If I write code to run under Linux, there's about a 90% chance that it will compile and run without changing a single line on Solaris, AIX, SCO, and BSD. In fact, with Cygwin and gcc, it's even got a fair shot at running on Win32.
If I write code to run under Windows, it'll run under windows. This year.
The problem isn't just hardware. Books, code, and all sorts of other things go obsolete, discontinued, or out-of-print. Have you ever tried to get a copy of a long-since out-of-print book -- you'll pay thirty times the sticker price. Out of print CDs are less expensive but still far pricier than current ones.
I have often wondered if there might be some way -- social, economical, or legislative -- to force things into the public domain once the owner isn't using them any more. Why on earth should it be illegal for me to digitally distribute a book that's been out of print since 1940? After all, one can hardly claim that I'm costing the publisher anything.
Deliberate obsolescence of a product -- particularly if that product is copyrighted or patented -- needs somehow to be turned into public-ownership of that product.
Perhaps copyright should expire at author's-life-plus-n (setting aside the whole "what should n be" debate for now) or the point at which the publisher is no longer willing to publish, whichever comes first. Something similar for patents might prevent certain offensive legal strategies involving patents.
I'm not one of these zealots who thinks that we should all be downloading copyrighted this-and-that for free without legal reprecussions, but when something is out of print, no longer manufactured, or a patent sitting idle in someone's files, it really should be fair game. --G
Last year, studies said bran was good for you. This year they say it's bad for you.
Vitamin C used to useless, then it was a miracle drug, now it's useless again.
And yes, after a year of studies finding little correlation, there will of course be two that find that video games are killing us all. Along with rays from high-tension lines, cellular phones, caffeine, aspartame, and the fumes from using ALex caulk on your house's siding.
Yawn.
Somebody let me know when the experts have agreed on something for more than five years in a row. I should be nearly finished with Thief II and System Shock 2 by then. Then you can let me know if I'm a raving psycho or not. --G
IIRC (IANAL of course), anything that passes over a phone line is protected like a phone call -- that's why you can listen in on any part of the radio spectrum except for the phone part: Since the phone part could be going on phone lines, listening to it constitutes wiretapping.
Given this, might it be possible to safeguard your email by making sure it all goes over a phone line?
True enough, but spoofing one's MAC address for a particular userspace program, while possible, is still hard enough to prevent too many people doing it. As opposed to a clint which took a fake MAC from the command line which could make all of this trivial for even the newest of Linux newbies.
Remember, their objective is probably to prevent casual account sharing, not all account sharing (which would be as much an technical and logistical impossibility as preventing people taping copies of their friends' CDs). --G
Okay, consider the question of why MP3.com found it necessary to put most of this in a closed-source library.
I suspect that that is because there is no way for the MP3.com server to verify the ethernet MAC. An open-source implementation of this library (which I'm sure will be forthcoming real soon now) could forge the MAC.
Why does MP3.com want the MAC? I assume it's to prevent account sharing -- if three or more MACs use the same account, they'd probably start denying requests, or at least they want to be able to start doing that if it becomes a problem.
If the MAC is their _only_ security against account sharing in this protocol, a reverse-engineered reimplementation would allow wide-spread account sharing. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the MAC is the only security: To rely on IP would flag anyone with a dynamic IP as an account-sharer.
This suggests that their sharing-detection would be vulnerable to abuse by an open-source reimplementation of their closed-source library. It also I think explains why they found it necessary to close the library: They've got a security flaw that could be easily exploited here.
Using the MAC was a clever solution to the problem of account sharing. I'm afraid though that it wasn't clever enough. In the absence of any way for the server to verify the MAC, they're vulnerable. --G
Since Slashdot is open source -- all the way up to the code actually running -- it is possible for a dedicated group of folks to create a new Slashdot if this one gets corporatized.
By opening the source, Slashdot's most irreplacable assets are now the skill and integrity of its story authors and editors. Which means that if that skill and integrity falls too low, slashdot can be replaced.
In this sense, VA/Andover/Murdoch/Fox/Disney/MegaCorp would be foolish to try to comprimise the reputation and integrity of Generalissimo Taco: They would be burning the only really valuable assset Slashdot has. The open code guarantees that all the rest of Slashdot is replaceable, and so provides a sort of insurance policy to us that we have do not have a Soft Taco Supreme.
HTML ignores repeated whitespace. Make every tenth or so space in the original text two spaces to indicate one, one space to indicate zero, \n to indicate EOF. Invisible to a browser, and just looks like source typos to the casual reader. Tee hee:)
Of course you're usually allowed to make copies for your personnal use, but apparently they forgot THAT part of the copyright law when they designed the crap...
I think that's precisely what they have in mind. The corps regard fair use as a "bug" in the law, and are trying to put together a technical workaround to this "bug." Fair use is the bane of the RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk.
Despite the huge technological leaps and bounds of the past seven millennia, say pollsters, the majority of humankind still use the wheel. Other ten thousand-year-old technologies such as fire and metalworking also show signs of continuing to be popular well into the supposedly technologically enlightened twenty-first century.
"I don't understand at all," said Jim Groznatz, a 20-year-old Silicon Valley multimillionaire. "I mean, we've got the internet, we've got the dotcoms, and people are still using the wheel?" Groznatz suggested that the widespread use of fire may represent "retro chic, perhaps even marketable retro chic."
In Washington, several congressional committees are now studying the disturbing technological backwardness evidenced by the continuing popularity of the wheel. "We need to let newer technologies progress to the front," said Vice President Al Gore. "The wheel is yesterday's technology; we need to look ahead to tomorrow's technology. I'm thinking fiber optics, probably."
In homes and families across America and the world, however, the wheel continues to occupy a central place. "I just put the TV table on castors last night," commented Wisconsen homeowner Jorg Ericcson. "I mean I guess the wheel is thousands of years old and all, but it still seems to work."
Mr. Ericcson may be in for a change, though. Microsoft recently announced the acquisition of Goodyear -- well known manufacturer of wheel accessories -- to produce a "new, user-friendly, proprietary wheel." The new "MS Wheels!" will feature multiple colors, a patented backing-up mechanism, and will be fully integrated into the popular Windows operating system. "We were concerned about 'Wheel piracy' initially," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, "but we re-watched Road Warrior last night and we're working on some sort of technical solution to control our intellectual property."
In the mean time, AOL and Time Warner have united to produce a new "Fire 2000" and Apple is reportedly working on a secret "eBronze" and "Opposable iThumbs" in its research labs. It's going to be an exciting century!
Look, I've played Quake, and if you pointed somewhat close to the guy, you hit him. In Marathon, shooting at someone on a ledge was very difficult. You could be putting shots that hit just 1 pixel over his shoulder.
Actually, monstors in M and M2 were modeled as cylinders -- shooting over someone's shoulder would often hit. Shooting just outside of it would miss.
Loved those games much as anyone, but I have to set the record straight on that. --G
The brief, linked to in the article, is really good reading. I highly reccomend it even to those up on the facts of the case. Despite being lawyerly, it's readable and at times even funny. --G
Really what techies practice is _reality_ -- we take the laws of nature to their limits. What's one level above law? Reality.
Technology has intrinsic respect for the laws of nature, before which all are ultimately equal. The law sets itself in front, obscuring nature's laws and trying to prevent technology penetrating to that kind of equality and imposing its own views of what equality is.
Irresolvable dispute between nature's anarchy -- the technocratic agenda -- and law's predictability and (delusions of?) justice. --G
Part of the problem is the engineering mindset that we geeks have internationally -- we regard legal impediments as bugs to be worked around. Illegal to export encryption? Develop it overseas. Illegal to copy it? Cleanroom it. Illegal to have unrestricted net access? Anonymizing proxy.
Techies are, in effect, resolving legal questions with the technologes they build -- and doing so without the aid of prefessionals in law, politics, etc. We are in effect practicing law every time we create a new algorithm to avoid an existing legal "problem".
Technology is undemocratic. I would argue that that's a flaw with democracy, but democracy defines it to be a flaw with technology. Technology follows its own anarchy -- what is possible, will be built and will expand to the limit of its technical feasibility. Law is trying very hard to stop that, more in some areas than others (imagine if software development were under the same restrictions as cloning research!). Who will win? Who knows.
But all of us techies need ot remember that we are fundamentally enemies of all democracy, of all legislative systems. We're pushing on what is technically feasible and working around what is legal as a bug. Prosecution lawyers -- enforcers of the law -- are necessarily our adversaries, as much as legislators.
So it follows: Know your enemy. Learn the relevant laws. Continue to ignore or work around them, but know it. --G
Assuming that there is a real consumer (ie non-government) demand for filter/censorware, what do you think would be the best design for such a product? That is, how would you as censorware critics design the best filter possible (given that a perfect filter is clearly impossible) for people who really want to be "protected" from obscenity?
But we, as a society, DON'T insist on treating mental illness...
Mental illness is NOT a case of the blues or the blahs or your self-diagnosed melancholia...
I take issue with your assumptions here. "Melancholy" is what I call it, yes. The shrinks who tried to force me onto drugs called it "depression" and "suicidal tendencies."
Whatever else mental illness may be, it's also an excuse for shrinks to play god with those of us with unusual personalities and even political beliefs.
So long as we keep talking about the awful toll that mental illness is taking, we will keep granting more and more extraordinary powers of intervention to the purveyors of psychiatric cures and taking more and more privacy and life away from the unwillingly diagnosed, all in the name of enforcing illusory standards of normalcy against people like me. Don't call it a myth and don't trivialize it -- it does happen. Don't assume everyone who disputes the psychological dogma of depression as disease does so uninformed. Some of us have suffered at the hands of the institutions that these pseudoscientists and pseudodoctors have inflicted upon our world. --G
Yeah. For one thng, we insist on treating mental illness. The treatment for the majority of physical illness is to sniffle a bit but buck up, go to work anyway, and in general be feeling better in a day or three. Why then are people so keen on treating mental illness when we're just fine on adapting to physical illness?
Yes, I'm melancholy. No, I don't want your drugs, shrinks, or guilt. --G
Actually, "burglar's implements" such as lockpicks are illegal to posess in some states. But the analogy holds even less in that light -- Napster is a long way from lockpicks. --G
Jon has a gift for explaining the problem, but none for putting together solutions. We need to start looking at this as what it is -- a continuation (not a new thing) -- of long-standing social attitudes toward mental differentness ("illness").
The same set of checks was almost verbatim what my high scholl pshrynk described as ways of finding suicide risks. Why is suicide like school shooting? The threat of either can get you tossed out of school and even locked up.
We need to start rejecting the "right" of school administrators and pshrynks to discriminate on the basis of mental "stability" real or perceived. We need to stop defending ourselves as "geeks are still stable, unlike these people" and start saying, "yes, geeks are unstable, just like most great achievers and great people."
Just like school adminstrators insist on equal treatment of hormone- and violence-addled football-bashers, they should accept that they must also provide equal treatment for the pallid, shy, sociopathic geek in the corner. Certainly the truly exceptional of the former have beaten, knifed, and raped a hundred times as many students as the truly exceptional of the latter have ever shot or bombed.
We need to stop fearing the mentally unstable -- the mentally unstable are the ones who will grow into the brilliantly creative. And without those, well, the dark ages were a more violent time by far than the renaissance. --G
It's worth noting that the "hate crime" nature of these crimes was certainly an aggravating factor in sentencing -- the law isn't "hate-blind" by any means.
I'm a Netscape user (Linux) and am interested in Mozilla. I'm just baffled by one thing --
What the heck is a Profile?
Are profiles user-specific? Non user-specific? A species of rare tropical bird? All sorts of stuff says "thus and such profile bug/feature exists" but none seems to say, "hey, you moron, a profile is an endangered species of fungus native to northern Tasmania" (or whatever a profile is).
Moron as always, --G
Re:What is with the color scheme?
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
Each of the Slashdot sections has its own color scheme -- since this was a "Your Rights Online" article, it gets the gold-and-brown thing. --G
(or at least, so I think... or else moderate this as "just plain wrong":) )
Slashdot Mirror
If I write code to run under Linux, there's about a 90% chance that it will compile and run without changing a single line on Solaris, AIX, SCO, and BSD. In fact, with Cygwin and gcc, it's even got a fair shot at running on Win32.
If I write code to run under Windows, it'll run under windows. This year.
Really, is this a hard question?
--G
What will things be kalled now? e.g.Knapster or Gnapster
That's easy. Split the difference -- halfway between 'g' and 'k' is 'i'. Ergo it would be the iNapster. Available in five fruity colorschemes.
--G
The problem isn't just hardware. Books, code, and all sorts of other things go obsolete, discontinued, or out-of-print. Have you ever tried to get a copy of a long-since out-of-print book -- you'll pay thirty times the sticker price. Out of print CDs are less expensive but still far pricier than current ones.
I have often wondered if there might be some way -- social, economical, or legislative -- to force things into the public domain once the owner isn't using them any more. Why on earth should it be illegal for me to digitally distribute a book that's been out of print since 1940? After all, one can hardly claim that I'm costing the publisher anything.
Deliberate obsolescence of a product -- particularly if that product is copyrighted or patented -- needs somehow to be turned into public-ownership of that product.
Perhaps copyright should expire at author's-life-plus-n (setting aside the whole "what should n be" debate for now) or the point at which the publisher is no longer willing to publish, whichever comes first. Something similar for patents might prevent certain offensive legal strategies involving patents.
I'm not one of these zealots who thinks that we should all be downloading copyrighted this-and-that for free without legal reprecussions, but when something is out of print, no longer manufactured, or a patent sitting idle in someone's files, it really should be fair game.
--G
Last year, studies said bran was good for you. This year they say it's bad for you.
Vitamin C used to useless, then it was a miracle drug, now it's useless again.
And yes, after a year of studies finding little correlation, there will of course be two that find that video games are killing us all. Along with rays from high-tension lines, cellular phones, caffeine, aspartame, and the fumes from using ALex caulk on your house's siding.
Yawn.
Somebody let me know when the experts have agreed on something for more than five years in a row. I should be nearly finished with Thief II and System Shock 2 by then. Then you can let me know if I'm a raving psycho or not.
--G
...they'll patent it and save us all from ever seeing one of these ads. :)
--G
IIRC (IANAL of course), anything that passes over a phone line is protected like a phone call -- that's why you can listen in on any part of the radio spectrum except for the phone part: Since the phone part could be going on phone lines, listening to it constitutes wiretapping.
Given this, might it be possible to safeguard your email by making sure it all goes over a phone line?
Just a thought...
--G
True enough, but spoofing one's MAC address for a particular userspace program, while possible, is still hard enough to prevent too many people doing it. As opposed to a clint which took a fake MAC from the command line which could make all of this trivial for even the newest of Linux newbies.
Remember, their objective is probably to prevent casual account sharing, not all account sharing (which would be as much an technical and logistical impossibility as preventing people taping copies of their friends' CDs).
--G
Okay, consider the question of why MP3.com found it necessary to put most of this in a closed-source library.
I suspect that that is because there is no way for the MP3.com server to verify the ethernet MAC. An open-source implementation of this library (which I'm sure will be forthcoming real soon now) could forge the MAC.
Why does MP3.com want the MAC? I assume it's to prevent account sharing -- if three or more MACs use the same account, they'd probably start denying requests, or at least they want to be able to start doing that if it becomes a problem.
If the MAC is their _only_ security against account sharing in this protocol, a reverse-engineered reimplementation would allow wide-spread account sharing. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the MAC is the only security: To rely on IP would flag anyone with a dynamic IP as an account-sharer.
This suggests that their sharing-detection would be vulnerable to abuse by an open-source reimplementation of their closed-source library. It also I think explains why they found it necessary to close the library: They've got a security flaw that could be easily exploited here.
Using the MAC was a clever solution to the problem of account sharing. I'm afraid though that it wasn't clever enough. In the absence of any way for the server to verify the MAC, they're vulnerable.
--G
The connecion here is too good to pass up.
Since Slashdot is open source -- all the way up to the code actually running -- it is possible for a dedicated group of folks to create a new Slashdot if this one gets corporatized.
By opening the source, Slashdot's most irreplacable assets are now the skill and integrity of its story authors and editors. Which means that if that skill and integrity falls too low, slashdot can be replaced.
In this sense, VA/Andover/Murdoch/Fox/Disney/MegaCorp would be foolish to try to comprimise the reputation and integrity of Generalissimo Taco: They would be burning the only really valuable assset Slashdot has. The open code guarantees that all the rest of Slashdot is replaceable, and so provides a sort of insurance policy to us that we have do not have a Soft Taco Supreme.
--G
HTML ignores repeated whitespace. Make every tenth or so space in the original text two spaces to indicate one, one space to indicate zero, \n to indicate EOF. Invisible to a browser, and just looks like source typos to the casual reader. Tee hee :)
Of course you're usually allowed to make copies for your personnal use, but apparently they forgot THAT part of the copyright law when they designed the crap...
I think that's precisely what they have in mind. The corps regard fair use as a "bug" in the law, and are trying to put together a technical workaround to this "bug." Fair use is the bane of the RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk.
Despite the huge technological leaps and bounds of the past seven millennia, say pollsters, the majority of humankind still use the wheel. Other ten thousand-year-old technologies such as fire and metalworking also show signs of continuing to be popular well into the supposedly technologically enlightened twenty-first century.
"I don't understand at all," said Jim Groznatz, a 20-year-old Silicon Valley multimillionaire. "I mean, we've got the internet, we've got the dotcoms, and people are still using the wheel?" Groznatz suggested that the widespread use of fire may represent "retro chic, perhaps even marketable retro chic."
In Washington, several congressional committees are now studying the disturbing technological backwardness evidenced by the continuing popularity of the wheel. "We need to let newer technologies progress to the front," said Vice President Al Gore. "The wheel is yesterday's technology; we need to look ahead to tomorrow's technology. I'm thinking fiber optics, probably."
In homes and families across America and the world, however, the wheel continues to occupy a central place. "I just put the TV table on castors last night," commented Wisconsen homeowner Jorg Ericcson. "I mean I guess the wheel is thousands of years old and all, but it still seems to work."
Mr. Ericcson may be in for a change, though. Microsoft recently announced the acquisition of Goodyear -- well known manufacturer of wheel accessories -- to produce a "new, user-friendly, proprietary wheel." The new "MS Wheels!" will feature multiple colors, a patented backing-up mechanism, and will be fully integrated into the popular Windows operating system. "We were concerned about 'Wheel piracy' initially," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, "but we re-watched Road Warrior last night and we're working on some sort of technical solution to control our intellectual property."
In the mean time, AOL and Time Warner have united to produce a new "Fire 2000" and Apple is reportedly working on a secret "eBronze" and "Opposable iThumbs" in its research labs. It's going to be an exciting century!
Look, I've played Quake, and if you pointed somewhat close to the guy, you hit him. In Marathon, shooting at someone on a ledge was very difficult. You could be putting shots that hit just 1 pixel over his shoulder.
Actually, monstors in M and M2 were modeled as cylinders -- shooting over someone's shoulder would often hit. Shooting just outside of it would miss.
Loved those games much as anyone, but I have to set the record straight on that.
--G
The brief, linked to in the article, is really good reading. I highly reccomend it even to those up on the facts of the case. Despite being lawyerly, it's readable and at times even funny.
--G
Might this just be a ploy for some sort of deal with MS -- more favorable licensing terms or some such?
--G
Really what techies practice is _reality_ -- we take the laws of nature to their limits. What's one level above law? Reality.
Technology has intrinsic respect for the laws of nature, before which all are ultimately equal. The law sets itself in front, obscuring nature's laws and trying to prevent technology penetrating to that kind of equality and imposing its own views of what equality is.
Irresolvable dispute between nature's anarchy -- the technocratic agenda -- and law's predictability and (delusions of?) justice.
--G
Part of the problem is the engineering mindset that we geeks have internationally -- we regard legal impediments as bugs to be worked around. Illegal to export encryption? Develop it overseas. Illegal to copy it? Cleanroom it. Illegal to have unrestricted net access? Anonymizing proxy.
Techies are, in effect, resolving legal questions with the technologes they build -- and doing so without the aid of prefessionals in law, politics, etc. We are in effect practicing law every time we create a new algorithm to avoid an existing legal "problem".
Technology is undemocratic. I would argue that that's a flaw with democracy, but democracy defines it to be a flaw with technology. Technology follows its own anarchy -- what is possible, will be built and will expand to the limit of its technical feasibility. Law is trying very hard to stop that, more in some areas than others (imagine if software development were under the same restrictions as cloning research!). Who will win? Who knows.
But all of us techies need ot remember that we are fundamentally enemies of all democracy, of all legislative systems. We're pushing on what is technically feasible and working around what is legal as a bug. Prosecution lawyers -- enforcers of the law -- are necessarily our adversaries, as much as legislators.
So it follows: Know your enemy. Learn the relevant laws. Continue to ignore or work around them, but know it.
--G
Assuming that there is a real consumer (ie non-government) demand for filter/censorware, what do you think would be the best design for such a product? That is, how would you as censorware critics design the best filter possible (given that a perfect filter is clearly impossible) for people who really want to be "protected" from obscenity?
But we, as a society, DON'T insist on treating mental illness...
Mental illness is NOT a case of the blues or the blahs or your self-diagnosed melancholia...
I take issue with your assumptions here. "Melancholy" is what I call it, yes. The shrinks who tried to force me onto drugs called it "depression" and "suicidal tendencies."
Whatever else mental illness may be, it's also an excuse for shrinks to play god with those of us with unusual personalities and even political beliefs.
So long as we keep talking about the awful toll that mental illness is taking, we will keep granting more and more extraordinary powers of intervention to the purveyors of psychiatric cures and taking more and more privacy and life away from the unwillingly diagnosed, all in the name of enforcing illusory standards of normalcy against people like me. Don't call it a myth and don't trivialize it -- it does happen. Don't assume everyone who disputes the psychological dogma of depression as disease does so uninformed. Some of us have suffered at the hands of the institutions that these pseudoscientists and pseudodoctors have inflicted upon our world.
--G
Yeah. For one thng, we insist on treating mental illness. The treatment for the majority of physical illness is to sniffle a bit but buck up, go to work anyway, and in general be feeling better in a day or three. Why then are people so keen on treating mental illness when we're just fine on adapting to physical illness?
Yes, I'm melancholy. No, I don't want your drugs, shrinks, or guilt.
--G
Actually, "burglar's implements" such as lockpicks are illegal to posess in some states. But the analogy holds even less in that light -- Napster is a long way from lockpicks.
--G
Jon has a gift for explaining the problem, but none for putting together solutions. We need to start looking at this as what it is -- a continuation (not a new thing) -- of long-standing social attitudes toward mental differentness ("illness").
The same set of checks was almost verbatim what my high scholl pshrynk described as ways of finding suicide risks. Why is suicide like school shooting? The threat of either can get you tossed out of school and even locked up.
We need to start rejecting the "right" of school administrators and pshrynks to discriminate on the basis of mental "stability" real or perceived. We need to stop defending ourselves as "geeks are still stable, unlike these people" and start saying, "yes, geeks are unstable, just like most great achievers and great people."
Just like school adminstrators insist on equal treatment of hormone- and violence-addled football-bashers, they should accept that they must also provide equal treatment for the pallid, shy, sociopathic geek in the corner. Certainly the truly exceptional of the former have beaten, knifed, and raped a hundred times as many students as the truly exceptional of the latter have ever shot or bombed.
We need to stop fearing the mentally unstable -- the mentally unstable are the ones who will grow into the brilliantly creative. And without those, well, the dark ages were a more violent time by far than the renaissance.
--G
It's worth noting that the "hate crime" nature of these crimes was certainly an aggravating factor in sentencing -- the law isn't "hate-blind" by any means.
I'm a Netscape user (Linux) and am interested in Mozilla. I'm just baffled by one thing --
What the heck is a Profile?
Are profiles user-specific? Non user-specific? A species of rare tropical bird? All sorts of stuff says "thus and such profile bug/feature exists" but none seems to say, "hey, you moron, a profile is an endangered species of fungus native to northern Tasmania" (or whatever a profile is).
Moron as always,
--G
Each of the Slashdot sections has its own color scheme -- since this was a "Your Rights Online" article, it gets the gold-and-brown thing.
:) )
--G
(or at least, so I think... or else moderate this as "just plain wrong"