I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the Web was pristine and complete -- which it's not.
Now, that's funny. I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the radio was new and original. How would you tell one Britney Spears song from another, or from any Ace Of Base title?
I'm sorry, but when did acccessing the Internet become a 'basic right'?
It did not specifically become a basic right. But since I started this by reporting on the German view on things, I may continue to quote German law. The basic rights of German citizens are written down in the Grundgesetz. The first section of that law is about basic rights, and is specifically protected against alteration - yes, we actually did learn something from the past. Freedom of expression in Germany also includes unhindered access to public information sources:
Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten.
translated: Everybody has the right to express his or her opinion freely in word, text or images and to inform himself or herself from publicly available sources.
Given the fact that the internet has become a major information source in Germany, publicly accessible information terminals are being installed in public libraries specifically for the purpose of serving article 5, section 1 of the Grundgesetz. They provide the Grundversorgung (basic service). Basic service is seen as necessary in order to make information available to all citizens so that they can exercise his or her citizens rights and make informed choices in elections and participiate in political life.
German Grundgesetz also defines the legal framework from which the derived basic right of Informationelle Selbstbestimmung (informational self-determination? Someone help me translate that) emerged during the 1974 (I believe) great census. The census rule said that citizen rights include the right to be left alone, and defined how intrusive the state can get and what can or can't be done with the data collected by the state. The census rule ultimately forced German legislature to create a privacy protection act and later led to the creation of a common European privacy framework.
This is very different from the US approach, where there is no such general privicacy protection act and framework, but only a collection of case law, some specific laws and a general reliance on self-regulation within the industry.
I like his argument, but his.sig really
pisses me off. Slashdot's forum is a public
place. Anything you say here can be quoted
as if you yelled it on the streets of Miami.
That is the result of public expression.
Quoting, or more properly, citation, is covered under fair use. Look it up at Brad Templeton's site: Myth 4, third paragraph:
Fair use is almost always a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use more of the work than is necessary to make the commentary). It should not harm the commercial value of the work -- in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is generally forbidden.)
Also, by simple act of posting my comments here on Slashdot, I obviously implicitly allow copying of my content for the purpose of conducting a discussion on Slashdot. This includes viewing, printing, quoting, and all other uses necessary to have a discussion here on this site. Copyright law explicitly protects such uses.
Use of my text outside of Slashdot, for example in a book published by Andover, or on a Best Of Slashdot CD-ROM, or in other places or for purposes other than discussion here on Slashdot requires a license. That is, I have to explicitly grant you the right to use my words.
Copyright does not cover names, trademark law does that.
Copyright does not cover ideas, patent law does that.
So if you like what I write, but I would not grant you a license to use my words, you could always phrase the ideas I convey in your own words, or express them differently (i.e. using no words at all). That should be differently enough in order not to qualify as a derived work, though.
And finally, when asked, I usually grant the license to use my words for free - completely, unaltered and with correct attribution as well as a pointer to my homepage. I do like to get 1-3 free reference exemplars of printed matter, and pointers to the sites where my words are hosted. Also, I will not grant license to use my words for free, if you sell them. If you make a living by selling my words and my works, I demand a sensible share of that money.
If you want to read my words, and my works, please go to my homepage. You find it at http://www.koehntopp.de/kris. I keep freely accessible online copies of everything I have written and deemed useful, whether sold or not. I make my contracts in such ways that I can maintain this website with my works so that you can access all my published articles and USENET posts as well as myopensourceprojects.
Copyright law may be not an ideal solution, and may be an annoyance sometimes. But there is (or at least was at some point in time) reason behind it and used sensibly and nonoffensively, it can be actually useful to protect the interests of the public as well as the interests of the author. Just try to think, and use Google, before you flame.
I cannot tell you why you should expect privacy in the US when accessing the net via public ressources, but I can tell you why you should expect such privacy in Germany.
In Germany, the supreme court has ruled that if a basic right can only be excercised in a way that the person exercising this right would feel monitored, threatened or otherwise limited while exercising that particular basic right in such a way that that person may decide not to exercise that basic right at all, then this is identical to an illegal takeway of such a basic right and therefore illegal.
I don't think it would be so difficult, once the industry relies on SDMI watermarking. If for example Sony sold a song to me, they would have an unmarked binary of the song on their server. If I bought that song, they would mark that binary, and ship it to me via download.
Now, if a second person bought that binary, that person would get the same binary bit for bit, but for the watermark.
I'll bet two identical copies but for the watermark would not be so hard to come by, especially for the popular songs.
The inital question still stands: Does having two identical copies (but for watermarks) help erasing the watermark?
Suppose you have two copies of the same song, both carrying a watermark, but different ones. Suppose you substract one song from the other. The bits that belong to the song should delete each other, and the bits that belong to the watermark and that are different in each watermark should remain. That should give you a pretty good idea how and where the watermark is in the song.
By flipping these bits randomly you should be able to perturb the watermark beond recognizeability without doing damage to the song beyond what the inital compression has done.
Currently, the crack attempts had only one copy of the song, and one watermark, to work with. How much easier will it be PACTOR style with two or n identical copies of the song, each with different watermarks?
This is the most prevailing metaphor in the article. The translator, unfortunately did not see fit to translate enough of it to make it understandable. There is a german verb festzementieren which literally translates to solidly cementing.
There is another level of subtelety here, which cannot be translated, but only understood historically and with reference to the Rote Armeee Fraktion (RAF) further up in his text.
The RAF terrorists did kill several high ranking figures in policics and economy, which makes it somewhat hard to align with their political views. They did one thing though which was quite funny and well executed despite being an act of terrorism and producing several miliion $$$ in damages: They demolished the high security prison in Weiterstadt to the ground just a few days before that prison was ready to accept the first prisoners. Nobody was killed in that operation, in fact nobody was even there but some old watchmen which were easily dealt with.
They literally blew up a concrete prison.
It took four years and 100 million Deutschmark ($50 million) to rebuild the Weiterstadt prison, which was opened in mid 1997.
Of course, another approach to the problem would have been to write the program in a portable library in the first place, and simply recompile it for the intended target platform, be it Windows or Linux.
I have seen this being done with a reasonably large project using the Qt 2.0 library. All development was done in Linux, and the project was later "ported" to Windows in the course of two days. Printing and some obscure font sizing problems required a bit of meddling, and several wrong assumptions and oversights were uncovered in the porting process, which turned out to be genuine errors in the original code. But all in all the project was easily converted from Linux to Windows with minimal effort.
The project (producing a 4 MB binary) is still being developed, in Linux, and regular compatibility testing is being done on the Windows platform mostly using vmware. All in all the money for the Windows Qt License and the vmware was well spent, as developing in the Linux environment still is much more comfortable, and debugging is easier, despite the shortcomings of the g++ compiler pointed out in the original article.
According to the local press, the differences between CeBit and Creative are not about MP3, but about their conduct on the last CeBit.
CeBit is currently a large fair, in fact it is the larges computer trade show on earth. Hannover cannot longer take all the people.
CeBit tried to split the show into a consumer show called "CeBit Home" and tried to promote the curent CeBit as a strictly business tradeshow. They have not been doing well: CeBit Home is actually shrinking, and many consumer product specialists are showing on the main CeBit.
Specifically: Creative undermined their marketing strategy at the last CeBit by having a loud and gaming oriented booth at the supposedly business oriented main CeBit. CeBit directorate wanted Creative to switch over to CeBit home, but Creative was not interested into a shrinking low profile fair.
In response to http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/09/04/ 000904oppetreley.xml
"Information does not want to be free -
people want it to be"
In your article you describe a "Napster system for software"
called "Crookster" and basically deny that peer-to-peer
networking does not have a free speech dimension.
Unfortunately, it has, and a very fundamental one. For
background reading, I recommend starting at
http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/high noon.html,
specifically 3.8 "Blacknet"
(http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/bla cknet.html).
Basically, what we are experiencing now is the beginning
of mediator free communication first time in history of
mankind. If you look at the history of communication, in
the past it usually involved a number of people helping
the sender and the recipient to talk to each other and
exchange information as well as value. Think for example
publishing a book or a record. In the past you needed
the author, the editor, the lectorate, the printer,
a number of people to ship the work, a number of people
to sell it and make individual contracts manually, a
number of people to shuffle the money and prepare the
bills, and, if the recipient could not read, someone
reading it to him or her.
Each improvement in technology has not only put a number
of people out of work, the scribes at the monasteries busily
copying books being only the first. It has also shortened
the length of the pipeline between the sender and the
recipient and it has lowered the transaction cost of
communication.
With the internet this cost is near zero for a single individual
communication, and the length of the pipeline is at two
(sender and receiver) and it is still shrinking. The number
of people working in the communication industries is
increasing, but these people are no longer involved in
YOUR communication, publishing YOUR work, but they are busy
maintaining a communication network open for ANY communication,
and your specific communication is only a few packets in that
sea of information. This is a shift from personal craftsmanship
to industrial infrastructure maintenance: People produce
goods or services no longer for a specific individual or
individual project, but the are maintaining a general
infrastructure used by more or less anonymous clients. You
do not know the names of the people who fabricated your car,
or your hot dog, and you do not know the names of the people
working together in order to have this email reach your desk.
There is no longer an editor and a publisher to thank in the
foreword.
This leads to a number of paradigm shifts in communication,
because a lot of concepts like protection of minors, copyright,
taxes and others depended on the presence of mediators involved
in any communication. For example, when you enter a video rental
in germany, there is a section that is blocked for minors, and
protection of minors relies on the shop owner to act as a mediator
and block access to certain stuff. For example, when you try to
import certain prohibited Nazi propaganda into Germany, customs
as a mediator will take care of that and conficate the stuff at
the border.
With the advent of the Internet, there is no longer any mediator
between the sender and the recipient AND the Internet provides
the technology to make sure of that. Cryptographically hard
technology, that is.
For example, using the SSL protocol, sender and receiver can
establish an encrypted communication channel between each other,
which cannot be intercepted. There is no way for any outside
party to tell what S and R are talking about and what kind of
information they exchange. SSL is designed to make this impossible.
Protection of minors currently relies on being able to tell what
is going on between S and R, though. Filters are listening in,
and change communication if they deem it unsuitable for R. This is
called a man-in-the-middle attack, and SSL certificates are specifically
designed to protect against these. You do not want an attacker to
listen in into your ecommerce transactions and change the account
number and amount in a banking transaction - SSL protects you. You
do want your filter to listen in into your childs communication
and change the content of the pages you think it should not see.
SSL protects against that, too. The MPAA and the RIAA want filters
to listen in into your communication and change the content of the
MP3s you did not buy. SSL protects against that, too.
Cryptographically enhanced communication protocols do even more,
though, and this is what Blacknet is really about. Using MIX technlogy
as applied to the remailer network or as discussed in Onion routing,
a cloud of encrypted communication is created in a peer to peer network.
Nodes inject encrypted packets of a standardized size into the network
and packets bounce through arbitrary number of random nodes, with
each node decrypting the packet and revealing an enclosed encrypted
packet with the next hop destination in it. This creates a cloud
of untraceable, anonymous communication, so that an outside watcher
cannot even identify (S, R) pairs. You could not even tell who
talked to who in such a network.
Such networks already exist in research implementations, and some
companies such as Zer0 Knowledge in Canada are testing commercial
variants of it. The net result is total privacy in communication:
Outside watchers cannot tell who talked to whom, and they cannot
tell what is being talked about. Note that this does not apply
to S and R: Inside their eastablished anonymous communication
channel they may or may not exchange certificates and thus can
establish a cryptographically hard and undenyable, hard to fake
proof of identity.
Both of this is already built, and available on a large scale (SSL)
or will be available on a large scale (ZKS Freenet).
For complete mediator free communication there is only one piece
missing in the puzzle, and that is anonymous cash payment, digital
coins. David Chaum invented that technology in the seventies, and
tried to market his product under the name Digicash. I don't know
about the current status of it, but I know what will happen once
this becomes available on a large scale, too:
People can search and find each other anonymously, thorugh services
just like Napster. In Napster I am not really interested into your
identity, I just want some goods. I can then establish a MIXed anyonymous
connection to you and exchange some files and a bit of digital cash.
From the outside, no party will be able to even observe that such
an exchange has taken place, or that you and I even know each other.
Nonetheless, in the end I will have one more file on my disk, and
you will have a bit more money in the wallet.
That is the concept of Blacknet.
It challenges fundamentally the rules our society is build upon, down
the the financing of our states. The crux with Blacknet ist: To protect
against blacknet, you must abandon the concept of mediator free
communication. To each and all communication there always must be
a big brother listening in and decide whether this is lawful and
licensed exchange of IP and money, deduce the tax from the money,
and grant permission to communicate. No more free and secret sped.
This too is no longer the world we are currently living in.
So one way or the other, Blacknet will destroy or society.
And that is the free speech dimension of things like Napster.
Kristian
Permission granted to do with the mail as you see fit.
Kristian
KDE and Qt jointly worked to remove even the last licensing problems had with the KDE project by putting Qt 2.2 under the GPL. RMS managed to dis that, again.
The KDE people have every right to be pissed, now. But their answer is one of the most mature reactions I have seen from an Open Source project. They even went through the pain to compile a detailed list of licenses and authors of their whole project for reference.
Thank you, KDE, for your grown up and professional respose to criticsm from a person who contributed an important meme to our community, but now behaves like a spoiled child.
OpenStep on a PC was by far the slowest Unix (compared with other Unices on the same hardware) on the face of the earth. I don't know why this is; some say it's the fact that all windows were buffered,
In Nextstep, all drawing was offscreen, in regular memory where the Postscript interpreter could access the bytes. These buffers were then downmixed to the appropriate depth and blitted on screen in this process. That is, if you had a 12 bit display, and a 4 bit display attached to your system, all drawing was offscreen in 12 bit/pixel, and then blitted out on the screen, possibly downmixing the color to the target display. This requires much RAM. If you took care to add enough RAM to the machine (I had a Nextstation with a 2 bit grey display and 20 MB, others had a 12 bit display and 32 MB), it was actually quite fast.
Comparing a Quadra and a Nextstation (same CPU, same clock, same amount of memory - 68040@25 MHz, 20 MB RAM), both using the same version of Illustrator and the same image, side to side, the Nextstation won hands down, due to superior memory management and better drawing subsystem.
Objective-C has an (arguably) annoying syntax, limited type checking, no access control and lacks exception handling.
Objective-C is all about component software. Components may even be added to finished programs as NSBundles or other form of dynamically loaded packages. To facilitate that, as much typechecking is deferred to runtime in Objective-C. Qt and Gtk do the same, for the same reasons, and so do Corba and COM: There is no way to use static typing (compile time typing) in component software.
Objective-C is typed, though, but it is dynamic typing (runtime typing). You can ask anything, anytime, what type it is and it will tell you its class and methods. You can ask objects "can you perform a 'xyz' method call, if I asked you to do this?" and the object can answer this. As I said in my initial posting, this is very different from C++ and Simula, it is Smalltalk. And it is really important for component software development.
As for access control: I don't believe in it. As soon as "private" and "protected" were invented, people were crying for "friend" to work around it. Access control is more a social problem ("We do not want to use these method calls, as they are private and can change anytime"), and as most social problems there should not be a technical solution for it ("But I really need to call this internal function, or I won't have code" "Then do it, and face the consequences when we upgrade").
And finally: yes. Objective-C has no builtin exceptions as Java has. It has a set of macros that basically do a try/catch block, even in a similar syntax (just all upcase, as these are macros).
These were proprietary extensions to the display postscript server, not part of PostScript proper.
These were no more propietary as postscript itself: Next bought the interpreter from Adobe, as all people did. They just got a newer version as for example what was shipped with the Solaris X server as an X extension.
This is great news, I'm hooked. I really like the Apple hardware, but I refrained from buying Apple until now, because I really need remote login and a Unix shell, and I refuse to work on anything resembling the crude old thing they used to call an operating system.
I found my first new exploits in 1994, when I had the opportunity to research AIX 3.2.5 as part of a tiger team. We found a list of about 10 ways to get root on the system (actually more, but this were the ten worst) in only a single way of systematic research of a stock configuration directly from the current installation tape. We called the vendor and waited. Nothing happened. For months.
I had to write an article in a (german) computer magazine under pseudonym, then take that article to the local vendors office and say "Look, now it is even in the papers" in order to get a reaction from then. IBM didn't care a shit about security back then, unless they were forced to by publicity.
This has thorougly changed now, but only due to full disclosure.
And even now you need disclosure and publicity to get people to get their act together. A large german online bookshop had their server wide open for nine months after I informed them that I was able to connect to their Oracle on their webserver using my Oracle installation, and get all their credit card data. Only after they ended up on in the same german computer magazine they decided to firewall themselves shut.
With open source the situation is better, but only slightly. I was able to break out of safe_mode in PHP 3.0.13 and below using a bug in their popen() implementation, and fixed it in CVS. I then posted the bug on bugtraq, forcing the PHP team to release 3.0.14 with the fix immediately. Nice reaction, but the core team didn't like me publicizing on bugtraq.
When I found a similar bug to break out of safe_mode using the mail() function, I did not create a fix, and did not post on bugtraq, but informed them privately of my findings. The fix went into CVS in under 3 weeks, but 3.0.15 was released only three weeks later.
I find this disappointing: Even in Open Source you get appropriate reaction to security issues only by forcing updates through full disclosure. Well, I for my part have learned my lesson: I find a security related bug, it goes to bugtraq - no delay, no mercy. The waiting ain't worth it.
Disclaimer: I have not seen MacOS X from the inside. I have seen Nextstep from the inside. It was beautiful.
Nextstep had one of the easiest and most elegant programming languages I have ever seen. It was called Objective-C and was OO in C done right: Pure C with the Object mechanisms of Smalltalk thrown in. You might have seen part of the ideas behind Objective-C recently: The signal-slot mechanism in the Meta Object Compiler (moc) in Qt has its roots in the Objective-C model, and Gtk ported that to plain C. In Objective-C it is part of the language, no moc or handcoding necessary, and all objects, slots and method invocations use this mechanism.
On top of this, the Next people built an API and tools which really revolutionized programming for me. This was the only programming environment where I actually felt supported by the API and programmed to solve a problem, instead of fighting shortcomings of the system.
The OO toolkits that came with their Objective-C compilers were one of the most cleverly designed collection of classes I have ever seen: By combining components of the Appkit and the Enterprise Object Framework, I was able to built applications which navigated a system of SQL tables, browsed tables and even allowed simple changes in table values in the SQL database - and I was able to do this by simply connecting the components in Interface Builder, no compile necessary for a working application! Of course you could compile and save the result and had a standalone application which worked just as well.
But Nextsteps Objective-C objects had enough metainformation ready that they were loadable and runnable (sic!) in their equivalent of Kdevelop. This is was reusable component software done right can do for you. Talk about fragile superclasses, about Corba and COM. I had all this in 1994, on a 25 MHz 68040 with 20 MB RAM, and it was better than anything that money can buy now.
On top of this, Nextstep delivered a GUI which painted every single pixel on the display with a postscript interpreter. This allowed you to write widgets in postscript, load them into the (possibly running remotely) display server, and run them with a single command. In todays buzzwords that would be equivalent to writing all your widgets in Java, uploading them to your X server once, and have them running up there, instead of sending four million drawing commands each time your want your widget shown. Nextsteps GUI displaying remotely was faster than X even with compression on slow links, because "execute that widget again" is faster to transmit and parse than all these drawing commands, and "your button 17 has been hit by left-mouse-down" is faster on the wire than long lists "mouse-move to coordinates x,y", "mouse-down on x,y" events.
The fact that postscript can do coordinate transformation, font handling, color, alpha channel mixing and several other things right which X still cannot do properly today helped, too.
But enough of the nostalgy. Here is my advice to you: Have a close look at MacOS X native API, at the language, at the object system, at the display system and at several other things. The Next people are extremely bright, and they are still at work at Apple. Unless Apple managed to really fuck up their Nextstep heritage, you have the chance to see a really, really nicely engineered system and you may learn a lot of things about elegance of design, about handling software components, and about OOP outside the scope of C++ and Java.
Do not try to port your code. You won't be doing your code and the MacOS X API a favor. Make your first experiences with natively designed code, and try to forget your Unix and C++ heritage when you make them. Unlearn what you have done previously and relearn programming and OO their way. Try to see the beauty of their way and widen your perspective.
Then come back and review your old work in your newly collected experience. I will find that your have many new and exciting ideas what to do and how to do it differently.
That's slightly over two months of MP3, played 24/7. You'll need more than 26000 titles at 3.5 minutes each to fill it, or 2200 CDs with 12 titles each.
You sir, and your little "copyright", are about the sickest things I've seen on/. in a long time. It shows just how perverted the whole concept of "IP" is.
I assume you allude to the signature you find below all my postings. I created that signature after I found that Slashdot posted a notice on every page it generates that "this page is copyright slashdot.org", which it isn't - I own my words, not slashdot. This has changed since then, but I kept that signature as a reminder that I own my words, nobody else. That proved useful when/. tried to make a book from the comments posted to the Hellmouth stories.
Your reaction to my signature shows that the reminder works. You have started to think about copyright and IP, and it's consequences for your life. That's exactly what I want to happen.
Personally I think that current IP law is indeed sick and perverted. It is still law, though, and govers your and my life as well as the life of Deja.
am making a point to post all of your comments on a web page of mine. What are you going to do, sue me?
If you are an US citizen, I don't even have to sue under current legislation. I just have to send you a DMCA takedown notice to you or your provider. You then have to take down these pages, or sue me and so does your provider. In fact, your provider has to take down these pages, unless he wants to become legally liable. It then becomes your duty to prove that you actually have the needed license to host that content and that I have no legal base to force you to take down the pages.
This is sick, and if I remember correctly, ACLU is currently working to have this changed. Also, there is no similar law currently in Germany or the EU, and I hope there never will be (in fact, I am working with groups like Fitug to stop such regulations becoming law in the EU).
But DMCA or not, I still believe that/. does not own my words in a way that they can make a book from it without asking me, and I still believe that Deja cannot turn my posts into their advertisements. The DMCA is just a very convenient way to stop them.
At the very most, you are giving an implicit licence to use the material in unaltered form.
I do not think that I even give that much permission implicitly. Remember the book/. made from the postings in the Hellmouth thread? They had to get permissions from all authors of posts they used, because posting on/. does give/. implicit permission to use this posting on their site, but not in a book. Similar logic applies to Deja.COM.
I own my works and I do not want them put in a context I cannot control by another entity - I want them to be shown as original as feasible. Current US and German copyright laws give me the power to control the use of my works, and so I do exercise my rights.
It seems your Usenet posts would be a loss for lots of people looking for help on deja.com
You are not missing anything: All my works I consider worthy to be preserved are available on my own website, including my printed articles and my USENET posts. I make them available unedited, without banner ads and without ad links overlayed. Also, I refuse to sign author contracts which will prohibit me from publishing my works on my own website - I do accept a 6 month delay clause, though.
This results in a 60 meg website with 2.5 GB traffic/mo. Not much compared to/., but ok for a private homepage, I think.
Probably none, given that you willingly put it somewhere where you knew it would be distributed worldwide (Usenet).
I am no lawyer, too, but I know a bit of copyright law because I am teaching web design, and I know pretty well that you need a license for other peoples intellectual property to use it. By posting material to USENET, you give an implicit license to use this material in the context of USENET, and use of my message in answers is even covered by fair use provisions.
What deja does, even in their normal use, probably exceeds that implicit license, and fair use. Anyway, I have just sent them a digitally signed formal takedown notice under DMCA asking them to take down all my posts from their site, and preventing their site to include my further postings. I also notified them that an opt-out solution by providing additional headers to my posts is not sufficient, as they are the ones needing a license to use my works, and I won't give them. It is their task to get the licenses required for the works of other authors presented on their site.
Nuking your articles manually is a pain, several thousand articles of mine are waiting to be deleted. Has somebody already written a perl script using LWP to generate nuke requests automatically?
Slashdot Mirror
I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the Web was pristine and complete -- which it's not.
Now, that's funny. I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the radio was new and original. How would you tell one Britney Spears song from another, or from any Ace Of Base title?
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I'm sorry, but when did acccessing the Internet become a 'basic right'?
It did not specifically become a basic right. But since I started this by reporting on the German view on things, I may continue to quote German law. The basic rights of German citizens are written down in the Grundgesetz. The first section of that law is about basic rights, and is specifically protected against alteration - yes, we actually did learn something from the past. Freedom of expression in Germany also includes unhindered access to public information sources:
Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten.
translated: Everybody has the right to express his or her opinion freely in word, text or images and to inform himself or herself from publicly available sources.
Given the fact that the internet has become a major information source in Germany, publicly accessible information terminals are being installed in public libraries specifically for the purpose of serving article 5, section 1 of the Grundgesetz. They provide the Grundversorgung (basic service). Basic service is seen as necessary in order to make information available to all citizens so that they can exercise his or her citizens rights and make informed choices in elections and participiate in political life.
German Grundgesetz also defines the legal framework from which the derived basic right of Informationelle Selbstbestimmung (informational self-determination? Someone help me translate that) emerged during the 1974 (I believe) great census. The census rule said that citizen rights include the right to be left alone, and defined how intrusive the state can get and what can or can't be done with the data collected by the state. The census rule ultimately forced German legislature to create a privacy protection act and later led to the creation of a common European privacy framework.
This is very different from the US approach, where there is no such general privicacy protection act and framework, but only a collection of case law, some specific laws and a general reliance on self-regulation within the industry.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I like his argument, but his .sig really
pisses me off. Slashdot's forum is a public
place. Anything you say here can be quoted
as if you yelled it on the streets of Miami.
That is the result of public expression.
Quoting, or more properly, citation, is covered under fair use. Look it up at Brad Templeton's site: Myth 4, third paragraph:
Fair use is almost always a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use more of the work than is necessary to make the commentary). It should not harm the commercial value of the work -- in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is generally forbidden.)
Also, by simple act of posting my comments here on Slashdot, I obviously implicitly allow copying of my content for the purpose of conducting a discussion on Slashdot. This includes viewing, printing, quoting, and all other uses necessary to have a discussion here on this site. Copyright law explicitly protects such uses.
Use of my text outside of Slashdot, for example in a book published by Andover, or on a Best Of Slashdot CD-ROM, or in other places or for purposes other than discussion here on Slashdot requires a license. That is, I have to explicitly grant you the right to use my words.
Copyright does not cover names, trademark law does that.
Copyright does not cover ideas, patent law does that.
So if you like what I write, but I would not grant you a license to use my words, you could always phrase the ideas I convey in your own words, or express them differently (i.e. using no words at all). That should be differently enough in order not to qualify as a derived work, though.
And finally, when asked, I usually grant the license to use my words for free - completely, unaltered and with correct attribution as well as a pointer to my homepage. I do like to get 1-3 free reference exemplars of printed matter, and pointers to the sites where my words are hosted. Also, I will not grant license to use my words for free, if you sell them. If you make a living by selling my words and my works, I demand a sensible share of that money.
If you want to read my words, and my works, please go to my homepage. You find it at http://www.koehntopp.de/kris. I keep freely accessible online copies of everything I have written and deemed useful, whether sold or not. I make my contracts in such ways that I can maintain this website with my works so that you can access all my published articles and USENET posts as well as my open source projects.
Copyright law may be not an ideal solution, and may be an annoyance sometimes. But there is (or at least was at some point in time) reason behind it and used sensibly and nonoffensively, it can be actually useful to protect the interests of the public as well as the interests of the author. Just try to think, and use Google, before you flame.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I cannot tell you why you should expect privacy in the US when accessing the net via public ressources, but I can tell you why you should expect such privacy in Germany.
In Germany, the supreme court has ruled that if a basic right can only be excercised in a way that the person exercising this right would feel monitored, threatened or otherwise limited while exercising that particular basic right in such a way that that person may decide not to exercise that basic right at all, then this is identical to an illegal takeway of such a basic right and therefore illegal.
In the above library scenario that would mean: If you are using a public information terminal to exercise your right as an adult to browse arbitrary information sources and you must fear that your browsing history is being monitored and may perhaps be used against you, than this would be an illecal takeway of your basic right to free and unhindered access to public information. It may be okay or even necessary to monitor the internet connection of minors (judges are still out on this issue in Germany), but it is clear illegal to do such a thing on a public terminal when an adult is using that terminal.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I don't think it would be so difficult, once the industry relies on SDMI watermarking. If for example Sony sold a song to me, they would have an unmarked binary of the song on their server. If I bought that song, they would mark that binary, and ship it to me via download.
Now, if a second person bought that binary, that person would get the same binary bit for bit, but for the watermark.
I'll bet two identical copies but for the watermark would not be so hard to come by, especially for the popular songs.
The inital question still stands: Does having two identical copies (but for watermarks) help erasing the watermark?
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Suppose you have two copies of the same song, both carrying a watermark, but different ones. Suppose you substract one song from the other. The bits that belong to the song should delete each other, and the bits that belong to the watermark and that are different in each watermark should remain. That should give you a pretty good idea how and where the watermark is in the song.
By flipping these bits randomly you should be able to perturb the watermark beond recognizeability without doing damage to the song beyond what the inital compression has done.
Currently, the crack attempts had only one copy of the song, and one watermark, to work with. How much easier will it be PACTOR style with two or n identical copies of the song, each with different watermarks?
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
See
Anschlag auf den Knast Weiterstadt for more information about the blown up concrete prison (german language).
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Blowing up concrete prisons
This is the most prevailing metaphor in the article. The translator, unfortunately did not see fit to translate enough of it to make it understandable. There is a german verb festzementieren which literally translates to solidly cementing.
There is another level of subtelety here, which cannot be translated, but only understood historically and with reference to the Rote Armeee Fraktion (RAF) further up in his text.
The RAF terrorists did kill several high ranking figures in policics and economy, which makes it somewhat hard to align with their political views. They did one thing though which was quite funny and well executed despite being an act of terrorism and producing several miliion $$$ in damages: They demolished the high security prison in Weiterstadt to the ground just a few days before that prison was ready to accept the first prisoners. Nobody was killed in that operation, in fact nobody was even there but some old watchmen which were easily dealt with.
They literally blew up a concrete prison.
It took four years and 100 million Deutschmark ($50 million) to rebuild the Weiterstadt prison, which was opened in mid 1997.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Of course, another approach to the problem would have been to write the program in a portable library in the first place, and simply recompile it for the intended target platform, be it Windows or Linux.
I have seen this being done with a reasonably large project using the Qt 2.0 library. All development was done in Linux, and the project was later "ported" to Windows in the course of two days. Printing and some obscure font sizing problems required a bit of meddling, and several wrong assumptions and oversights were uncovered in the porting process, which turned out to be genuine errors in the original code. But all in all the project was easily converted from Linux to Windows with minimal effort.
The project (producing a 4 MB binary) is still being developed, in Linux, and regular compatibility testing is being done on the Windows platform mostly using vmware. All in all the money for the Windows Qt License and the vmware was well spent, as developing in the Linux environment still is much more comfortable, and debugging is easier, despite the shortcomings of the g++ compiler pointed out in the original article.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
According to the local press, the differences between CeBit and Creative are not about MP3, but about their conduct on the last CeBit.
CeBit is currently a large fair, in fact it is the larges computer trade show on earth. Hannover cannot longer take all the people.
CeBit tried to split the show into a consumer show called "CeBit Home" and tried to promote the curent CeBit as a strictly business tradeshow. They have not been doing well: CeBit Home is actually shrinking, and many consumer product specialists are showing on the main CeBit.
Specifically: Creative undermined their marketing strategy at the last CeBit by having a loud and gaming oriented booth at the supposedly business oriented main CeBit. CeBit directorate wanted Creative to switch over to CeBit home, but Creative was not interested into a shrinking low profile fair.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
The RIAA was friendly enough to build one of the most well known brands in the software industry for Napster, Inc. Thank you, RIAA.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
This is my mail to Nicholas Petreley.
/ 000904oppetreley.xml
h noon.html,
a cknet.html).
In response to http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/09/04
"Information does not want to be free -
people want it to be"
In your article you describe a "Napster system for software"
called "Crookster" and basically deny that peer-to-peer
networking does not have a free speech dimension.
Unfortunately, it has, and a very fundamental one. For
background reading, I recommend starting at
http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/hig
specifically 3.8 "Blacknet"
(http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/bl
Basically, what we are experiencing now is the beginning
of mediator free communication first time in history of
mankind. If you look at the history of communication, in
the past it usually involved a number of people helping
the sender and the recipient to talk to each other and
exchange information as well as value. Think for example
publishing a book or a record. In the past you needed
the author, the editor, the lectorate, the printer,
a number of people to ship the work, a number of people
to sell it and make individual contracts manually, a
number of people to shuffle the money and prepare the
bills, and, if the recipient could not read, someone
reading it to him or her.
Each improvement in technology has not only put a number
of people out of work, the scribes at the monasteries busily
copying books being only the first. It has also shortened
the length of the pipeline between the sender and the
recipient and it has lowered the transaction cost of
communication.
With the internet this cost is near zero for a single individual
communication, and the length of the pipeline is at two
(sender and receiver) and it is still shrinking. The number
of people working in the communication industries is
increasing, but these people are no longer involved in
YOUR communication, publishing YOUR work, but they are busy
maintaining a communication network open for ANY communication,
and your specific communication is only a few packets in that
sea of information. This is a shift from personal craftsmanship
to industrial infrastructure maintenance: People produce
goods or services no longer for a specific individual or
individual project, but the are maintaining a general
infrastructure used by more or less anonymous clients. You
do not know the names of the people who fabricated your car,
or your hot dog, and you do not know the names of the people
working together in order to have this email reach your desk.
There is no longer an editor and a publisher to thank in the
foreword.
This leads to a number of paradigm shifts in communication,
because a lot of concepts like protection of minors, copyright,
taxes and others depended on the presence of mediators involved
in any communication. For example, when you enter a video rental
in germany, there is a section that is blocked for minors, and
protection of minors relies on the shop owner to act as a mediator
and block access to certain stuff. For example, when you try to
import certain prohibited Nazi propaganda into Germany, customs
as a mediator will take care of that and conficate the stuff at
the border.
With the advent of the Internet, there is no longer any mediator
between the sender and the recipient AND the Internet provides
the technology to make sure of that. Cryptographically hard
technology, that is.
For example, using the SSL protocol, sender and receiver can
establish an encrypted communication channel between each other,
which cannot be intercepted. There is no way for any outside
party to tell what S and R are talking about and what kind of
information they exchange. SSL is designed to make this impossible.
Protection of minors currently relies on being able to tell what
is going on between S and R, though. Filters are listening in,
and change communication if they deem it unsuitable for R. This is
called a man-in-the-middle attack, and SSL certificates are specifically
designed to protect against these. You do not want an attacker to
listen in into your ecommerce transactions and change the account
number and amount in a banking transaction - SSL protects you. You
do want your filter to listen in into your childs communication
and change the content of the pages you think it should not see.
SSL protects against that, too. The MPAA and the RIAA want filters
to listen in into your communication and change the content of the
MP3s you did not buy. SSL protects against that, too.
Cryptographically enhanced communication protocols do even more,
though, and this is what Blacknet is really about. Using MIX technlogy
as applied to the remailer network or as discussed in Onion routing,
a cloud of encrypted communication is created in a peer to peer network.
Nodes inject encrypted packets of a standardized size into the network
and packets bounce through arbitrary number of random nodes, with
each node decrypting the packet and revealing an enclosed encrypted
packet with the next hop destination in it. This creates a cloud
of untraceable, anonymous communication, so that an outside watcher
cannot even identify (S, R) pairs. You could not even tell who
talked to who in such a network.
Such networks already exist in research implementations, and some
companies such as Zer0 Knowledge in Canada are testing commercial
variants of it. The net result is total privacy in communication:
Outside watchers cannot tell who talked to whom, and they cannot
tell what is being talked about. Note that this does not apply
to S and R: Inside their eastablished anonymous communication
channel they may or may not exchange certificates and thus can
establish a cryptographically hard and undenyable, hard to fake
proof of identity.
Both of this is already built, and available on a large scale (SSL)
or will be available on a large scale (ZKS Freenet).
For complete mediator free communication there is only one piece
missing in the puzzle, and that is anonymous cash payment, digital
coins. David Chaum invented that technology in the seventies, and
tried to market his product under the name Digicash. I don't know
about the current status of it, but I know what will happen once
this becomes available on a large scale, too:
People can search and find each other anonymously, thorugh services
just like Napster. In Napster I am not really interested into your
identity, I just want some goods. I can then establish a MIXed anyonymous
connection to you and exchange some files and a bit of digital cash.
From the outside, no party will be able to even observe that such
an exchange has taken place, or that you and I even know each other.
Nonetheless, in the end I will have one more file on my disk, and
you will have a bit more money in the wallet.
That is the concept of Blacknet.
It challenges fundamentally the rules our society is build upon, down
the the financing of our states. The crux with Blacknet ist: To protect
against blacknet, you must abandon the concept of mediator free
communication. To each and all communication there always must be
a big brother listening in and decide whether this is lawful and
licensed exchange of IP and money, deduce the tax from the money,
and grant permission to communicate. No more free and secret sped.
This too is no longer the world we are currently living in.
So one way or the other, Blacknet will destroy or society.
And that is the free speech dimension of things like Napster.
Kristian
Permission granted to do with the mail as you see fit.
Kristian
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
KDE and Qt jointly worked to remove even the last licensing problems had with the KDE project by putting Qt 2.2 under the GPL. RMS managed to dis that, again.
The KDE people have every right to be pissed, now. But their answer is one of the most mature reactions I have seen from an Open Source project. They even went through the pain to compile a detailed list of licenses and authors of their whole project for reference.
Thank you, KDE, for your grown up and professional respose to criticsm from a person who contributed an important meme to our community, but now behaves like a spoiled child.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
As far as I understand SSL, you must use virtual interfaces to host SSL web servers. How does the policy change affect these servers?
Also, TLS is supposed to fix that. Which browsers implement TLS correctly?
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
deutsch:
1 Million = 1E6
1 Milliarde = 1E9
1 Billion = 1E12
1 Billiarde = 1E15
english:
1 million = 1E6
1 billion = 1E9
1 trillion = 1E12
1 ? = 1E15
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
OpenStep on a PC was by far the slowest Unix (compared with other Unices on the same hardware) on the face of the earth. I don't know why this is; some say it's the fact that all windows were buffered,
In Nextstep, all drawing was offscreen, in regular memory where the Postscript interpreter could access the bytes. These buffers were then downmixed to the appropriate depth and blitted on screen in this process. That is, if you had a 12 bit display, and a 4 bit display attached to your system, all drawing was offscreen in 12 bit/pixel, and then blitted out on the screen, possibly downmixing the color to the target display. This requires much RAM. If you took care to add enough RAM to the machine (I had a Nextstation with a 2 bit grey display and 20 MB, others had a 12 bit display and 32 MB), it was actually quite fast.
Comparing a Quadra and a Nextstation (same CPU, same clock, same amount of memory - 68040@25 MHz, 20 MB RAM), both using the same version of Illustrator and the same image, side to side, the Nextstation won hands down, due to superior memory management and better drawing subsystem.
Objective-C has an (arguably) annoying syntax, limited type checking, no access control and lacks exception handling.
Objective-C is all about component software. Components may even be added to finished programs as NSBundles or other form of dynamically loaded packages. To facilitate that, as much typechecking is deferred to runtime in Objective-C. Qt and Gtk do the same, for the same reasons, and so do Corba and COM: There is no way to use static typing (compile time typing) in component software.
Objective-C is typed, though, but it is dynamic typing (runtime typing). You can ask anything, anytime, what type it is and it will tell you its class and methods. You can ask objects "can you perform a 'xyz' method call, if I asked you to do this?" and the object can answer this. As I said in my initial posting, this is very different from C++ and Simula, it is Smalltalk. And it is really important for component software development.
As for access control: I don't believe in it. As soon as "private" and "protected" were invented, people were crying for "friend" to work around it. Access control is more a social problem ("We do not want to use these method calls, as they are private and can change anytime"), and as most social problems there should not be a technical solution for it ("But I really need to call this internal function, or I won't have code" "Then do it, and face the consequences when we upgrade").
And finally: yes. Objective-C has no builtin exceptions as Java has. It has a set of macros that basically do a try/catch block, even in a similar syntax (just all upcase, as these are macros).
These were proprietary extensions to the display postscript server, not part of PostScript proper.
These were no more propietary as postscript itself: Next bought the interpreter from Adobe, as all people did. They just got a newer version as for example what was shipped with the Solaris X server as an X extension.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
This is great news, I'm hooked. I really like the Apple hardware, but I refrained from buying Apple until now, because I really need remote login and a Unix shell, and I refuse to work on anything resembling the crude old thing they used to call an operating system.
Now I will walk in beauty again.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I found my first new exploits in 1994, when I had the opportunity to research AIX 3.2.5 as part of a tiger team. We found a list of about 10 ways to get root on the system (actually more, but this were the ten worst) in only a single way of systematic research of a stock configuration directly from the current installation tape. We called the vendor and waited. Nothing happened. For months.
I had to write an article in a (german) computer magazine under pseudonym, then take that article to the local vendors office and say "Look, now it is even in the papers" in order to get a reaction from then. IBM didn't care a shit about security back then, unless they were forced to by publicity.
This has thorougly changed now, but only due to full disclosure.
And even now you need disclosure and publicity to get people to get their act together. A large german online bookshop had their server wide open for nine months after I informed them that I was able to connect to their Oracle on their webserver using my Oracle installation, and get all their credit card data. Only after they ended up on in the same german computer magazine they decided to firewall themselves shut.
With open source the situation is better, but only slightly. I was able to break out of safe_mode in PHP 3.0.13 and below using a bug in their popen() implementation, and fixed it in CVS. I then posted the bug on bugtraq, forcing the PHP team to release 3.0.14 with the fix immediately. Nice reaction, but the core team didn't like me publicizing on bugtraq.
When I found a similar bug to break out of safe_mode using the mail() function, I did not create a fix, and did not post on bugtraq, but informed them privately of my findings. The fix went into CVS in under 3 weeks, but 3.0.15 was released only three weeks later.
I find this disappointing: Even in Open Source you get appropriate reaction to security issues only by forcing updates through full disclosure. Well, I for my part have learned my lesson: I find a security related bug, it goes to bugtraq - no delay, no mercy. The waiting ain't worth it.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Disclaimer: I have not seen MacOS X from the inside. I have seen Nextstep from the inside. It was beautiful.
Nextstep had one of the easiest and most elegant programming languages I have ever seen. It was called Objective-C and was OO in C done right: Pure C with the Object mechanisms of Smalltalk thrown in. You might have seen part of the ideas behind Objective-C recently: The signal-slot mechanism in the Meta Object Compiler (moc) in Qt has its roots in the Objective-C model, and Gtk ported that to plain C. In Objective-C it is part of the language, no moc or handcoding necessary, and all objects, slots and method invocations use this mechanism.
On top of this, the Next people built an API and tools which really revolutionized programming for me. This was the only programming environment where I actually felt supported by the API and programmed to solve a problem, instead of fighting shortcomings of the system.
The OO toolkits that came with their Objective-C compilers were one of the most cleverly designed collection of classes I have ever seen: By combining components of the Appkit and the Enterprise Object Framework, I was able to built applications which navigated a system of SQL tables, browsed tables and even allowed simple changes in table values in the SQL database - and I was able to do this by simply connecting the components in Interface Builder, no compile necessary for a working application! Of course you could compile and save the result and had a standalone application which worked just as well.
But Nextsteps Objective-C objects had enough metainformation ready that they were loadable and runnable (sic!) in their equivalent of Kdevelop. This is was reusable component software done right can do for you. Talk about fragile superclasses, about Corba and COM. I had all this in 1994, on a 25 MHz 68040 with 20 MB RAM, and it was better than anything that money can buy now.
On top of this, Nextstep delivered a GUI which painted every single pixel on the display with a postscript interpreter. This allowed you to write widgets in postscript, load them into the (possibly running remotely) display server, and run them with a single command. In todays buzzwords that would be equivalent to writing all your widgets in Java, uploading them to your X server once, and have them running up there, instead of sending four million drawing commands each time your want your widget shown. Nextsteps GUI displaying remotely was faster than X even with compression on slow links, because "execute that widget again" is faster to transmit and parse than all these drawing commands, and "your button 17 has been hit by left-mouse-down" is faster on the wire than long lists "mouse-move to coordinates x,y", "mouse-down on x,y" events.
The fact that postscript can do coordinate transformation, font handling, color, alpha channel mixing and several other things right which X still cannot do properly today helped, too.
But enough of the nostalgy. Here is my advice to you: Have a close look at MacOS X native API, at the language, at the object system, at the display system and at several other things. The Next people are extremely bright, and they are still at work at Apple. Unless Apple managed to really fuck up their Nextstep heritage, you have the chance to see a really, really nicely engineered system and you may learn a lot of things about elegance of design, about handling software components, and about OOP outside the scope of C++ and Java.
Do not try to port your code. You won't be doing your code and the MacOS X API a favor. Make your first experiences with natively designed code, and try to forget your Unix and C++ heritage when you make them. Unlearn what you have done previously and relearn programming and OO their way. Try to see the beauty of their way and widen your perspective.
Then come back and review your old work in your newly collected experience. I will find that your have many new and exciting ideas what to do and how to do it differently.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
That's slightly over two months of MP3, played 24/7. You'll need more than 26000 titles at 3.5 minutes each to fill it, or 2200 CDs with 12 titles each.
Or in other words, it is well past anything your average radio station is playing. It is not video which killed the radio star, it's MP3.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
You sir, and your little "copyright", are about the sickest things I've seen on /. in a long time. It shows just how perverted the whole concept of "IP" is.
/. tried to make a book from the comments posted to the Hellmouth stories.
/. does not own my words in a way that they can make a book from it without asking me, and I still believe that Deja cannot turn my posts into their advertisements. The DMCA is just a very convenient way to stop them.
I assume you allude to the signature you find below all my postings. I created that signature after I found that Slashdot posted a notice on every page it generates that "this page is copyright slashdot.org", which it isn't - I own my words, not slashdot. This has changed since then, but I kept that signature as a reminder that I own my words, nobody else. That proved useful when
The signature has no legal relevance. Current German copyright law says that you own your works whether you create a disclaimer or not, and US copyright law is the same since 1974. Before that, you had to register your works with some copyright bureau and mark protected works with a © symbol and the year of registration. You US citizend may know the details better than I do, I hope.
Your reaction to my signature shows that the reminder works. You have started to think about copyright and IP, and it's consequences for your life. That's exactly what I want to happen.
Personally I think that current IP law is indeed sick and perverted. It is still law, though, and govers your and my life as well as the life of Deja.
am making a point to post all of your comments on a web page of mine. What are you going to do, sue me?
If you are an US citizen, I don't even have to sue under current legislation. I just have to send you a DMCA takedown notice to you or your provider. You then have to take down these pages, or sue me and so does your provider. In fact, your provider has to take down these pages, unless he wants to become legally liable. It then becomes your duty to prove that you actually have the needed license to host that content and that I have no legal base to force you to take down the pages.
This is sick, and if I remember correctly, ACLU is currently working to have this changed. Also, there is no similar law currently in Germany or the EU, and I hope there never will be (in fact, I am working with groups like Fitug to stop such regulations becoming law in the EU).
But DMCA or not, I still believe that
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
At the very most, you are giving an implicit licence to use the material in unaltered form.
/. made from the postings in the Hellmouth thread? They had to get permissions from all authors of posts they used, because posting on /. does give /. implicit permission to use this posting on their site, but not in a book. Similar logic applies to Deja.COM.
I do not think that I even give that much permission implicitly. Remember the book
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Could you pleasy state your reason for doing so?
/., but ok for a private homepage, I think.
I own my works and I do not want them put in a context I cannot control by another entity - I want them to be shown as original as feasible. Current US and German copyright laws give me the power to control the use of my works, and so I do exercise my rights.
It seems your Usenet posts would be a loss for lots of people looking for help on deja.com
You are not missing anything: All my works I consider worthy to be preserved are available on my own website, including my printed articles and my USENET posts. I make them available unedited, without banner ads and without ad links overlayed. Also, I refuse to sign author contracts which will prohibit me from publishing my works on my own website - I do accept a 6 month delay clause, though.
This results in a 60 meg website with 2.5 GB traffic/mo. Not much compared to
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
I am no lawyer, too, but I know a bit of copyright law because I am teaching web design, and I know pretty well that you need a license for other peoples intellectual property to use it. By posting material to USENET, you give an implicit license to use this material in the context of USENET, and use of my message in answers is even covered by fair use provisions.
What deja does, even in their normal use, probably exceeds that implicit license, and fair use. Anyway, I have just sent them a digitally signed formal takedown notice under DMCA
asking them to take down all my posts from their site, and preventing their site to include my further postings. I also notified them that an opt-out solution by providing additional headers to my posts is not sufficient, as they are the ones needing a license to use my works, and I won't give them. It is their task to get the licenses required for the works of other authors presented on their site.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Nuking your articles manually is a pain, several thousand articles of mine are waiting to be deleted. Has somebody already written a perl script using LWP to generate nuke requests automatically?
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp