But the car dealership will replace your windshield under the owners waranty if your windshield is scratched so much you cannot view the road properly.
Really? Will they do so if it becomes scratched because I store a roll of barbed wire jammed against the window? I bet they won't. I don't think exposing the screen of an electronic device to change and keys rubbing against it is normal enough use for them to be responsible. Anyone who does that is a moron and deserves to have their iPod scratched. You know most computer vendors won't replace your laptop screen either if you store your change and keys between the screen and keyboard while carrying it around. How do these morons survive long enough to buy iPods? We need more large predators.
Knowingly releasing a defective item is not legal, when the defect in question results in irreparable damage to a core function of the product or presents an undisclosed hazard to consumers.
My car did not come with a warning that rubbing keys against the finish might scratch it. Does that mean the car company owes me money?
When I was a kid, my parents made me confess to the grocery store clerk that I had stolen a lollypop. The lollypops were just sitting there for anyone to grab and put in their pocket. Oh....but wait, we as a society prosecute shop lifting. Hmmm... So why not start finally prosecuting the hackers. It was a password protected site. The reporter's use of the password was still a violation, regardless of the intention.
Yup, hackers who break into systems are breaking the law. Just like people who break into banks. What if, however, a person noticed the back door to a bank was propped open and walked in and noticed the employees had not only left the back door open, but the safe was also open and all the money just sitting there with no one in sight. Now suppose that our theoretical person, being basically honest but concerned about the safety of their and all their friend's money, did not take any money but wrote an opinion piece for the paper complaining about the lax security.
Well that person could be guilty of a crime, like trespassing, or "unauthorized entry to a bank" if such a law existed but still have caused no harm (just like the reporter in this case), and most people would be more concerned about the bank's negligence. To bring this back to the current topic of a school's lax security for student data, schools are government run institutions and thus held to a higher standard of liability than a private institution like a bank. Personal data on a child is arguably as important or more important and damaging than cash is. Children do not get to choose what school they go to, usually, and do not have any ability to move to a school that will take better care of their personal data. So while you are correct in saying that people who would break in and take this info, especially to use improperly are acting unethically, that in no way absolves the manager of this system from acting negligently as well.
As far as I know, every work published in the United States has to be registered with the Library of Congress, and a copy provided.
It was two copies up until the 70's. That law has changed and no reference copies are now required and all works are copyrighted by default.
Project Gutenburg is bending over backwards to get old books published online, and publishers like Penguin and Everyman make their bread and butter on classic books.
Of all the books the law currently makes it illegal for me to copy, what percentage do you suppose are available for sale in the U.S. either new or used for a reasonable price (i.e. not as a rare collector's item worth thousands)? Would you care to bet that it is more than 1% ?
However, fair use does not extend to the scanning and reproduction of entire books online, and a book is not an image.
The fair use doctrine makes no mention of the type of work, whether an image or a book and has been held to include copying entire works in some instances.
You know, this reminds me of the rhetoric in Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.
By Slashdot tradition, the first person to mention Hitler automatically loses the argument, but I'll let you slide this once.
great works are NOT erased from the public consciousness by publishers - in fact, they tend to be published and republished again and again. A good chunk of Penguin Putnam's line is great literature.
Great literature they have reformatted, added a preface to and are now claiming copyright over even though the work itself predates copyright? They republish so called classic works, but once a modern work is no longer profitable it is shelved and is not available for purchase. You don't see anything wrong with the vast majority of books being unavailable to the people either for purchase or for free? You don't see any harm in a publisher deciding wholly based upon the current profitability of a work what works should and should not be available to the public? How many great works in the past would have never been recognized as such and distributed to people worldwide for the enrichment of all humanity if they had not gone out of copyright and then were distributed for free? I can think of several works right now. What works don't I know about because they were out of print 40 years before I was born, but are still illegal to distribute for free?
This may come as a shock, but publishers make their money by selling books, not printing them and locking them away. If bookstores don't order the books and put them on their shelves, that isn't the publisher's fault.
No it isn't their fault for bookstores not ordering them. It is their fault for lobbying for longer copyright terms and denying those books to the public for free. It is their fault for not making them public domain when they stop selling them solely so that they don't have to compete with those works. It is their fault for making books unaccessible by using unjust laws to restrict my free speech right to reproduce that work even when they do so only to make the slightest of profit, despite the harm it causes.
Number one, if you want to contact the original copyright holder of a book for permission, you write a letter to the publisher, and the publisher takes care of the rest.
In the U.S. all works are copyrighted, even those with no copyright information registered anywhere. What about publishers that are out of business. What about authors that are long dead? The majority or works copyrights are held by unknown parties.
there is a pretty even spred[sic] of copyrights held by individuals and by organizations.
Ahh, but then their are certain companies that own a disproportionate number of copyrights.
If you had bothered to read all of my post, you would have seen that I specifically raised the issue of fa
Google's PR department has twisted the facts. Google is not producing content for consumers, but in fact stealing from copyright holders.
Google is copying entire works from libraries, but not for their own personal use. This is legal under fair use, subject to conditions they have met. Google is republishing excerpts of those books as part of a for profit service which is legal under fair use subject to certain conditions which they have met. Google has built a giant, searchable index of the terms used in these books which they use to provide a service. This service and the metadata it inherently creates is the content Google has produced and is perfectly legal. Perhaps you should, you know, actually read the laws before you make strong declarative statements. As an aside, this super-card-catalogue is a great boon to society and mankind. If copyright laws are changed to make it illegal it will be to the detriment of society not its benefit.
The argument that what was in the first draft of the U.S. Constitution is exactly what copyright should be is extremely flawed, both historically and logically..... Copyright may require some tweaking to function properly in this new age of the Internet, but regressing two centuries is not the answer at all.
I agree it should be changed from it's original form, but probably in the opposite direction you are thinking. Originally copyright was an opt-in system and commercial copying was restricted for 1-14 years so the author could make a profit and thus be encouraged to create. Now, reproduction distribution, and profitable shelf life for the vast majority of works could be motivated by as little as two years, not the 83+ years it has been extended to. Hell many copyrighted works, like video games are completely unusable after as little as six years when the hardware and software required to use them. How does an unusable work entering the public domain nearly a century after it has done anything to motivate new works do anything to help society? Not to mention originally, the opt-in system required reference copies to preserve works for posterity, whereas now works are destroyed forever on a daily basis. The current system needs more than tweaks, it needs a complete overhaul and is a detriment to society, not a benefit.
The main issue here revolves around whether Google asked for permission from the copyright holders before scanning. And, both morally and legally speaking, they should have.
Have you ever heard of the fair-use doctrine? It defines four criteria for fair-use copying of works in the U.S. and so long as Google meets those criteria it does not have to ask anyone anything. Legally, they are not even bound to let authors opt-out of their system, they are just doing it to be nice. The precedent was set on an internet case for a system similar to images.google.com. Basically, it was held that a company can copy entire images without permission provided they do not use those images or republish more than a small excerpt of them (thumbnail images). Google has legal precedent to back them up here. Morally speaking I don't see any problem with kicking members of these big publishing houses in the shins or torching their cars. They are a blight upon society and are erasing our literary heritage for profit. Great works are erased from public consciousness, locked away in warehouses to crumble away all for the sake of a very small amount of money. The behavior of these publishing houses is so sickening that I don't think they have any moral grounds for complaint about anything anyone does with regard to their copyrights.
And, the fact is that if they had asked first, they quite possibly would have had the publishers and authors bending over backwards to help, because it IS a good idea.
You are ignorant and naive. First the right's holders for most copyrighted works cannot be found, so there is no way to ask them and the cost of tracking down the right's holder for every single work would cost more money than anyone, and I do me an anyone has. Second, while most authors are happy to have Google index their works, most copyrights holders for books are large publishers whose business model (market and distribution lock-in contracts) are threatened by Google's work. Hell they specifically are trying to force Google to an opt-in scheme so their works don't have to compete on equal footing with the large percentage of works that are not in print (but still copyrighted) and are otherwise unavailable to most people. Basically, they want most copyrighted works to be unavailable to most people and that is ethically unconscionable and diametrically opposed to the intention of copyright law and the good of the people.
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them.
Ummm, yeah, ok. I run Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and Windows on a regular basis. I've built my share of machines. I use OS X as my workstation of choice. But I'm sure you know so much more than I do, or something.
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
Well, I'm in an office with about 75 engineers right now. We build really, really expensive hardware and software that does relational modeling of networks to develop security models and filter unwanted worms, DoS attacks, etc. If your ISP or your ISP's ISP is not using some of our boxes, then they are in a tiny minority. Engineers here get to choose their own workstation. Over half of them are powerbooks. But I'm sure that is because we are all really technophobic artists.
And, as a computer hardware expert, I will attest to the fact that Macintosh computers are no better engineered or manufactured than Dell systems, and in fact I would actually put them a cut below Dell because of the problems their overstyled chassis designs cause.
Credibility -> toilet. Dells are crap, made of the cheapest parts available. They're fine if you need a few hundred boxes and don't mind a dozen DOA or dying in the first few weeks. (to be shipped back and replaced.) Dell has one of the worst track records for hardware reliability of all major providers. Apple makes good quality hardware (not great) and is ranked consistently at the top of the heap for hardware reliability and support among the top 10 computer retailers.
But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Let me just guess here, you write about video games? Sorry, plenty of tech savvy writers use mac, especially in the security, networking, and engineering fields. Just go to some conventions and it is pretty apparent. You don't see them much among the gaming and clueless newbie rag crowds. I wonder what field you specialize in?
I wonder how long it will be before the publishers realize that Google (like paper libraries before them) are really doing the publishers a favor.
I believe you are mistaken. print.google.com is in the best interest of authors who want to sell books and is in the best interest of readers who want to find and read on particular topics. It is not in the best long-term interests of publishing companies though. You see, publishing companies value added is the same value added by the RIAA. They do not create works and they do not do a better job creating physical books than any print shop. What they do is market and distribute books. By developing contracts with book stores and online sellers the bigger publishing houses are able to push their book of the week, while minimizing the availability of small competitors and older works. In fact, most publishing companies have a huge stable of copyrights on works that they don't even offer for sale (>90% of all books under copyright). They use that copyright to prevent anyone from reading those books on the off chance it might be worth something some day and mostly to prevent them from competing with their current books.
The combination of Google print (which bypasses their marketing machine) online resellers like Amazon (which bypass their distribution scheme) and the potential of good, downloadable e-books (which bypasses their physical publishing capabilities) pretty much makes them useless. That means they need to try to use litigation and pass laws to secure their revenue stream or find a new one. Instead of moving to the long-tail model and offering up their entire catalogues and thereby ensuring revenue with their already ridiculously protective copyright length laws, they have decided to attack Google directly. Right now, however, the law favors Google in this regard.
As for me, I'm quite happy to have Google index my works and create this huge benefit for myself and all of mankind. As for the publishing house executives, shame on these greedy middle-men, history will judge you greedy fools, willing to sell out the good of humanity and trying to enforce a for-profit dark ages. Rot in hell.
I'll be very surprised if Google win, and when they lose they'll move to an opt-in system.
I won't be. Read the case law on why images.google.com is allowed to copy and store entire copyrighted works. The long and short of it is because although they copy the whole works, they don't use them themselves and they only provide excerpts to end users. (Actually they meet all 4 criteria for fair use).
If they move to an opt in system the majority of works will not be available and preserved for future generations since most copyright holders don't even know they are such and don't care. Humanity will lose a great opportunity to do what the Library of Congress should have started ten years ago, that is archive all works for future generations so knowledge is not destroyed. Any one who doubts that copyright laws are no longer "promoting useful arts and sciences" is trying really hard to ignore reality.
My argument is that you were modded up because you are appealing to/. groupthink and emotivism. Which seems to be the norm these days.
That is an interesting argument given that the argument itself is buzzword compliant. What is groupthink, a bunch of people agreeing when you disagree with them? Maybe a lot of people thought the argument was an interesting and pertinent comparison to show how the logic of the previous argument was flawed?
Individuals don't have a democratic say in how the Internet runs. Countries do.
Ummm, not really. Right now the U.S. has a say, and certain corporations have a say. Various countries, via the U.N. have said they will have a say, and the U.S. cannot stop them. As for democracy, we aren't talking about democracy we're talking about representation. A dictator may, poorly, represent his people. An elected official may do a very good job of representing his people. When the people of a country who pay to build and operate portions of the internet, contribute to its development, and rely upon it have no one to represent them at all when decisions are made, they are said to have no representation. This is similar to how the American colonies objected to having no say in taxes and policies imposed upon them by England.
Say's who? Essentially the Internet is still free.
I say so and anyone who has a clue about how DNS works says so. Name resolution is not free, it is controlled and fees are imposed upon it. More importantly, it is not resilient with U.S. run servers comprising a single point of failure. At the whim of some bureaucrat there is no technological or political process that can stop the U.S. from redirecting the vast majority of internet traffic to and from Iran tomorrow and the world objects to that sword of damocles.
Domestic based political ideas like democracy don't work at an international level. That is why there is a complete study of international relations. Democratizing the Internet will not work at an international level. You know why? Because of balance of power politics. You are giving control to many other countries evenly, but it doesn't work like that. These countries will form coalitions for control of the Internet against other state actors. It's always been that way at the international level and it'll never change for a resource like the Internet.
Yes because U.N. committees making decisions about air traffic control, shipping, commerce, traditional telecommunications, etc. have all failed miserably with third world dictators censoring free speech in America and China making it illegal to ship copies of the declaration of independence from Jamaica to Chile. Oh, wait. All those regulatory bodies do just fine and the sky has not fallen. Telephone directories are not subject to the whims of Kim Jong.
Your assertions that "democracy" does not work at an international level and a dictatorship by the U.S. is a good idea are specious and poorly conceived.
I find it quite disturbing that you/.'ers put a whole heap of mistrust in solely the US but cannot put that mistrust against all the other state actors.
And there you miss the point of equal representation. No one has to trust anyone when everyone is represented, they just have to trust that all the countries working together will reach a workable compromise. This is a lot better than blindly trusting the U.S. to currently and always in the future behave benevolently. You're the one advocating a single government should be trusted over a coalition of the entire world, to manage a global enterprise no less. "No taxation without representation" is just as valid a slogan now as it was when U.S. patriots chanted a couple hundred years ago. Right now the U.S. charges for entries into the DNS system, has complete control over it, and all the other countries who have spent billions building the global internet are not represented. That is not fair or wise.
The concern is that there are these Nations, that are Dictatorships. Some pretend to be democracies, but there is 'coincidentally' only one choice for leader on the ballot during any given vote.
Some people are of the opinion that the U.S. government does not represent it's people, with its pseudo-democracy. Having the choice between two candidates that both serve the same masters is not much different between choosing from only one candidate. You see, how well a country represents the will of its people is a matter for debate, but not something one country can decide for all other countries.
These Dictators would be the ones voting - not their citizens. The voice of these People has already been stifled.
Each country has to hash out it's own government system. Some will be less representative than the U.S. and some more representative. Tell me again how arbitrarily selecting the government of the U.S. to not only represent the will of the U.S. population, but also that of all the world, without consulting any of them is going to more accurately represent the will of the people....Wait, now try that again without making the unfounded assumption that the U.S. is better than the rest of the world and always will be.
Do you want to have one nation that does listen to its people most of the time running a 'free information' repository, or a 'majority vote' from 12 dictators that 'democratically' censors you if you criticize Kim Jung-Il on your webpage?
Your assumption is that somehow a bunch of third world dictators will arbitrarily be able to censor information over the objections of both the U.S., all of Europe, south America, etc,. etc. Now tell me why you think it is more likely that these governments, who have to date little power in the U.N. to push anything, are more likely to collectively gain that power and force changes on the rest of the world, than the U.S. is likely to censor it's enemies or threaten to do so for political/economic advantages?
The U.N. is a collection of nations with well formed and poorly formed governments. If a dictator took over the U.K. tomorrow though, the U.N. would not suddenly start voting to censor everything according to their whim. If a dictator, took over the U.S. tomorrow, they could start censoring the entire internet. Do you see where most countries would prefer the former situation to the latter?
All your new argument has done is shifted the root servers to use country specific TLDs first, something still has to assign and maintain a list of those country specific TLDs. "The marketplace" deciding on those can be very dangerous. What if the.tv TLD is co-opted from the country that owns it by ISPs in other countries to be used for their own purposes? I still think an international body keeping an official root server list is a better idea.
Then we'd have six different management consoles for remove recovery, six vendors for service and support, and no volume discount to speak of.
You can't deal with different vendors recovery setups? Their are products, free products that solve this problem. Hardware support should be "ship us a replacement" it does not matter how many vendors there are for it. Software support from Dell is worse than useless and if you are going to bother with it you should go with another vendor anyway. Volume discounts are a scam, you get better deals by getting multiple vendor bids, those prices will come down.
...we're the state, and they chose to go with Dell.
We're the government so it is OK to make stupid decisions and lock ourselves into a single vendor. Stupid is stupid.
We have to do three bids on everything we buy, but not with vendors on the pre-approved list. Dell is on the list.
This sounds to me like, "we have a procedure to prevent having a vendor take us in the rear either by bribing purchase agents or through predatory business practices, but then we implemented a bypass for it so we can still be screwed." Here's an idea, instead of just going with Dell because they are on a list, why don't you actually take multiple bids and see what happens. Why is it that people who have to make purchasing decisions are not required by their employers to take a basic business course on subject?
DNA tests can be independently verified after the fact. The process of how DNA matching works is available to the public.
This is not true. A friend of mine writes closed source software that processes DNA comparisons for a product that is used for genetic testing in civil and criminal court cases. Some of the algorithms they use border on fraud, with arbitrary metrics deciding that if a particular sequence is not common enough in the general population, it must be a mistake and is ignored for the comparison. The fact of the matter is, without access to the code used to run these comparisons, their is no practical way to determine if any of them are valid.
Obviously you distrust the machine itself (which, as a blackbox, has been tested and verified as accurate)... therefore you have to free the code! But wait, why do you trust that the compiler is correct?
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who has done a significant amount of research into any sort of formalized testing, especially compliance testing, will tell you that neither whitebox nor blackbox testing is sufficient in and of itself. Whitebox testing cannot usually cover all the code used by a system with sufficient expertise to ensure proper operation. Blackbox testing cannot test every single condition under which the system will be used and cannot catch all the edge cases. Maybe the system works fine except every other wednesday due to a problem with the time registration. Maybe it works fine within a certain temperature range, or humidity range. Maybe it works fine so long as the value read by a sensor is not a prime number. Being able to see the inner workings of the device is necessary to catch many of these problems in a real world situation.
It's a simple trade secret... open and shut. Opening this door would cause a world of pain. I realize everyone on slashdot is inherently socialist and thinks no one deserves the right to make money off of anything... however at some point you need to use your brain and really realize what it is you are asking for.
Yeah, because the courts don't have any procedures for dealing with trade secrets. Oh wait, maybe they do it all the time and allow trade secrets to be viewed by experts who agree not to reveal them. There is no reason why this should cause the business to lose money, unless their product is revealed to not be working properly, in which case they shouldn't be making money. And if it comes right down to it, I'd say clearing an innocent person of a criminal charge is more important that a company's right to keep secrets for profit.
I don't think you understand the implications of what you are endorsing. I have a friend who develops closed source software used by police forces to compare DNA samples and used to conduct forensic investigations. Some of the code and calculations he has described to me is nothing short of horrible. Do you want to be matched as having your DNA at a crime scene because a closed source application notices that the DNA it has recorded for you is rare, so it assumes it made a mistake and then ignores that part of your DNA for the comparison? You may well find yourself in that position some day and without access to the code, you certainly can't find and test enough people with rare DNA sequences to prove that the system is not working.
Anyone building software they plan on selling for use by police to gather or process evidence in court had damn well better plan to have that code reviewed by independent experts for both the defense and the prosecution. Any company that does not take this into account in their business plan deserves what they get. Justice is still more important than profit.
if Qwest wants to give the '.qw' suffix to someone else, go right ahead. If the consumer doesn't like it, he can start using the '.cc' suffix.
OK, you proposal is each ISP runs their own root server, right? So Qwest allocates.qw to route to their server and tells everyone that everything ending in.qw should direct to their system and they resolve all their customers to do that. In the mean time QualityWarner ISP in South Africa tells everyone.qw should direct to their system and they resolve all of their cuistomers to do that. What does every other ISP do? Do some resolve one and some resolve others? That is exactly what a root server is supposed to decide and what the U.N. wants to take control of so that everyone is directed to the same place. Thats is what the U.S. sponsored ICANN does now. There needs to be some body that allocates these top level domains so that there are no conflicts, otherwise the same TLD my be claimed by multiple groups. What the U.N. is proposing is an international body that will make these decisions.
I hope you are joking and are not really that ignorant. These countries already own most of the hardware and software the current system is running on. What they are planning is to stop letting the U.S. decide how it is administered and start a U.N. run organization to do that, since without a single master root server, not everyone can communicate together. The U.S., however, has decided it does not care and wants to be in control and is willing to let the world have trouble talking to the U.S. and the U.S. have trouble talking to the rest of the world, because we are not willing to use the U.N. root TLD list. This is not about the cost of hardware of bandwidth, it is about the U.S. being able to shut off service and refusing to transition to a system controlled by all the countries involved and it is about U.S. companies charging yearly for entries to that list, thus motivating the U.S. to try to stop the world from moving to a better solution.
I'm waiting for Adobe to wake up and give Apple the big...
That happened quite a while ago, with Adobe no longer supporting many really cool features of Apple's OS because Windows does not have an equivalent feature (see no services, no spotlight plugins, etc.) and by designing end user applications that require administrative privileges and start their own CVS-like services that suck huge amounts of resources and crash regularly. Also, by buying products and mothballing them and canceling development for the mac entirely, when 70% of their customers for that product are running it on a mac. Adobe has been saying "screw you" to Apple for quite a while and would love to dump them if half their customers were not wedded to the mac environment as much as to adobe products. Several times now they have mothballed projects, then cancelled the mac version when sales drop (because their is nothing new to buy and because some of them were never even updated to work on OS X natively). Basically, from what insiders have told me most of the big players at Adobe are pretty anti-mac and would like to minimize mac development. There is not much more they can do to Apple without losing huge chunks of revenue, it's already a gloves off, drag-out fight. This is just a nice, "Go ahead and drop photoshop we dare you" message with a product ready to be expanded to take up that role and maybe do it better. We'll see who blinks.
What possible motivation do we have to give it up?
What makes you think we have a choice? The U.N. already voted, now the big question is will we force them to fork the internet, possibly introducing conflicting TLD entries and separate payments within and outside the U.S., will they change their minds to avoid that possibility, or will the U.S. play nice and let the rest of the world have a say and a share. Sorry but if someone has to choose between the world and the U.S. being able to view their page, most people will choose the world, because that is where most of their viewers are from. U.S. citizens may be very unhappy when they cannot reliably reach internet resources for all foreign businesses, markets, and government, much more so than the rest of the world will be unhappy about problems reaching the U.S. The U.S. is not in the best bargaining position here and foreign politicians can get a lot of political currency out of "standing up to the U.S. bullies."
But maybe I haven't thought this through. Can someone tell me what's wrong with this system? It seems technologically feasible, without really changing the way the DNS works.
Question: What percentage of users know what a root server is?
Answer: So small it is not significant.
Question: Where do most people get the right IP address to go with google.com or sex.xxx?
Answer: Their ISP of company runs a DNS server which grabs it's info from the closest 1 or 3 or 9 root servers.
Question: If ISPs query a different root server based upon the TLD and there are thousands of TLDs how many servers must they query?
Answer: Thousands.
This will generate a lot more traffic and open up all sorts of security concerns and their still needs to be a master list of what server operates what TLD (which is really what the root server is). If only one such list exists, whomever controls it can break traffic for any and all TLDs. If multiple such lists exist, how are discrepancies reconciled? How do expect these TLDs to be equitably created (given that they can be used to generate a lot of money) and why do you expect that whomever controls that root list will not decide to give.com to someone else who just paid them a billion dollars or when they are ordered to by their government?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your proposal, but it seems to me that the administration of TLDs needs to be distributed among a number of servers and needs to be a democracy, where multiple countries each maintain the same lists, with fees going to an international body and with the majority opinion on a TLD being the authority.
is the US the wife-beater and the rest of the world has a duty to stop it, or is Saddam the wife-beater and US had a duty to stop him?
Lets see wife-beater is to wife-beater as country A is to individual B?
To answer your question Iraq and the U.S. are both wife beaters, but the U.S. after selling and giving Iraq clubs and whips and teaching him how to use them decided it would rather beat Iraq's wife (people) after all and beat the shit out of Iraq until it could not really fight back anymore. The wife is till struggling and clawing a bit, but I'm sure she'll get used to it soon.
If we could get 2x dual-Opteron servers, we'd jump on it for all our ESX servers - especially with ESX3 and native x64 memory support. SWEET! But no, we'll be stuck with Xeon "EMT64" bastardized x64 CPU's because we're locked into Dell.
If you have chosen a single vendor to supply all your systems, well you are getting what you deserve. Here's an idea, ask for bids from multiple vendors and let them compete, you get much better deals and you don't have to worry if one won't supply you with what you want.
I find it horrifying that you think that EVERY nation should have a democractic say in the administration of the internet -- including countries that already, today, censor the internet for the 'good of their citizens'. I wonder, what other mechanisms of control would you like to see bestowed upon these other nations?
I find it horrifying that you think that EVERY person should have a democractic say including people that are black, jewish, or women, or too poor to own land. Those kinds of people voting might result in blacks owning local businesses and women being able to wickedly seduce men without a husband or father to stop them. Poor people could pass laws that provide a minimum wage, thus hurting the economy for their own selfish interests. I wonder, what other mechanisms of control would you like to see bestowed upon these other types of people; education, the right to ride in the front of buses, the right to marry white women?
There is great danger and injustice in assuming that your beliefs are 100% correct and better than everyone else's. Democracy is all about taking everyone's opinion into account. Any country that relies upon the U.S. to always remain a benevolent dictator of the internet and protect their freedoms for them is a country of fools. Right now a power grab in the U.S. could result in the internet resolving to religious messages instead of proper resolution in muslim countries around the world. Even if the U.S. is a good defender of free speech now, that is not a reason to trust it implicitly in the future, instead the system should be made robust and redundant with control shared by many nations. Democracy is not a cure-all, but it is better than trusting a dictatorship of one nation.
This controversy is about who controls the root servers. However, i think it's absurd. Nothing stops UN, national governments, or Joe Average from setting up new root servers, but you'd need to convince others to use those servers, and that is unlikely to be possible in anywhere but the worst of dictatorships. US has no control over DNS, beyond that everyone voluntarily agree that the US-run root servers are authoritative.
Your understanding is incomplete. The actual, physical root servers are primarily located outside the U.S. and paid for by foreign companies and organizations. Most major U.N nations, EU, China, Russia, etc. have agreed that the U.S. should no longer control those servers. There is no need to get people to switch, they can keep using the same root server, it just won't be administered by the U.S. anymore. The problem comes when those servers disagree with servers in the U.S. and when the U.S. wants to be paid for registering names in the U.S. and the U.N. wants to be paid for registering names outside the U.S. It leads to differences between what the U.S. sees and what the world sees. The U.N. nations voted and agreed the U.S. should not solely collect the money and should not be authoritative and the U.S. disagrees. The U.S. is hoping to use threats of ignoring the U.N. system and the potential disruption to bully the world into letting it have the money and the ability to shut of critical infrastructure around the world. That is not democratic and is opposed to the concept of equal representation for all. This is also the same type of nationalism, arrogance, and isolationism that has crumbled many an empire. Sorry but in the battle of the U.S. versus the world, the U.S. still loses, big time.
Lets say you have a neighbor who just moved into a newly built home next to yours. The first weekend out, they're in the yard trying to start a garden and want to water in some plants. Sadly, the outside faucets weren't hooked up, so they poke their head over the fence and ask you if they could run your hose over to their yard just so they could get their garden watered a little bit. You, being the nice guy you are, let them use your hose and water... you're on a well so it's not costing you much of anything.... There is nothing saying other countries can't go and start their own DNS servers. They can provide their own service, there's no obligation on the part of the US to hand over its root servers to anyone else.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. First, there is not one well, but a dozen well systems we (the U.S.) control. Second, nearly half of those well systems and more than half of the actual, physical wells are not in our yard, but those of our neighbors. Third, this is not about two neighbors, but one guy who runs the "well access system" for all the wells both on his land and other peoples land, for everyone in town. Fourth, the neighbors paid to drill those wells on their properties and paid for all the plumbing. Fifth, we (the U.S.) have our little cousins charging money every year for entries in this control system. Sixth, The guy running this control system is a violent psycho who breaks the town ordinances, beats people up, and has been caught outright lying in town meetings over and over again. This guy also has running feuds with about half of town (it's a pretty rough town).
What the U.N. nations are likely to do is just what you suggest, start their own naming service and switch over all the wells and well systems on their own property. And here is where your analogy completely collapses, because while the value of wells is supplying a resource, the value of the internet is in the connections themselves. It is a transport mechanism, not a commodity. What our dear congress critter is proposing is legislation that says all those neighbors can't do what they want with their wells, which they will promptly ignore. It might go so far as to threaten sanctions or poisoning of the existing system if other countries try to switch, which is also useless.
I see no "control" being exerted over the Internet here. What do they fear?
They fear that they will have to keep paying money to use their own networks and they fear that the U.S. will shut off or redirect DNS service to foreign countries. They fear being economically and socially dependent upon a resource that they have paid to develop and pay to maintain, while that resource can be shut off by the U.S., whom they do not trust. For that matter, I thought the U.S. was supposed to be about representation for all and democracy. What is democratic about one country making decisions for the world without giving them any sort of representation? The U.S. should be championing this move to distributed DNS in many countries with redundancy against a single (political) attack. Instead they are claiming to know better than the world, and that they should be able to make decisions for everyone. It is sad how broken, nationalist, and adversarial American ideals have become.
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But the car dealership will replace your windshield under the owners waranty if your windshield is scratched so much you cannot view the road properly.
Really? Will they do so if it becomes scratched because I store a roll of barbed wire jammed against the window? I bet they won't. I don't think exposing the screen of an electronic device to change and keys rubbing against it is normal enough use for them to be responsible. Anyone who does that is a moron and deserves to have their iPod scratched. You know most computer vendors won't replace your laptop screen either if you store your change and keys between the screen and keyboard while carrying it around. How do these morons survive long enough to buy iPods? We need more large predators.
Knowingly releasing a defective item is not legal, when the defect in question results in irreparable damage to a core function of the product or presents an undisclosed hazard to consumers.
My car did not come with a warning that rubbing keys against the finish might scratch it. Does that mean the car company owes me money?
When I was a kid, my parents made me confess to the grocery store clerk that I had stolen a lollypop. The lollypops were just sitting there for anyone to grab and put in their pocket. Oh....but wait, we as a society prosecute shop lifting. Hmmm... So why not start finally prosecuting the hackers. It was a password protected site. The reporter's use of the password was still a violation, regardless of the intention.
Yup, hackers who break into systems are breaking the law. Just like people who break into banks. What if, however, a person noticed the back door to a bank was propped open and walked in and noticed the employees had not only left the back door open, but the safe was also open and all the money just sitting there with no one in sight. Now suppose that our theoretical person, being basically honest but concerned about the safety of their and all their friend's money, did not take any money but wrote an opinion piece for the paper complaining about the lax security.
Well that person could be guilty of a crime, like trespassing, or "unauthorized entry to a bank" if such a law existed but still have caused no harm (just like the reporter in this case), and most people would be more concerned about the bank's negligence. To bring this back to the current topic of a school's lax security for student data, schools are government run institutions and thus held to a higher standard of liability than a private institution like a bank. Personal data on a child is arguably as important or more important and damaging than cash is. Children do not get to choose what school they go to, usually, and do not have any ability to move to a school that will take better care of their personal data. So while you are correct in saying that people who would break in and take this info, especially to use improperly are acting unethically, that in no way absolves the manager of this system from acting negligently as well.
In what country are you referring?
The U.S., where this lawsuit is taking place.
As far as I know, every work published in the United States has to be registered with the Library of Congress, and a copy provided.
It was two copies up until the 70's. That law has changed and no reference copies are now required and all works are copyrighted by default.
Project Gutenburg is bending over backwards to get old books published online, and publishers like Penguin and Everyman make their bread and butter on classic books.
Of all the books the law currently makes it illegal for me to copy, what percentage do you suppose are available for sale in the U.S. either new or used for a reasonable price (i.e. not as a rare collector's item worth thousands)? Would you care to bet that it is more than 1% ?
However, fair use does not extend to the scanning and reproduction of entire books online, and a book is not an image.
The fair use doctrine makes no mention of the type of work, whether an image or a book and has been held to include copying entire works in some instances.
You know, this reminds me of the rhetoric in Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.
By Slashdot tradition, the first person to mention Hitler automatically loses the argument, but I'll let you slide this once.
great works are NOT erased from the public consciousness by publishers - in fact, they tend to be published and republished again and again. A good chunk of Penguin Putnam's line is great literature.
Great literature they have reformatted, added a preface to and are now claiming copyright over even though the work itself predates copyright? They republish so called classic works, but once a modern work is no longer profitable it is shelved and is not available for purchase. You don't see anything wrong with the vast majority of books being unavailable to the people either for purchase or for free? You don't see any harm in a publisher deciding wholly based upon the current profitability of a work what works should and should not be available to the public? How many great works in the past would have never been recognized as such and distributed to people worldwide for the enrichment of all humanity if they had not gone out of copyright and then were distributed for free? I can think of several works right now. What works don't I know about because they were out of print 40 years before I was born, but are still illegal to distribute for free?
This may come as a shock, but publishers make their money by selling books, not printing them and locking them away. If bookstores don't order the books and put them on their shelves, that isn't the publisher's fault.
No it isn't their fault for bookstores not ordering them. It is their fault for lobbying for longer copyright terms and denying those books to the public for free. It is their fault for not making them public domain when they stop selling them solely so that they don't have to compete with those works. It is their fault for making books unaccessible by using unjust laws to restrict my free speech right to reproduce that work even when they do so only to make the slightest of profit, despite the harm it causes.
Number one, if you want to contact the original copyright holder of a book for permission, you write a letter to the publisher, and the publisher takes care of the rest.
In the U.S. all works are copyrighted, even those with no copyright information registered anywhere. What about publishers that are out of business. What about authors that are long dead? The majority or works copyrights are held by unknown parties.
there is a pretty even spred[sic] of copyrights held by individuals and by organizations.
Ahh, but then their are certain companies that own a disproportionate number of copyrights.
If you had bothered to read all of my post, you would have seen that I specifically raised the issue of fa
Google's PR department has twisted the facts. Google is not producing content for consumers, but in fact stealing from copyright holders.
Google is copying entire works from libraries, but not for their own personal use. This is legal under fair use, subject to conditions they have met. Google is republishing excerpts of those books as part of a for profit service which is legal under fair use subject to certain conditions which they have met. Google has built a giant, searchable index of the terms used in these books which they use to provide a service. This service and the metadata it inherently creates is the content Google has produced and is perfectly legal. Perhaps you should, you know, actually read the laws before you make strong declarative statements. As an aside, this super-card-catalogue is a great boon to society and mankind. If copyright laws are changed to make it illegal it will be to the detriment of society not its benefit.
The argument that what was in the first draft of the U.S. Constitution is exactly what copyright should be is extremely flawed, both historically and logically..... Copyright may require some tweaking to function properly in this new age of the Internet, but regressing two centuries is not the answer at all.
I agree it should be changed from it's original form, but probably in the opposite direction you are thinking. Originally copyright was an opt-in system and commercial copying was restricted for 1-14 years so the author could make a profit and thus be encouraged to create. Now, reproduction distribution, and profitable shelf life for the vast majority of works could be motivated by as little as two years, not the 83+ years it has been extended to. Hell many copyrighted works, like video games are completely unusable after as little as six years when the hardware and software required to use them. How does an unusable work entering the public domain nearly a century after it has done anything to motivate new works do anything to help society? Not to mention originally, the opt-in system required reference copies to preserve works for posterity, whereas now works are destroyed forever on a daily basis. The current system needs more than tweaks, it needs a complete overhaul and is a detriment to society, not a benefit.
The main issue here revolves around whether Google asked for permission from the copyright holders before scanning. And, both morally and legally speaking, they should have.
Have you ever heard of the fair-use doctrine? It defines four criteria for fair-use copying of works in the U.S. and so long as Google meets those criteria it does not have to ask anyone anything. Legally, they are not even bound to let authors opt-out of their system, they are just doing it to be nice. The precedent was set on an internet case for a system similar to images.google.com. Basically, it was held that a company can copy entire images without permission provided they do not use those images or republish more than a small excerpt of them (thumbnail images). Google has legal precedent to back them up here. Morally speaking I don't see any problem with kicking members of these big publishing houses in the shins or torching their cars. They are a blight upon society and are erasing our literary heritage for profit. Great works are erased from public consciousness, locked away in warehouses to crumble away all for the sake of a very small amount of money. The behavior of these publishing houses is so sickening that I don't think they have any moral grounds for complaint about anything anyone does with regard to their copyrights.
And, the fact is that if they had asked first, they quite possibly would have had the publishers and authors bending over backwards to help, because it IS a good idea.
You are ignorant and naive. First the right's holders for most copyrighted works cannot be found, so there is no way to ask them and the cost of tracking down the right's holder for every single work would cost more money than anyone, and I do me an anyone has. Second, while most authors are happy to have Google index their works, most copyrights holders for books are large publishers whose business model (market and distribution lock-in contracts) are threatened by Google's work. Hell they specifically are trying to force Google to an opt-in scheme so their works don't have to compete on equal footing with the large percentage of works that are not in print (but still copyrighted) and are otherwise unavailable to most people. Basically, they want most copyrighted works to be unavailable to most people and that is ethically unconscionable and diametrically opposed to the intention of copyright law and the good of the people.
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them.
Ummm, yeah, ok. I run Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and Windows on a regular basis. I've built my share of machines. I use OS X as my workstation of choice. But I'm sure you know so much more than I do, or something.
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
Well, I'm in an office with about 75 engineers right now. We build really, really expensive hardware and software that does relational modeling of networks to develop security models and filter unwanted worms, DoS attacks, etc. If your ISP or your ISP's ISP is not using some of our boxes, then they are in a tiny minority. Engineers here get to choose their own workstation. Over half of them are powerbooks. But I'm sure that is because we are all really technophobic artists.
And, as a computer hardware expert, I will attest to the fact that Macintosh computers are no better engineered or manufactured than Dell systems, and in fact I would actually put them a cut below Dell because of the problems their overstyled chassis designs cause.
Credibility -> toilet. Dells are crap, made of the cheapest parts available. They're fine if you need a few hundred boxes and don't mind a dozen DOA or dying in the first few weeks. (to be shipped back and replaced.) Dell has one of the worst track records for hardware reliability of all major providers. Apple makes good quality hardware (not great) and is ranked consistently at the top of the heap for hardware reliability and support among the top 10 computer retailers.
But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Let me just guess here, you write about video games? Sorry, plenty of tech savvy writers use mac, especially in the security, networking, and engineering fields. Just go to some conventions and it is pretty apparent. You don't see them much among the gaming and clueless newbie rag crowds. I wonder what field you specialize in?
I wonder how long it will be before the publishers realize that Google (like paper libraries before them) are really doing the publishers a favor.
I believe you are mistaken. print.google.com is in the best interest of authors who want to sell books and is in the best interest of readers who want to find and read on particular topics. It is not in the best long-term interests of publishing companies though. You see, publishing companies value added is the same value added by the RIAA. They do not create works and they do not do a better job creating physical books than any print shop. What they do is market and distribute books. By developing contracts with book stores and online sellers the bigger publishing houses are able to push their book of the week, while minimizing the availability of small competitors and older works. In fact, most publishing companies have a huge stable of copyrights on works that they don't even offer for sale (>90% of all books under copyright). They use that copyright to prevent anyone from reading those books on the off chance it might be worth something some day and mostly to prevent them from competing with their current books.
The combination of Google print (which bypasses their marketing machine) online resellers like Amazon (which bypass their distribution scheme) and the potential of good, downloadable e-books (which bypasses their physical publishing capabilities) pretty much makes them useless. That means they need to try to use litigation and pass laws to secure their revenue stream or find a new one. Instead of moving to the long-tail model and offering up their entire catalogues and thereby ensuring revenue with their already ridiculously protective copyright length laws, they have decided to attack Google directly. Right now, however, the law favors Google in this regard.
As for me, I'm quite happy to have Google index my works and create this huge benefit for myself and all of mankind. As for the publishing house executives, shame on these greedy middle-men, history will judge you greedy fools, willing to sell out the good of humanity and trying to enforce a for-profit dark ages. Rot in hell.
I'll be very surprised if Google win, and when they lose they'll move to an opt-in system.
I won't be. Read the case law on why images.google.com is allowed to copy and store entire copyrighted works. The long and short of it is because although they copy the whole works, they don't use them themselves and they only provide excerpts to end users. (Actually they meet all 4 criteria for fair use).
If they move to an opt in system the majority of works will not be available and preserved for future generations since most copyright holders don't even know they are such and don't care. Humanity will lose a great opportunity to do what the Library of Congress should have started ten years ago, that is archive all works for future generations so knowledge is not destroyed. Any one who doubts that copyright laws are no longer "promoting useful arts and sciences" is trying really hard to ignore reality.
My argument is that you were modded up because you are appealing to /. groupthink and emotivism. Which seems to be the norm these days.
That is an interesting argument given that the argument itself is buzzword compliant. What is groupthink, a bunch of people agreeing when you disagree with them? Maybe a lot of people thought the argument was an interesting and pertinent comparison to show how the logic of the previous argument was flawed?
Individuals don't have a democratic say in how the Internet runs. Countries do.
Ummm, not really. Right now the U.S. has a say, and certain corporations have a say. Various countries, via the U.N. have said they will have a say, and the U.S. cannot stop them. As for democracy, we aren't talking about democracy we're talking about representation. A dictator may, poorly, represent his people. An elected official may do a very good job of representing his people. When the people of a country who pay to build and operate portions of the internet, contribute to its development, and rely upon it have no one to represent them at all when decisions are made, they are said to have no representation. This is similar to how the American colonies objected to having no say in taxes and policies imposed upon them by England.
Say's who? Essentially the Internet is still free.
I say so and anyone who has a clue about how DNS works says so. Name resolution is not free, it is controlled and fees are imposed upon it. More importantly, it is not resilient with U.S. run servers comprising a single point of failure. At the whim of some bureaucrat there is no technological or political process that can stop the U.S. from redirecting the vast majority of internet traffic to and from Iran tomorrow and the world objects to that sword of damocles.
Domestic based political ideas like democracy don't work at an international level. That is why there is a complete study of international relations. Democratizing the Internet will not work at an international level. You know why? Because of balance of power politics. You are giving control to many other countries evenly, but it doesn't work like that. These countries will form coalitions for control of the Internet against other state actors. It's always been that way at the international level and it'll never change for a resource like the Internet.
Yes because U.N. committees making decisions about air traffic control, shipping, commerce, traditional telecommunications, etc. have all failed miserably with third world dictators censoring free speech in America and China making it illegal to ship copies of the declaration of independence from Jamaica to Chile. Oh, wait. All those regulatory bodies do just fine and the sky has not fallen. Telephone directories are not subject to the whims of Kim Jong.
Your assertions that "democracy" does not work at an international level and a dictatorship by the U.S. is a good idea are specious and poorly conceived.
I find it quite disturbing that you /.'ers put a whole heap of mistrust in solely the US but cannot put that mistrust against all the other state actors.
And there you miss the point of equal representation. No one has to trust anyone when everyone is represented, they just have to trust that all the countries working together will reach a workable compromise. This is a lot better than blindly trusting the U.S. to currently and always in the future behave benevolently. You're the one advocating a single government should be trusted over a coalition of the entire world, to manage a global enterprise no less. "No taxation without representation" is just as valid a slogan now as it was when U.S. patriots chanted a couple hundred years ago. Right now the U.S. charges for entries into the DNS system, has complete control over it, and all the other countries who have spent billions building the global internet are not represented. That is not fair or wise.
The concern is that there are these Nations, that are Dictatorships. Some pretend to be democracies, but there is 'coincidentally' only one choice for leader on the ballot during any given vote.
Some people are of the opinion that the U.S. government does not represent it's people, with its pseudo-democracy. Having the choice between two candidates that both serve the same masters is not much different between choosing from only one candidate. You see, how well a country represents the will of its people is a matter for debate, but not something one country can decide for all other countries.
These Dictators would be the ones voting - not their citizens. The voice of these People has already been stifled.
Each country has to hash out it's own government system. Some will be less representative than the U.S. and some more representative. Tell me again how arbitrarily selecting the government of the U.S. to not only represent the will of the U.S. population, but also that of all the world, without consulting any of them is going to more accurately represent the will of the people. ...Wait, now try that again without making the unfounded assumption that the U.S. is better than the rest of the world and always will be.
Do you want to have one nation that does listen to its people most of the time running a 'free information' repository, or a 'majority vote' from 12 dictators that 'democratically' censors you if you criticize Kim Jung-Il on your webpage?
Your assumption is that somehow a bunch of third world dictators will arbitrarily be able to censor information over the objections of both the U.S., all of Europe, south America, etc,. etc. Now tell me why you think it is more likely that these governments, who have to date little power in the U.N. to push anything, are more likely to collectively gain that power and force changes on the rest of the world, than the U.S. is likely to censor it's enemies or threaten to do so for political/economic advantages?
The U.N. is a collection of nations with well formed and poorly formed governments. If a dictator took over the U.K. tomorrow though, the U.N. would not suddenly start voting to censor everything according to their whim. If a dictator, took over the U.S. tomorrow, they could start censoring the entire internet. Do you see where most countries would prefer the former situation to the latter?
All your new argument has done is shifted the root servers to use country specific TLDs first, something still has to assign and maintain a list of those country specific TLDs. "The marketplace" deciding on those can be very dangerous. What if the .tv TLD is co-opted from the country that owns it by ISPs in other countries to be used for their own purposes? I still think an international body keeping an official root server list is a better idea.
Then we'd have six different management consoles for remove recovery, six vendors for service and support, and no volume discount to speak of.
You can't deal with different vendors recovery setups? Their are products, free products that solve this problem. Hardware support should be "ship us a replacement" it does not matter how many vendors there are for it. Software support from Dell is worse than useless and if you are going to bother with it you should go with another vendor anyway. Volume discounts are a scam, you get better deals by getting multiple vendor bids, those prices will come down.
We're the government so it is OK to make stupid decisions and lock ourselves into a single vendor. Stupid is stupid.
We have to do three bids on everything we buy, but not with vendors on the pre-approved list. Dell is on the list.
This sounds to me like, "we have a procedure to prevent having a vendor take us in the rear either by bribing purchase agents or through predatory business practices, but then we implemented a bypass for it so we can still be screwed." Here's an idea, instead of just going with Dell because they are on a list, why don't you actually take multiple bids and see what happens. Why is it that people who have to make purchasing decisions are not required by their employers to take a basic business course on subject?
DNA tests can be independently verified after the fact. The process of how DNA matching works is available to the public.
This is not true. A friend of mine writes closed source software that processes DNA comparisons for a product that is used for genetic testing in civil and criminal court cases. Some of the algorithms they use border on fraud, with arbitrary metrics deciding that if a particular sequence is not common enough in the general population, it must be a mistake and is ignored for the comparison. The fact of the matter is, without access to the code used to run these comparisons, their is no practical way to determine if any of them are valid.
Obviously you distrust the machine itself (which, as a blackbox, has been tested and verified as accurate)... therefore you have to free the code! But wait, why do you trust that the compiler is correct?
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who has done a significant amount of research into any sort of formalized testing, especially compliance testing, will tell you that neither whitebox nor blackbox testing is sufficient in and of itself. Whitebox testing cannot usually cover all the code used by a system with sufficient expertise to ensure proper operation. Blackbox testing cannot test every single condition under which the system will be used and cannot catch all the edge cases. Maybe the system works fine except every other wednesday due to a problem with the time registration. Maybe it works fine within a certain temperature range, or humidity range. Maybe it works fine so long as the value read by a sensor is not a prime number. Being able to see the inner workings of the device is necessary to catch many of these problems in a real world situation.
It's a simple trade secret... open and shut. Opening this door would cause a world of pain. I realize everyone on slashdot is inherently socialist and thinks no one deserves the right to make money off of anything... however at some point you need to use your brain and really realize what it is you are asking for.
Yeah, because the courts don't have any procedures for dealing with trade secrets. Oh wait, maybe they do it all the time and allow trade secrets to be viewed by experts who agree not to reveal them. There is no reason why this should cause the business to lose money, unless their product is revealed to not be working properly, in which case they shouldn't be making money. And if it comes right down to it, I'd say clearing an innocent person of a criminal charge is more important that a company's right to keep secrets for profit.
I don't think you understand the implications of what you are endorsing. I have a friend who develops closed source software used by police forces to compare DNA samples and used to conduct forensic investigations. Some of the code and calculations he has described to me is nothing short of horrible. Do you want to be matched as having your DNA at a crime scene because a closed source application notices that the DNA it has recorded for you is rare, so it assumes it made a mistake and then ignores that part of your DNA for the comparison? You may well find yourself in that position some day and without access to the code, you certainly can't find and test enough people with rare DNA sequences to prove that the system is not working.
Anyone building software they plan on selling for use by police to gather or process evidence in court had damn well better plan to have that code reviewed by independent experts for both the defense and the prosecution. Any company that does not take this into account in their business plan deserves what they get. Justice is still more important than profit.
if Qwest wants to give the '.qw' suffix to someone else, go right ahead. If the consumer doesn't like it, he can start using the '.cc' suffix.
OK, you proposal is each ISP runs their own root server, right? So Qwest allocates .qw to route to their server and tells everyone that everything ending in .qw should direct to their system and they resolve all their customers to do that. In the mean time QualityWarner ISP in South Africa tells everyone .qw should direct to their system and they resolve all of their cuistomers to do that. What does every other ISP do? Do some resolve one and some resolve others? That is exactly what a root server is supposed to decide and what the U.N. wants to take control of so that everyone is directed to the same place. Thats is what the U.S. sponsored ICANN does now. There needs to be some body that allocates these top level domains so that there are no conflicts, otherwise the same TLD my be claimed by multiple groups. What the U.N. is proposing is an international body that will make these decisions.
I hope you are joking and are not really that ignorant. These countries already own most of the hardware and software the current system is running on. What they are planning is to stop letting the U.S. decide how it is administered and start a U.N. run organization to do that, since without a single master root server, not everyone can communicate together. The U.S., however, has decided it does not care and wants to be in control and is willing to let the world have trouble talking to the U.S. and the U.S. have trouble talking to the rest of the world, because we are not willing to use the U.N. root TLD list. This is not about the cost of hardware of bandwidth, it is about the U.S. being able to shut off service and refusing to transition to a system controlled by all the countries involved and it is about U.S. companies charging yearly for entries to that list, thus motivating the U.S. to try to stop the world from moving to a better solution.
I'm waiting for Adobe to wake up and give Apple the big...
That happened quite a while ago, with Adobe no longer supporting many really cool features of Apple's OS because Windows does not have an equivalent feature (see no services, no spotlight plugins, etc.) and by designing end user applications that require administrative privileges and start their own CVS-like services that suck huge amounts of resources and crash regularly. Also, by buying products and mothballing them and canceling development for the mac entirely, when 70% of their customers for that product are running it on a mac. Adobe has been saying "screw you" to Apple for quite a while and would love to dump them if half their customers were not wedded to the mac environment as much as to adobe products. Several times now they have mothballed projects, then cancelled the mac version when sales drop (because their is nothing new to buy and because some of them were never even updated to work on OS X natively). Basically, from what insiders have told me most of the big players at Adobe are pretty anti-mac and would like to minimize mac development. There is not much more they can do to Apple without losing huge chunks of revenue, it's already a gloves off, drag-out fight. This is just a nice, "Go ahead and drop photoshop we dare you" message with a product ready to be expanded to take up that role and maybe do it better. We'll see who blinks.
What possible motivation do we have to give it up?
What makes you think we have a choice? The U.N. already voted, now the big question is will we force them to fork the internet, possibly introducing conflicting TLD entries and separate payments within and outside the U.S., will they change their minds to avoid that possibility, or will the U.S. play nice and let the rest of the world have a say and a share. Sorry but if someone has to choose between the world and the U.S. being able to view their page, most people will choose the world, because that is where most of their viewers are from. U.S. citizens may be very unhappy when they cannot reliably reach internet resources for all foreign businesses, markets, and government, much more so than the rest of the world will be unhappy about problems reaching the U.S. The U.S. is not in the best bargaining position here and foreign politicians can get a lot of political currency out of "standing up to the U.S. bullies."
But maybe I haven't thought this through. Can someone tell me what's wrong with this system? It seems technologically feasible, without really changing the way the DNS works.
Question: What percentage of users know what a root server is?
Answer: So small it is not significant.
Question: Where do most people get the right IP address to go with google.com or sex.xxx?
Answer: Their ISP of company runs a DNS server which grabs it's info from the closest 1 or 3 or 9 root servers.
Question: If ISPs query a different root server based upon the TLD and there are thousands of TLDs how many servers must they query?
Answer: Thousands.
This will generate a lot more traffic and open up all sorts of security concerns and their still needs to be a master list of what server operates what TLD (which is really what the root server is). If only one such list exists, whomever controls it can break traffic for any and all TLDs. If multiple such lists exist, how are discrepancies reconciled? How do expect these TLDs to be equitably created (given that they can be used to generate a lot of money) and why do you expect that whomever controls that root list will not decide to give .com to someone else who just paid them a billion dollars or when they are ordered to by their government?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your proposal, but it seems to me that the administration of TLDs needs to be distributed among a number of servers and needs to be a democracy, where multiple countries each maintain the same lists, with fees going to an international body and with the majority opinion on a TLD being the authority.
is the US the wife-beater and the rest of the world has a duty to stop it, or is Saddam the wife-beater and US had a duty to stop him?
Lets see wife-beater is to wife-beater as country A is to individual B?
To answer your question Iraq and the U.S. are both wife beaters, but the U.S. after selling and giving Iraq clubs and whips and teaching him how to use them decided it would rather beat Iraq's wife (people) after all and beat the shit out of Iraq until it could not really fight back anymore. The wife is till struggling and clawing a bit, but I'm sure she'll get used to it soon.
If we could get 2x dual-Opteron servers, we'd jump on it for all our ESX servers - especially with ESX3 and native x64 memory support. SWEET! But no, we'll be stuck with Xeon "EMT64" bastardized x64 CPU's because we're locked into Dell.
If you have chosen a single vendor to supply all your systems, well you are getting what you deserve. Here's an idea, ask for bids from multiple vendors and let them compete, you get much better deals and you don't have to worry if one won't supply you with what you want.
I find it horrifying that you think that EVERY nation should have a democractic say in the administration of the internet -- including countries that already, today, censor the internet for the 'good of their citizens'. I wonder, what other mechanisms of control would you like to see bestowed upon these other nations?
I find it horrifying that you think that EVERY person should have a democractic say including people that are black, jewish, or women, or too poor to own land. Those kinds of people voting might result in blacks owning local businesses and women being able to wickedly seduce men without a husband or father to stop them. Poor people could pass laws that provide a minimum wage, thus hurting the economy for their own selfish interests. I wonder, what other mechanisms of control would you like to see bestowed upon these other types of people; education, the right to ride in the front of buses, the right to marry white women?
There is great danger and injustice in assuming that your beliefs are 100% correct and better than everyone else's. Democracy is all about taking everyone's opinion into account. Any country that relies upon the U.S. to always remain a benevolent dictator of the internet and protect their freedoms for them is a country of fools. Right now a power grab in the U.S. could result in the internet resolving to religious messages instead of proper resolution in muslim countries around the world. Even if the U.S. is a good defender of free speech now, that is not a reason to trust it implicitly in the future, instead the system should be made robust and redundant with control shared by many nations. Democracy is not a cure-all, but it is better than trusting a dictatorship of one nation.
This controversy is about who controls the root servers. However, i think it's absurd. Nothing stops UN, national governments, or Joe Average from setting up new root servers, but you'd need to convince others to use those servers, and that is unlikely to be possible in anywhere but the worst of dictatorships. US has no control over DNS, beyond that everyone voluntarily agree that the US-run root servers are authoritative.
Your understanding is incomplete. The actual, physical root servers are primarily located outside the U.S. and paid for by foreign companies and organizations. Most major U.N nations, EU, China, Russia, etc. have agreed that the U.S. should no longer control those servers. There is no need to get people to switch, they can keep using the same root server, it just won't be administered by the U.S. anymore. The problem comes when those servers disagree with servers in the U.S. and when the U.S. wants to be paid for registering names in the U.S. and the U.N. wants to be paid for registering names outside the U.S. It leads to differences between what the U.S. sees and what the world sees. The U.N. nations voted and agreed the U.S. should not solely collect the money and should not be authoritative and the U.S. disagrees. The U.S. is hoping to use threats of ignoring the U.N. system and the potential disruption to bully the world into letting it have the money and the ability to shut of critical infrastructure around the world. That is not democratic and is opposed to the concept of equal representation for all. This is also the same type of nationalism, arrogance, and isolationism that has crumbled many an empire. Sorry but in the battle of the U.S. versus the world, the U.S. still loses, big time.
Lets say you have a neighbor who just moved into a newly built home next to yours. The first weekend out, they're in the yard trying to start a garden and want to water in some plants. Sadly, the outside faucets weren't hooked up, so they poke their head over the fence and ask you if they could run your hose over to their yard just so they could get their garden watered a little bit. You, being the nice guy you are, let them use your hose and water... you're on a well so it's not costing you much of anything.... There is nothing saying other countries can't go and start their own DNS servers. They can provide their own service, there's no obligation on the part of the US to hand over its root servers to anyone else.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. First, there is not one well, but a dozen well systems we (the U.S.) control. Second, nearly half of those well systems and more than half of the actual, physical wells are not in our yard, but those of our neighbors. Third, this is not about two neighbors, but one guy who runs the "well access system" for all the wells both on his land and other peoples land, for everyone in town. Fourth, the neighbors paid to drill those wells on their properties and paid for all the plumbing. Fifth, we (the U.S.) have our little cousins charging money every year for entries in this control system. Sixth, The guy running this control system is a violent psycho who breaks the town ordinances, beats people up, and has been caught outright lying in town meetings over and over again. This guy also has running feuds with about half of town (it's a pretty rough town).
What the U.N. nations are likely to do is just what you suggest, start their own naming service and switch over all the wells and well systems on their own property. And here is where your analogy completely collapses, because while the value of wells is supplying a resource, the value of the internet is in the connections themselves. It is a transport mechanism, not a commodity. What our dear congress critter is proposing is legislation that says all those neighbors can't do what they want with their wells, which they will promptly ignore. It might go so far as to threaten sanctions or poisoning of the existing system if other countries try to switch, which is also useless.
I see no "control" being exerted over the Internet here. What do they fear?
They fear that they will have to keep paying money to use their own networks and they fear that the U.S. will shut off or redirect DNS service to foreign countries. They fear being economically and socially dependent upon a resource that they have paid to develop and pay to maintain, while that resource can be shut off by the U.S., whom they do not trust. For that matter, I thought the U.S. was supposed to be about representation for all and democracy. What is democratic about one country making decisions for the world without giving them any sort of representation? The U.S. should be championing this move to distributed DNS in many countries with redundancy against a single (political) attack. Instead they are claiming to know better than the world, and that they should be able to make decisions for everyone. It is sad how broken, nationalist, and adversarial American ideals have become.