Software patents have never worked, and can never work. There is no way they can be made to work.
Marks do nothing to solve the absurd problem of scale. No one can ever assimilate the patent database, or even keep up with new additions, no matter what reforms were enacted. Anyone who tells you their code is "legal" with respect to patents is a bold-faced liar. Every line of code is a ticking patent timebomb.
The very term is just a code word for "Barratry."
They are a legal anomaly and a practical absurdity. They "function" only in that they are almost entirely ignored by those they are intended to govern. In short, they are a very expensive, very destructive farce.
In theory they were meant to be a tool for rich people to shake down poor people, but they even backfire at that, since small "IP" companies can shake down giants with impugnity without being counterattacked, as long as they have no products of their own.
I can goose your startup scripts and replace your shell. From there, I can substitute anything you see and do, using my own ps, df, ls, you name it. And that's just the crude way. Sooner or later someone would write something really wicked, say parsing the machine code of every executable image your "shell" runs for system calls and replacing them with calls to intercepts. Or is there a more elegant way? strace has some special magic for this, I forget how it works.
If you always log in with one account, you'll never know. Even if you logged in as root and poked around, I could hide it in very clever ways using one of the many indirect ways to get things done in a shell script, and in the average user's homedir there are a million places to hide files.
Keeping in mind Linspire is totally Desktop-centric, I can see why they might have a radically different view on the permissions system from most existing Linux users.
I've already read lots of lengthy posts trashing this contrarian point of view. And they have a lot of good points, as yours does, but ultimately this reads like a single-user vs. multi-user culture clash.
The fact is that on any operating system when you have a single, important user who runs malicious code, it doesn't matter much whether they're root or not, unless the machine has a security model more fine-grained and well-integrated than anything currently in wide use.
If that user can access their own files, then their own files can be destroyed. If that user can access the internet, then the compromise can also send their files over it. Or it can simply make them a spam bot. Or a relay. If that user has an address book, then its contents can be targets for viral propagation. And so on, and so forth.
Frankly, to do most things attackers want to do, "root" is unnecessary. Nothing within the unix "user management" repertoire really lets you deal effectively with this problem, and what few solutions you do have are, let's be honest, ugly, cumbersome, evil hacks.
What stops all this? A real, heretofore unknown high-level security model, that actually says "The email program can access stored email data, preferences, and can talk to the network on this port, to these hosts" and "the word processor cannot talk IRC" and so forth. This requires a rich resource model, rethinking data storage metaphors, the whole nine yards. Unix does not have this. Windows hosts only have it in the crudest and most limited form with "personal firewalls" that to some extent at least police the network activities of applications.
So for all the Unix folks, of course, this disdain for the security model is heresy, but for the desktop world (and really, servers benefit greatly from a fresh perspective as well), it's not such a bad point. Unix lacks a security model rich enough to be truly useful to everyday users, and by extension, companies like Linspire that cater to them.
Tom Clancy's jingoistic pro-military, pro-police-state propaganda and lackluster dialogue aside, the game is beautiful and it really hits its stride when you plug into the internet and start testing out their multiplayer modes.
The co-op play is a real joy to behold, and the versus play is a really original take on multiplayer "shooters." You wouldn't think a 2v2 where one side has guns and the other side is devoted to stealth would work. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly successful, noticeably balanced, and deep.
There is just nothing quite like sneaking up behind a merc as he saunters past you down a corridor, grabbing his neck, holding down the button and whispering something offensive into his ear before you snap his neck. Or for that matter, watching a spy do a 20 foot header through the air from a grenade you dropped right at his feet while he was trying to sneak past you.
When you see an alarm go off, and are rushing through some dark basement area towards it and think you catch something moving in the shadows, but it disappears when you shine your flashlight on it, you feel real fear.:D
Congrats to Ubisoft. No dobut they'll make the mint selling extras over the XBox live channel to boot...
I experimented with increasing the power on that Linksys model. All that ever happened when I did it is the signal strength measured by the other nodes would decrease. Who knows, I probably did it wrong.
I got the impression the 624+ was somehow internally quite different from the 624, but I don't remember how.
I did experiment with better antennas as well. This was especially disappointing. The 5% to 10% gains I saw were not solving my problems, certainly not worth the money. Although again, maybe I am not a good antenna buyer...
These more complex routers drive me nuts
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Router Built for Gamers
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· Score: 5, Informative
I spent a long time trying to get a sister product, the DI-624, to work.
First of all, I never tried their MIMO gear, but the range and power on all the previous XG gear I tried was shockingly less than I expected. You felt lucky to penetrate two walls, or go 30 feet. Yes, of course, this is all construction materials and background noise and so forth. But in general the way these devices are marketed you do not realize how unlikely you are to see the performance numbers they claim, or potentially even use the device in a meaningful way at all.
For the first YEAR I owned this product, the firmware was unusuable! The device would work, sure, but gradually you would see latencies and packet loss creep up over a 24-48 hour period until the network was unusable. Some kind of resource leaking... And then you would also see occasional random lockups. Only power cycling the router would help.
Can you picture a cron job that wget's the router reboot URL? Now you are getting the picture. And I know from the forums that earlier DLink adopters had it worse, in many cases much worse. DLink, of course, was just in no hurry at all to fix the problem. AN ENTIRE YEAR. Imagine my amazement when they finally fixed it at all.
I actually tried a competing Linksys product. It was worse, both in terms of analog performance, and also that it would lose 40% of its speed with WPA encryption enabled. Pathetic. The biggest draw there is a GPL firmware you can fix yourself. But don't get me started on the whole Sveasoft evilness. But in general GPL firmware is the way to go, and it's what we need to encourage. It just kills me the Linksys hardware is under-powered.
Of course, none of these chipset manufacturers can be bothered to cooperate on a high speed standard, so you are throwing in your lot with either Atheros or Broadcomm. The DLink XTreme G's are Atheros. So, if you bought in, you didn't just get the router, you got a bunch of cards, too, and you are locked in if you want to realize their high-speed modes.
And don't get me started on the Linux support. There is no GPL driver for these products. None. You can use MadWifi, which is a GPL wrapper around a binary, closed-source "HAL." This disables all the "Xtreme-ness" of the network, and MadWifi, according to their faq, is in no hurry at all to fix that. However, this is the ONLY stable linux driver solution I have found for the newer Atheros chips. You can use NDISWrapper or DriverLoader, however, neither is stable.
Overall 802.11g and derivatives are an ugly, ill-supported, overpromised nightmare, and in hindsight I would never have gotten within 100 yards of one. My advice, stay away unless you have no other choice, and just absolutely love troubleshooting.
There is the civil angle, which says, this guy inconvenienced me, he offended me, he cost me some money. That angle is pretty strong, and we can all get on board with saying... spamming should result in fines, say, an order of magnitude larger than any profits you could ever hope to generate from the activity.
Then there is the criminal angle, which says, this is the equivalent of harrassment on an inconceivable scale. He sent my kids, along with 40 million other kids, solicitations for drugs and porn. By contributing to the spam epidemic, he disrupted commerce to a degree that really goes beyond any civil conduct. I don't know if this guy in particular was involved with drugs, porn, stock scams, or the other staples, but this is perfectly apropos for many spam operations, so let's proceed with the hypothetical case where he is. You know what, this seems pretty solid to me too. I mean, say he spent his days stealing mail from the postal service, and his nights exposing himself and soliciting on streetcorners. This is orders of magnitude less harmful than what most normal spam operations do. Yet both of those activities will definitely get you tossed in the slammer. Interestingly, messing with the mail is by far the worse of the two activities, in terms of ciminal sentencing guidelines.
Yeah, you know what, I blanch at 9 years hard time for this guy too. But strictly speaking it appears more or less consistent with our (admittedly highly inconsistent) criminal legal standards.
Prison in any form is a highly undesirable way of dealing with crime. It has lots of pretensions to rehabilitate, but its main use is as an ugly, often counterproductive deterrent. You will undoubtedly find a great variation of opinions among slashdotters about criminal justice reform, from the hardcore Heinleinian "eye for an eye" or even "two punishments, public caning or death" types, to ultra-new-age "treat crime like mental illness" types. My only contribution is that probably there is not enough "real" public humiliation in being a criminal these days. Crime in America is frequently a private affair. Well, then again, we are certainly bringing it back for sexual abusers. Am I saying I would be happier if we just forced the guy to bankruptcy and gave him an hour-long public spanking? Not exactly. But, food for thought.
Commercial development and free software development will always coexist. The market will always pick up the slack for what people won't, or can't, do for free. You're right about that.
If the switch to another product is painless (though I wouldn't assume that), the whole transaction might be a net-gain for everybody, acrimony notwithstanding.
The problem is that people clearly still don't realize what they are buying into when they eschew a free license, and they get screwed. Hopefully the learning process will continue.
This is a process: the community learning the value of "freedom."
If I blame anyone, I blame the dismissive people who said this would never happen, and if it did, it wouldn't matter.
BitMover is doing what's best for BitMover. They had a sexy marketing line with "fake freedom" and it fooled some people. Who do you "blame?" The marketing department? Or the people they convinced?
This is not a story about a corporation "getting burned" because someone dared to create an open source version of their product. Excuse me, that's called competition, and you can't play that card without being fundamentally against open source, if not all competition.
This is a story about the dangers of non-free software - dangers that exist for everyone, for AT&T and IBM just as much as for Linux and Gnu hackers.
I just hope everyone, corporate or otherwise, learns from the experience. If we don't, we can blame ourselves.
Man, remember all those people "flaming" over the freedom of tools on the lists? What was with them, anyway? Aren't they just starting a "religious war?" Who cares if this tool is free. It didn't cost me anything. Those crazy license zealots.
But wait.
Now, look what happened. The company (or individual) that was your friend a couple of years ago, decides today that you've offended them. Now they are taking their ball and going home.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
This is why freedom matters.
And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?
The audacity!
Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears? And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
Perhaps the biggest source of apprehension about cookies, and probably the reason many anti-spyware tools and services filter them, comes from the practices of companies like doubleclick.
These companies can effectively spy on your use of the web (if not other internet services with web components), watching you travel from site to site and learning your browsing, and even purchasing habits (yes, doubleclick does offer this level of integration with ecommerce sites, much as coremetrics etc does, as a 3rd party analytics provider), since their advertisements are, as they like to claim, "everywhere."
The big conspiracy theory was that they would begin to correlate individual random unique ID's from within this massive database with actual people, by cooperating with major sites that both use doubleclick and register users. They could even mix in more traditional marketing databases, and that could give you can get a pretty nice, deep stare right through anyone's clothing, so to speak. I use that metaphor deliberately, because this kind of power is the equivalent of a sex fantasy to people in the business.
And of course what's the point of doing all this if you can't sell that data all over the countryside?
Yeah yeah, we were all paranoid nuts, pass the tinfoil, ha ha ha. Then they actually started doing it. They bought a major "traditional" consumer database firm and announced their plans to do exactly this. There was an uproar. All covered on slashdot, if I recall correctly.
For the layman: Cookies are designed with an important limitation: the cookie "namespace" is tightly bound to the domain from which the cookie was set. This is necessary for a variety of reasons. You don't want site A reading site B's data, for instance.
But a company like doubleclick has their servers hit directly from web pages all over the net. They can set a globally unique identifier cookie on their domain, and use it to track you as you hit pages on every other domain that includes a double click image. And of course they know where you hit their image from various data in the request; the "referer," querystring tagging, etc.
So, uh, you can "trust" doubleclick to do the right thing and not reveal what they know about your travels through the big messy public library we call the internet. But I suggest you "Trust No One," even when the giant faceless marketing company doesn't have unprecedented means, enormous motive, and unique opportunity.
I don't believe it's offtopic, considering how much attention the article devotes to the topic, to consider for a moment the scale and scope of illegal immigration in the U.S..
If you don't live anywhere near the border, it is probably impossible for you to imagine what has happened over the past two decades in this country. Without any honest debate or policy making, we have entirely, almost formally abdicated the southern border of the United States. Literally millions of "visitors" from other countries now live here. The debate is no longer whether to try to "strengthen the border" but whether or not to give their children driver's licenses and scholarships.
What we have done is create a de-facto second class of U.S. citizen, a "sub citizen" that provides a convenient array of features to business in the southern U.S..
Now the avalanche of "issues:" xenophobia, debates about free trade and freedom of movement, patriotism and racism, classism, corny high-school economic ideologies and horse-and-barn-door-ism. The person writing this article seems to have a clear conclusion, after having spent some time in the midst of the issue: these kids are Americans, and we should treat them like Americans. The thing it makes me think of is that many of our reasoned beliefs (especially those coming from farther up in the chilly north) about what we should do about the "illegal immigration" problem - whether they are principled, right, wrong, or crazy - are often a bit divorced from reality, and most ultimately lead to perpetuation of the status quo: the institutional ghetto, the second-class citizen, and the end of what we love, these days, to lionize as the American Dream.
If someone put a licence on their software that said if you use the software you have to refrain from ever speaking ill of it to anyone else, would that stand?
Maybe the license is not what you think it is. It is a manifestation of some particular, very limited rights of an author. You can humorously claim that you have more rights than you really do, but writing that in a license doesn't make it so.
We can debate policy and law about what an author should be able to dictate to consumers, in licenses or otherwise. You cannot avoid setting limits, the only question is where the limits are. It is perfectly acceptable to set limits to where the GPL is in bounds, while prohibition (through any mechanism) of DRM circumvention is out of bounds. Indeed, this was (arguably) the legal state of affairs in this country from the dawn of the information age until the DMCA passed.
By the way, the DMCA is a very, very bad law, that we need to never take our eyes off repealing. It has been met with civil disobedience on an almost unprecedented scale. Rather, it was simply ignored, and its so putrid that most interested parties are afraid to see it enforced, because it would create a backlash.
Licenses happen at the whim of the government. And the government's job is to promote the progress of the arts and sciences. It may actually be the right position to take: that an author can't use a license to command his consumers follow his elaborate scheme for consuming his media (on pain of criminal and civil penalties etc.) any more than he can use a licence to force consumers to wear red clothes or send him love letters. Meanwhile why wouldn't many other uses of a license, from the GPL to the whole spectrum of normal closed source licenses, still stand?
For that matter we can discuss whether or not the license - more accurately things like the shrinkwrap EULA - is enforceable at all. As it is, it is perilously outside what most common law considers to be a valid contract, with the informed consent of both parties, etc. Indeed, until UCITA started gaining speed (UCITA makes the DMCA look as pure as a Dr. Seuss book) it wasn't clear that licenses are any more than proactive, hopeful, if egotistical word-games played by content creators.
From that perspective the GPL is basically a simple defense against the kinds of madness that more open-ended and fully enforceable licenses can create. If you take this perspective it is totally consistent, and indeed necessary, to advocate both for GPL use and a restoration of sane, pre-UCITA policy with respect to licenses.
No one is seriously floating trusted email, yet. Although now that you mention it, it sounds like a catchy idea. Realistically, I think they they won't try to shut their users out of insecure email. But they can offer an alternative - using their platform to send and receive "secure" email. The catch is that everyone may want to switch to some kind of secured mail, because inside the lockbox it will be possible to regulate spam.
There is always the Compuserve factor, though. Compuserve is in many ways the proto-locked platform, with their own parallel email, media distribution, etc. It offered a lot of the benefits trusted email would, but it withered against an open competitor like the Internet. Any closed system will ultimately have to outcompete the free, open, anarchic bazaar of the Internet. For email, the winning factor is how many people you can talk to. If it's much less than everyone, you have a problem.
In general, during the migration from unlocked to locked platforms interoperability will be crucial, so the problem won't be obvious at first. After they've manuevered everyone into the jail, then they can try to slam the bars shut.
Ironically all of the media that's worth anything (games, music, movies) will escape the jail and make it out into the internet in unprotected formats. But things like Word documents, if they fit into the security framework (and why not? isn't disappearing ink, selected viewership, etc part of the appeal?) will finally realize Gates' dream of being completely inaccessible to any competitors' platforms (or potentially even applications). Keeping in mind, I don't think they will try to force you to lock your documents up. But if you need to send or receive a locked word document or a "secure" email then you will have to buy into the platform.
Better still, because many people will envy Microsoft's castle, they will try to build their own. Apple, for instance - they've already started, really. If they didn't play ball with Microsoft, those two commercial systems may finally be prevented from interoperating for more than just sharing music. This is true balkanization, not just between the open camp and the closed camp, but between each "secure" platform as well.
I don't know how thoroughly we've all digested it yet, but open source has arrived, and in addition to changing what people expect of their software, it has raised the bar considerably for corporations like Microsoft. It is already eating their breakfast in the server space, and it is growing to the point where in a few more years there is potential to threaten their client desktops as well, starting with businesses and other large, lucrative deployments. We as an industry are starting to recognize, and ultimatly demand, the benefits of freedom.
On the one hand I like Microsoft buying into the wild-eyed "Alamo" mentality of the content trust, trying to arm wrestle every customer for control, because the more aggressive they get with Digital Restrictions Management, the more it will drive everyone into the arms of competitors, including open and free software.
I wish I could say I thought trusted computing was doomed to fail, but frankly I think it can be considerably successful. If the end result is that your computer is not managed by you, and 3rd parties like Microsoft can take the XBox busines model (and probably, simplicity of interface) deeper into PC territory, this is probably a relief for a variety of consumers beleaguered with "general purpose" computing and all that it entails, viruses, spyware, etc. Better software architecture could solve their problems, but outside control can solve it almost as well.
I guess what will ultimately happen is balkanization, as more aggressive attempts at controlling the platform will split consumers into low and high ends. At the low end, the "game console" converges into a media system and a simple home computer, where every application is trusted and the vendor is the gatekeeper. They'll be happier because, like video consoles today, the hardware is cheap and the costs are deferred into the software and services. At the high end, the general purpose PC that is currently a staple in the home will fade into niche status - a tool for hobbyists and professionals. What fills the void in between, in the end, is hopefully a free-software-based system that is simple enough for all consumers to use, that provides them with an alternative to commercial products, perhaps marketed by a white knight corporation much as IBM has taken free software to the server world.
You're right to point these things out, and I am actually well aware of all of those cases. I didn't say our history was perfect. Only that we actually had aspirations (and successes).
Failures make the news and the history books. Successes happen every day. They're the lack of pain you don't feel, when you don't get hurt.
You are simply, and rather blatantly, misreading me. Your misreading makes me out to be "making too much fuss." But I am not suggesting by any means this is the end of everything. "Merely," the unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions.
Very trivially:
"unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions" != "the end of American civilization", "the end of everything"
Living like slaves didn't end civilization in China (yet). I suspect there are people not able to make distinctions this fine, but I hope you are not one of them.
Whether or not there have been abuses (and whether or not the public at large is aware of them yet - no small matter considering the fine print of the Act), has absolutely nothing to do with whether we are "fussing over nothing." We are discussing the unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions.
Consider the meaning of these traditions. The fact that someone working for our president can point his finger at you and say, "you, come with me," and then you spend years in a cage without a lawyer, due process, a phone call, etc, is bad. The only time it is not bad is in the theoretical and impossible perfect world where we all have perfect, omniscient knowledge and only, ever, use this power for good.
The rules we have to regulate our law enforcement activities are not there to make law enforcement easier or harder. They are there to protect us against ourselves - they inscribe a well-known and ancient protection against human nature, and our ancestors had to bleed into the earth for many, many generations to secure these freedoms, after wearying, inconceivable repitition of abuses, time, after time, after time.
We made our constitution difficult to change to protect our children from cowards. Cowards who run crying, begging for protection from terrorists at any price - even though they kill fewer people than slipping and falling, even though they are selling freedoms that sufficed for us through many, many crises before. I'm sure there are many here who are scared enough of Osama to sell out their civil rights on the chance it will make them a little safer. It's the price we all pay for the general ignorance of history.
The PATRIOT act itself stirs up a lot of confusing debate because it is a beast of many parts; I hope we can stay on topic and remember that we are not objecting to interdepartmental communications and red-tape reductions in law enforcement, but rather the rolling back of safeguards that were established very recently - and in response to abuse of power by American law enforcement so systematic and staggering that even Congress and the President were frightened into enacting them.
Hoover's FBI is not ancient history, it is recent history. And we are Americans - it is shameful to forget our past so conspicuously as to suggest complaints over the PATRIOT act are trifles and fuss. These are matters of principle, of black-letter constitutional law. We do not need to wait for abuses to "fuss." The abuses have already happened, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again... This is why we had safeguards for PATRIOT to remove in the first place. How many times does it have to happen for us to really get it? How thick is America's collective skull?
Knuth came across as charming, and funny, and classically geeky, re-computing the size of a piece of paper necessary for making a five-pointed star with one cut and rattling off the equation behind it, or describing his mental process behind brushing his teeth, but also clearly grounded in continuing scholarly work.
The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.
Apparently yes. How about this: an even trade. No federal funding for stem cell research, no federal funding for oil wars in the middle east. Let Haliburton get private funding if they want it so bad.
Stem cells from embryos headed for the medical waste bin are "sacred" and we protest that the government should not pay for stem cell research, even though it could literally revolutionize medicine. Meanwhile the lives of unambiguously alive, adult men and women in our military (and we quietly footnote, foreigners as well) are bravely sacrificed in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (no, not in Iran, which actually has them), freedom and safety (no, not in Sierra Leone, or China, which make Iraq look like Virginia), to stop Osama from striking again (no, not in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where he actually is)... wait, are we still pretending its not for our energy supply? Not for nothing, but...
How we fight such a dubious war while crying crocodile tears over embryos we destroy by the truckload daily at IVF clinics... while still claiming to be moral, even religious crusaders is inexplicable to me. But this is the moral vortex we live in now. How anyone thinks they keep it straight I have no idea.
So yes, of course the government controvertially sacrifices lives with "confiscated" cash every day. Stem cell research would be a relief, frankly. This is leaving aside that our supposed care over embryos is often an insincere facade for culture warriors that were only recently opposing birth control the same way.
This article is terribly vague, and it is important to note that this is NOT a ruling but what appears to be a comment (albeit a singificant, loaded one) by a judge during arguments. Still, if I put my legal spectator hat on, it does indeed look like the broadcast flag is in jeopardy.
Frankly I was kind of hoping they would try and implement it. The outcry would have been huge, and good for the larger cause.
The content trust always seems to have a pistol target on their foot, but they miss (or chicken out of their "best" ideas) too often. I was kind of looking forward to watching 300 million Americans simultaneously learn that the VCR was now illegal (metaphorically speaking), and that they now record television only at the whim of the broadcaster.
The big picture is the DMCA and the "information warfare" underpinning it. I have no idea why anybody thinks we should become an Orwellian state just so that copyright can be enforced marginally better, but then again maybe nobody does. This sometimes feels like a negotiating process. Look, we'll threaten this outrageous thing, and then this only awful thing doesn't look as bad. Or, we'll give you this minor victory (broadcast flag) and then you'll be satisfied to live in your cage.
We are actively negotiating our culture at this point. How we think about media is up for grabs. Do we think about it as something a content creator should be allowed to control to the extent of broadcast flags enforced by federal agents? Or is it something more like it's always been. Simple, de-facto free.
Actually, I don't care about a company that wants to try some crazy DRM scheme. I say let them try all they want. But what I care about is when the government and police step in to try to protect it or enforce it, let alone to the extent of chilling or even censoring speech. That's ridiculous. If users break the protection and it fails in the marketplace, OK, it was just a bad idea. It's absurd to use law enforcement to invent and prop up some nutty business model that shouldn't exist.
I could potentially be sued, even jailed, because of any traffic that can be shown to have originated from my internet connection and computer. If I am held liable for what is done with my electronic communications equipment, I should have the legal right to ensure that it is being properly used.
Oh yeah. That's a really good point. Didn't even think of that.
Many states have different laws regarding what is legal in terms of wiretapping; some allow one party to record a phone call only if all parties consent, and others, famously D.C., for instance, do not.
Most all of them recognize that, outside of law enforcement activity a 3rd party isn't permitted to eavesdrop.
One thing that occurs to me is that there have been a spate of decisions in a law enforcement context to the effect that electronic communications like email lack the same "expectation of privacy" that phone calls and postal mail do. Whereas this seems to acknowledge that chat serves a similar function to the phone, just with distinct technology, and thus extends the same protection.
The article briefly mentioned that while this wife wasn't allowed to wiretap her husband, her husband's employer is (while he's at work, anyway). I thought this was funny, the different standards between the workplace and the home. There are a variety of justifications for wiretapping your employees - something that, as far as I know in most states, employers have carte blanche to do - but the interesting thing is that when you start thinking about them, most of them apply to the spouse as well.
At work, you use your employer's computer, in your employer's building (their machine, their house), but the wife jointly owns both. At work, you may make the argument that wiretapping is necessary to insure reliability and integrity of your business, but the spouse can argue the same is necessary to insure the integrity of the marriage. Both will claim: "What's their privacy for anyway? Do they have something to hide?"
The only strong argument I can think of for surveillance by employers is that the employee "consents." I suppose spouses don't have the same leverage to compel "consent" to eavesdropping as employers do.
Ugly business, trying to get a job that will promise to respect your privacy. You can always "just work somewhere else," but there are quite a few things we already prevent employers from doing because "somewhere else" is nowhere if we don't.
Here we have the eternal question. Does TV/Radio/Video Games/Books control us? Can a video game make us do things?
We acknowledge that free speech is essential to a free society. But on the other hand we place many, many limits on that speech. Some apply to words you speak, or write (on paper or the internet), such as threats to other people (most famously, the President), but also just old fashioned false advertising, libel, slander, fire in a crowded theater, and so forth. Furthermore free expression is limited by a variety of standards of "obscenity" - for instance you still cannot reliably express yourself with nudity in many places throughout the country.
The more powerful the media, the harsher the rules. Television has a mountain of rules governing what broadcasters can say or do, even since the recent elimination of some of the more famous ones (Fairness Doctrine etc). Janet Jackson can expose her breast on a New York street corner, but not during the halftime show. But of course there is a constant struggle for artistic freedom and in general our society tolerates more every decade than it did the decade before.
We made rules because we were afraid of the "power" of the mass media. News stories about kids "doing what TV tells them" have traction because we instinctively believe that they must be true. Well, we know that we aren't automatons controlled by the media, are we?
Of course, there's the advertising industry. This is a giant industry. There is academic rhetoric about information and capitalism, but the business doesn't sell itself that way. Read their trade magazines. They are literally and unabashedly selling behavior.
Maybe it's just not cut and dried. We are influenced by our interaction with the box in the corner of the room - not quite in the same way we are influenced by our interactions with people, and yet not for nothing, either.
The lesson of history in the U.S. and the world seems to be that we think freedom is great in principle, and in practice we vote against it as often as not. We have a number of double-standards. When little Johnny or little Jane's safety or sexual habits are at stake, we are often ready, as a society, to clamp down. And yet when political "news" equivalent to false advertising or propaganda is up for debate, we are often much more resistent to consider rules. Yet if you look to the Middle East, Russia or China, you can see that propaganda is dangerous too. Who knows which is more "dangerous" even, in the end? Europe is incredibly tolerant of nudity on TV, and they haven't degenerated into anarchy yet.
Myself, I would advocate bringing back things like the Fairness Doctrine, since as long as the ordinary citizen's access to the forum of telivision is so limited it seems that we need to be careful not to allow unpopular views to be effectively censored there. Whereas I'm more European in sensibilities terms of censoring things on the basis of sexual content. I suppose this means I buy into the notion that mass media influences us too.
Well, this is a long digression. All I'm really trying to get into here is that we're inconsistent when we think about these things, and as an exercise we should be more consistent. Here's a question. What sense does it make to restrict or ban Grand Theft Auto, and not the Godfather movies that inspired it?
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There is only one way to reform Software Patents.
That is to abolish them.
Software patents have never worked, and can never work. There is no way they can be made to work.
Marks do nothing to solve the absurd problem of scale. No one can ever assimilate the patent database, or even keep up with new additions, no matter what reforms were enacted. Anyone who tells you their code is "legal" with respect to patents is a bold-faced liar. Every line of code is a ticking patent timebomb.
The very term is just a code word for "Barratry."
They are a legal anomaly and a practical absurdity. They "function" only in that they are almost entirely ignored by those they are intended to govern. In short, they are a very expensive, very destructive farce.
In theory they were meant to be a tool for rich people to shake down poor people, but they even backfire at that, since small "IP" companies can shake down giants with impugnity without being counterattacked, as long as they have no products of their own.
I can fool you without root.
I can goose your startup scripts and replace your shell. From there, I can substitute anything you see and do, using my own ps, df, ls, you name it. And that's just the crude way. Sooner or later someone would write something really wicked, say parsing the machine code of every executable image your "shell" runs for system calls and replacing them with calls to intercepts. Or is there a more elegant way? strace has some special magic for this, I forget how it works.
If you always log in with one account, you'll never know. Even if you logged in as root and poked around, I could hide it in very clever ways using one of the many indirect ways to get things done in a shell script, and in the average user's homedir there are a million places to hide files.
OK, I'll bite.
Keeping in mind Linspire is totally Desktop-centric, I can see why they might have a radically different view on the permissions system from most existing Linux users.
I've already read lots of lengthy posts trashing this contrarian point of view. And they have a lot of good points, as yours does, but ultimately this reads like a single-user vs. multi-user culture clash.
The fact is that on any operating system when you have a single, important user who runs malicious code, it doesn't matter much whether they're root or not, unless the machine has a security model more fine-grained and well-integrated than anything currently in wide use.
If that user can access their own files, then their own files can be destroyed. If that user can access the internet, then the compromise can also send their files over it. Or it can simply make them a spam bot. Or a relay. If that user has an address book, then its contents can be targets for viral propagation. And so on, and so forth.
Frankly, to do most things attackers want to do, "root" is unnecessary. Nothing within the unix "user management" repertoire really lets you deal effectively with this problem, and what few solutions you do have are, let's be honest, ugly, cumbersome, evil hacks.
What stops all this? A real, heretofore unknown high-level security model, that actually says "The email program can access stored email data, preferences, and can talk to the network on this port, to these hosts" and "the word processor cannot talk IRC" and so forth. This requires a rich resource model, rethinking data storage metaphors, the whole nine yards. Unix does not have this. Windows hosts only have it in the crudest and most limited form with "personal firewalls" that to some extent at least police the network activities of applications.
So for all the Unix folks, of course, this disdain for the security model is heresy, but for the desktop world (and really, servers benefit greatly from a fresh perspective as well), it's not such a bad point. Unix lacks a security model rich enough to be truly useful to everyday users, and by extension, companies like Linspire that cater to them.
Tom Clancy's jingoistic pro-military, pro-police-state propaganda and lackluster dialogue aside, the game is beautiful and it really hits its stride when you plug into the internet and start testing out their multiplayer modes.
:D
The co-op play is a real joy to behold, and the versus play is a really original take on multiplayer "shooters." You wouldn't think a 2v2 where one side has guns and the other side is devoted to stealth would work. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly successful, noticeably balanced, and deep.
There is just nothing quite like sneaking up behind a merc as he saunters past you down a corridor, grabbing his neck, holding down the button and whispering something offensive into his ear before you snap his neck. Or for that matter, watching a spy do a 20 foot header through the air from a grenade you dropped right at his feet while he was trying to sneak past you.
When you see an alarm go off, and are rushing through some dark basement area towards it and think you catch something moving in the shadows, but it disappears when you shine your flashlight on it, you feel real fear.
Congrats to Ubisoft. No dobut they'll make the mint selling extras over the XBox live channel to boot...
I experimented with increasing the power on that Linksys model. All that ever happened when I did it is the signal strength measured by the other nodes would decrease. Who knows, I probably did it wrong.
I got the impression the 624+ was somehow internally quite different from the 624, but I don't remember how.
I did experiment with better antennas as well. This was especially disappointing. The 5% to 10% gains I saw were not solving my problems, certainly not worth the money. Although again, maybe I am not a good antenna buyer...
I spent a long time trying to get a sister product, the DI-624, to work.
First of all, I never tried their MIMO gear, but the range and power on all the previous XG gear I tried was shockingly less than I expected. You felt lucky to penetrate two walls, or go 30 feet. Yes, of course, this is all construction materials and background noise and so forth. But in general the way these devices are marketed you do not realize how unlikely you are to see the performance numbers they claim, or potentially even use the device in a meaningful way at all.
For the first YEAR I owned this product, the firmware was unusuable! The device would work, sure, but gradually you would see latencies and packet loss creep up over a 24-48 hour period until the network was unusable. Some kind of resource leaking... And then you would also see occasional random lockups. Only power cycling the router would help.
Can you picture a cron job that wget's the router reboot URL? Now you are getting the picture. And I know from the forums that earlier DLink adopters had it worse, in many cases much worse. DLink, of course, was just in no hurry at all to fix the problem. AN ENTIRE YEAR. Imagine my amazement when they finally fixed it at all.
I actually tried a competing Linksys product. It was worse, both in terms of analog performance, and also that it would lose 40% of its speed with WPA encryption enabled. Pathetic. The biggest draw there is a GPL firmware you can fix yourself. But don't get me started on the whole Sveasoft evilness. But in general GPL firmware is the way to go, and it's what we need to encourage. It just kills me the Linksys hardware is under-powered.
Of course, none of these chipset manufacturers can be bothered to cooperate on a high speed standard, so you are throwing in your lot with either Atheros or Broadcomm. The DLink XTreme G's are Atheros. So, if you bought in, you didn't just get the router, you got a bunch of cards, too, and you are locked in if you want to realize their high-speed modes.
And don't get me started on the Linux support. There is no GPL driver for these products. None. You can use MadWifi, which is a GPL wrapper around a binary, closed-source "HAL." This disables all the "Xtreme-ness" of the network, and MadWifi, according to their faq, is in no hurry at all to fix that. However, this is the ONLY stable linux driver solution I have found for the newer Atheros chips. You can use NDISWrapper or DriverLoader, however, neither is stable.
Overall 802.11g and derivatives are an ugly, ill-supported, overpromised nightmare, and in hindsight I would never have gotten within 100 yards of one. My advice, stay away unless you have no other choice, and just absolutely love troubleshooting.
There is the civil angle, which says, this guy inconvenienced me, he offended me, he cost me some money. That angle is pretty strong, and we can all get on board with saying... spamming should result in fines, say, an order of magnitude larger than any profits you could ever hope to generate from the activity.
Then there is the criminal angle, which says, this is the equivalent of harrassment on an inconceivable scale. He sent my kids, along with 40 million other kids, solicitations for drugs and porn. By contributing to the spam epidemic, he disrupted commerce to a degree that really goes beyond any civil conduct. I don't know if this guy in particular was involved with drugs, porn, stock scams, or the other staples, but this is perfectly apropos for many spam operations, so let's proceed with the hypothetical case where he is. You know what, this seems pretty solid to me too. I mean, say he spent his days stealing mail from the postal service, and his nights exposing himself and soliciting on streetcorners. This is orders of magnitude less harmful than what most normal spam operations do. Yet both of those activities will definitely get you tossed in the slammer. Interestingly, messing with the mail is by far the worse of the two activities, in terms of ciminal sentencing guidelines.
Yeah, you know what, I blanch at 9 years hard time for this guy too. But strictly speaking it appears more or less consistent with our (admittedly highly inconsistent) criminal legal standards.
Prison in any form is a highly undesirable way of dealing with crime. It has lots of pretensions to rehabilitate, but its main use is as an ugly, often counterproductive deterrent. You will undoubtedly find a great variation of opinions among slashdotters about criminal justice reform, from the hardcore Heinleinian "eye for an eye" or even "two punishments, public caning or death" types, to ultra-new-age "treat crime like mental illness" types. My only contribution is that probably there is not enough "real" public humiliation in being a criminal these days. Crime in America is frequently a private affair. Well, then again, we are certainly bringing it back for sexual abusers. Am I saying I would be happier if we just forced the guy to bankruptcy and gave him an hour-long public spanking? Not exactly. But, food for thought.
Commercial development and free software development will always coexist. The market will always pick up the slack for what people won't, or can't, do for free. You're right about that.
If the switch to another product is painless (though I wouldn't assume that), the whole transaction might be a net-gain for everybody, acrimony notwithstanding.
The problem is that people clearly still don't realize what they are buying into when they eschew a free license, and they get screwed. Hopefully the learning process will continue.
This is a process: the community learning the value of "freedom."
If I blame anyone, I blame the dismissive people who said this would never happen, and if it did, it wouldn't matter.
BitMover is doing what's best for BitMover. They had a sexy marketing line with "fake freedom" and it fooled some people. Who do you "blame?" The marketing department? Or the people they convinced?
This is not a story about a corporation "getting burned" because someone dared to create an open source version of their product. Excuse me, that's called competition, and you can't play that card without being fundamentally against open source, if not all competition.
This is a story about the dangers of non-free software - dangers that exist for everyone, for AT&T and IBM just as much as for Linux and Gnu hackers.
I just hope everyone, corporate or otherwise, learns from the experience. If we don't, we can blame ourselves.
Man, remember all those people "flaming" over the freedom of tools on the lists? What was with them, anyway? Aren't they just starting a "religious war?" Who cares if this tool is free. It didn't cost me anything. Those crazy license zealots.
But wait.
Now, look what happened. The company (or individual) that was your friend a couple of years ago, decides today that you've offended them. Now they are taking their ball and going home.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
This is why freedom matters.
And what is BitMover so upset about? That anyone would dare compete with them?
The audacity!
Does any vendor of a commercial product have a moral high ground to complain when a competitor appears? And whose problem is it if they are trying to charge money for something other will do for free?
Perhaps the biggest source of apprehension about cookies, and probably the reason many anti-spyware tools and services filter them, comes from the practices of companies like doubleclick.
These companies can effectively spy on your use of the web (if not other internet services with web components), watching you travel from site to site and learning your browsing, and even purchasing habits (yes, doubleclick does offer this level of integration with ecommerce sites, much as coremetrics etc does, as a 3rd party analytics provider), since their advertisements are, as they like to claim, "everywhere."
The big conspiracy theory was that they would begin to correlate individual random unique ID's from within this massive database with actual people, by cooperating with major sites that both use doubleclick and register users. They could even mix in more traditional marketing databases, and that could give you can get a pretty nice, deep stare right through anyone's clothing, so to speak. I use that metaphor deliberately, because this kind of power is the equivalent of a sex fantasy to people in the business.
And of course what's the point of doing all this if you can't sell that data all over the countryside?
Yeah yeah, we were all paranoid nuts, pass the tinfoil, ha ha ha. Then they actually started doing it. They bought a major "traditional" consumer database firm and announced their plans to do exactly this. There was an uproar. All covered on slashdot, if I recall correctly.
For the layman: Cookies are designed with an important limitation: the cookie "namespace" is tightly bound to the domain from which the cookie was set. This is necessary for a variety of reasons. You don't want site A reading site B's data, for instance.
But a company like doubleclick has their servers hit directly from web pages all over the net. They can set a globally unique identifier cookie on their domain, and use it to track you as you hit pages on every other domain that includes a double click image. And of course they know where you hit their image from various data in the request; the "referer," querystring tagging, etc.
So, uh, you can "trust" doubleclick to do the right thing and not reveal what they know about your travels through the big messy public library we call the internet. But I suggest you "Trust No One," even when the giant faceless marketing company doesn't have unprecedented means, enormous motive, and unique opportunity.
I don't believe it's offtopic, considering how much attention the article devotes to the topic, to consider for a moment the scale and scope of illegal immigration in the U.S..
If you don't live anywhere near the border, it is probably impossible for you to imagine what has happened over the past two decades in this country. Without any honest debate or policy making, we have entirely, almost formally abdicated the southern border of the United States. Literally millions of "visitors" from other countries now live here. The debate is no longer whether to try to "strengthen the border" but whether or not to give their children driver's licenses and scholarships.
What we have done is create a de-facto second class of U.S. citizen, a "sub citizen" that provides a convenient array of features to business in the southern U.S..
Now the avalanche of "issues:" xenophobia, debates about free trade and freedom of movement, patriotism and racism, classism, corny high-school economic ideologies and horse-and-barn-door-ism. The person writing this article seems to have a clear conclusion, after having spent some time in the midst of the issue: these kids are Americans, and we should treat them like Americans. The thing it makes me think of is that many of our reasoned beliefs (especially those coming from farther up in the chilly north) about what we should do about the "illegal immigration" problem - whether they are principled, right, wrong, or crazy - are often a bit divorced from reality, and most ultimately lead to perpetuation of the status quo: the institutional ghetto, the second-class citizen, and the end of what we love, these days, to lionize as the American Dream.
If someone put a licence on their software that said if you use the software you have to refrain from ever speaking ill of it to anyone else, would that stand?
Maybe the license is not what you think it is. It is a manifestation of some particular, very limited rights of an author. You can humorously claim that you have more rights than you really do, but writing that in a license doesn't make it so.
We can debate policy and law about what an author should be able to dictate to consumers, in licenses or otherwise. You cannot avoid setting limits, the only question is where the limits are. It is perfectly acceptable to set limits to where the GPL is in bounds, while prohibition (through any mechanism) of DRM circumvention is out of bounds. Indeed, this was (arguably) the legal state of affairs in this country from the dawn of the information age until the DMCA passed.
By the way, the DMCA is a very, very bad law, that we need to never take our eyes off repealing. It has been met with civil disobedience on an almost unprecedented scale. Rather, it was simply ignored, and its so putrid that most interested parties are afraid to see it enforced, because it would create a backlash.
Licenses happen at the whim of the government. And the government's job is to promote the progress of the arts and sciences. It may actually be the right position to take: that an author can't use a license to command his consumers follow his elaborate scheme for consuming his media (on pain of criminal and civil penalties etc.) any more than he can use a licence to force consumers to wear red clothes or send him love letters. Meanwhile why wouldn't many other uses of a license, from the GPL to the whole spectrum of normal closed source licenses, still stand?
For that matter we can discuss whether or not the license - more accurately things like the shrinkwrap EULA - is enforceable at all. As it is, it is perilously outside what most common law considers to be a valid contract, with the informed consent of both parties, etc. Indeed, until UCITA started gaining speed (UCITA makes the DMCA look as pure as a Dr. Seuss book) it wasn't clear that licenses are any more than proactive, hopeful, if egotistical word-games played by content creators.
From that perspective the GPL is basically a simple defense against the kinds of madness that more open-ended and fully enforceable licenses can create. If you take this perspective it is totally consistent, and indeed necessary, to advocate both for GPL use and a restoration of sane, pre-UCITA policy with respect to licenses.
No one is seriously floating trusted email, yet. Although now that you mention it, it sounds like a catchy idea. Realistically, I think they they won't try to shut their users out of insecure email. But they can offer an alternative - using their platform to send and receive "secure" email. The catch is that everyone may want to switch to some kind of secured mail, because inside the lockbox it will be possible to regulate spam.
There is always the Compuserve factor, though. Compuserve is in many ways the proto-locked platform, with their own parallel email, media distribution, etc. It offered a lot of the benefits trusted email would, but it withered against an open competitor like the Internet. Any closed system will ultimately have to outcompete the free, open, anarchic bazaar of the Internet. For email, the winning factor is how many people you can talk to. If it's much less than everyone, you have a problem.
In general, during the migration from unlocked to locked platforms interoperability will be crucial, so the problem won't be obvious at first. After they've manuevered everyone into the jail, then they can try to slam the bars shut.
Ironically all of the media that's worth anything (games, music, movies) will escape the jail and make it out into the internet in unprotected formats. But things like Word documents, if they fit into the security framework (and why not? isn't disappearing ink, selected viewership, etc part of the appeal?) will finally realize Gates' dream of being completely inaccessible to any competitors' platforms (or potentially even applications). Keeping in mind, I don't think they will try to force you to lock your documents up. But if you need to send or receive a locked word document or a "secure" email then you will have to buy into the platform.
Better still, because many people will envy Microsoft's castle, they will try to build their own. Apple, for instance - they've already started, really. If they didn't play ball with Microsoft, those two commercial systems may finally be prevented from interoperating for more than just sharing music. This is true balkanization, not just between the open camp and the closed camp, but between each "secure" platform as well.
I don't know how thoroughly we've all digested it yet, but open source has arrived, and in addition to changing what people expect of their software, it has raised the bar considerably for corporations like Microsoft. It is already eating their breakfast in the server space, and it is growing to the point where in a few more years there is potential to threaten their client desktops as well, starting with businesses and other large, lucrative deployments. We as an industry are starting to recognize, and ultimatly demand, the benefits of freedom.
On the one hand I like Microsoft buying into the wild-eyed "Alamo" mentality of the content trust, trying to arm wrestle every customer for control, because the more aggressive they get with Digital Restrictions Management, the more it will drive everyone into the arms of competitors, including open and free software.
I wish I could say I thought trusted computing was doomed to fail, but frankly I think it can be considerably successful. If the end result is that your computer is not managed by you, and 3rd parties like Microsoft can take the XBox busines model (and probably, simplicity of interface) deeper into PC territory, this is probably a relief for a variety of consumers beleaguered with "general purpose" computing and all that it entails, viruses, spyware, etc. Better software architecture could solve their problems, but outside control can solve it almost as well.
I guess what will ultimately happen is balkanization, as more aggressive attempts at controlling the platform will split consumers into low and high ends. At the low end, the "game console" converges into a media system and a simple home computer, where every application is trusted and the vendor is the gatekeeper. They'll be happier because, like video consoles today, the hardware is cheap and the costs are deferred into the software and services. At the high end, the general purpose PC that is currently a staple in the home will fade into niche status - a tool for hobbyists and professionals. What fills the void in between, in the end, is hopefully a free-software-based system that is simple enough for all consumers to use, that provides them with an alternative to commercial products, perhaps marketed by a white knight corporation much as IBM has taken free software to the server world.
You're right to point these things out, and I am actually well aware of all of those cases. I didn't say our history was perfect. Only that we actually had aspirations (and successes).
Failures make the news and the history books. Successes happen every day. They're the lack of pain you don't feel, when you don't get hurt.
You are simply, and rather blatantly, misreading me. Your misreading makes me out to be "making too much fuss." But I am not suggesting by any means this is the end of everything. "Merely," the unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions.
Very trivially:
"unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions" != "the end of American civilization", "the end of everything"
Living like slaves didn't end civilization in China (yet). I suspect there are people not able to make distinctions this fine, but I hope you are not one of them.
Whether or not there have been abuses (and whether or not the public at large is aware of them yet - no small matter considering the fine print of the Act), has absolutely nothing to do with whether we are "fussing over nothing." We are discussing the unraveling of hundreds of years of sacred American values and traditions.
Consider the meaning of these traditions. The fact that someone working for our president can point his finger at you and say, "you, come with me," and then you spend years in a cage without a lawyer, due process, a phone call, etc, is bad. The only time it is not bad is in the theoretical and impossible perfect world where we all have perfect, omniscient knowledge and only, ever, use this power for good.
The rules we have to regulate our law enforcement activities are not there to make law enforcement easier or harder. They are there to protect us against ourselves - they inscribe a well-known and ancient protection against human nature, and our ancestors had to bleed into the earth for many, many generations to secure these freedoms, after wearying, inconceivable repitition of abuses, time, after time, after time.
We made our constitution difficult to change to protect our children from cowards. Cowards who run crying, begging for protection from terrorists at any price - even though they kill fewer people than slipping and falling, even though they are selling freedoms that sufficed for us through many, many crises before. I'm sure there are many here who are scared enough of Osama to sell out their civil rights on the chance it will make them a little safer. It's the price we all pay for the general ignorance of history.
The PATRIOT act itself stirs up a lot of confusing debate because it is a beast of many parts; I hope we can stay on topic and remember that we are not objecting to interdepartmental communications and red-tape reductions in law enforcement, but rather the rolling back of safeguards that were established very recently - and in response to abuse of power by American law enforcement so systematic and staggering that even Congress and the President were frightened into enacting them.
Hoover's FBI is not ancient history, it is recent history. And we are Americans - it is shameful to forget our past so conspicuously as to suggest complaints over the PATRIOT act are trifles and fuss. These are matters of principle, of black-letter constitutional law. We do not need to wait for abuses to "fuss." The abuses have already happened, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again... This is why we had safeguards for PATRIOT to remove in the first place. How many times does it have to happen for us to really get it? How thick is America's collective skull?
Knuth came across as charming, and funny, and classically geeky, re-computing the size of a piece of paper necessary for making a five-pointed star with one cut and rattling off the equation behind it, or describing his mental process behind brushing his teeth, but also clearly grounded in continuing scholarly work.
The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.
Apparently yes. How about this: an even trade. No federal funding for stem cell research, no federal funding for oil wars in the middle east. Let Haliburton get private funding if they want it so bad.
Stem cells from embryos headed for the medical waste bin are "sacred" and we protest that the government should not pay for stem cell research, even though it could literally revolutionize medicine. Meanwhile the lives of unambiguously alive, adult men and women in our military (and we quietly footnote, foreigners as well) are bravely sacrificed in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (no, not in Iran, which actually has them), freedom and safety (no, not in Sierra Leone, or China, which make Iraq look like Virginia), to stop Osama from striking again (no, not in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where he actually is)... wait, are we still pretending its not for our energy supply? Not for nothing, but...
How we fight such a dubious war while crying crocodile tears over embryos we destroy by the truckload daily at IVF clinics... while still claiming to be moral, even religious crusaders is inexplicable to me. But this is the moral vortex we live in now. How anyone thinks they keep it straight I have no idea.
So yes, of course the government controvertially sacrifices lives with "confiscated" cash every day. Stem cell research would be a relief, frankly. This is leaving aside that our supposed care over embryos is often an insincere facade for culture warriors that were only recently opposing birth control the same way.
This article is terribly vague, and it is important to note that this is NOT a ruling but what appears to be a comment (albeit a singificant, loaded one) by a judge during arguments. Still, if I put my legal spectator hat on, it does indeed look like the broadcast flag is in jeopardy.
Frankly I was kind of hoping they would try and implement it. The outcry would have been huge, and good for the larger cause.
The content trust always seems to have a pistol target on their foot, but they miss (or chicken out of their "best" ideas) too often. I was kind of looking forward to watching 300 million Americans simultaneously learn that the VCR was now illegal (metaphorically speaking), and that they now record television only at the whim of the broadcaster.
The big picture is the DMCA and the "information warfare" underpinning it. I have no idea why anybody thinks we should become an Orwellian state just so that copyright can be enforced marginally better, but then again maybe nobody does. This sometimes feels like a negotiating process. Look, we'll threaten this outrageous thing, and then this only awful thing doesn't look as bad. Or, we'll give you this minor victory (broadcast flag) and then you'll be satisfied to live in your cage.
We are actively negotiating our culture at this point. How we think about media is up for grabs. Do we think about it as something a content creator should be allowed to control to the extent of broadcast flags enforced by federal agents? Or is it something more like it's always been. Simple, de-facto free.
Actually, I don't care about a company that wants to try some crazy DRM scheme. I say let them try all they want. But what I care about is when the government and police step in to try to protect it or enforce it, let alone to the extent of chilling or even censoring speech. That's ridiculous. If users break the protection and it fails in the marketplace, OK, it was just a bad idea. It's absurd to use law enforcement to invent and prop up some nutty business model that shouldn't exist.
I could potentially be sued, even jailed, because of any traffic that can be shown to have originated from my internet connection and computer. If I am held liable for what is done with my electronic communications equipment, I should have the legal right to ensure that it is being properly used.
Oh yeah. That's a really good point. Didn't even think of that.
Many states have different laws regarding what is legal in terms of wiretapping; some allow one party to record a phone call only if all parties consent, and others, famously D.C., for instance, do not.
Most all of them recognize that, outside of law enforcement activity a 3rd party isn't permitted to eavesdrop.
One thing that occurs to me is that there have been a spate of decisions in a law enforcement context to the effect that electronic communications like email lack the same "expectation of privacy" that phone calls and postal mail do. Whereas this seems to acknowledge that chat serves a similar function to the phone, just with distinct technology, and thus extends the same protection.
The article briefly mentioned that while this wife wasn't allowed to wiretap her husband, her husband's employer is (while he's at work, anyway). I thought this was funny, the different standards between the workplace and the home. There are a variety of justifications for wiretapping your employees - something that, as far as I know in most states, employers have carte blanche to do - but the interesting thing is that when you start thinking about them, most of them apply to the spouse as well.
At work, you use your employer's computer, in your employer's building (their machine, their house), but the wife jointly owns both. At work, you may make the argument that wiretapping is necessary to insure reliability and integrity of your business, but the spouse can argue the same is necessary to insure the integrity of the marriage. Both will claim: "What's their privacy for anyway? Do they have something to hide?"
The only strong argument I can think of for surveillance by employers is that the employee "consents." I suppose spouses don't have the same leverage to compel "consent" to eavesdropping as employers do.
Ugly business, trying to get a job that will promise to respect your privacy. You can always "just work somewhere else," but there are quite a few things we already prevent employers from doing because "somewhere else" is nowhere if we don't.
Does the media control our minds?
Here we have the eternal question. Does TV/Radio/Video Games/Books control us? Can a video game make us do things?
We acknowledge that free speech is essential to a free society. But on the other hand we place many, many limits on that speech. Some apply to words you speak, or write (on paper or the internet), such as threats to other people (most famously, the President), but also just old fashioned false advertising, libel, slander, fire in a crowded theater, and so forth. Furthermore free expression is limited by a variety of standards of "obscenity" - for instance you still cannot reliably express yourself with nudity in many places throughout the country.
The more powerful the media, the harsher the rules. Television has a mountain of rules governing what broadcasters can say or do, even since the recent elimination of some of the more famous ones (Fairness Doctrine etc). Janet Jackson can expose her breast on a New York street corner, but not during the halftime show. But of course there is a constant struggle for artistic freedom and in general our society tolerates more every decade than it did the decade before.
We made rules because we were afraid of the "power" of the mass media. News stories about kids "doing what TV tells them" have traction because we instinctively believe that they must be true. Well, we know that we aren't automatons controlled by the media, are we?
Of course, there's the advertising industry. This is a giant industry. There is academic rhetoric about information and capitalism, but the business doesn't sell itself that way. Read their trade magazines. They are literally and unabashedly selling behavior.
Maybe it's just not cut and dried. We are influenced by our interaction with the box in the corner of the room - not quite in the same way we are influenced by our interactions with people, and yet not for nothing, either.
The lesson of history in the U.S. and the world seems to be that we think freedom is great in principle, and in practice we vote against it as often as not. We have a number of double-standards. When little Johnny or little Jane's safety or sexual habits are at stake, we are often ready, as a society, to clamp down. And yet when political "news" equivalent to false advertising or propaganda is up for debate, we are often much more resistent to consider rules. Yet if you look to the Middle East, Russia or China, you can see that propaganda is dangerous too. Who knows which is more "dangerous" even, in the end? Europe is incredibly tolerant of nudity on TV, and they haven't degenerated into anarchy yet.
Myself, I would advocate bringing back things like the Fairness Doctrine, since as long as the ordinary citizen's access to the forum of telivision is so limited it seems that we need to be careful not to allow unpopular views to be effectively censored there. Whereas I'm more European in sensibilities terms of censoring things on the basis of sexual content. I suppose this means I buy into the notion that mass media influences us too.
Well, this is a long digression. All I'm really trying to get into here is that we're inconsistent when we think about these things, and as an exercise we should be more consistent. Here's a question. What sense does it make to restrict or ban Grand Theft Auto, and not the Godfather movies that inspired it?
Hi.
I think it's really funny that you blame that on me.
Especially since you're so obviously a Troll.
You're muted. I won't see anything else you write after this. If you come back with more users, I'll just mute new users as well. Goodbye.