IP's being poor relation to individuals (or IP's listed at tracker being poor relation to actually participating clients) mean nothing to the powers that seek to waylay citizens with the cultural blunt trauma of Intellectual Property. They don't have to explain themselves, they don't have to make sense, they just have to have more resources than you and occasionally convince a cadre of crazies Glenn Beck style that they are in the right in order to keep their own hands clean while you are beaten.
There are probably other great reasons for maintaining my own collection but I just take this freedom for granted so am having trouble listing the other things I like about it.
If it weren't for copyright, fuzz could offer his library freely and easily online, so everyone else could benefit from his categorizing and archiving effort at his whim.
If his broadband stinks, then he could collaborate with other interested parties in positions (such as myself) to offer server bandwidth, but who are not personally skilled at archival.
Unfortunately, thanks to IP it is illegal for grass roots efforts to archive, categorize, distribute and chronicle virtually any artistic media. You must have "permission from the rights holder" to share and evaluate facts, oft giving said rights holders the opportunity to sadistically overprice, or completely forbid various activities.
Artistic works are facts, part of human history. Being forbidden from analyzing, cataloging and sharing these facts harms us all.
If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software which is in this case technically superior without having to pay for it.
I'm sorry, the FOSS community wants what now? Most of the FOSS community backs Theora. Toe to toe, H.264's superiority of Theora is marginal. It's main claim to fame is simple Ubiquity. Most embedded devices choose to hardware accelerate H.264 instead of Theora, with the net effect that I (as a video producer and distributer) will likely be forced to pay royalties at some unspecified time in the future per consumer of my work in order to take advantage of said short-sighted hardware support decisions.
Next will you argue that Internet Explorer is "superior" to Safari simply because more computers have it installed at present, or because it appears faster when you click the little "e" due to components automatically preloading with Windows?
What a fascinatingly oversimplified view you have of China. I guess it escaped your attention that they have the fastests-growing middle class in the world.
Is there something bad about boiling a subject down to it's essence?
Also, please provide a citation for your claim. I tried googling "fastests-growing middle class" and only got two sketchy articles mentioning that China's middle class was growing.. none of them giving any superlative comparisons.
I re-iterate. China can make more cheap electronic goods because of bargain basement labor costs. There is no magic involved. If people are being paid less for their labor, then they have critically less money with which to buy gadgets.. especially since their need to eat and put a roof over their head is not mitigated.
You get what you pay for, and the Chinese economy pays among the lowest margins in the world to it's staggering population. If their government really believes they can live without the global community or basic Internet Access, then let them buy their own computers with no money and enjoy their national 403 page.
VM's are not security. They've been broken in many ways.
[Citation needed], if there are windows rootkits that can break out of a chrooted VM to attack a Linux or BSD OS, I would very much like to hear about those.
1> Keylogger screenshots are faster than Javascript taint/redraw cycles
2> increase from 128px squared to full client area which has click focus. Even if redraw were faster than screenshot, you'd get a view of each OSK layout paired with cursor position. The correct OSK key is either under the cursor this screenshot, or last screenshot.
From a size perspective, you can grab WSXGA screenshots at 12kb per change base (tiff group 4) and 5-7kb per frame (gif) which may have been hefty in the nineties but makes facebook laugh at you today.
What I could get behind instead would be a standard for Keyboard security. One where a keyboard could speak raw TLS with an LCD display confirming the identity of the remote endpoint.
TLS to the local computer defeats any hardware keylogging attempts, defeats van eck, and can be used casually. TLS straight through to the remote server beats any software rootkits. I think that is about as powerful as your single factor of authentication can get.;3
OSK, eh? I don't know about modern keyloggers, but Back Orifice took posturized screenshots 128px square centered around the mouse at each click without users noticing in the days of dialup.
I'm pretty sure any decent keylogger does just that: it logs keystrokes, irrespective of whether it's goign into a VM or the host OS. The host OS has to pass keyboard presses to the VM: I'd assume that it could log them and screencap just as well as if running on the host.
Derpa derpa, if the Host OS is the hardened, bank-site-only linux distro and the VM is the free-for-all OS (let's say Windows, doesn't have to be) then no keylogger inside of the VM could capture keystrokes when the VM lacks input focus, especially if the user has the presence of mind to shut down the VM before opening the banking kiosk-mode browser session.
And for those who might wonder, this approach would be easy to implement with a firewall on the Host OS, only allowing traffic from the VM's process ID to have free reign of network resources.:3
In other news, what effects will this have on new trends such as Twitpay?:P
Spend more at the local record store, you have less to spend in the bookstore. And both will probably go out of business anyway because artificially propping them up is an inefficient use of capital.
My solution, isolate China and then abolish copyright.
Perhaps we could live on less or stretch our dollar farther if we could experience the last century of words, sounds and images without having our wallets maimed for the "privilege".
Besides, if the Chinese are so well off, then why in hell am I supposed to finish this broccoli?;P
Unless they figure out that they can consume most of their own production.
-jcr
Um... no?
China drops the bottom line of production by exploiting the workforce. How many exploited workers (read: sweatshop laborers) do you suppose can afford a Dell?
Let me put this in a different perspective:
If McDonalds was globally limited to only serving food to the people who work there..
... yea, I don't have to finish that thought, now do I? Oh yeah, and they still get their discounts.;P
Civilization is built by successful men, standing on the backs of unsuccessful men, all of them doing it in the quest for women and reproduction.
Interesting analysis. Historically, the advancements in society stem from male achievements far more often than from female achievements, and historically these male achievements are all motivated by the desire to get laid and/or reproduce.
I will not waste time attacking the content of your claim, because I've just realized something much more fundamental. The very foundation of your reasoning (paying attention to what has and what has not contributed to the lion's share of societal success), I can demonstrate that 0.00% of societal progress has arisen as a direct result of either your efforts, or the efforts of any person who derives from your conjectures.
Put simply, you are personally even more detrimental to societal success than female promiscuity!:D At least, according to the *ahem* "unpopular" rules of your own style of inference.
So, come back once you've contributed to society in some earth shattering way as a consequence of an attempt to reproduce, and then perhaps your mode of inference will, at the very least, stop undermining itself. Good day!:3
It doesn't matter which people you are talking about or why, simply beginning the sentence in this fashion guarantees Overgeneralization.
Example: Person A travels through Town X for the first time. He sees 10 people, all of them children. Person A returns home and reports that there are no adult residents in Town X.
Look, when it comes to sex, men and women are different, and it isn't somehow bigoted or sexist to say so. It's fucking *evolution*. And the differences in male and female sexual patterns are very well documented, and exist because, in our more primitive primate days, the male and female of the species had different reproductive goals, and therefore different sexual strategies.
I *have* mod points, but parent does not need to be modded up. I can't insert "citation needed" through moderation. >:(
Looks like it's time for me to update my whitepaper on massively parallel OS design again? I admit, due to lack of interest I have let it fall a bit out of date, recently.
Among other things, I'm going with the name "Ironfluid" now, as I've finally deconflated the terms "cloud computing" and "fluid computing". Cloud really just means "run by somebody else", while "fluid computing" implies parallel processing and fault tolerance; decoupling the software completely from the hardware. Google, for example, offers both: but does not offer the tools for the common sysadmin to form their own clouds.
Every male 18 to 40ish is required to serve in their military. It's not unusual to see tanks rolling down the street...
It sounds to me as though they might be banning violent games.. not to curb violent behaviors.. but to prevent "tomorrows soldiers" from turning into couch potatoes.
After all, the Swiss Army should be known for something more than MacGuyver's dweeby pocketknife xD
In a practical sense Slashdot is guilty of censorship on a daily basis. It provides the ability to hide any post that moderators don't like.
Offering criteria by which readers can choose to censor incoming content is a positive thing. All readers are two clicks away from either fine-tuning or turning that feature off and viewing every post anyone wants to make. I, for example, view everything below some threshold "abbreviated" and open up some comments that appear potentially interesting even if they were panned by the mods.
OTOH making that decision for them and forever silencing unpopular speech (especially in an automated fashion based on simple word choice) is a negative thing (that many content providers obviously do). Try playing "combat arms" one day (free to play military fps) where if you say the word "sniper" your friends get "s***er" and waste valuable seconds wondering if there is a toilet on the bell tower and strain their eyes in that direction when they should be taking cover.:P
The legal system understands anything that someone explains to it.
I think that depends strongly on who is doing the explaining.
If you were on trial for anything like this, and the evidence presented was that your computer had certain material on it, and you try to tell the judge "that is a folder that everyone gets stuff in, it's not just me and it's not my fault, I pinky swear" do you think the judge will calmly weigh your important analysis of the situation, or scoff and assume you are terrible at making up excuses for material that is obviously on your computer? Desperate perps say some pretty messed up things, and you can't take it all seriously
Alternately, whoever isn't on the stand isn't going to say jack about material like this or try to throw any doubt on the matter by describing what a cache folder is, or the prosecutor will just throw mud at their reputation next. I mean, who wants their name cited anywhere in one of these headlines?
The long and short of it is, porn in general and CP in particular is just one of the many red herrings that powerful people like to use to trick the people into giving up their autonomy. Once any communication *might* contain copyrighted, pornographic, or otherwise contraband content then it becomes *impossible* to tell without having to wiretap everybody, erect a national firewall and make it conspiracy when you do not report on your neighbors voluntarily.
I'm actually surprised that the US is not jumping on this bandwagon, but I guess they are simply watching the UK, Australia, NZ and China to see how badly they fail so that when the US firewall goes up it will be especially difficult to route around.:P
Wrong. You still have to give him his computer back after removal of CP. It’s still his posession. So everything else still means theft.
LOL, know of many people who have been searched and their computer equipment seized, persuant to a variety of different kinds of investigations. None of these people were ever charged with anything, and none of them ever got their equipment back or a penny in restorations. None of them had bucketloads of cash, time or inclination at their disposal to throw away futilely trying to fight about it in court, either.
So if they can seize, dissect and discard the possessions of people who never even view porn, and have no traces of illegality anywhere on their computer or premesis, you think they'll give back a box with that mess in the cache?!
The best advice I can give you is, pray your home is never searched. You will lose every electronic device capable of storing data that you own (I haven't heard of seizing TV's or DVD players, thank heavens), many of your possessions will be missing or damaged, your place will be wrecked and they might even cut holes in your wall. It doesn't matter what they are looking for or how peripherally you are involved, you will need a fabulously expensive lawyer to put any reigns on how they ruin your property or scuttle your livelihood — and one must be retained in advance and placed on speed-dial. Once any damage is done it's already too late, because law enforcement can and will dodge any responsibility for pointlessly gutting your home.
It's important to know your rights. For convenience, I have listed them for you at this page.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't the same principle apply here?
The only principal that ever applies is that rich, litigious people and institutions get whatever they want.
In a democratic society, they couch their whims into bite sized "causes" with simple-seeming resolutions that the populace can get behind to reduce the effort the upper class has to put into getting their way, such as "copyright infringement starving all the poor artists" or "carbon emissions destroying the environment" or "Lack of Christian Values (and influence) in our schools leading to bedlam". Then they just sit back, nudge where they feel they need to, and drive popular opinion towards their destinations.
This is why when the rich are hoist by their own petard: be it homophobic GOP senators and leaders of the church buying meth from their male prostitutes, or music studios caught mass-infringing their own artists' copyright, or (alleged) copyright holders perjuring DMCA provisions by issuing fraudulent takedown notices (be it for IP address confusion, or just as often for scattershot pissing in the pool) you never hear more than a "gotcha" headline about the matter, and then nothing after that ever changes. The power of these "causes" are always directly proportional to wealthy, influential people orchestrating them to suit their particular needs.
IP's being poor relation to individuals (or IP's listed at tracker being poor relation to actually participating clients) mean nothing to the powers that seek to waylay citizens with the cultural blunt trauma of Intellectual Property. They don't have to explain themselves, they don't have to make sense, they just have to have more resources than you and occasionally convince a cadre of crazies Glenn Beck style that they are in the right in order to keep their own hands clean while you are beaten.
There are probably other great reasons for maintaining my own collection but I just take this freedom for granted so am having trouble listing the other things I like about it.
If it weren't for copyright, fuzz could offer his library freely and easily online, so everyone else could benefit from his categorizing and archiving effort at his whim.
If his broadband stinks, then he could collaborate with other interested parties in positions (such as myself) to offer server bandwidth, but who are not personally skilled at archival.
Unfortunately, thanks to IP it is illegal for grass roots efforts to archive, categorize, distribute and chronicle virtually any artistic media. You must have "permission from the rights holder" to share and evaluate facts, oft giving said rights holders the opportunity to sadistically overprice, or completely forbid various activities.
Artistic works are facts, part of human history. Being forbidden from analyzing, cataloging and sharing these facts harms us all.
"Use us, we're 7% slower, but we won't grab your balls and gouge you to death with arbitrarily decided licencing fees a year or two from now!"
It's just, you know, you had this typo. there. Spell checker doesn't catch those.
The virtual world should get the same protection as meatspace.
Feh, I'll just wait around on your WoW server until you PK someone and then have you arrested for murder.
If there is sufficient motivation to create open source patent free licenses then they'll happen regardless if there are patented competitors.
This is a case where the FOSS community wants all of the benefits of patented software which is in this case technically superior without having to pay for it.
I'm sorry, the FOSS community wants what now? Most of the FOSS community backs Theora. Toe to toe, H.264's superiority of Theora is marginal. It's main claim to fame is simple Ubiquity. Most embedded devices choose to hardware accelerate H.264 instead of Theora, with the net effect that I (as a video producer and distributer) will likely be forced to pay royalties at some unspecified time in the future per consumer of my work in order to take advantage of said short-sighted hardware support decisions.
Next will you argue that Internet Explorer is "superior" to Safari simply because more computers have it installed at present, or because it appears faster when you click the little "e" due to components automatically preloading with Windows?
What a fascinatingly oversimplified view you have of China. I guess it escaped your attention that they have the fastests-growing middle class in the world.
Is there something bad about boiling a subject down to it's essence?
Also, please provide a citation for your claim. I tried googling "fastests-growing middle class" and only got two sketchy articles mentioning that China's middle class was growing.. none of them giving any superlative comparisons.
When I do searches related to Chinese income however, I learn that average per capita income has only recently passed the $3k USD watermark, and the Urban-rural income gap is the widest it's been in 30 years.
I re-iterate. China can make more cheap electronic goods because of bargain basement labor costs. There is no magic involved. If people are being paid less for their labor, then they have critically less money with which to buy gadgets.. especially since their need to eat and put a roof over their head is not mitigated.
You get what you pay for, and the Chinese economy pays among the lowest margins in the world to it's staggering population. If their government really believes they can live without the global community or basic Internet Access, then let them buy their own computers with no money and enjoy their national 403 page.
VM's are not security. They've been broken in many ways.
[Citation needed], if there are windows rootkits that can break out of a chrooted VM to attack a Linux or BSD OS, I would very much like to hear about those.
So I presume your web browser doesn't use OpenSSL / GNUTLS or whatever your host platform's native SSL library is?
Noep. Sometimes there are advantages to statically linked libraries. :P
1> Keylogger screenshots are faster than Javascript taint/redraw cycles
2> increase from 128px squared to full client area which has click focus. Even if redraw were faster than screenshot, you'd get a view of each OSK layout paired with cursor position. The correct OSK key is either under the cursor this screenshot, or last screenshot.
From a size perspective, you can grab WSXGA screenshots at 12kb per change base (tiff group 4) and 5-7kb per frame (gif) which may have been hefty in the nineties but makes facebook laugh at you today.
What I could get behind instead would be a standard for Keyboard security. One where a keyboard could speak raw TLS with an LCD display confirming the identity of the remote endpoint.
TLS to the local computer defeats any hardware keylogging attempts, defeats van eck, and can be used casually. TLS straight through to the remote server beats any software rootkits. I think that is about as powerful as your single factor of authentication can get. ;3
OSK, eh? I don't know about modern keyloggers, but Back Orifice took posturized screenshots 128px square centered around the mouse at each click without users noticing in the days of dialup.
I'm pretty sure any decent keylogger does just that: it logs keystrokes, irrespective of whether it's goign into a VM or the host OS. The host OS has to pass keyboard presses to the VM: I'd assume that it could log them and screencap just as well as if running on the host.
Derpa derpa, if the Host OS is the hardened, bank-site-only linux distro and the VM is the free-for-all OS (let's say Windows, doesn't have to be) then no keylogger inside of the VM could capture keystrokes when the VM lacks input focus, especially if the user has the presence of mind to shut down the VM before opening the banking kiosk-mode browser session.
And for those who might wonder, this approach would be easy to implement with a firewall on the Host OS, only allowing traffic from the VM's process ID to have free reign of network resources. :3
In other news, what effects will this have on new trends such as Twitpay? :P
Spend more at the local record store, you have less to spend in the bookstore. And both will probably go out of business anyway because artificially propping them up is an inefficient use of capital.
My solution, isolate China and then abolish copyright.
Perhaps we could live on less or stretch our dollar farther if we could experience the last century of words, sounds and images without having our wallets maimed for the "privilege".
Besides, if the Chinese are so well off, then why in hell am I supposed to finish this broccoli? ;P
Unless they figure out that they can consume most of their own production.
-jcr
Um... no?
China drops the bottom line of production by exploiting the workforce. How many exploited workers (read: sweatshop laborers) do you suppose can afford a Dell?
Let me put this in a different perspective:
If McDonalds was globally limited to only serving food to the people who work there..
... yea, I don't have to finish that thought, now do I? Oh yeah, and they still get their discounts. ;P
Tomayto, Tomahto
Civilization is built by successful men, standing on the backs of unsuccessful men, all of them doing it in the quest for women and reproduction.
Interesting analysis. Historically, the advancements in society stem from male achievements far more often than from female achievements, and historically these male achievements are all motivated by the desire to get laid and/or reproduce.
I will not waste time attacking the content of your claim, because I've just realized something much more fundamental. The very foundation of your reasoning (paying attention to what has and what has not contributed to the lion's share of societal success), I can demonstrate that 0.00% of societal progress has arisen as a direct result of either your efforts, or the efforts of any person who derives from your conjectures.
Put simply, you are personally even more detrimental to societal success than female promiscuity! :D At least, according to the *ahem* "unpopular" rules of your own style of inference.
So, come back once you've contributed to society in some earth shattering way as a consequence of an attempt to reproduce, and then perhaps your mode of inference will, at the very least, stop undermining itself. Good day! :3
A completely different time? So you've found work since then that demonstrates Unwin's work as incorrect?
.... yes?
I know plenty. As a group they ...
It doesn't matter which people you are talking about or why, simply beginning the sentence in this fashion guarantees Overgeneralization.
Example: Person A travels through Town X for the first time. He sees 10 people, all of them children. Person A returns home and reports that there are no adult residents in Town X.
Look, when it comes to sex, men and women are different, and it isn't somehow bigoted or sexist to say so. It's fucking *evolution*. And the differences in male and female sexual patterns are very well documented, and exist because, in our more primitive primate days, the male and female of the species had different reproductive goals, and therefore different sexual strategies.
I *have* mod points, but parent does not need to be modded up. I can't insert "citation needed" through moderation. >:(
Looks like it's time for me to update my whitepaper on massively parallel OS design again? I admit, due to lack of interest I have let it fall a bit out of date, recently.
Among other things, I'm going with the name "Ironfluid" now, as I've finally deconflated the terms "cloud computing" and "fluid computing". Cloud really just means "run by somebody else", while "fluid computing" implies parallel processing and fault tolerance; decoupling the software completely from the hardware. Google, for example, offers both: but does not offer the tools for the common sysadmin to form their own clouds.
I think I'd like to.
Every male 18 to 40ish is required to serve in their military. It's not unusual to see tanks rolling down the street ...
It sounds to me as though they might be banning violent games.. not to curb violent behaviors.. but to prevent "tomorrows soldiers" from turning into couch potatoes.
After all, the Swiss Army should be known for something more than MacGuyver's dweeby pocketknife xD
And yet, you're still alive to tell the tale! :D
In a practical sense Slashdot is guilty of censorship on a daily basis. It provides the ability to hide any post that moderators don't like.
Offering criteria by which readers can choose to censor incoming content is a positive thing. All readers are two clicks away from either fine-tuning or turning that feature off and viewing every post anyone wants to make. I, for example, view everything below some threshold "abbreviated" and open up some comments that appear potentially interesting even if they were panned by the mods.
OTOH making that decision for them and forever silencing unpopular speech (especially in an automated fashion based on simple word choice) is a negative thing (that many content providers obviously do). Try playing "combat arms" one day (free to play military fps) where if you say the word "sniper" your friends get "s***er" and waste valuable seconds wondering if there is a toilet on the bell tower and strain their eyes in that direction when they should be taking cover. :P
Hmm, just to clarify, you are saying that — based on firsthand knowledge — any firsthand knowledge you have guarantees you will become a predator?
Excuse me just a moment, I have to look up the number for "America's Dumbest Criminals" xD
The legal system understands anything that someone explains to it.
I think that depends strongly on who is doing the explaining.
If you were on trial for anything like this, and the evidence presented was that your computer had certain material on it, and you try to tell the judge "that is a folder that everyone gets stuff in, it's not just me and it's not my fault, I pinky swear" do you think the judge will calmly weigh your important analysis of the situation, or scoff and assume you are terrible at making up excuses for material that is obviously on your computer? Desperate perps say some pretty messed up things, and you can't take it all seriously
Alternately, whoever isn't on the stand isn't going to say jack about material like this or try to throw any doubt on the matter by describing what a cache folder is, or the prosecutor will just throw mud at their reputation next. I mean, who wants their name cited anywhere in one of these headlines?
The long and short of it is, porn in general and CP in particular is just one of the many red herrings that powerful people like to use to trick the people into giving up their autonomy. Once any communication *might* contain copyrighted, pornographic, or otherwise contraband content then it becomes *impossible* to tell without having to wiretap everybody, erect a national firewall and make it conspiracy when you do not report on your neighbors voluntarily.
I'm actually surprised that the US is not jumping on this bandwagon, but I guess they are simply watching the UK, Australia, NZ and China to see how badly they fail so that when the US firewall goes up it will be especially difficult to route around. :P
Wrong. You still have to give him his computer back after removal of CP. It’s still his posession. So everything else still means theft.
LOL, know of many people who have been searched and their computer equipment seized, persuant to a variety of different kinds of investigations. None of these people were ever charged with anything, and none of them ever got their equipment back or a penny in restorations. None of them had bucketloads of cash, time or inclination at their disposal to throw away futilely trying to fight about it in court, either.
So if they can seize, dissect and discard the possessions of people who never even view porn, and have no traces of illegality anywhere on their computer or premesis, you think they'll give back a box with that mess in the cache?!
The best advice I can give you is, pray your home is never searched. You will lose every electronic device capable of storing data that you own (I haven't heard of seizing TV's or DVD players, thank heavens), many of your possessions will be missing or damaged, your place will be wrecked and they might even cut holes in your wall. It doesn't matter what they are looking for or how peripherally you are involved, you will need a fabulously expensive lawyer to put any reigns on how they ruin your property or scuttle your livelihood — and one must be retained in advance and placed on speed-dial. Once any damage is done it's already too late, because law enforcement can and will dodge any responsibility for pointlessly gutting your home.
It's important to know your rights. For convenience, I have listed them for you at this page.