My understanding of the NSA's position re. DES was that they were opposed to software implementations because they did not believe that any software encryption solution was secure. Indeed, this is still the official line -- check out the Data Encryption Standard and you'll find that it specifies only hardware implementations are compliant.
I don't think the standard could have been published at all without giving away the algorithm; I don't see how releasing DES in "non-algorithm form" could have been done. This "NSA wanted to sit on DES" thing is acquiring the status of an urban myth.
I'm quite prepared to believe that the NSA are black hats, and that they have all sorts of back doors into things. But their public behaviour has not given much support to this view. Every intervention of the NSA of which I am aware has had the effect of making a product more secure, not less.
Which seems right to me. Although encryption can be used by terrorists etc, it would be a poor intelligence organisation indeed which depended on broken signals for its information. The major use of encryption is commercial. And the damage which might be caused by not being able to intercept an email is absolutely nothing compared to the damage to the USA which might be caused by allowing the Bank of America and Citicorp to use an insecure encryption system for their transactions.
I wouldn't rule conspiracy theories out entirely, but I am currently not convinced.
No. I would imagine that the technical review would be there in order that the US Government keeps its regulatory powers there, on a sort of "use it or lose it" basis. That way, if they decide to change the regime back again, they wouldn't need to establish new powers.
Also, the technical review lets them see exactly what the non-government sector has, and to keep track of how far ahead of the envelope the NSA is. The US encryption law is a lousy thing, but I would not waste energy on constructing a conspiracy theory around the technical review. This reminds me too much of the "back door" into DES which turned out not to be there. (Everyone thought that the NSA was being cagey about the reasons for the form of the DES s-boxes in order to protect a bank door; in fact they were not giving details because DES was optimised against a kind of cryptanalysis which wasn't in the public domain).
On a related point, I think there's an inconsistency in this post. If the NSA can spot "back doors" in commonly available packages, and if that were the reason they wanted to check new packages, then it would not be true that strong encryption was out of the bag.
Prahalad, C.K.; and Hamel, Gary. "The Core Competence of the Corporation." Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990, pp. 79-91.. He's got a book out with a similar title (in an airport bookshop near you), but I doubt it adds much to the article.
I agree that the [tm] is probably fscked through common usage, although I'll mention that an MBA-dude would have been more likely to hear it without the [tm], as he has given blanket license for its use in academic contexts.
But he's a good guy, and I bet he'd be very receptive to your paper (particularly if the Open Source/Core Competency nexus might add new fields to his consulting empire).
very good post, and people should read the essay linked to. Just one point to save you some trouble later:
The phrase "Core Competency" is a [tm] trademark of Gary Hamel, a management science professor at the London Business School. He's a cool enough guy (I know him), and doesn't usually get heavy over the fact. But he makes his living out of going round talking to companies as "the Core Competency[tm] guy". So he's a bit touchy if anyone else tries to pass themselves off. And sometimes he feels obliged to defend his trademark in order to stop it passing into the public domain ("use it or lose it")
I'm not sure what your firm DoxPara Research does, but if you're planning on using the phrase "Core Competency" in a consulting context, you might want to send ghamelATlbsDOTacDOTuk a message, just to keep everything above board.
Me, I'd say screw it, trademark law's a crock and the thing's probably gone public domain anyway by now. But the information can't make you poorer.
whether we like it or not, they deserve to get a much bigger share of the money that you spend in your local record store than Hootie and the Blowfish do.
I don't like it, and what I think they deserve is to get their sorry asses competed out of business now that you don't need major capital to be in the music industry.
And anyway, just putting up a bunch of capital doesn't necessarily mean that you should automatically "deserve" a big return -- if that were true, airlines would be among the most profitable companies in the world. We have a saying in my industry (consulting), which we repeat whenever the PHBs come around telling us to do this that and the other in the name of "our shareholders".
It goes:
"Our skills are a scarce good. Shareholders' equity is not a scarce good. That's why we get the big rewards, and they don't"
(all geeks should repeat this mantra three times a day to create the correct mindset for dealing with employers)
Applying it to the music industry, it seems to me that musical talent is a scarce good, and will stay scarce forever. Distribution networks for music are currently a scarce good, but are getting much less scarce every day. Sony should be very scared (and, by its behaviour, almost certainly is).
A quick conversation with a BBC mate reveals that what has been sent is the "house template" letter to start research for a documentary on X, where X is anything from a condemned tower block to the Bavarian Illuminati. A bit boilerplate, but hey, it is not given to everyone to have a clue.
My answers would be:
A brief biography and description of yourself.
I was born amind a thunderstorm in a Huddersfield tenament, the child of a milkmaid of easy virtue, and an indeterminate number of lost Persian sailors. As a child, I was prodigiously curious about words, and ate my way through five volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary until stopped by a curious fear of the letter K. My knowledge of computers comes from the workhouse, where a kindly beadle would strike me with a copy of Knuth (Vol.1) to still my piteous cries (a cruel act indeed, given my phobia). I am fat.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
I was interested in dots ever since university, where I studied punctuation under the great Professor Ewan Cribb. My interest in slashes developed later, while I was playing with Billy Boston's swing band.
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
I remember a terrible tussle I once fought with a ruffian.
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
To me, it means air, water, freedom and modesty. I have only one friend, a Mr. A Coward, who constantly impresses me with the volume of his invective and erudition. One day, I will beat him to the coveted First Post!
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
As different as chalk from carbonate. From my eerie eyrie next to Lake Erie, I spend my days chasing chicken-hawls and remonstrating with them. On Slashdot, I merely lambast.
God, I'm bored. The bit at the top about the BBC having a form letter is true though.
"There are ten record companies" sounds to me like someone is taking the industry structure for granted when the underlying technology changes. Which (oh yeh, MBA-boy?) is often the worst business forecast you can make.
Currently there are ten companies (actually, I'd count fewer than this if you're talking Sony-scale). That's because you need to have a lot of money to produce, promote and ship a CD in the volumes which a big artist needs. And the start-up costs for breaking a new band are huge.
What does the Internet do? Oh yeh, simplifies distribution and reduces start-up costs in a variety of businesses. It burns Sony's ass that Rancid Records of Podunk, Illinois are on the same Internet as them! and get their CDs delivered by the same Amazon.com as SONY! And they're reacting to it by trying to shut everything down with lawyers. Which is (at our current best guess) the non-clue thing to do.
My guess is that Sony are dead. The big guys are never going to agree to this in contract renewals (do you see Celine Dion giving this one away? Or Tina Turner? Or anyone with a half-decent manager?). And the new guys are never going to sign with Sony anyway.
jsm
PS On a factual note, does anyone know if this "standard Sony contract" applies to the "faux-indie" labels in which Sony has a majority stake? Like Creation Records et al?
Last time I checked, The Artist had a name which wasn't even an ASCII character, just a funny sort of squiggle thing. How in the hell do they hope to register that as a domain name?
you are a very silly man and I'm not going to listen to you any more
Well -- your ISP may have something to say about that, because 10^16 16 digit numbers will take something like 160,000 terabytes (give or take a few bytes for HTML headers). But assuming it's possible, you still aren't doing anything wrong, because, unlike the examples given above, you aren't giving anyone any information that isn't contained in the sentence "B of A credit card numbers are 16 digits long". If a man delivered a solid block of marble to my door, should I turn him in for selling me a fake of the Venus de Milo? After all, it's in there somewhere.
If on the other hand you posted the algorithm for generating valid credit card numbers, you would be a criminal, and I doubt anyone would argue with that. If your best mate set up a site with that algorithm on it, and you set up a site directing people to his site (maybe he lived in a country with no extradition treaty to the USA or something), then you're part of a serious crime.
I think the analogies hold up, but the critique is interesting. Thanks.
jsm
Re:What makes you think...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
That "private" network is a "public" utility, which has many of the features of a natural monopoly. Unless there was a possibility of real competition in terms of telephone networks (as opposed to carriers/switching companies), then you're stuck with the wires out in the street. Which makes them a monopoly in my book, and means that the normal rules of commerce don't apply.
I have a reasonable right to expect that my privacy be honoured, and I don't expect that right to be breached without good reason. I expect the government to enforce that right, not breach it itself, unless I willingly, freely and knowingly choose to use a non-private network. The fact that the wires are owned by a joint stock company doesn't effect that.
That surely does NOT make sense. Since most people have a free will (and there are laws governing the actions of those who don't) we can, in our very self-conscious, lawful way choose not to download copyrighted material (or kill, steal, whatever..) just because we are presented with the opportunity.
I don't buy this.
First things first; this comment is an example of what is usually an admirable principle; that control and prohibition should be kept as close in the causal chain as possible to the "bad act". This keeps the sphere of prohibition as small as possible, which is good.
But there comes a point at which it's just not possible to use the "other people have free will" argument, and when you have to suspect bad faith. Human beings aren't super-rational calculators running algorithms designed by Donald Knuth. They're funny, kludgey systems which react to stimuli in partly autonomous but partly predictable ways. And they're about as manipulable as the slashdot Karma system (no offense). People who behave in ways which influence the behaviour of others are part of the causal chain which leads to someone's rights being violated.
Should I be allowed to put up a site of credit card numbers? Hey, the people who download them have free will, don't blame me for what they do with them! How about if, for a fee, I introduce you to a guy who knows a hit man? How about if I publish the names and addresses of abortionists on the Net, with a red cross over the ones that have been killed? If you lent me your car and I left it out in a bad neighbourhood with the keys in the ignition, would you consider it to be partly my fault when it got stolen?
In a lot of these cases, I'm intending that crimes happen, and helping them to happen. I'm part of (an accessory to) the crime. I can claim that it's not my intention that these bad things happen (if I've got a good story, I might even get away with it). Some examples aren't crimes at all. But there's certainly a case to answer -- it's not the same as owning an automatically spidered search engine (and most search engines do attempt to keep themselves warez-free).
David Hume has a good few words to say about this, if I could only remember them.
Obviously in a "nineteen clicks wide" network, then the chances are that the majority of all web pages are in some way "linking to" illegal material.
But there's a difference between that and putting up your fabulous "list of warez/mp3z site" which is obviously designed to promote piracy. Just as there's a difference between writing technical specs for Ma Bell and publishing "How to Get Phone Calls Free", even though you got the information for the one from the other.
It's an ambiguous issue, and there's no clear-cut way to decide it (if there were, the books of laws would be a lot shorter). The legal concept would be mens rea or "guilty mind". So, did the guy know he was doing something bad, but thought that the technical facts about the Internet would mean he couldn't be caught for it? If yes, then guilty he is.
On the other hand, music copyright law is a pretty bad law anyway, and deserves to be broken. If I ruled the world, I'd replace the concept of mens rea in copyright cases with:
jsm's Principle of Not Taking The Piss:
Trade mp3s if you like, but don't take the piss. Remember that they are actually someone's work
Oh, if only the world would put me in charge . . .
I seem to remember that Linux is a [tm] in Austria, and guess that it might be one in Finland, which would mean bad news for Mr. Brodt.
More generally, a trademark isn't something like a patent or a copyright which you can just have on the shelf. Trademark law exists to protect companies against unscrupulous imitators cashing in on their goodwill. Which means that you typically have to be actually trading to keep your trademark. Unless the German guys start producing a proprietary product fairly similar to Linux (good luck guys), they won't get the [tm].
On the other hand, German [tm] law is widely known to suck, so there may be more to it than this.
Actually, this is a "feature" of German trademark law, which sucks.
I seem to remember that a German opportunist trademarked the name "Lady Di" three days after her death (charming chap). And then sued the Princess Diana Memorial Trust (yes yes or whatever its called) because "Princess Diana" was obviously the same person as "Lady Di", so they were infringing his trademark. There's a lawsuit going on over this one at the moment.
The trademark is not enforceable outside Germany, and probably not inside Germany either, if anyone had the time and lawyers to sort it out. It's certainly wasting a lot of time for the Diana people.
But sooner or later there will be a European Directive on trademarks, so as long as the Linux [tm] isn't stolen in other countries (unlikely) the Germans will have to give it up.
My advice to you would be to trademark "Folkenspiel" as an insulting name for the Germans and then go after Deutsche Telekom hard.
Hmmm... but AFAIK, these comments are on the issue of privacy and security of personal information rather than censorship. My position on this is that I own my name and my personal details, and that I very much do expect my government to protect that ownership. I'm not prepared to rely on "self-regulation" to protect my personal details from being sold without my permission. And I'd hope that this right could indeed be recognised by any government in the world.
On the other hand, and taking into account Thurow's actual comments (which I've now had time to read), you don't seem to be in disagreement with him on this matter.
If the government "regulates" the Internet to the extent of not allowing companies to pass on information about you for marketing or other purposes, then it is arguably enforcing your property rights in your name and other valuable information about you.
And if this is the limit of Thurow's proposal, it's hard not to agree with him that we can't trust "self-regulation" on this one -- we want the means to sue people who expropriate our valuable personal information.
In 95 he loudly complained that Greenspan was being to tight with the money supply by his low interest rates, and he (greenspan) NEEDS to raise interest rates to save the stock market.
I have no knowledge of what Thurow did or didn't say, but this comment doesn't make sense. Low interest rates are a "loose money" policy, not a tight money. It seems much more likely to me that Thurow (as a knee-jerk expansionist Keynesian) would have been calling for lower interest rates rather than higher in 1995, in which case he got what he wanted, and was right on the money. In any case, nobody would ever call higher interest rates good for the stock market.
Thurow is in fact bloody awful, but it is extremely unfair to lambast economists for not being able to predict the stock market. There's a lot of economic theory on why the market is unpredictable, but think about it this way -- how do you know that there aren't loads of economists around who can predict perfectly, but aren't telling you?
I'd be very careful of Cato -- they tend to be fair-weather friends. They have put out some very good libertarian material, but recently appear to have reinvented themselves as corporate flacks pure and simple -- very keen on Social Security privatisation, and on putting out some absolutely awful pseudo-economics to make their case[1]
I for one would not trust Cato to stand firm if IBM, Microsoft, Bertelsmann and AOL came up with a "voluntary" self-censoring system. Particularly not if there was the sniff of a grant to Cato involved.
jsm
[1]For those who care about Cato's economics: their projections seem to assume that GDP will grow at 1%/year while stocks return 7%/year for twenty years -- does 1% economic growth usually coincide with bull markets?
The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.
Libertarians would also be no help to you in the face of "self-regulation" by the Bertelsmann Group, or in protecting your privacy from those who would spam you mercilessly. A Libertarian Internet would quite likely become a corporate monster, with no tolerance of opposing views. But since the censorship was imposed by the cable companies and ISPs, it wouldn't be "censorship", right?
Seriously, if you believe that only government censorship is bad (which is a defensible position; governments have amonopoly on legal use of force), then go for your life; be a Libertarian on this.
If, on the other hand, you think that making it unreasonably costly for opposing views to be heard is also a form of de facto censorship, then the EFF or ACLU are likely to be more to your text.
Me? I take the position of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on this;
(relevant extract below)
In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favors from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and illspoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us, as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them.
In the economics profession, sadly, LT has gained the nickname "Less-Than Thorough" for the quality of effort he puts into his economic writings these days.
Oh yeah, and the newspaper industry seems to get along fine with self-regulation.
Amazon have a lot of hostile comments up, it seems, but ignore them. They're mainly from people who've used the example routines in mission-critical systems and are whining about the odd funny result. The guy who claims that the routines aren't robust is daft in my book -- they're examples from a textbook on numerical algorithms, not super-powered black boxes with a million special cases.
Hmmmm... looking at the chapter, I'd say that it's a bit lightweight. You don't need to be a maths purist to think that it's a bit poor to teach people to do least-squares estimation without calculating the standard errors as they go. Or at least without even mentioning that there are such things as standard errors.
And polynomial interpretation is only useful when you have a very good idea of what the data's going to give you -- it can go very badly wrong otherwise. For a small step-up in complexity, they could have covered cubic splines, which are much more generally useful.
If the planet is the home of Steve Jobs, then it will have an eccentricity in its orbit, due to the necessity of having the whole planet revolve around Jobs rather than vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding of the NSA's position re. DES was that they were opposed to software implementations because they did not believe that any software encryption solution was secure. Indeed, this is still the official line -- check out the Data Encryption Standard and you'll find that it specifies only hardware implementations are compliant.
I don't think the standard could have been published at all without giving away the algorithm; I don't see how releasing DES in "non-algorithm form" could have been done. This "NSA wanted to sit on DES" thing is acquiring the status of an urban myth.
I'm quite prepared to believe that the NSA are black hats, and that they have all sorts of back doors into things. But their public behaviour has not given much support to this view. Every intervention of the NSA of which I am aware has had the effect of making a product more secure, not less.
Which seems right to me. Although encryption can be used by terrorists etc, it would be a poor intelligence organisation indeed which depended on broken signals for its information. The major use of encryption is commercial. And the damage which might be caused by not being able to intercept an email is absolutely nothing compared to the damage to the USA which might be caused by allowing the Bank of America and Citicorp to use an insecure encryption system for their transactions.
I wouldn't rule conspiracy theories out entirely, but I am currently not convinced.
jsm
No. I would imagine that the technical review would be there in order that the US Government keeps its regulatory powers there, on a sort of "use it or lose it" basis. That way, if they decide to change the regime back again, they wouldn't need to establish new powers.
Also, the technical review lets them see exactly what the non-government sector has, and to keep track of how far ahead of the envelope the NSA is. The US encryption law is a lousy thing, but I would not waste energy on constructing a conspiracy theory around the technical review. This reminds me too much of the "back door" into DES which turned out not to be there. (Everyone thought that the NSA was being cagey about the reasons for the form of the DES s-boxes in order to protect a bank door; in fact they were not giving details because DES was optimised against a kind of cryptanalysis which wasn't in the public domain).
On a related point, I think there's an inconsistency in this post. If the NSA can spot "back doors" in commonly available packages, and if that were the reason they wanted to check new packages, then it would not be true that strong encryption was out of the bag.
jsm
yup, he did. The ref is
Prahalad, C.K.; and Hamel, Gary. "The Core Competence of the Corporation." Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990, pp. 79-91.. He's got a book out with a similar title (in an airport bookshop near you), but I doubt it adds much to the article.
I agree that the [tm] is probably fscked through common usage, although I'll mention that an MBA-dude would have been more likely to hear it without the [tm], as he has given blanket license for its use in academic contexts.
But he's a good guy, and I bet he'd be very receptive to your paper (particularly if the Open Source/Core Competency nexus might add new fields to his consulting empire).
Have fun.
jsm
(good old google shows I'm not just making this up)
very good post, and people should read the essay linked to. Just one point to save you some trouble later:
The phrase "Core Competency" is a [tm] trademark of Gary Hamel, a management science professor at the London Business School. He's a cool enough guy (I know him), and doesn't usually get heavy over the fact. But he makes his living out of going round talking to companies as "the Core Competency[tm] guy". So he's a bit touchy if anyone else tries to pass themselves off. And sometimes he feels obliged to defend his trademark in order to stop it passing into the public domain ("use it or lose it")
I'm not sure what your firm DoxPara Research does, but if you're planning on using the phrase "Core Competency" in a consulting context, you might want to send ghamelATlbsDOTacDOTuk a message, just to keep everything above board.
Me, I'd say screw it, trademark law's a crock and the thing's probably gone public domain anyway by now. But the information can't make you poorer.
this free business advice brought to you by
jsm
LISP is the language of the future
And always will be.
jsm
sorry and all that, but when you think of a line like that, you've got to use it!
whether we like it or not, they deserve to get a much bigger share of the money that you spend in your local record store than Hootie and the Blowfish do.
I don't like it, and what I think they deserve is to get their sorry asses competed out of business now that you don't need major capital to be in the music industry.
And anyway, just putting up a bunch of capital doesn't necessarily mean that you should automatically "deserve" a big return -- if that were true, airlines would be among the most profitable companies in the world. We have a saying in my industry (consulting), which we repeat whenever the PHBs come around telling us to do this that and the other in the name of "our shareholders".
It goes:
"Our skills are a scarce good. Shareholders' equity is not a scarce good. That's why we get the big rewards, and they don't"
(all geeks should repeat this mantra three times a day to create the correct mindset for dealing with employers)
Applying it to the music industry, it seems to me that musical talent is a scarce good, and will stay scarce forever. Distribution networks for music are currently a scarce good, but are getting much less scarce every day. Sony should be very scared (and, by its behaviour, almost certainly is).
It's all about da scarcity ^H^H^H^H Benjamins.
jsm
A quick conversation with a BBC mate reveals that what has been sent is the "house template" letter to start research for a documentary on X, where X is anything from a condemned tower block to the Bavarian Illuminati. A bit boilerplate, but hey, it is not given to everyone to have a clue.
My answers would be:
A brief biography and description of yourself.
I was born amind a thunderstorm in a Huddersfield tenament, the child of a milkmaid of easy virtue, and an indeterminate number of lost Persian sailors. As a child, I was prodigiously curious about words, and ate my way through five volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary until stopped by a curious fear of the letter K. My knowledge of computers comes from the workhouse, where a kindly beadle would strike me with a copy of Knuth (Vol.1) to still my piteous cries (a cruel act indeed, given my phobia). I am fat.
The background of how you first became interested in Slashdot.
I was interested in dots ever since university, where I studied punctuation under the great Professor Ewan Cribb. My interest in slashes developed later, while I was playing with Billy Boston's swing band.
Any interesting anecdotes from your time in Slashdot
I remember a terrible tussle I once fought with a ruffian.
An explanation of what being in the Slashdot community means to you and friendships that you have formed here.
To me, it means air, water, freedom and modesty. I have only one friend, a Mr. A Coward, who constantly impresses me with the volume of his invective and erudition. One day, I will beat him to the coveted First Post!
How your life on Slashdot contrasts with your normal life.
As different as chalk from carbonate. From my eerie eyrie next to Lake Erie, I spend my days chasing chicken-hawls and remonstrating with them. On Slashdot, I merely lambast.
God, I'm bored. The bit at the top about the BBC having a form letter is true though.
jsm
furthermore:
"There are ten record companies" sounds to me like someone is taking the industry structure for granted when the underlying technology changes. Which (oh yeh, MBA-boy?) is often the worst business forecast you can make.
Currently there are ten companies (actually, I'd count fewer than this if you're talking Sony-scale). That's because you need to have a lot of money to produce, promote and ship a CD in the volumes which a big artist needs. And the start-up costs for breaking a new band are huge.
What does the Internet do? Oh yeh, simplifies distribution and reduces start-up costs in a variety of businesses. It burns Sony's ass that Rancid Records of Podunk, Illinois are on the same Internet as them! and get their CDs delivered by the same Amazon.com as SONY! And they're reacting to it by trying to shut everything down with lawyers. Which is (at our current best guess) the non-clue thing to do.
My guess is that Sony are dead. The big guys are never going to agree to this in contract renewals (do you see Celine Dion giving this one away? Or Tina Turner? Or anyone with a half-decent manager?). And the new guys are never going to sign with Sony anyway.
jsm
PS On a factual note, does anyone know if this "standard Sony contract" applies to the "faux-indie" labels in which Sony has a majority stake? Like Creation Records et al?
Last time I checked, The Artist had a name which wasn't even an ASCII character, just a funny sort of squiggle thing. How in the hell do they hope to register that as a domain name?
you are a very silly man and I'm not going to listen to you any more
jsm
Well -- your ISP may have something to say about that, because 10^16 16 digit numbers will take something like 160,000 terabytes (give or take a few bytes for HTML headers). But assuming it's possible, you still aren't doing anything wrong, because, unlike the examples given above, you aren't giving anyone any information that isn't contained in the sentence "B of A credit card numbers are 16 digits long". If a man delivered a solid block of marble to my door, should I turn him in for selling me a fake of the Venus de Milo? After all, it's in there somewhere.
If on the other hand you posted the algorithm for generating valid credit card numbers, you would be a criminal, and I doubt anyone would argue with that. If your best mate set up a site with that algorithm on it, and you set up a site directing people to his site (maybe he lived in a country with no extradition treaty to the USA or something), then you're part of a serious crime.
I think the analogies hold up, but the critique is interesting. Thanks.
jsm
That "private" network is a "public" utility, which has many of the features of a natural monopoly. Unless there was a possibility of real competition in terms of telephone networks (as opposed to carriers/switching companies), then you're stuck with the wires out in the street. Which makes them a monopoly in my book, and means that the normal rules of commerce don't apply.
I have a reasonable right to expect that my privacy be honoured, and I don't expect that right to be breached without good reason. I expect the government to enforce that right, not breach it itself, unless I willingly, freely and knowingly choose to use a non-private network. The fact that the wires are owned by a joint stock company doesn't effect that.
jsm
That surely does NOT make sense. Since most people have a free will (and there are laws governing the actions of those who don't) we can, in our very self-conscious, lawful way choose not to download copyrighted material (or kill, steal, whatever..) just because we are presented with the opportunity.
I don't buy this.
First things first; this comment is an example of what is usually an admirable principle; that control and prohibition should be kept as close in the causal chain as possible to the "bad act". This keeps the sphere of prohibition as small as possible, which is good.
But there comes a point at which it's just not possible to use the "other people have free will" argument, and when you have to suspect bad faith. Human beings aren't super-rational calculators running algorithms designed by Donald Knuth. They're funny, kludgey systems which react to stimuli in partly autonomous but partly predictable ways. And they're about as manipulable as the slashdot Karma system (no offense). People who behave in ways which influence the behaviour of others are part of the causal chain which leads to someone's rights being violated.
Should I be allowed to put up a site of credit card numbers? Hey, the people who download them have free will, don't blame me for what they do with them! How about if, for a fee, I introduce you to a guy who knows a hit man? How about if I publish the names and addresses of abortionists on the Net, with a red cross over the ones that have been killed? If you lent me your car and I left it out in a bad neighbourhood with the keys in the ignition, would you consider it to be partly my fault when it got stolen?
In a lot of these cases, I'm intending that crimes happen, and helping them to happen. I'm part of (an accessory to) the crime. I can claim that it's not my intention that these bad things happen (if I've got a good story, I might even get away with it). Some examples aren't crimes at all. But there's certainly a case to answer -- it's not the same as owning an automatically spidered search engine (and most search engines do attempt to keep themselves warez-free).
David Hume has a good few words to say about this, if I could only remember them.
jsm
It's not all that nebulous ...
Obviously in a "nineteen clicks wide" network, then the chances are that the majority of all web pages are in some way "linking to" illegal material.
But there's a difference between that and putting up your fabulous "list of warez/mp3z site" which is obviously designed to promote piracy. Just as there's a difference between writing technical specs for Ma Bell and publishing "How to Get Phone Calls Free", even though you got the information for the one from the other.
It's an ambiguous issue, and there's no clear-cut way to decide it (if there were, the books of laws would be a lot shorter). The legal concept would be mens rea or "guilty mind". So, did the guy know he was doing something bad, but thought that the technical facts about the Internet would mean he couldn't be caught for it? If yes, then guilty he is.
On the other hand, music copyright law is a pretty bad law anyway, and deserves to be broken. If I ruled the world, I'd replace the concept of mens rea in copyright cases with:
jsm's Principle of Not Taking The Piss:
Trade mp3s if you like, but don't take the piss. Remember that they are actually someone's work
Oh, if only the world would put me in charge . . .
jsm
On the other hand, I think the European Union would have something to say about this. I found this link:
Which basically says that trademarks acquired in one EU state can't be diluted in other EU mamber states
I seem to remember that Linux is a [tm] in Austria, and guess that it might be one in Finland, which would mean bad news for Mr. Brodt.
More generally, a trademark isn't something like a patent or a copyright which you can just have on the shelf. Trademark law exists to protect companies against unscrupulous imitators cashing in on their goodwill. Which means that you typically have to be actually trading to keep your trademark. Unless the German guys start producing a proprietary product fairly similar to Linux (good luck guys), they won't get the [tm].
On the other hand, German [tm] law is widely known to suck, so there may be more to it than this.
jsm
Actually, this is a "feature" of German trademark law, which sucks.
I seem to remember that a German opportunist trademarked the name "Lady Di" three days after her death (charming chap). And then sued the Princess Diana Memorial Trust (yes yes or whatever its called) because "Princess Diana" was obviously the same person as "Lady Di", so they were infringing his trademark. There's a lawsuit going on over this one at the moment.
The trademark is not enforceable outside Germany, and probably not inside Germany either, if anyone had the time and lawyers to sort it out. It's certainly wasting a lot of time for the Diana people.
But sooner or later there will be a European Directive on trademarks, so as long as the Linux [tm] isn't stolen in other countries (unlikely) the Germans will have to give it up.
My advice to you would be to trademark "Folkenspiel" as an insulting name for the Germans and then go after Deutsche Telekom hard.
jsm
Someone should let that idiot run a company some time...
...
Dog Eat Dog Films, I think it's called
yup
The man runs drives to unionise his own staff. I call that downright masochistic.
jsm
Hmmm ... but AFAIK, these comments are on the issue of privacy and security of personal information rather than censorship. My position on this is that I own my name and my personal details, and that I very much do expect my government to protect that ownership. I'm not prepared to rely on "self-regulation" to protect my personal details from being sold without my permission. And I'd hope that this right could indeed be recognised by any government in the world.
jsm
On the other hand, and taking into account Thurow's actual comments (which I've now had time to read), you don't seem to be in disagreement with him on this matter.
If the government "regulates" the Internet to the extent of not allowing companies to pass on information about you for marketing or other purposes, then it is arguably enforcing your property rights in your name and other valuable information about you.
And if this is the limit of Thurow's proposal, it's hard not to agree with him that we can't trust "self-regulation" on this one -- we want the means to sue people who expropriate our valuable personal information.
jsm
In 95 he loudly complained that Greenspan was being to tight with the money supply by his low interest rates, and he (greenspan) NEEDS to raise interest rates to save the stock market.
I have no knowledge of what Thurow did or didn't say, but this comment doesn't make sense. Low interest rates are a "loose money" policy, not a tight money. It seems much more likely to me that Thurow (as a knee-jerk expansionist Keynesian) would have been calling for lower interest rates rather than higher in 1995, in which case he got what he wanted, and was right on the money. In any case, nobody would ever call higher interest rates good for the stock market.
Thurow is in fact bloody awful, but it is extremely unfair to lambast economists for not being able to predict the stock market. There's a lot of economic theory on why the market is unpredictable, but think about it this way -- how do you know that there aren't loads of economists around who can predict perfectly, but aren't telling you?
jsm
I'd be very careful of Cato -- they tend to be fair-weather friends. They have put out some very good libertarian material, but recently appear to have reinvented themselves as corporate flacks pure and simple -- very keen on Social Security privatisation, and on putting out some absolutely awful pseudo-economics to make their case[1]
I for one would not trust Cato to stand firm if IBM, Microsoft, Bertelsmann and AOL came up with a "voluntary" self-censoring system. Particularly not if there was the sniff of a grant to Cato involved.
jsm
[1]For those who care about Cato's economics: their projections seem to assume that GDP will grow at 1%/year while stocks return 7%/year for twenty years -- does 1% economic growth usually coincide with bull markets?
The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.
Libertarians would also be no help to you in the face of "self-regulation" by the Bertelsmann Group, or in protecting your privacy from those who would spam you mercilessly. A Libertarian Internet would quite likely become a corporate monster, with no tolerance of opposing views. But since the censorship was imposed by the cable companies and ISPs, it wouldn't be "censorship", right?
Seriously, if you believe that only government censorship is bad (which is a defensible position; governments have amonopoly on legal use of force), then go for your life; be a Libertarian on this.
If, on the other hand, you think that making it unreasonably costly for opposing views to be heard is also a form of de facto censorship, then the EFF or ACLU are likely to be more to your text.
Me? I take the position of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on this;
(relevant extract below)
In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favors from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and illspoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us, as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them.
jsm
In the economics profession, sadly, LT has gained the nickname "Less-Than Thorough" for the quality of effort he puts into his economic writings these days.
Oh yeah, and the newspaper industry seems to get along fine with self-regulation.
jsm
And indeed, here it is at Amazon too:
Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing
Amazon have a lot of hostile comments up, it seems, but ignore them. They're mainly from people who've used the example routines in mission-critical systems and are whining about the odd funny result. The guy who claims that the routines aren't robust is daft in my book -- they're examples from a textbook on numerical algorithms, not super-powered black boxes with a million special cases.
Of course, if you're feeling cheap, pick it up at http://www.nr.com/
jsm
(who once won a pint for managing to sneak a reference to "Tukey's biweight" into a memorandum)
Hmmmm ... looking at the chapter, I'd say that it's a bit lightweight. You don't need to be a maths purist to think that it's a bit poor to teach people to do least-squares estimation without calculating the standard errors as they go. Or at least without even mentioning that there are such things as standard errors.
...
And polynomial interpretation is only useful when you have a very good idea of what the data's going to give you -- it can go very badly wrong otherwise. For a small step-up in complexity, they could have covered cubic splines, which are much more generally useful.
Numerical Recipes, now there was a book
jsm
If the planet is the home of Steve Jobs, then it will have an eccentricity in its orbit, due to the necessity of having the whole planet revolve around Jobs rather than vice versa.
jsm