Go read his reply, you'll not that he runs a well known and popular cryptography site. In fact, in the advisory they use the phrase "a proponent of open source cryptography who runs his own free crypto portal" in their description of him.
I see this as just a bunch of lame posturing and egos getting in the way. The problem I have with this is the way they describe him on the openssh.org website: NOTE: If you reached this web site via www.OpenSSH.ORG, please realize that OpenSSH.COM is the correct address, and that OpenSSH.ORG is owned by a domain squatter (Alex de Joode of Zedz.net) who allocated the domain after he saw us first use the name, and probably collects information about those who visit the page before forwarding it to here. Also, please do not mail to us at openssh.ORG, since he also receives that mail. We have repeatedly asked him to please give us the domain, since we feel that we (not he) created this free, new, and great thing for the world to use and we wish to avoid confusion. If you can, please mail him and ask him to reconsider. The members of our developer group have asked as nicely as possible, and it has not gotten us anywhere.
Also, his website is the primary distribution point for rsaref and cfs for openbsd. Yet he is untrustworthy to host a domain that points to the correct site?
Jesus christ OpenBSD people, put your egos down and get a grip.
Asked specifically about the prospect of opening Windows source code, Gates told Time magazine in November: ``The only thing we know for sure would be bad for consumers is anything that blocks us from being able to innovate Windows or anything that made it so that when people buy Windows they don't know what's in it.''
"Your Honor, I killed this guy because that's what I am and what I do -- I cannot change this. I submit that there is no justice in punishing me: I cannot be changed".
"That's great, son, but our society has been predetermined to punish people who do that. I'm predetermined to punish you. Don't hold it against me: I cannot be changed."
I just thought of that as an amusing reply and had to post it.
To toss in my $0.02, I agree with a lot of the responses to this.
I think it's wrong to imply that just because someone has no free will means that all their future actions are immutable. Assuming he was the only thing in existance and there were no outside influences, you *might* be able to make an argument like that. But the universe is a system with many other objects that tend to interact with and effect each other.
And if he couldn't be changed, there's a much better reason to lock him up than negative reinforcement: safety.
I have a feeling any possible replies to this will start to touch on whether prison or punishment is a valid or fair method of dealing with percieved negative behavior. That is beyond the scope of this post.
And as someone else pointed out, do we really need drugs when very soon we'll be able to alter our states of mind with VR?
Obviously you've never taken a hallucinogen.:) That would be easy to tell if you *hadnt* mentioned it later in the post.
They don't just alter your senses, they alter your train of thought..how your mind gets from point a to point b. Or maybe you'll be trying to get from point a to point b and end up somehow at point c and forget about point a and point b altogether.
Or given a few facts while sober you might make a simple logical conclusion. While in a psychedelic frame of mind, it's amazing the paths of thought you'll bounce around.
I don't think you can gain any real insight on the universe from drugs, but I think you can learn things about yourself.
But you don't have to have any great goals when taking a psychedelic. Drugs are simply masturbation for your mind. And you've already got hair growing on that.:)
I was very tempted to post this anonymously because saying something that implies I may have used drugs once isn't something this society looks highly upon. Interestingly enough, I usually think less of people who routinely go out and get plastered at bars than my friends who take a psychedelic once in a while.
Perhaps not, but they could store hashes of every block on the CD, and see if the client's data hashes to the same value.
Eh, you're right. I hadn't even thought of that.
So yeah, if they put any thought into this, you shouldn't be able to send your friends small chunks of data that will enable you to download the entire thing.
About the only thing that's left would be if the servers implementation itself was broken, and that's somewhat difficult to find without the source.
That would be unlikely, as it doesn't use a unique identifier. As you'll notice in earlier posts it asks for random chunks of data from the cd you claim to have.
The only piracy possibility that seems likely is if the chunks aren't so random as they appear. (They obviously can't store an entire cd to compare it to.) If so, a pirate may be able to give other people all the different chunks of data that the beam-it server may ask for.
However, if the mp3.com people are smart, they could could store enough of a variety of data per song on their server to be comparable to the size of the mp3 itself. In which case a pirate wouldn't save any time or effort by sending those same chunks to friends instead of the actual mp3s.
You can unencode an mp3 back into wave format. You have to be able to unencode it or you wouldn't be able to play it.
There's some minor loss with mp3 compared to actual cd audio but your average consumer is not going to notice most of the time.
You might be able to notice if you compared two tracks side by side with a good pair of high quality headphones, but other than that, if you can stand listening to the quality of mp3s, unencoding them will essentially have the exact same quality.
However, if your cd is scratched to the point where it's difficult to read, the beam-it software probably will not be able to verify you own the cd in the first place.
It works by requesting small sections of tracks off of a cd, which you send and it verifies as correct. If you can't play or rip your cd, I doubt they will be able to verify it's the cd you say it is.
I think the coolest thing about freedom is the transparently encrypted email. IIRC, this is how it works. You get email sent to your freedom nym. The freedom servers forward your mail to wherever you want, in encrypted format. When you download the mail with a pop client, freedom decrypts it before the data is passed to your pop client, so your client reads the mail in plain text.
Pretty cool, but it *is* annoying that you're limited to a pop client. But, if you don't want to use pop, you can still use public email services, as they won't be able to see your actual ip address, because you're hidden behind the freedom servers.
I think spam won't be as hard to deal with as you'd imagine. It should only be of minimal difficulty to track a post to a certain nym. That nym can be disabled.
However, to connect a nym to a person is significantly more difficult, keeping hte privacy intact.
Interestingly enough, when I had to cancel my account with them (due to a technical problem, see earlier post), I had to send them the files related to my nyms and my passphrase for those nyms.
Although, as long as they accept anonymous money orders, they can just get new accounts.
Before you waste the price, you need to be aware of one limitation. In the current version, you can not differentiate between different networks. For example, if you have a local network of 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0, you can not access it while running freedom. You have to turn off freedom, which resets all your connections.
The software is very nice, although the connections are a bit slow over your average modem (understandably). Unfortunately, for me that limitation meant I couldn't use it, and I was forced to return my product.
On the bright side the company was very easy to deal with, and I suggest the product for anyone that doesn't have to deal with a lan as well as the internet.
Oh yeah, and of course the first version only runs on windows.:)
free beer? free source? free speech?
on
Free Be
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· Score: 1
Further proof that Open Source has made the Operating System Free (as in beer) but what about speech?
How come every time there's an article that mentions free something do I have to hear the lame free beer/free speech comparison?!
YES. WE'VE ALL HEARD IT MANY TIMES. WE CAN ALL FIGURE OUT THE COMPARISON OURSELVES.
If I see that comparison one more time in an article summary I'm going to have to gnaw off my leg.
Uhm how exactly do you intend to "kick off the assholes?"
If you'd actually read about UDP you'd understand that all reasonable and some unreasonable attempts to contact the isp are made before it happens. The ISP is not responsive to the internet community at large or does not have effective measures to deal with them.
You should call up @home and tell them you don't like the spammers. That's the whole point of the list. @home not doing what they should, and the usenet community at large is using the power of denying them access to pressure them to fall in line. The only reason that creates pressure is because customers, like you, want access to usenet. It's a rather simple thing.
The major problem I see is the virtual servers that hold many sites into a single machine. Every site owner have access to run programs in the machine, if those sites are not properly secured one site owner could be able to exploit some known hole to be able to scan memory is search for other site owner's keys.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but how is that any less secure than a dedicated server? Granted, there seem to be more locally exploitable security problems, but really, all that's being said here is "if the sites not secure, it's not secure and bad things can happen".
Their heuristic technique is interesting and novel, but that's all. ZDnet is just trying to make more of a story than there is. "Someone developed a method of identifying the more-randomness of cryptographic keys among the pseudo-random crap that's in memory." That's all there is to this story. It has little-to-no security implications for your average e-commerce site.
If someone has compromised the machine, then of course nothing on the machine is secure anymore.
Eh, I kinda got off topic. I realize this was more for colleges than High Schools, but I felt the parallel was a good one. As for the end, that was just a tangent.:)
I don't think the classes that would be based on microsoft technology would really be so horrible. When I was still in school EVERYTHING was macs, because of the deals apple cut with schools. A lot of my friends started with the same thing. We don't use macs now. What does that mean?
However a lot of us were already using PCs so that may have made a difference. I don't know what I'd be doing for a living now if I had never been exposed to a PC.
It would be nice if for some of the more advanced public school cs classes (read: not keyboarding, not word processing) would offer ways to learn alternative (Anything But Microsoft) ways of doing things.
But I think the tech departments, in the current state of things, would have a hard time convincing the school administrators there's need for anything else. And I think it would be hard to convince the tech departments of most schools of the same thing.
Perhaps some of us who claim to be concerned could volunteer some time, or something.
Yes, but this is a dangerous time for Linux. People here always complain about managers or media people not knowing something that seems simple, like that redhat is just *one* brand of linux. Some people assume redhat == linux and linux == redhat.
Do you know why slackware jumped his version up? People were asking if he was/why wasn't he "linux 6.0" compliant. Referring to redhats version number.
Sure everyone in the community understands, but a lot of people outside don't.
From what I understand from Bruce's post about the company, LinuxOne is just the first poor-quality knockoff. I imagine there's going to be many more where that came from.
Really this could hurt the linux community quite a lot. If a place like this gets some news coverage then screws something up (like what's inevitably going to happen), then that will reflect badly on all of linux.
Does anyone see the open licenses eventually creating problems for the adoption of Linux in this way? Anyone can make their own crap distribution, slap a name on it, make a few press releases and suddenly, to a portion of people out there, they represent linux.
So sony is betting their entire company on this. That's just silly. For one thing, stock price really doesn't effect a company all that much. As much as everyone would like you to think otherwise, stock doesn't really effect the company that much.
The other problem with them "betting the company" is the console market is just not *that big*. I don't think they could do that if they wanted to. So if somehow, this console thing screws up, all their other divisions (cameras, laptops, home audio equipment, dvd players, and dozens of other things) are not going to be able to support the company?
Good morning class. Today we're going to talk about standards. Standards are good things. Standards allow many different companies and even individuals to write code that will all work together. Don't people always get mad at microsoft for making their own standards and changing ones that already exist?
I do, however, agree that it's a little silly to expect slashdot to be a shining beacon of everything that's right. Completely open source. Completely standards conformant. Less Jon Katz articles. More original content. Totally unbiased editorials. Flawless moderation.
Standards are important, but you're all just whiny.:P
I've been saying the media needs to be spanked. As far as I'm concerned, the only people who needed to hear about this was the industry professionals, but no one else, really. Maybe it should have made the paper once or twice, but beyond that it was just useless.
It was just the media creating it's own story out of something to continue the need for news, even if there isn't any worth reporting. I remember they always manage to find one or two doomsayers to keep everyone worried. You can always find people who think the worst is going to happen and it's going to happen *NOW*. Why do you think there's suicide cults?
The big problem with the media is it's double standards. When there's a minority that calls out doom and destruction, they get newspaper articles and special reports. When there's a minority about anything else, they're lucky if they get a two sentence article on some news roundup page. How much news have you seen on any of the important (to us) court cases? The DVD stuff, the etoys stuff. And out of the ones you've seen, how many report the news fairly or correctly?
The media doesn't report the news, it tries to create it. And it will only create the stories that will get it the most circulation. It's like a soap opera.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this as just a bunch of lame posturing and egos getting in the way. The problem I have with this is the way they describe him on the openssh.org website:
NOTE: If you reached this web site via www.OpenSSH.ORG, please realize that OpenSSH.COM is the correct address, and that OpenSSH.ORG is owned by a domain squatter (Alex de Joode of Zedz.net) who allocated the domain after he saw us first use the name, and probably collects information about those who visit the page before forwarding it to here. Also, please do not mail to us at openssh.ORG, since he also receives that mail. We have repeatedly asked him to please give us the domain, since we feel that we (not he) created this free, new, and great thing for the world to use and we wish to avoid confusion. If you can, please mail him and ask him to reconsider. The members of our developer group have asked as nicely as possible, and it has not gotten us anywhere.
Also, his website is the primary distribution point for rsaref and cfs for openbsd. Yet he is untrustworthy to host a domain that points to the correct site?
Jesus christ OpenBSD people, put your egos down and get a grip.
Nanobots with all the information, self replicating and self maintaining.
Nanotechnology is the answer to everything. :)
Asked specifically about the prospect of opening Windows source code, Gates told Time magazine in November: ``The only thing we know for sure would be bad for consumers is anything that blocks us from being able to innovate Windows or anything that made it so that when people buy Windows they don't know what's in it.''
That's classic.
n 1: a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership
One of the prerequisites to match the definition is that it's a 'form of socialism.' which I think you'd have a difficult time proving.
I think even saying that it abolishes private ownership would be a little iffy.
"That's great, son, but our society has been predetermined to punish people who do that. I'm predetermined to punish you. Don't hold it against me: I cannot be changed."
I just thought of that as an amusing reply and had to post it.
To toss in my $0.02, I agree with a lot of the responses to this.
I think it's wrong to imply that just because someone has no free will means that all their future actions are immutable. Assuming he was the only thing in existance and there were no outside influences, you *might* be able to make an argument like that. But the universe is a system with many other objects that tend to interact with and effect each other.
And if he couldn't be changed, there's a much better reason to lock him up than negative reinforcement: safety.
I have a feeling any possible replies to this will start to touch on whether prison or punishment is a valid or fair method of dealing with percieved negative behavior. That is beyond the scope of this post.
Obviously you've never taken a hallucinogen. :) That would be easy to tell if you *hadnt* mentioned it later in the post.
They don't just alter your senses, they alter your train of thought..how your mind gets from point a to point b. Or maybe you'll be trying to get from point a to point b and end up somehow at point c and forget about point a and point b altogether.
Or given a few facts while sober you might make a simple logical conclusion. While in a psychedelic frame of mind, it's amazing the paths of thought you'll bounce around.
I don't think you can gain any real insight on the universe from drugs, but I think you can learn things about yourself.
But you don't have to have any great goals when taking a psychedelic. Drugs are simply masturbation for your mind. And you've already got hair growing on that. :)
I was very tempted to post this anonymously because saying something that implies I may have used drugs once isn't something this society looks highly upon. Interestingly enough, I usually think less of people who routinely go out and get plastered at bars than my friends who take a psychedelic once in a while.
Anyway, I'm rambling here.
Eh, you're right. I hadn't even thought of that.
So yeah, if they put any thought into this, you shouldn't be able to send your friends small chunks of data that will enable you to download the entire thing.
About the only thing that's left would be if the servers implementation itself was broken, and that's somewhat difficult to find without the source.
The only piracy possibility that seems likely is if the chunks aren't so random as they appear. (They obviously can't store an entire cd to compare it to.) If so, a pirate may be able to give other people all the different chunks of data that the beam-it server may ask for.
However, if the mp3.com people are smart, they could could store enough of a variety of data per song on their server to be comparable to the size of the mp3 itself. In which case a pirate wouldn't save any time or effort by sending those same chunks to friends instead of the actual mp3s.
There's some minor loss with mp3 compared to actual cd audio but your average consumer is not going to notice most of the time.
You might be able to notice if you compared two tracks side by side with a good pair of high quality headphones, but other than that, if you can stand listening to the quality of mp3s, unencoding them will essentially have the exact same quality.
However, if your cd is scratched to the point where it's difficult to read, the beam-it software probably will not be able to verify you own the cd in the first place.
It works by requesting small sections of tracks off of a cd, which you send and it verifies as correct. If you can't play or rip your cd, I doubt they will be able to verify it's the cd you say it is.
Pretty cool, but it *is* annoying that you're limited to a pop client. But, if you don't want to use pop, you can still use public email services, as they won't be able to see your actual ip address, because you're hidden behind the freedom servers.
However, to connect a nym to a person is significantly more difficult, keeping hte privacy intact.
Interestingly enough, when I had to cancel my account with them (due to a technical problem, see earlier post), I had to send them the files related to my nyms and my passphrase for those nyms.
Although, as long as they accept anonymous money orders, they can just get new accounts.
Hopefully a happy medium can be found.
The software is very nice, although the connections are a bit slow over your average modem (understandably). Unfortunately, for me that limitation meant I couldn't use it, and I was forced to return my product.
On the bright side the company was very easy to deal with, and I suggest the product for anyone that doesn't have to deal with a lan as well as the internet.
Oh yeah, and of course the first version only runs on windows. :)
How come every time there's an article that mentions free something do I have to hear the lame free beer/free speech comparison?!
YES. WE'VE ALL HEARD IT MANY TIMES. WE CAN ALL FIGURE OUT THE COMPARISON OURSELVES.
If I see that comparison one more time in an article summary I'm going to have to gnaw off my leg.
That's why he said the company that can't offer access was going to offer SDSL, not ADSL. It's the telco company that has ADSL.
If you'd actually read about UDP you'd understand that all reasonable and some unreasonable attempts to contact the isp are made before it happens. The ISP is not responsive to the internet community at large or does not have effective measures to deal with them.
You should call up @home and tell them you don't like the spammers. That's the whole point of the list. @home not doing what they should, and the usenet community at large is using the power of denying them access to pressure them to fall in line. The only reason that creates pressure is because customers, like you, want access to usenet. It's a rather simple thing.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but how is that any less secure than a dedicated server? Granted, there seem to be more locally exploitable security problems, but really, all that's being said here is "if the sites not secure, it's not secure and bad things can happen".
Their heuristic technique is interesting and novel, but that's all. ZDnet is just trying to make more of a story than there is. "Someone developed a method of identifying the more-randomness of cryptographic keys among the pseudo-random crap that's in memory." That's all there is to this story. It has little-to-no security implications for your average e-commerce site.
If someone has compromised the machine, then of course nothing on the machine is secure anymore.
Now...I wonder if they can patent this.
Eh, I kinda got off topic. I realize this was more for colleges than High Schools, but I felt the parallel was a good one. As for the end, that was just a tangent. :)
However a lot of us were already using PCs so that may have made a difference. I don't know what I'd be doing for a living now if I had never been exposed to a PC.
It would be nice if for some of the more advanced public school cs classes (read: not keyboarding, not word processing) would offer ways to learn alternative (Anything But Microsoft) ways of doing things.
But I think the tech departments, in the current state of things, would have a hard time convincing the school administrators there's need for anything else. And I think it would be hard to convince the tech departments of most schools of the same thing.
Perhaps some of us who claim to be concerned could volunteer some time, or something.
Do you know why slackware jumped his version up? People were asking if he was/why wasn't he "linux 6.0" compliant. Referring to redhats version number.
Sure everyone in the community understands, but a lot of people outside don't.
Really this could hurt the linux community quite a lot. If a place like this gets some news coverage then screws something up (like what's inevitably going to happen), then that will reflect badly on all of linux.
Does anyone see the open licenses eventually creating problems for the adoption of Linux in this way? Anyone can make their own crap distribution, slap a name on it, make a few press releases and suddenly, to a portion of people out there, they represent linux.
The other problem with them "betting the company" is the console market is just not *that big*. I don't think they could do that if they wanted to. So if somehow, this console thing screws up, all their other divisions (cameras, laptops, home audio equipment, dvd players, and dozens of other things) are not going to be able to support the company?
This is simply the company trying to make money.
I am looking forward to the psx2 however.:)
I do, however, agree that it's a little silly to expect slashdot to be a shining beacon of everything that's right. Completely open source. Completely standards conformant. Less Jon Katz articles. More original content. Totally unbiased editorials. Flawless moderation.
Standards are important, but you're all just whiny. :P
They're already automatically down to zero instead of one. If you don't want to see them, read at one.
It was just the media creating it's own story out of something to continue the need for news, even if there isn't any worth reporting. I remember they always manage to find one or two doomsayers to keep everyone worried. You can always find people who think the worst is going to happen and it's going to happen *NOW*. Why do you think there's suicide cults?
The big problem with the media is it's double standards. When there's a minority that calls out doom and destruction, they get newspaper articles and special reports. When there's a minority about anything else, they're lucky if they get a two sentence article on some news roundup page. How much news have you seen on any of the important (to us) court cases? The DVD stuff, the etoys stuff. And out of the ones you've seen, how many report the news fairly or correctly?
The media doesn't report the news, it tries to create it. And it will only create the stories that will get it the most circulation. It's like a soap opera.
I could see it creating some major confusion.
But that's okay, I don't know anything but software development houses that are intending to adopt win2k anytime soon anyway.