when their data failed to come in, why the hell didn't they *contact* NASA and ASK what happened to it??
You seem to suggest they would have been able to correct the problem, once they learned about it. They weren't. Cassini is built with a minimum of moving parts (for robustness, I guess), and the whole vehicle has to be turned around for every operation that requires aiming at a target, such as Earth or some Saturnian moon. The entire list of operations to be performed for an event has to be uploaded to Cassini well in advance of execution.
Therefore, Cassini couldn't begin transmitting to (or listening for new commands from) Earth until it had finished listening to Huygens. When the first playback of Channel B arrived at Earth more than one hour later, not accompanied by Channel A, Cassini was already below Titan's horizon as seen from Huygens' landing site.
This is why radio telescopes on Earth were able to report a successful landing on Titan several hours before ESA had any data even from the early stages of the descent. When Huygens continued transmitting far longer than expected, and Saturn was about to disappear below the horizon to radio telescopes in Australia, ESA was engaging additional telescopes in Europe to continue listening. They may have been investigating the Channel A problem simultaneously, but there was nothing NASA could have done about it at that time.
I would assume this information came from the press conference that was scheduled for today.
It did; I watched the press conference on NASA webcast and I wonder if it's a misinterpretation of what Jean-Pierre Lebreton (Huygens mission manager) briefly tried to explain. He seemed to refer to the direct Huygens-Earth signal as "Channel C" and said they were still busy analyzing the recorded signal, but he didn't go into detail on whether the "missing data" referred to the lost pictures or to the failed doppler wind experiment.
As I understand it, both the doppler wind experiment on Cassini and the very long baseline interferometry experiment on Earth aimed at tracing the descent path of Huygens in Titan's atmosphere, though from different points of view (maybe either experiment had other aims as well).
It has been said that the signal from Huygens was much too faint for any data to be extracted from it here on Earth, only the carrier could supposedly be detected. I guess it's like listening on the shortwave band using a regular radio and noticing the presence of a weak transmitter, while the signal is so blurred you can't possibly make out what they are saying. But if aliens 60 light-years away are supposed to hear WWII radio broadcasts from Earth now, maybe it's technically possible for us to pick up a mobile phone call from Saturn orbit?
Send probe with a canister of oxygen with it, descend into the atmosphere, and issue a detonate command.
What would happen? Probably about the same as if you dropped a canister of methane into Earth's atmosphere and detonated it. A big fireball, yes, but a canister of methane isn't going to consume all the oxygen on Earth. Nor will that canister of oxygen consume all the methane on Titan.
On Titan, warning signs reading "flammable" are posted in the oxygen mines (they extract small amounts of oxygen from solid-rock water), not around the natural methane lakes.
How to avoid solving the problem
on
Verizon vs. Europe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They shuld greylist instead, that way at least SOME legit mail would get through.
Given Verizon's reputation, I'm not sure I'd want them to accept e-mail from me, legit or not (yes, I'm a European). I support the basic idea of rejecting all mail from certain networks, countries or even continents based on past experiences of abuse, except I'd never want my ISP to do it for me without me having a say in the matter. I know approximately from where I can expect legit mail; Verizon can't possibly tell the same for all their users.
I don't send a lot of e-mail these days, and I have yet to see any mail of mine rejected due to my IP address being blacklisted. Should that happen, I sure wouldn't waste my time requesting to be whitelisted. If Verizon or their customers don't want mail from Europe, I won't bother them, regardless of their rationale. The biggest loss is on those uninformed users who aren't getting the service they have paid for. Rather than help Verizon identify a legit mail sender, I'd help my friends identify a legit mail provider, perhaps by rejecting their mail until they take notice.
At the University where i work we cut spam to about 10% of former bulk with Evan Harris' greylisting software 'relaydelay' (thanks Evan!). It let's through all legit mail as long as the sending server follows SMTP-standards and allows for a temporary failure.
"Greylisting" (a rather misleading word, as there is no "list" in the usual sense involved, but rather a delay mechanism) happens to work today only because such a small fraction of the Internet uses that method. Forget the "legit" part; it lets through all mail as long as the sending server follows the SMTP standard and allows for a temporary failure. When spammers find out they will be 50 percent more profitable by allowing for temporary failures, they will do so, and "greylisting" will have no effect beyond that slight delay. When a majority of open relays were either closed or blacklisted in the past, spammers managed to overcome that problem. They will overcome this one too.
I myself work at a university where "greylisting" is used, and it does indeed work - for now. It's however a very selfish way of protecting your mailbox, because you have to discourage the rest of the Internet from employing it in order for it to remain efficient, much like antibiotics...
Some problems with mailinglistsoftware that uses different envelope senders for each mail, but you can whitelist those servers.
A cure worse than the disease. If you have to manually keep track of every legit server that is inconvenienced by the delay, then you are going to forget a few of them, and they may find it easier to either adjust their envelope senders or drop you from their mailing list, than to remind umpteen list members of that forgotten whitelisting.
Bringing up manual whitelisting merely implies that the automatic mechanism isn't working properly. Consider that any automatic mail filtering mechanism, including the extreme one of rejecting any and all mail from anywhere on the Internet, will actually "work" if you can manually whitelist every legit sender. It then comes down to how much of the mail you receive requires manual intervention, and how much can be dealt with automatically.
I don't know how the two organizations are related to each other, but I guess there is a reason why JPL has been assigned jpl.nasa.gov for their Internet domain name.
They probably did. Alas, even auditing a large program won't always get everything. You do your best and hope you didn't miss anything important.
And when their hired auditor (understandably) doesn't deliver 100 percent of the service he was paid for, the company's customers and other members of the general public are expected to step in and report the remaining faults to the vendor in confidence, free of charge?
Finding every bug is indeed a difficult task, if not impossible. However, if the industry can rely on informed members of the public to cover up every failure of theirs (and sue anybody who doesn't cooperate), the industry will have very little incentive to make real improvements.
If a random guy I don't know unintentionally makes a mess for himself and I learn about it, my first reaction is to tell him personally if I can, and simply ignore the problem if I can't. However, most businesses don't automatically qualify for that courtesy, and before I help a company improve one of their products, I want assurance that my assistance will benefit the general public more than their stock holders, and I want some recognition for my contribution.
As the default corporate policy appears to be "valuable technical advice accepted free of charge, questions politely unanswered", I need a little more than an empty feedback form on their website to offer them five minutes of my time.
And invoking copyright law to silence consumer advice, even when that advice is ill-informed or inappropriate in some other way, is just plain stupid. As long as Tena isn't actually distributing Tegam's code (or derivative works of it), this "reverse engineering" objection is ludicruous, whether legally enforcible or not.
Dione will get a very close pass, in october next year, don't know if that feature will be in range though.
Appearantly not, if I'm to believe the trajectory data for Cassini distributed with Celestia. That data is certainly not reliable, as Celestia predicts Cassini will collide with Dione on October 11, 2005! However, if we assume the prediction is mostly correct with respect to when Cassini will be nearest Dione, the linear canyon (which seems to be located at 10N 40E according to the maps produced from Voyager photos) will unfortunately be on the dark side at that time. When the sun rises some six hours later, Cassini will also be above the horizon, but 200,000 km away.
The December 14 Dione flyby isn't listed among the encounters in that tour schedule, probably because 80,000 km isn't considered "close" enough. Maybe there will be yet another photo opportunity, but I doubt it. Another possibility would be for NASA to adjust the arrival time for the October 2005 encounter in case they want to get better shots of the "wispy" area, but that seems just as unlikely to me.
Looking at the Dione picture, I'm intrigued by the linear feature near Dione's terminator to the left, crossing a number of craters and irregular fractures on the surface (diagonal orientation, from upper left to lower right). It has an internal shadow on the upper right side suggesting it's some kind of ditch or canyon. Given that Dione's radius is 560 km, this canyon seems to be more than 1 km wide and 100 km long. Could that be a tectonic feature too, or is it the track of a meteorite barely touching Dione's surface instead of impacting? I'm inclined to believe the latter, since it's so straight, but I wonder what such an event might have looked like.
Maybe Cassini will obtain a closer look at this area later. It would be nice to have a 3D model of the terrain, showing elevations.
Problem is noone is quite sure exactly what they mean by this argument as it was downloaded through an anonymous ftp site publically assessable.
It reminds me of an earlier story about criminal charges filed against Reuters for accessing Intentia's earnings report on the company's own website before it was officially released (by guessing the URL).
That case ended without trial in January 2003 with the prosecutor finding that Intentia had announced the report would be published "around 2pm" rather than "14:00 sharp". Reuters therefore could not know that their successful retrieval of the document about an hour before 14:00 was "unauthorized" by Intentia. Unfortunately, we still don't know whether a more precise announcement would have constituted a legally binding prohibition against Reuters or anybody else attempting to access the file before that time.
However, earlier cases demonstrate that circumvention of a technical access control mechanism is not necessary for "data intrusion" to have been committed according to the language of the Swedish Penal Code. Typical violations of this kind are police officers browsing criminal records they have technical access to, but are not formally authorized to examine (because those records are unrelated to their work). The "data intrusion" statute is only one short article of the entire Penal Code (covering everything from murder and kidnapping to forgery and treason), and it's seldom used when more specific laws apply, but I think it suffers from the same problem of "overbroad applicability" as the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It just hasn't seen that much use in court, even as it has been on the books since the 1970's.
As for Intentia, they (along with two other companies) were given a warning by the Stockholm Stock Exchange disciplinary board for accidentally distributing their earnings report before it became official.
According to theory, the rings were originally made up of water ice, but over the years they have been bombarded with a lot of other material (rock, I presume) so that they are now quite dirty. A lot of dust has landed on Saturn's moons as well; see for instance Phoebe and Iapetus, the latter showing a nearly black leading hemisphere (imagine pushing a snowball in front of you through an ash cloud for 100 million years).
In other words, what is desperately needed up there is a vacuum cleaner (then we can send the sufficiently cleaned ice on a trajectory towards Mars, to be used for irrigation).
What frosts my sox is that we canucks have to pay the levy on all recordable media, even ones we use for data purposes. And Yes, certain organizations can get an excemption, but the paperwork required to comply to their record keeping requirements negates the benefit.
How about proposing a corresponding scheme for the software industry, meant to compensate ourselves for the copying of our works that is done legally? Certain organizations (such as music distributors) can get an exception, but the paperwork should be burdensome enough for them to negate the benefit. So I would settle for something like 0.1 cent on each blank CD bought by any distributor.
Not that I would support the actual adoption of such a levy, of course. I just like a good argument, waiting for a chance to accuse my opponents of stealing the profits from poor software developers.
Me. I believe the tariff is effectively a tax on high tech and creative industries. I am a software developer. I distribute my work on CDs and now have the privilege of paying SOCAN royalties so I can distribute my own work. Many of my friends are artists, small label musicians or small business owners who use CDR for everything BUT copying mainstream music.
Amen to that. While I'm not a Canadian, I'll be happy to join you complaining about that "almost invisible" tax on creativity (and put my name on that complaint, too).
Imagine that you run some kind of mafia business, demanding a "share" in any business transaction within your "territory" (say, a few city blocks) in return for "protection". Specifically, anybody buying a copy of an audio recording must pay you a percentage on top of the price already paid in order to be allowed to play that recording. Since you are then profiting on someone else's creative work, aren't you committing copyright infringement?
If merely demanding a percentage isn't infringement, let's make it visual: You sit at the front gate, inspecting the shopping bag of one your subjects who just arrived home. The bag contains a pack of blank CDs and a note with downloading instructions for some software or music already paid for. You confiscate both, but offer to do the downloading and return the written CDs for a small fee. The alternative is not to bring in any music or software at all. Your subject accepts the offer.
A regular pirate makes a profit by copying music made by others without paying royalties, and selling the copies. What if he were to sell his "product" in parts, ready for "assembly" by the customers themselves, demanding only to be paid per copy?
This reasoning of course wouldn't work in a court of law, but morally I think I can claim that anybody charging you with a fee (without my permission), for copying (with my permission) software or music I have written, is guilty of copyright infringement. If you allow others to copy your software, maybe you can add a clause to the license requiring that no levy be paid for the medium used (much like shareware distributors aren't allowed to charge for downloads)?
Owning a tool and having the potiental of doing something is NOT a prove of being guilty.
Nobody claims that every owner of an MP3 player or recordable media is guilty of anything, not even legal copying. The levy or tax is a fee, not a fine. It's like your local amusement park charging an entrance fee to cover not only normal expenses for the services you enjoy, but also for cleaning and repairing things you didn't soil or break yourself. It's easier to split the bill among all visitors, than to catch those who actually do the damage.
The problem is of course that the levy applies to any recordable media sold in your country, regardless of manufacturer, and thus you have no choice if you want to use recordable media at all. If you think the entrace fee to the amusement park is too high, you are free to visit a competitor instead, and this freedom is what keeps park owners from charging more than is really warranted. You don't have that freedom with respect to recordable media. However, the lack of freedom alone doesn't turn the fee for a product you wanted into a fine for a crime you didn't commit.
Since I'm not familiar with Canadian copyright law (I'm not a Canadian), I don't quite understand the part of the article where the legality of MP3 players is discussed. The reasoning seems to be that if MP3 players aren't considered "recordable media" subject to the levy, then they can't be legally used for any copying at all (from which would follow that also regular computers are illegal). What is the basis for this argument?
Oops, I misread the part about tree rings; I thought the article said that three consecutive rings were narrower than the others, suggesting a three-year chill after which nature would have recovered. If the chill instead spanned human generations, chances are indeed that none of the people living then actually realized that the temperature was gradually falling, or that there was anything unusual about it. However, I guess it most likely had an impact on their lives, perhaps forcing them to migrate now and then.
Still, their perception of the climate had nothing to do with the size of human population, only with how far back they could remember.
What do ancient societies know about science, or historical records?
Knowing science is not the same as being affected by it. From the article:
"Something happened back at this time and it was monumental," Thompson said. "But it didn't seem monumental to humans then because there were only approximately 250 million people occupying the planet, compared to the 6.4 billion we now have.
How does Thompson conclude that the event didn't seem monumental to the people living 5,200 years ago; did he travel back in his time machine to ask them or what? If I were to die in a snow blizzard like Ötzi did, I would consider that monumental to me.
They quite likely didn't have much historical records of their own to tell what the climate had been hundreds of years before, but according to Thompson's evidence, this chill appears to have lasted only three years. At a time when humans had already begun farming, they sure must have noticed that their crops failed and the weather wasn't what it had used to be for decades. So what if their explanation for it may have differed from ours?
In any case, I highly doubt they said: "Oh, it's been snowing for weeks now, but since there are only 250 million of us on the entire planet, this event isn't monumental at all and we simply don't care about it!"
As for the flood, one possible origin of that myth is the filling of the Black Sea which occurred some 7,000 years ago (due to melting glaciers and thus a raised sea level).
you encrypt your message, and send it through multiple remailers, on each stage, it is decrypted to the next 'bounce'...no computer in the path knows the final destination of the email...
When you use remailers, you are merely packing additional delivery instructions into the contents of a message. From the viewpoint of your ISP, your first remailer is the destination, and you can't hide the address of that remailer from the server to which you send your encrypted message. Neither can you prevent the owners of that server from learning when the message was sent. Those addresses and timestamps constitute the traffic data which we are discussing here, as certain authorities want it to be retained for potential uses beyond mere billing.
As long as the operators don't actually retain copies of message contents, encrypting said messages offers no additional privacy. To make a human analogy, you write a message for Alice, encrypt it using Alice's public key, add a note to Bob saying "please forward this to Alice", encrypt the whole thing again using Bob's public key, and send it off to Bob. As long as you use some operator's mail server (rather than your own custom channels) to deliver the message in each step, some operator will learn that you sent a message to Bob, and somebody else will learn that Bob sent a message to Alice. Thus, even the delivery instructions that you encrypted ("forward this to Alice") will eventually appear in plaintext as delivery is carried out, and thus be subject to the data retention policy. You might just as well have skipped the encryption step as neither ISP ever looked at the message contents!
so, very difficult if not next to impossible to trace.
The issue here isn't whether you can send untraceable messages, but whether the data retention policy being discussed would encourage people to encrypt their communications. As long as the policy only applies to traffic data, encrypting the message contents serves no purpose at all besides letting the users feel safe about it, no matter how many anonymous remailers you employ.
There may be several other good reasons for encrypting your communications, but traffic data retention isn't one of them.
Also, you can post and get your anonymous encrypted email from USENET, there are groups for nothing but this.....again, use remailers to hop the message around the world a few times...before it goes through a mail to news server...This is untraceable...
I wouldn't call it "untraceable" unless I can tell for sure how reliable each hop is, but I agree that adding a broadcast link (Usenet) to the chain makes a significant difference, in that you can't tell who the ultimate recipients are when the message is sent everywhere. This is much like those secret messages placed under "personal" in printed newspapers, available to anybody but understood by the intended recipient only.
Still, traffic data retention may mean that the authorities get access to log files from a substantial number of operators, allowing them to compare log entries and analyze traffic patterns in a way which the operators themselves have been unable or unwilling to do. It's almost as if everybody (including the remailers) would be hosted by the same ISP. If Alice is a known terrorist, Bob will be considered an accomplice, and soon you will be a suspect too merely by talking to Bob. Now, Bob may obtain multiple identities (accounts) to make things more interesting, but it's not like people will begin using anonymous remailers for their communications in general, or they would become regulated out of existance.
Well, if anything is going to drive people to personal encryption, this type of brain-damaged legislation will be it.
Exactly how would you be able to encrypt data like recipient address, sender address, date and time of the connection was made, what phone number you dialled, how long your call lasted, and how much you are supposed to pay for it? You can encrypt the contents of your e-mail message if you like, but if you want your ISP to actually deliver it, you at least have to provide them with the recipient address in plaintext. That's traffic data stored by your ISP, which is what this proposal is about.
Here on Slashdot, KokoBonobo claimed:
The retained data would not only consist of logs, but of entire conversations and contents of the e-mails and SMS messages.
I see no support for this bold claim in either of the linked documents. They are appearantly talking about traffic data, not message contents. This data retention proposal was discussed on Slashdot months ago; we didn't find any evidence of planned bulk snooping back then either.
There is some mention of certain "other" pieces of traffic data, not yet specified. What could that be? Perhaps whether the phone call was made using hidden Caller ID, and any technical service logs associated with the subscriber line... That's a lot of data; let's just throw in an MP3 of the entire call (whether voice or fax) as well for simplicity, right?:-)
Now, it's quite possible that your average politician will be unable to tell an SMTP message envelope from a user's manually written signature, and would thus happily vote for any proposal either way, but I suggest you quote the specific parts of the proposal that mandate bulk snooping before you label it "brain-damaged". Have you seen the proposal?
There is no fundamental, philosophical distinction between a hardware patent and a software patent. There are however both legal and practical distinctions. The legal ones can be added or removed at the whim of your legislature, while the practical ones are a bit harder to get rid of. The question is, will you accept a practical issue (such as the ability to identify and sue infringers) as the only reason to distinguish between two different kinds of inventions, one patentable and the other not?
If you don't, then you can argue for patents on essentially everything, including various mental processes (since you can learn new ways of thinking on various courses, an innovative mental process may have a commercial value). Problem is, how do you distinguish between those teaching this method as part of their business and those merely telling their friends about it at no charge? Or, do you even care to make that distinction; maybe you expect people to stop handing out free advice to their friends if someone has a patent on that advice? While you technically could legislate also against "non-profit patent infringement", would that be a sensible thing to do?
For this practical reason, patent law has traditionally been limited to deal with hardware inventions, leaving abstract things like business methods and works of art aside as non-patentable, because that's an easy distinction to make even for a layman. People designing and manufacturing hardware in their spare time, for others to use free of charge, are way too few to have any impact on the economy; therefore "hardware" essentially implies "commercial".
This traditional distinction has been blurred by computer software, which to a layman may look like hardware (it comes in a physical box known as a "computer"), but which is essentially a work of "literature" or "art". You can sell it commercially either way, but if you can patent a computer program or an algorithm, what is there to stop you from patenting also the intrigue of a work of fiction, a method of education used in schools, or a way to save cattle from drowning? Will you have the resources to track down infringers and claim royalties, when none of those things come with manufacturing labels and serial numbers? Exactly who "sold" that algorithm to whom, and in how many "copies"? When intellectual property is turned into popular knowledge and back into intellectual property again, any notions of "ownership" and "contract" tied to the original property are effectively lost.
I don't own any patents myself. I do own stock (indirectly) in companies owning patents (probably both hardware and software), but I don't care a lot how they manage their patent portfolios; that's up to them. Not running a business myself, I don't mind a situation where patents are granted for hardware inventions only, and where patents don't interfere with my freedom to tinker with whatever technology I like in my spare time. If and when they do, I'll fight them for that. Either patents should be limited to areas of society where I don't go, say by making a legal distinction between "hardware" and "software", or I'll argue against patents altogether simply because they are unacceptable on software (works of art). Those who claim that patents should be equally applicable on hardware and software will be met by their own argument working against them.
According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students
I assume the poster is talking about an actual e-mail message sent to all Harvard students, not a mere press release.
Was this e-mail message sent by Google, or by Harvard themselves? Either way, does Harvard permit their students to opt out from being spammed with the details of every agreement they make with third parties?
I work in university IT support. Don't you just love it when your university makes a deal with some company to distribute their software to staff and students, after which said company sees fit to spam all your students telling them to contact you immediately in order to have you install that software for them, in a manner contrary to the procedures already established by IT support?
Say there is a second company that independently of the first develops the shiny new algorithm that compresses all your data to 1%. Let's assume that it took one year and a hundred of scientists (ie. a lot of money) for the second company to develop this algorithm. If it's possible for the first company to protect this invention with a patent and thereby exclude the second company from receiving any return from their investment, how can we expect companies to invest so much in R&D?
A patent isn't a reward for innovation, it's a reward for being the first to file for a patent, whether or not it covers a real invention. With hardware stuff, you usually don't risk violating someone else's patent unless you actually start manufacturing and selling said hardware. However, when patents are being granted on mere algorithms or the very process of thinking itself, how are you going to catch every infringer who has applied the same thinking in his own business without also hurting a lot of innocent bystanders?
No matter if it costs someone one hundred man years; if all they can come up with is a written explanation of how to solve a particular problem in your head but no new hardware mechanism, they don't deserve a government monopoly on getting a return on that investment.
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
I began arguing against software patents around the time when the League for Programming Freedom was founded, before I had even seen a software patent or imagined they would once become a problem in Europe, and before I could find anybody concerned to argue with. Now there are plenty of people involved and the issue is high on the agenda, but I have grown tired of arguing. Having one's opponents essentially ignore every argument thrown at them makes it look like a waste of good ammunition.
Since I found no other issue of interest to me in this year's election to the European Parliament, I made the software patent issue the deciding one for me. Not that it mattered a lot in the end; my preferred candidate would probably have been the same even without this particular issue. However, with the Parliament on the right track, we still have to deal with the Commission and the Council, in effect the desires of national governments and (unelected) pro-patent lobbying groups.
Even as I hope to see this issue laid to rest soon and the proposals for software patents scrapped, I'm planning for the worst, simply to make clear that this spoonful of political porridge is getting nowhere near my stomach; it will either remain in the bowl or be spewed out all over the table.
- See this proposal on your desk? Vote it down, or else.
- So, you made that proposal into European law, in spite of what I told you to do? Now watch me spank my national government if you attempt to implement it where I live.
- So you still don't get my point, but you have actually made it national law? So what. Here is a piece of patented software. I wrote it, you try to stop me from distributing it.
- Now, you say my distribution may be legal in spite of the patent claims because it isn't commercial? That's very nice of you and everything, but how does that help my programmer friends who are actually trying to make a living off their creative efforts? I'm not asking for any special treatment; from now on I'll simply charge for my software if that makes you happy. Have you called the police yet?
- Well, I'm so sorry for not having consulted a patent attorney who could have told me that my implementation actually doesn't infringe due to a technicality. Thank you for pointing it out, it will be fixed right away, and I want that lawsuit filed against me tomorrow at the latest.
- Your Honor, you may wonder why I went through all that trouble to formally violate a patent when I didn't have any intent of selling my software in the first place. The reason is that I consider the application of the Patent Act on computer software a violation of my freedom of speech, since the software I have written is technically indistinguishable from speech as it is defined by law. I respectfully ask the Court to apply the rules laid out in the Constitution for resolving any conflict between the Patent Act and the Fundamental Rights and Freedoms established by the same Constitution. We used to have freedom of speech before software patents came around, and I don't think lawyers should try to change established practice in the area of civil rights. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
It may take a long time before we get there, and it may cost a lot of money to our opponents, but it's always easier to show by example than to explain by handwaving.
I just want to add my support to your position. What we have earned from our efforts to automatically filter away the junk at the receiving end is the ability to accept far more junk mail than any human could possibly read. Networking resources have been allocated (by the recipients) to accomodate the senders rather than the recipients themselves.
If your domain serves 100 users, each willing to receive up to ten messages per day (on average), your domain mail server should be configured not to accept more than 1,000 messages per day in total; anything in excess of that would be pointless. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, say by having your mail server shut down for most of the day (as the article suggested), or by delaying inbound sessions. Of these two approaches, I believe the latter is least likely to cause problems also to legit senders (including mailing lists), since the protocols involved (TCP and SMTP) are designed to repeatedly retry failed connection attempts until delivery is successful.
When people call me on the phone to give me information, I make a point of writing that information down while I'm still talking to them. If instead I were to allow them to hang up, chances are I might get another call before I get to write down the notes from the first call, and I might forget it altogether. I don't think this imposed delay is considered rude or costly to the first caller; I'm simply making sure their message to me is not lost. It should be the same with e-mail; having the SMTP server say to the SMTP client "please hold on for a minute while we sort things out here" is certainly less costly to the sender of the message being delayed, than saying so on the phone.
If mailing list operators and other senders of legit bulk mail need the ability to make several outbound connections simultaneously, they can have it, but there is no point in the receiving server being able to accept multiple inbound connections simultaneously if there aren't enough users around to even read the messages.
United States Copyright Law, that may be. Still, the right to attribution is included in the Berne Convention (Article 6bis), which the United States ratified after I began posting to Usenet. The right to attribution is part of the author's moral rights, an integral component of the continental European (originally French and German) notion of copyright, which in the past wasn't recognized by the United States. I suppose it doesn't matter to the Berne Convention whether the right to attribution and non-mutilation of protected works is included in the Copyright Act proper, the DMCA, the Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act, the PATRIOT Act, any federal or state statutory law, or even case law, as long as it's there somewhere. If it weren't, then the United States would probably be in violation of the Berne Convention.
If Google was replacing the addresses with valid-looking but phony ones, or erasing the whole address, or otherwise making it less than obvious that an email address had been there, you might have a point.
Google is essentially replacing a valid e-mail address with an invalid one. While experienced users will catch it as a phony address, I suspect quite a few pieces of software that tries to detect e-mail addresses in parsed text will accept them as valid and generate links to them. Since e-mail addresses must be exactly reproduced (save for some letter case conversion) in order to be useful as such, deleting a single letter is effectively the same as erasing the address, leaving only the text "an e-mail address was here" or equivalent. That's a true statement, so it's not fraud, but it doesn't fulfil a requirement of attribution any more than replacing the author's name with "a proper name was here" does.
I guess the real issue is whether the author's name is considered sufficient attribution under the Berne Convention even when the author has provided more specific identifying information. For a major corporate entity such as "Microsoft" or "McGraw-Hill", or a famous author such as "Rudyard Kipling", their names alone indeed seem sufficient. However, corporate entities enjoy no moral rights, only natural persons do, so we should stick to the latter here. Proper names of natural persons are by no means unique, and even if I'd probably be the only claimant to my works, I'm not a famous author and a stranger who reads my articles would be unable to identify me without the address I added deliberately.
Even if the attribution is found sufficient, the issue of mutilation remains, since Google automatically destroys any e-mail addresses in the articles, whether they form part of credits or not. Are they essential to the work as such? It depends. If one or two addresses are mentioned only in passing in an article about gardening, probably not. If they form part of the evidence for a spam report, or examples in an article on electronic mail, they are certainly essential. Since I'm not a gardener, but a computer scientist working with data communications for a profession, my articles tend to be more of the latter kind. I'm probably just as offended by Google censoring my e-mail addresses as a gardener would be if Google replaced every mention of the Latin name of a specific rose variety with the text "some Latin words" (perhaps arguing that their readers don't understand Latin anyway).
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
That'll get you nowhere fast.
I'm not in a hurry; I'm merely 43. Given current expiration times, I imagine my rights will remain valid well into the 22nd century, to be guarded by my heirs.
You control whether people can copy/distribute your messages- but once you give that permission, you have no further authority. If you allow someone to copy something, he implicitly is able to choose to copy only half of it, if that's what he prefers.
If I permit verbatim copying of my articles, that's not permission by me also for anyone to copy only selected portions of it. Note that it may still be legal under the "fair use" doctrine to selectively quote my articles, regardless of any explicit or implicit permission, provided this is done in a manner that respects the integrity of the original work. In reality, I don't object to such quoting, as that's part of the way discussions are conducted on Usenet, and even in other media (like here on Slashdot, where I quote you).
What Google is doing, and what I'm objecting to, isn't mere quoting; they are systematically removing specific pieces of information that the authors carefully included, mainly for context but also to give proper credit to other authors. They are not removing all identifying information, since they usually leave proper names as they are, but as others have pointed out, proper names alone are seldom enough to identify a Usenet poster.
I could take your article above, cut and paste it in its entirety into another Slashdot article and repost it as "Anonymous Coward" without referring to you as its real author. I don't know whether you would object to it, but it sure wouldn't be "fair use" of your work. Are you saying that by posting to Slashdot in the first place, you gave me implicit permission to copy "selected parts" of your article (all of it, leaving out your name and Slashdot ID) and run a business offering your article text (but not your name) to others for their entertainment? That's essentially what Google is doing here.
Blacking out small parts of a work and then redistributing it is common and legal. Recent court decisions reinforce this view, such as the one with a company that sold censored VHS tapes.
Did that company specifically censor the credits in the beginning or end of the tape, blacking out names or addresses of copyright holders only? I admit, that information usually does constitute a very small part of the entire videotape, but it's often considered to be highly important information. Since it ended up in court, it suggests the copyright holders did object to the censorship.
Also, when we are getting into specific court cases, we have to consider that copyright legislation isn't the same all over the world. European copyright law generally focuses more on the moral interests of the authors, while American law tends to stress primarily financial interests. Your court case could easily end up the opposite way in a different jurisdiction. I think we should concentrate on the common underlying principles behind copyright, not the peculiarities of national laws.
Is that requirement already attached to your messages? If not, too late. By uploading them to USENET, you have implicitly given permission for the content to be replicated widely (since you knew that such copying would occur automatically once you posted)
When I posted my articles, Google wasn't even around. Perhaps Dejanews was in operation in 1997; I don't remember. I was well aware that my articles would be copied and distributed far and wide using UUCP or NNTP, and I had no objection to either that or to any systematic archiving that someone might engage in without my knowledge. I also anticipated that parts of what I wrote might be quoted out of context without proper credit, but while I didn't approve of that, it wasn't sufficient to deter me from posting in the first place. The fact that I have made my articles available on servers worldwide does not imp
I recently retrieved all articles in Google Groups posted using either of the four e-mail addresses I remember having used for Usenet (there were 429 such articles, posted between 1985 and 1997). I never mangled my e-mail address on purpose, but I had mostly stopped posting to Usenet when spamming took off in the mid 90's. Those four addresses have since all been disabled, although I tried to keep them alive as long as possible, as a matter of principle (I preferred using blacklists to silence annoying senders rather than give up my freedom to express myself in public for the convenience of spammers).
Google not only masks the address of each poster, but also anything in the article itself that merely looks like an e-mail address, including Message IDs. When I quote somebody else, referring to the author of that quote by name and e-mail address, Google sees fit to remove that identifying information. I did not approve of them mangling my articles in this way; that was not part of the understanding of how my postings were to be processed when I made them.
Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others. I'm perfectly happy with Google or anyone else archiving my articles for future readers, as long as they don't modify what I have written. If someone wants to quote a significant portion of an article rather than all of it, that's fine too, as long as they attribute it to the original author, but that's not an archive, and that's not what Google is doing. Instead, Google is systematically erasing information detailing exactly who wrote what part of each article. What if an e-mail address is used as the sole identifier of the author in an explicit copyright notice, will Google destroy that information too?
As for Google allowing individual authors to opt out from having their articles archived at all, that's fine but it's no excuse for systematic copyright infringement, however small. To make a rough analogy, that's like Napster allowing copyright holders to request their own titles to be removed from Napster's database on an individual basis, while continuing to distribute anything the copyright holders haven't complained about (maybe because they haven't found out about it). For distribution to be legal, copyright requires authors to opt in to it, not fail to opt out. If authors want to opt out from enforcing their rights, they do so by neglecting to sue.
I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of what I once wrote. Google however does not provide me with that option. Should I really have to send Google 429 removal requests, and then submit my articles to some other public archive, just to make that point? What a waste.
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You seem to suggest they would have been able to correct the problem, once they learned about it. They weren't. Cassini is built with a minimum of moving parts (for robustness, I guess), and the whole vehicle has to be turned around for every operation that requires aiming at a target, such as Earth or some Saturnian moon. The entire list of operations to be performed for an event has to be uploaded to Cassini well in advance of execution.
Therefore, Cassini couldn't begin transmitting to (or listening for new commands from) Earth until it had finished listening to Huygens. When the first playback of Channel B arrived at Earth more than one hour later, not accompanied by Channel A, Cassini was already below Titan's horizon as seen from Huygens' landing site.
This is why radio telescopes on Earth were able to report a successful landing on Titan several hours before ESA had any data even from the early stages of the descent. When Huygens continued transmitting far longer than expected, and Saturn was about to disappear below the horizon to radio telescopes in Australia, ESA was engaging additional telescopes in Europe to continue listening. They may have been investigating the Channel A problem simultaneously, but there was nothing NASA could have done about it at that time.
It did; I watched the press conference on NASA webcast and I wonder if it's a misinterpretation of what Jean-Pierre Lebreton (Huygens mission manager) briefly tried to explain. He seemed to refer to the direct Huygens-Earth signal as "Channel C" and said they were still busy analyzing the recorded signal, but he didn't go into detail on whether the "missing data" referred to the lost pictures or to the failed doppler wind experiment.
As I understand it, both the doppler wind experiment on Cassini and the very long baseline interferometry experiment on Earth aimed at tracing the descent path of Huygens in Titan's atmosphere, though from different points of view (maybe either experiment had other aims as well).
It has been said that the signal from Huygens was much too faint for any data to be extracted from it here on Earth, only the carrier could supposedly be detected. I guess it's like listening on the shortwave band using a regular radio and noticing the presence of a weak transmitter, while the signal is so blurred you can't possibly make out what they are saying. But if aliens 60 light-years away are supposed to hear WWII radio broadcasts from Earth now, maybe it's technically possible for us to pick up a mobile phone call from Saturn orbit?
What would happen? Probably about the same as if you dropped a canister of methane into Earth's atmosphere and detonated it. A big fireball, yes, but a canister of methane isn't going to consume all the oxygen on Earth. Nor will that canister of oxygen consume all the methane on Titan.
On Titan, warning signs reading "flammable" are posted in the oxygen mines (they extract small amounts of oxygen from solid-rock water), not around the natural methane lakes.
Given Verizon's reputation, I'm not sure I'd want them to accept e-mail from me, legit or not (yes, I'm a European). I support the basic idea of rejecting all mail from certain networks, countries or even continents based on past experiences of abuse, except I'd never want my ISP to do it for me without me having a say in the matter. I know approximately from where I can expect legit mail; Verizon can't possibly tell the same for all their users.
I don't send a lot of e-mail these days, and I have yet to see any mail of mine rejected due to my IP address being blacklisted. Should that happen, I sure wouldn't waste my time requesting to be whitelisted. If Verizon or their customers don't want mail from Europe, I won't bother them, regardless of their rationale. The biggest loss is on those uninformed users who aren't getting the service they have paid for. Rather than help Verizon identify a legit mail sender, I'd help my friends identify a legit mail provider, perhaps by rejecting their mail until they take notice.
"Greylisting" (a rather misleading word, as there is no "list" in the usual sense involved, but rather a delay mechanism) happens to work today only because such a small fraction of the Internet uses that method. Forget the "legit" part; it lets through all mail as long as the sending server follows the SMTP standard and allows for a temporary failure. When spammers find out they will be 50 percent more profitable by allowing for temporary failures, they will do so, and "greylisting" will have no effect beyond that slight delay. When a majority of open relays were either closed or blacklisted in the past, spammers managed to overcome that problem. They will overcome this one too.
I myself work at a university where "greylisting" is used, and it does indeed work - for now. It's however a very selfish way of protecting your mailbox, because you have to discourage the rest of the Internet from employing it in order for it to remain efficient, much like antibiotics...
A cure worse than the disease. If you have to manually keep track of every legit server that is inconvenienced by the delay, then you are going to forget a few of them, and they may find it easier to either adjust their envelope senders or drop you from their mailing list, than to remind umpteen list members of that forgotten whitelisting.
Bringing up manual whitelisting merely implies that the automatic mechanism isn't working properly. Consider that any automatic mail filtering mechanism, including the extreme one of rejecting any and all mail from anywhere on the Internet, will actually "work" if you can manually whitelist every legit sender. It then comes down to how much of the mail you receive requires manual intervention, and how much can be dealt with automatically.
I don't know how the two organizations are related to each other, but I guess there is a reason why JPL has been assigned jpl.nasa.gov for their Internet domain name.
And when their hired auditor (understandably) doesn't deliver 100 percent of the service he was paid for, the company's customers and other members of the general public are expected to step in and report the remaining faults to the vendor in confidence, free of charge?
Finding every bug is indeed a difficult task, if not impossible. However, if the industry can rely on informed members of the public to cover up every failure of theirs (and sue anybody who doesn't cooperate), the industry will have very little incentive to make real improvements.
If a random guy I don't know unintentionally makes a mess for himself and I learn about it, my first reaction is to tell him personally if I can, and simply ignore the problem if I can't. However, most businesses don't automatically qualify for that courtesy, and before I help a company improve one of their products, I want assurance that my assistance will benefit the general public more than their stock holders, and I want some recognition for my contribution.
As the default corporate policy appears to be "valuable technical advice accepted free of charge, questions politely unanswered", I need a little more than an empty feedback form on their website to offer them five minutes of my time.
And invoking copyright law to silence consumer advice, even when that advice is ill-informed or inappropriate in some other way, is just plain stupid. As long as Tena isn't actually distributing Tegam's code (or derivative works of it), this "reverse engineering" objection is ludicruous, whether legally enforcible or not.
Appearantly not, if I'm to believe the trajectory data for Cassini distributed with Celestia. That data is certainly not reliable, as Celestia predicts Cassini will collide with Dione on October 11, 2005! However, if we assume the prediction is mostly correct with respect to when Cassini will be nearest Dione, the linear canyon (which seems to be located at 10N 40E according to the maps produced from Voyager photos) will unfortunately be on the dark side at that time. When the sun rises some six hours later, Cassini will also be above the horizon, but 200,000 km away.
The December 14 Dione flyby isn't listed among the encounters in that tour schedule, probably because 80,000 km isn't considered "close" enough. Maybe there will be yet another photo opportunity, but I doubt it. Another possibility would be for NASA to adjust the arrival time for the October 2005 encounter in case they want to get better shots of the "wispy" area, but that seems just as unlikely to me.
Looking at the Dione picture, I'm intrigued by the linear feature near Dione's terminator to the left, crossing a number of craters and irregular fractures on the surface (diagonal orientation, from upper left to lower right). It has an internal shadow on the upper right side suggesting it's some kind of ditch or canyon. Given that Dione's radius is 560 km, this canyon seems to be more than 1 km wide and 100 km long. Could that be a tectonic feature too, or is it the track of a meteorite barely touching Dione's surface instead of impacting? I'm inclined to believe the latter, since it's so straight, but I wonder what such an event might have looked like.
Maybe Cassini will obtain a closer look at this area later. It would be nice to have a 3D model of the terrain, showing elevations.
It reminds me of an earlier story about criminal charges filed against Reuters for accessing Intentia's earnings report on the company's own website before it was officially released (by guessing the URL).
That case ended without trial in January 2003 with the prosecutor finding that Intentia had announced the report would be published "around 2pm" rather than "14:00 sharp". Reuters therefore could not know that their successful retrieval of the document about an hour before 14:00 was "unauthorized" by Intentia. Unfortunately, we still don't know whether a more precise announcement would have constituted a legally binding prohibition against Reuters or anybody else attempting to access the file before that time.
However, earlier cases demonstrate that circumvention of a technical access control mechanism is not necessary for "data intrusion" to have been committed according to the language of the Swedish Penal Code. Typical violations of this kind are police officers browsing criminal records they have technical access to, but are not formally authorized to examine (because those records are unrelated to their work). The "data intrusion" statute is only one short article of the entire Penal Code (covering everything from murder and kidnapping to forgery and treason), and it's seldom used when more specific laws apply, but I think it suffers from the same problem of "overbroad applicability" as the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It just hasn't seen that much use in court, even as it has been on the books since the 1970's.
As for Intentia, they (along with two other companies) were given a warning by the Stockholm Stock Exchange disciplinary board for accidentally distributing their earnings report before it became official.
According to theory, the rings were originally made up of water ice, but over the years they have been bombarded with a lot of other material (rock, I presume) so that they are now quite dirty. A lot of dust has landed on Saturn's moons as well; see for instance Phoebe and Iapetus, the latter showing a nearly black leading hemisphere (imagine pushing a snowball in front of you through an ash cloud for 100 million years).
In other words, what is desperately needed up there is a vacuum cleaner (then we can send the sufficiently cleaned ice on a trajectory towards Mars, to be used for irrigation).
How about proposing a corresponding scheme for the software industry, meant to compensate ourselves for the copying of our works that is done legally? Certain organizations (such as music distributors) can get an exception, but the paperwork should be burdensome enough for them to negate the benefit. So I would settle for something like 0.1 cent on each blank CD bought by any distributor.
Not that I would support the actual adoption of such a levy, of course. I just like a good argument, waiting for a chance to accuse my opponents of stealing the profits from poor software developers.
Amen to that. While I'm not a Canadian, I'll be happy to join you complaining about that "almost invisible" tax on creativity (and put my name on that complaint, too).
Imagine that you run some kind of mafia business, demanding a "share" in any business transaction within your "territory" (say, a few city blocks) in return for "protection". Specifically, anybody buying a copy of an audio recording must pay you a percentage on top of the price already paid in order to be allowed to play that recording. Since you are then profiting on someone else's creative work, aren't you committing copyright infringement?
If merely demanding a percentage isn't infringement, let's make it visual: You sit at the front gate, inspecting the shopping bag of one your subjects who just arrived home. The bag contains a pack of blank CDs and a note with downloading instructions for some software or music already paid for. You confiscate both, but offer to do the downloading and return the written CDs for a small fee. The alternative is not to bring in any music or software at all. Your subject accepts the offer.
A regular pirate makes a profit by copying music made by others without paying royalties, and selling the copies. What if he were to sell his "product" in parts, ready for "assembly" by the customers themselves, demanding only to be paid per copy?
This reasoning of course wouldn't work in a court of law, but morally I think I can claim that anybody charging you with a fee (without my permission), for copying (with my permission) software or music I have written, is guilty of copyright infringement. If you allow others to copy your software, maybe you can add a clause to the license requiring that no levy be paid for the medium used (much like shareware distributors aren't allowed to charge for downloads)?
Will the real copyright holders please stand up?
Nobody claims that every owner of an MP3 player or recordable media is guilty of anything, not even legal copying. The levy or tax is a fee, not a fine. It's like your local amusement park charging an entrance fee to cover not only normal expenses for the services you enjoy, but also for cleaning and repairing things you didn't soil or break yourself. It's easier to split the bill among all visitors, than to catch those who actually do the damage.
The problem is of course that the levy applies to any recordable media sold in your country, regardless of manufacturer, and thus you have no choice if you want to use recordable media at all. If you think the entrace fee to the amusement park is too high, you are free to visit a competitor instead, and this freedom is what keeps park owners from charging more than is really warranted. You don't have that freedom with respect to recordable media. However, the lack of freedom alone doesn't turn the fee for a product you wanted into a fine for a crime you didn't commit.
Since I'm not familiar with Canadian copyright law (I'm not a Canadian), I don't quite understand the part of the article where the legality of MP3 players is discussed. The reasoning seems to be that if MP3 players aren't considered "recordable media" subject to the levy, then they can't be legally used for any copying at all (from which would follow that also regular computers are illegal). What is the basis for this argument?
Oops, I misread the part about tree rings; I thought the article said that three consecutive rings were narrower than the others, suggesting a three-year chill after which nature would have recovered. If the chill instead spanned human generations, chances are indeed that none of the people living then actually realized that the temperature was gradually falling, or that there was anything unusual about it. However, I guess it most likely had an impact on their lives, perhaps forcing them to migrate now and then.
Still, their perception of the climate had nothing to do with the size of human population, only with how far back they could remember.
Knowing science is not the same as being affected by it. From the article:
How does Thompson conclude that the event didn't seem monumental to the people living 5,200 years ago; did he travel back in his time machine to ask them or what? If I were to die in a snow blizzard like Ötzi did, I would consider that monumental to me.
They quite likely didn't have much historical records of their own to tell what the climate had been hundreds of years before, but according to Thompson's evidence, this chill appears to have lasted only three years. At a time when humans had already begun farming, they sure must have noticed that their crops failed and the weather wasn't what it had used to be for decades. So what if their explanation for it may have differed from ours?
In any case, I highly doubt they said: "Oh, it's been snowing for weeks now, but since there are only 250 million of us on the entire planet, this event isn't monumental at all and we simply don't care about it!"
As for the flood, one possible origin of that myth is the filling of the Black Sea which occurred some 7,000 years ago (due to melting glaciers and thus a raised sea level).
When you use remailers, you are merely packing additional delivery instructions into the contents of a message. From the viewpoint of your ISP, your first remailer is the destination, and you can't hide the address of that remailer from the server to which you send your encrypted message. Neither can you prevent the owners of that server from learning when the message was sent. Those addresses and timestamps constitute the traffic data which we are discussing here, as certain authorities want it to be retained for potential uses beyond mere billing.
As long as the operators don't actually retain copies of message contents, encrypting said messages offers no additional privacy. To make a human analogy, you write a message for Alice, encrypt it using Alice's public key, add a note to Bob saying "please forward this to Alice", encrypt the whole thing again using Bob's public key, and send it off to Bob. As long as you use some operator's mail server (rather than your own custom channels) to deliver the message in each step, some operator will learn that you sent a message to Bob, and somebody else will learn that Bob sent a message to Alice. Thus, even the delivery instructions that you encrypted ("forward this to Alice") will eventually appear in plaintext as delivery is carried out, and thus be subject to the data retention policy. You might just as well have skipped the encryption step as neither ISP ever looked at the message contents!
The issue here isn't whether you can send untraceable messages, but whether the data retention policy being discussed would encourage people to encrypt their communications. As long as the policy only applies to traffic data, encrypting the message contents serves no purpose at all besides letting the users feel safe about it, no matter how many anonymous remailers you employ.
There may be several other good reasons for encrypting your communications, but traffic data retention isn't one of them.
I wouldn't call it "untraceable" unless I can tell for sure how reliable each hop is, but I agree that adding a broadcast link (Usenet) to the chain makes a significant difference, in that you can't tell who the ultimate recipients are when the message is sent everywhere. This is much like those secret messages placed under "personal" in printed newspapers, available to anybody but understood by the intended recipient only.
Still, traffic data retention may mean that the authorities get access to log files from a substantial number of operators, allowing them to compare log entries and analyze traffic patterns in a way which the operators themselves have been unable or unwilling to do. It's almost as if everybody (including the remailers) would be hosted by the same ISP. If Alice is a known terrorist, Bob will be considered an accomplice, and soon you will be a suspect too merely by talking to Bob. Now, Bob may obtain multiple identities (accounts) to make things more interesting, but it's not like people will begin using anonymous remailers for their communications in general, or they would become regulated out of existance.
Exactly how would you be able to encrypt data like recipient address, sender address, date and time of the connection was made, what phone number you dialled, how long your call lasted, and how much you are supposed to pay for it? You can encrypt the contents of your e-mail message if you like, but if you want your ISP to actually deliver it, you at least have to provide them with the recipient address in plaintext. That's traffic data stored by your ISP, which is what this proposal is about.
Here on Slashdot, KokoBonobo claimed:
I see no support for this bold claim in either of the linked documents. They are appearantly talking about traffic data, not message contents. This data retention proposal was discussed on Slashdot months ago; we didn't find any evidence of planned bulk snooping back then either.There is some mention of certain "other" pieces of traffic data, not yet specified. What could that be? Perhaps whether the phone call was made using hidden Caller ID, and any technical service logs associated with the subscriber line... That's a lot of data; let's just throw in an MP3 of the entire call (whether voice or fax) as well for simplicity, right? :-)
Now, it's quite possible that your average politician will be unable to tell an SMTP message envelope from a user's manually written signature, and would thus happily vote for any proposal either way, but I suggest you quote the specific parts of the proposal that mandate bulk snooping before you label it "brain-damaged". Have you seen the proposal?
There is no fundamental, philosophical distinction between a hardware patent and a software patent. There are however both legal and practical distinctions. The legal ones can be added or removed at the whim of your legislature, while the practical ones are a bit harder to get rid of. The question is, will you accept a practical issue (such as the ability to identify and sue infringers) as the only reason to distinguish between two different kinds of inventions, one patentable and the other not?
If you don't, then you can argue for patents on essentially everything, including various mental processes (since you can learn new ways of thinking on various courses, an innovative mental process may have a commercial value). Problem is, how do you distinguish between those teaching this method as part of their business and those merely telling their friends about it at no charge? Or, do you even care to make that distinction; maybe you expect people to stop handing out free advice to their friends if someone has a patent on that advice? While you technically could legislate also against "non-profit patent infringement", would that be a sensible thing to do?
For this practical reason, patent law has traditionally been limited to deal with hardware inventions, leaving abstract things like business methods and works of art aside as non-patentable, because that's an easy distinction to make even for a layman. People designing and manufacturing hardware in their spare time, for others to use free of charge, are way too few to have any impact on the economy; therefore "hardware" essentially implies "commercial".
This traditional distinction has been blurred by computer software, which to a layman may look like hardware (it comes in a physical box known as a "computer"), but which is essentially a work of "literature" or "art". You can sell it commercially either way, but if you can patent a computer program or an algorithm, what is there to stop you from patenting also the intrigue of a work of fiction, a method of education used in schools, or a way to save cattle from drowning? Will you have the resources to track down infringers and claim royalties, when none of those things come with manufacturing labels and serial numbers? Exactly who "sold" that algorithm to whom, and in how many "copies"? When intellectual property is turned into popular knowledge and back into intellectual property again, any notions of "ownership" and "contract" tied to the original property are effectively lost.
I don't own any patents myself. I do own stock (indirectly) in companies owning patents (probably both hardware and software), but I don't care a lot how they manage their patent portfolios; that's up to them. Not running a business myself, I don't mind a situation where patents are granted for hardware inventions only, and where patents don't interfere with my freedom to tinker with whatever technology I like in my spare time. If and when they do, I'll fight them for that. Either patents should be limited to areas of society where I don't go, say by making a legal distinction between "hardware" and "software", or I'll argue against patents altogether simply because they are unacceptable on software (works of art). Those who claim that patents should be equally applicable on hardware and software will be met by their own argument working against them.
I assume the poster is talking about an actual e-mail message sent to all Harvard students, not a mere press release.
Was this e-mail message sent by Google, or by Harvard themselves? Either way, does Harvard permit their students to opt out from being spammed with the details of every agreement they make with third parties?
I work in university IT support. Don't you just love it when your university makes a deal with some company to distribute their software to staff and students, after which said company sees fit to spam all your students telling them to contact you immediately in order to have you install that software for them, in a manner contrary to the procedures already established by IT support?
Say there is a second company that independently of the first develops the shiny new algorithm that compresses all your data to 1%. Let's assume that it took one year and a hundred of scientists (ie. a lot of money) for the second company to develop this algorithm. If it's possible for the first company to protect this invention with a patent and thereby exclude the second company from receiving any return from their investment, how can we expect companies to invest so much in R&D?
A patent isn't a reward for innovation, it's a reward for being the first to file for a patent, whether or not it covers a real invention. With hardware stuff, you usually don't risk violating someone else's patent unless you actually start manufacturing and selling said hardware. However, when patents are being granted on mere algorithms or the very process of thinking itself, how are you going to catch every infringer who has applied the same thinking in his own business without also hurting a lot of innocent bystanders?
No matter if it costs someone one hundred man years; if all they can come up with is a written explanation of how to solve a particular problem in your head but no new hardware mechanism, they don't deserve a government monopoly on getting a return on that investment.
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
I began arguing against software patents around the time when the League for Programming Freedom was founded, before I had even seen a software patent or imagined they would once become a problem in Europe, and before I could find anybody concerned to argue with. Now there are plenty of people involved and the issue is high on the agenda, but I have grown tired of arguing. Having one's opponents essentially ignore every argument thrown at them makes it look like a waste of good ammunition.
Since I found no other issue of interest to me in this year's election to the European Parliament, I made the software patent issue the deciding one for me. Not that it mattered a lot in the end; my preferred candidate would probably have been the same even without this particular issue. However, with the Parliament on the right track, we still have to deal with the Commission and the Council, in effect the desires of national governments and (unelected) pro-patent lobbying groups.
Even as I hope to see this issue laid to rest soon and the proposals for software patents scrapped, I'm planning for the worst, simply to make clear that this spoonful of political porridge is getting nowhere near my stomach; it will either remain in the bowl or be spewed out all over the table.
- See this proposal on your desk? Vote it down, or else.
- So, you made that proposal into European law, in spite of what I told you to do? Now watch me spank my national government if you attempt to implement it where I live.
- So you still don't get my point, but you have actually made it national law? So what. Here is a piece of patented software. I wrote it, you try to stop me from distributing it.
- Now, you say my distribution may be legal in spite of the patent claims because it isn't commercial? That's very nice of you and everything, but how does that help my programmer friends who are actually trying to make a living off their creative efforts? I'm not asking for any special treatment; from now on I'll simply charge for my software if that makes you happy. Have you called the police yet?
- Well, I'm so sorry for not having consulted a patent attorney who could have told me that my implementation actually doesn't infringe due to a technicality. Thank you for pointing it out, it will be fixed right away, and I want that lawsuit filed against me tomorrow at the latest.
- Your Honor, you may wonder why I went through all that trouble to formally violate a patent when I didn't have any intent of selling my software in the first place. The reason is that I consider the application of the Patent Act on computer software a violation of my freedom of speech, since the software I have written is technically indistinguishable from speech as it is defined by law. I respectfully ask the Court to apply the rules laid out in the Constitution for resolving any conflict between the Patent Act and the Fundamental Rights and Freedoms established by the same Constitution. We used to have freedom of speech before software patents came around, and I don't think lawyers should try to change established practice in the area of civil rights. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
It may take a long time before we get there, and it may cost a lot of money to our opponents, but it's always easier to show by example than to explain by handwaving.
I just want to add my support to your position. What we have earned from our efforts to automatically filter away the junk at the receiving end is the ability to accept far more junk mail than any human could possibly read. Networking resources have been allocated (by the recipients) to accomodate the senders rather than the recipients themselves.
If your domain serves 100 users, each willing to receive up to ten messages per day (on average), your domain mail server should be configured not to accept more than 1,000 messages per day in total; anything in excess of that would be pointless. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, say by having your mail server shut down for most of the day (as the article suggested), or by delaying inbound sessions. Of these two approaches, I believe the latter is least likely to cause problems also to legit senders (including mailing lists), since the protocols involved (TCP and SMTP) are designed to repeatedly retry failed connection attempts until delivery is successful.
When people call me on the phone to give me information, I make a point of writing that information down while I'm still talking to them. If instead I were to allow them to hang up, chances are I might get another call before I get to write down the notes from the first call, and I might forget it altogether. I don't think this imposed delay is considered rude or costly to the first caller; I'm simply making sure their message to me is not lost. It should be the same with e-mail; having the SMTP server say to the SMTP client "please hold on for a minute while we sort things out here" is certainly less costly to the sender of the message being delayed, than saying so on the phone.
If mailing list operators and other senders of legit bulk mail need the ability to make several outbound connections simultaneously, they can have it, but there is no point in the receiving server being able to accept multiple inbound connections simultaneously if there aren't enough users around to even read the messages.
United States Copyright Law, that may be. Still, the right to attribution is included in the Berne Convention (Article 6bis), which the United States ratified after I began posting to Usenet. The right to attribution is part of the author's moral rights, an integral component of the continental European (originally French and German) notion of copyright, which in the past wasn't recognized by the United States. I suppose it doesn't matter to the Berne Convention whether the right to attribution and non-mutilation of protected works is included in the Copyright Act proper, the DMCA, the Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act, the PATRIOT Act, any federal or state statutory law, or even case law, as long as it's there somewhere. If it weren't, then the United States would probably be in violation of the Berne Convention.
Google is essentially replacing a valid e-mail address with an invalid one. While experienced users will catch it as a phony address, I suspect quite a few pieces of software that tries to detect e-mail addresses in parsed text will accept them as valid and generate links to them. Since e-mail addresses must be exactly reproduced (save for some letter case conversion) in order to be useful as such, deleting a single letter is effectively the same as erasing the address, leaving only the text "an e-mail address was here" or equivalent. That's a true statement, so it's not fraud, but it doesn't fulfil a requirement of attribution any more than replacing the author's name with "a proper name was here" does.
I guess the real issue is whether the author's name is considered sufficient attribution under the Berne Convention even when the author has provided more specific identifying information. For a major corporate entity such as "Microsoft" or "McGraw-Hill", or a famous author such as "Rudyard Kipling", their names alone indeed seem sufficient. However, corporate entities enjoy no moral rights, only natural persons do, so we should stick to the latter here. Proper names of natural persons are by no means unique, and even if I'd probably be the only claimant to my works, I'm not a famous author and a stranger who reads my articles would be unable to identify me without the address I added deliberately.
Even if the attribution is found sufficient, the issue of mutilation remains, since Google automatically destroys any e-mail addresses in the articles, whether they form part of credits or not. Are they essential to the work as such? It depends. If one or two addresses are mentioned only in passing in an article about gardening, probably not. If they form part of the evidence for a spam report, or examples in an article on electronic mail, they are certainly essential. Since I'm not a gardener, but a computer scientist working with data communications for a profession, my articles tend to be more of the latter kind. I'm probably just as offended by Google censoring my e-mail addresses as a gardener would be if Google replaced every mention of the Latin name of a specific rose variety with the text "some Latin words" (perhaps arguing that their readers don't understand Latin anyway).
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
I'm not in a hurry; I'm merely 43. Given current expiration times, I imagine my rights will remain valid well into the 22nd century, to be guarded by my heirs.
If I permit verbatim copying of my articles, that's not permission by me also for anyone to copy only selected portions of it. Note that it may still be legal under the "fair use" doctrine to selectively quote my articles, regardless of any explicit or implicit permission, provided this is done in a manner that respects the integrity of the original work. In reality, I don't object to such quoting, as that's part of the way discussions are conducted on Usenet, and even in other media (like here on Slashdot, where I quote you).
What Google is doing, and what I'm objecting to, isn't mere quoting; they are systematically removing specific pieces of information that the authors carefully included, mainly for context but also to give proper credit to other authors. They are not removing all identifying information, since they usually leave proper names as they are, but as others have pointed out, proper names alone are seldom enough to identify a Usenet poster.
I could take your article above, cut and paste it in its entirety into another Slashdot article and repost it as "Anonymous Coward" without referring to you as its real author. I don't know whether you would object to it, but it sure wouldn't be "fair use" of your work. Are you saying that by posting to Slashdot in the first place, you gave me implicit permission to copy "selected parts" of your article (all of it, leaving out your name and Slashdot ID) and run a business offering your article text (but not your name) to others for their entertainment? That's essentially what Google is doing here.
Did that company specifically censor the credits in the beginning or end of the tape, blacking out names or addresses of copyright holders only? I admit, that information usually does constitute a very small part of the entire videotape, but it's often considered to be highly important information. Since it ended up in court, it suggests the copyright holders did object to the censorship.
Also, when we are getting into specific court cases, we have to consider that copyright legislation isn't the same all over the world. European copyright law generally focuses more on the moral interests of the authors, while American law tends to stress primarily financial interests. Your court case could easily end up the opposite way in a different jurisdiction. I think we should concentrate on the common underlying principles behind copyright, not the peculiarities of national laws.
When I posted my articles, Google wasn't even around. Perhaps Dejanews was in operation in 1997; I don't remember. I was well aware that my articles would be copied and distributed far and wide using UUCP or NNTP, and I had no objection to either that or to any systematic archiving that someone might engage in without my knowledge. I also anticipated that parts of what I wrote might be quoted out of context without proper credit, but while I didn't approve of that, it wasn't sufficient to deter me from posting in the first place. The fact that I have made my articles available on servers worldwide does not imp
I recently retrieved all articles in Google Groups posted using either of the four e-mail addresses I remember having used for Usenet (there were 429 such articles, posted between 1985 and 1997). I never mangled my e-mail address on purpose, but I had mostly stopped posting to Usenet when spamming took off in the mid 90's. Those four addresses have since all been disabled, although I tried to keep them alive as long as possible, as a matter of principle (I preferred using blacklists to silence annoying senders rather than give up my freedom to express myself in public for the convenience of spammers).
Google not only masks the address of each poster, but also anything in the article itself that merely looks like an e-mail address, including Message IDs. When I quote somebody else, referring to the author of that quote by name and e-mail address, Google sees fit to remove that identifying information. I did not approve of them mangling my articles in this way; that was not part of the understanding of how my postings were to be processed when I made them.
Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others. I'm perfectly happy with Google or anyone else archiving my articles for future readers, as long as they don't modify what I have written. If someone wants to quote a significant portion of an article rather than all of it, that's fine too, as long as they attribute it to the original author, but that's not an archive, and that's not what Google is doing. Instead, Google is systematically erasing information detailing exactly who wrote what part of each article. What if an e-mail address is used as the sole identifier of the author in an explicit copyright notice, will Google destroy that information too?
As for Google allowing individual authors to opt out from having their articles archived at all, that's fine but it's no excuse for systematic copyright infringement, however small. To make a rough analogy, that's like Napster allowing copyright holders to request their own titles to be removed from Napster's database on an individual basis, while continuing to distribute anything the copyright holders haven't complained about (maybe because they haven't found out about it). For distribution to be legal, copyright requires authors to opt in to it, not fail to opt out. If authors want to opt out from enforcing their rights, they do so by neglecting to sue.
I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of what I once wrote. Google however does not provide me with that option. Should I really have to send Google 429 removal requests, and then submit my articles to some other public archive, just to make that point? What a waste.