh, right. Nevermind.
Aside from Star Wars IV, my favorite is Independence Day. Yes, it's not a space battle, but that gives it the advantage of a good excuse for sound and banking turns. It's only real shortcoming is the fake explosions, especially of the fighter jets. They completely stop and vaporize, leaving no debris, and well after it's vaporized, the pilot is still shown screaming. But the motion and cinematography is great.
And like all Microsoft software, it's vulnerable to buffer overflows.
Exactly 15 years after you recorded it. And I can copy my copy as much as I want, so long as I don't let anyone else have it. And you can have my circumvention devices - when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Exactly. There were many retailers failing to sell heavily restricted files. Then Apple sold songs with practically non-existant DRM - unlimited plays, three computers, ability to burn to CD, etc. And of course this sold very well. If heavy restrictions don't sell and light restrictions sell very well, it stands to reason that no restrictions would sell even better.
You say the RIAA won't be happy without DRM. True, but why? There is no legitimate reason. DRM hinders sales and does absolutely nothing to stop mass copyright infringement.
Why would Apple drop DRM?
Because they would sell more music without it.
If (and I'm not sure whether this is the case) there is no user who has privilages to do what the firewall does but no privelages to write raw data to the disks, then it partially Microsoft's fault.
I hope Apple doesn't do this, because it will make it much harder for them to drop DRM in the future. Instead of doing as they should by pressuring the RIAA members to allow DRM-free downloads, Apple would implicitly support DRM to protect their new revenue stream. The RIAA needs to realize that DRM doesn't work, and that those who purchase the music generally don't infringe anyway.
I feel I should warn people that that link will crash Mozilla.
It would seem that Knoppix could still come to the rescue. It wouldn't take long before the random errors make the system unbootable, so at this point, the majority of the user's data might be accessible (depending on how bad the filesystem is borked). With Knoppix (or any full featured boot cd) you could scp or samba the data to another computer or disk.
I agree. And it wouldn't even need to delay the story: wget the page (but don't publish the copy yet), post the story, email the webmaster. If he tells you to go ahead and relieve his servers, then change the links to point to your copy, otherwise keep them and throw away the local copy you made.
If you want to join the fight against copyright infringement, than look and see what the users are downloading and uploading, and if they're infringing, use whatever means necessary to make them stop. This is a noble cause, though as some have said, it may increase your liability. But simply banning certain protocols is no more effective than cutting the cable would be -- you reduce infringement only at the cost of making the network less useful.
BitTorrent is the salient example - it has the scary P2P name applied to it, and it is often used to infringe copyrights. I assume you would ban it from a school network. But BitTorrent also enables cheap distribution of large amounts of data, which helps independant musicians (some of whom go to your school), Linux distros, and in the present case, Blizzard, which is part of the software industry that pays your salary. And since it's easy to find out who's hosting and downloading a torrent, BitTorrent doesn't shield copyright infringemers any more than HTTP does. And I don't see you running to ban that.
The real problem that colleges have with P2P, as you say, is that it hogs bandwidth, because the peers, not someone else's server, contribute upload bandwidth. But that problem is easily solved with quotas and throttling. Yes, it could also be "solved" by banning P2P. Bandwidth usage could be reduced even more by banning HTTP -- think how fast telnet would be! But the latter two solutions are bad because they cripple the network. The first solution, however, fairly distributes a limited resource, which is exactly what network administrators are supposed to do.
Not really. H+ would just be called the hydrogen ion, but it mixes with water to form hydronium, H3O+.
Of course they don't - if they knew or cared, they wouldn't be using iTunes. But there is a good-sized market who does care, and would use iTunes if not for the DRM.
I couldn't agree more, and wish I had mod points. But even people without them can also foster this idea, simply by using the right terminology. Don't debate P2P with your friends, don't even debate theft with them - debate copyright infringement with them. I think the names we call these things really is important.
There's nothing artificial about it. The supply of copies of information, given the existance of one copy, is naturally infinite. Copyright places an artificial limit on that supply, because we arguably want creating popular information to be profitable. The extent to which we should artificially limit the supply to achieve this goal is debatable.
Don't get me wrong, I think copyrights are generally good and mass copyright infringement is bad. I also think the term should be something like 10 years, and only distributing the copies to others, not making copies for yourself, should be limited. My point is, don't think that copyright is the natural state of things, recognize it as the compromise that it is.