Hmm - if you asked me "What would I want from a Slashdot subscription?",
no-banner-ads would be way down on my list. Let's think of some
things the user population might really like (ranging
from the realistic to the ridiculous...)
Purchasable karma - for a small additional fee, of course...
VIP chat with (insert your most-loved Slashdot editor here)
Voting-out of (insert your most-hated Slashdot editor here)
Priority consideration in the story-submission queue
Higher rankings in comment submission
Suggest a few of your own! (I've kept my ideas non-obscene,
since this is just meant in good fun).
An ordinance of petitioner City of Ladue bans all
residential signs but those falling within one of ten exemptions, for
the principal purpose of minimizing the visual clutter associated with
such signs. Respondent Gilleo filed this action, alleging that the
ordinance violated her right to free speech by prohibiting her from
displaying a sign stating, "For Peace in the Gulf," from her home. The
District Court found the ordinance unconstitutional, and the Court of
Appeals affirmed, holding that the ordinance was a "content based"
regulation, and that Ladue's substantial interests in enacting it were
not sufficiently compelling to support such a restriction.
Held: The ordinance violates a Ladue resident's right to free speech. Pp. 4-16.
(he did the interview with Salon and then submitted the story to Slashdot).
Umm, what "interview with Salon"? Where is he even named in
the Salon article? As far as I see, there is one sentence
"Then, when BountyQuest announced that no prior art had been
discovered undermining the one-click patent, others began to wonder.",
which refers collectively to criticism, though of course he is very
much among the doubters, and submitted the April 2001 Slashdot story
where he does briefly retail his own charges. And
then a paragraph giving O'Reilly's statement
about how the contest was conducted.
But TheoDP's far from the only
person with bad things to say about BountyQuest, and is not quoted
at all in the Salon article itself.
So this is why I feel sorry for him: As you've just shown, O'Reilly's
ad-hominem worked. Rather than looking at the evidence, you
reacted to how O'Reilly framed the issue. Now, while "having a weblog"
does not a journalist make, O'Reilly is a prominent publisher, not
some random geek writing a diary. TheoDP will not be able to have
his reply to the personal attack heard in a comparable manner, unless
it's picked up by someone else in the media. That's a situation which
draws my sympathy.
I managed to find what seems to be the
critical exchange, back in April 2001:
Q: What degree of diligence did BountyQuest exert in trying to
understand the very high profile 1-Click submissions? Were people
contacted who had actually used or were at least familiar with the
prior art described in the submissions? (Submitted by Edie)
TOR: Again, I can't really answer for BountyQuest. However, I
imagine that they used the same criteria a court would use, namely to
read the documents and to do "pattern matching" on them.
Q: Of the four entries cited specifically by number as "Terrific
Submissions" by BountyQuest, Tim O'Reilly chose to exclude only
one - #25, which referred to anIBM mainframe system -- from receiving a portion of the $10,000
"unofficial" award, even though it's arguably the most similar to the
Amazon patent and represents prior art that Jeff Bezos could have
personally used or seen earlier in his mainframe days. Why?
(Submitted by Ted)
TOR: Well, I actually thought the Doonesbury cartoon was the
best example - it made it pretty clear to me that 1-click shopping was
an "obvious" idea. But as programmers say on the net, IANAL (I am not
a lawyer), and the lawyers at BountyQuest obviously didn't think that
it would pass muster in a court of law as evidence of prior art.
But as to the specific entry you mention - # 25 - it isn't at all
clear to me how it's relevant. I didn't read every page, but in
scanning through it, I didn't see much evidence of relevance in
it. Perhaps if whomever had submitted it had pointed specifically to
the passages they thought were relevant, we might have been able to
see it as well. But frankly, based on what I did see there, it's hard
to see why it was submitted at all!
And I even was able to make sense of it all.
The three selected entries were patents. The other
one (#25) was not. So while it might have been closer in a conceptual
sense, it arguably wasn't as close in a patent-law sense.
What's also interesting, though, is the number of submissions that
talk about simplifying the buying process on the Web without actually
inventing 1-Click shopping. Look at submission #25 to see how much
work some IBM engineers did on the subject of digital shopping without
actually inventing 1-Click.
That's disturbingly PR-ish for me, as if they are saying
in a twisted way that this prior art actually proves that their patent
was a valid innovation (i.e., look at all this relevant earlier work,
and they didn't actually invent "1-Click", so Amazon must have innovated!).
My ears always perk up when a journalist with the ability to be
heard dismisses a critic by slinging mud at them. I have a lot
of sympathy for the underdogs in that situation, in part because of
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
And I've learned some great things by being willing to listen to the target.
TheoDP briefly laid out his complaint in his own words in a
Usenet Posting
At the very least, this makes me dubious about the claim by O'Reilly
that TheoDP wouldn't explain the relevance of his material.
He sent in hundreds of pages of material without any explanation of
why he believed any particular part of it invalidated the patent, and
all of those who looked at it couldn't see the remotest
relevance. Requests for clarification about just what in this material
represented prior art were met with avoidance and hostility. His
continued harrassment of both me and BountyQuest has convinced me that
he's some kind of a crank.
The story gets weirder still. Another contestant in the Amazon
sweepstakes has stepped forward, complaining that his entry was one of
four BountyQuest cited as a ``Terrific Submission'' but that, unlike
the other three, he didn't get any money.
Ted Conway, a freelance programmer in Chicago, submitted details of a
system used by IBM in the 1970s to order and ship printed
reports. ``The parallels to Amazon's system are very similar,'' Conway
tells me. (He notes that Bezos worked at IBM's San Jose research labs
in college and likely would have used the IBM system.)
BountyQuest didn't agree and offered Conway a T-shirt as a consolation
prize. Conway now accuses BountyQuest of pulling a whitewash to
protect Amazon's legal case.
In a Q&A posted today on SiliconValley.com
(www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/gmsv/), an online partner of the
Mercury News, O'Reilly says Conway's submission isn't relevant to the
Amazon patent. But he admits he's not clear how BountyQuest officials
researched and judged the entries. Cella declined to answer any
questions about the contest.
Matthew Powers, managing partner of the Silicon Valley office of Weil,
Gotshal & Manges, says it's unlikely the site would try to cover for
Amazon.
The Menlo Park patent attorney says the publicity ``would be so
valuable for BountyQuest that there's no way in the world they would
not have accepted a submission that killed the patent
How interesting. I assume TheoDP is Ted Conway.
Pending further evidence. I'm inclined to side with TheoDP. It looks like
the power of journalism again. Throw the mud, make the smear, virtually
no-one will ever check the evidence, and the target can't fight back.
Yes,
my experiences do color my view here.
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 11:27:11 -0500
To: openlaw-announce [at-sign] eon.law.harvard.edu
From: Wendy Seltzer
Subject: [openlaw] Eldred v. Ashcroft to the Supreme Court
From Lawrence Lessig and the Openlaw team:
We are extremely pleased to report that the Supreme Court has today granted
cert in Eldred v. Ashcroft. After the case was listed on the court's
conference calendar 4 weeks in a row, the court decided to hear the full
range of issues in the appeal.
We have gotten this far because of the extraordinary work and support of
many many people -- especially the plaintiffs in this case, but also the
extraordinary pro bono work of the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue.
We would also not be here but for the extraordinary help of a wide range of
law professors and volunteer lawyers, who have used the Openlaw process to
make our work better. Those professors signed the amicus briefs in this
case, as did the Eagle Forum and Cato Institute.
There's just one more step in this process of reversing Congress'
mistake: After getting 0 votes in the District Court, 2 votes in the
Court of Appeals, and now at least 4 votes in the Supreme Court to hear the
case, we now need just 5 to prevail.
Thank you for your continued interest and support.
Read more background on the case and join the Openlaw process at
http://eldred.openlaw.org/
It is exactly as I said, years ago, about the development of
censorware.
If a control system works for American children, then
it will work for peasants in China. Inversely, if a control
system DOES NOT work for peasants in China, then it will not
work for children in America.
The Net interprets censorship as damage, ...
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2
The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.
-- John Gilmore
What if censorship is in the router?
-- Seth Finkelstein
Is routing-around true in practice,
rather than than simply a trivial underground?
It doesn't seem to ever work for "the masses". We're seeing another
experimental test of this principle. I wish
it well, but the past failures are sobering.
The problem is, basically, these indictments tend to read:
"The defendant is hereby charged with murder, rape, robbery, and being
obnoxious".
The prosecution does this because 1) They like to throw lots of mud
and see if it sticks, and 2) Sometimes they hope that with the serious
crimes, the judge or jury will pile-on the "being obnoxious" charge,
and establish case law that can be used later against
true enemies-of-the-state.
Then the stories can be "Defendant charged with being obnoxious".
And the web-discussion runs "If being obnoxious is a crime, we
are all criminals. 1984, Orwell, Rand etc. etc."
So the problem is that the "being obnoxious" charge often isn't
the reason for the case itself. It's a kitchen-sink or mudslinging aspect.
On the other hand, it is there, and the fact that the prosecution is trying
for it still remains a problem. These situations sometimes aren't simple.
Further, it is ironic that the poster of this story, Michael Sims, has
been accused by his former partner in running censorware.org, of
effectively censoring...
You'll note the word censoring isn't in the essay.
In this context, it makes for too easy a target, for a
distracting high-noise side-argument of getting into a
definition-of-censorship debate.
I talk about the corruptions and temptations of the power of
journalism, and similar issues. Note I'm not the only person
who has such a view of Michael Sims' actions. For example,
Jonathan Wallace's account corroborates mine.
But there is a deep irony here (and my message is not completely
off-topic). The destruction of censorware.org did (and still does)
a lot of harm to the cause of promoting freedom of expression. More
personally, I was just musing that were I to find myself
in legal trouble for free-speech work,
as other programmers have, I sure hope I'd get as much favorable
press as has been given to the raisethefist guy. It is one of my
biggest worries that Michael Sims, yes that Michael Sims, the poster
of the story, would further abuse his editorial position at Slashdot,
behave in a spiteful manner similar to how he has done in the past with
censorware.org, and make my legal position worse, out of
score-settling revenge.
Given how Michael Sims behaves, I think it's an extremely reasonable worry.
Now, many people will certainly discount Rob's opinion, whether for
well or poorly thought out reasons. However, considering the very
high readership of Slashdot, this is a far cry from being certain
his opinion is discounted by all.
But, c'mon guys - if Microsoft pulled something like this, I can
hardly imagine the stories it would generate. Most especially
that privacy policy change!
I agree with the other comments that the privacy policy change
looks like
a preparation to sell the data as an asset, in a buy-out or merger.
It is certainly extremely suggestive. If it were in fact to concern
being cracked or similar, then the logical place to say that is in the
"security" section. Instead, it's a free-standing section that
effectively disclaims the entire previous policy for extremely vague
reasons. That's certainly a BIG change.
Again, what would the Slashdot story be, if Microsoft did that in
one of its services?
I should hasten to add that I don't believe there's anything silly,
like a specific quid-pro-quo directive. Rob is an extremely nice person
that I've seen. But this is the
essence of a conflict-of-interest. The idea that our guys are good,
upstanding, moral, they never would do something bad... It may be a
sincere belief on the part of the writer, but that's why it's a problem.
I'm biased and corrupt and you should ignore my opinions on the subject,...
Umm, the sarcasm obscures a logical problem. If you are
(using your words), biased and corrupt, and have an EDITORIAL POSITION,
then people have a very hard time ignoring your opinions. And the
above is a case in point.
Yes, publically defending changes made by your owner, especially
considering how those changes would likely be savaged if
done by an opponent, raises deep issues of conflict of interest
which deserve better than such an offhand dismissal.
After all, how different is "You get what you pay for after all", from
"If you don't like our click-wrap license, don't use the software"?
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 22:30:56 -0800
From: Greg Broiles
Subject: Re: Pricing spare resources and options?
At 01:44 PM 11/18/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>The recent comments on Mojo Nation prompted me to look at their site
>again. I don't see much guidance on how to set prices for network
>services. There's a mention someplace that business customers will build >pricing schemes on top of Mojo Nation, but not much indication of what
>these schemes might be.
>
>So what is the "right" way to price resources? (Preferably beyond the
>obvious "supply and demand.")
Unfortunately, one of the evolutionary steps in Mojo Nation's development
has been their abandonment, for the most part, of user-visible and
user-configurable economics; they deliberately made it difficult to see how
many Mojo are held by the local broker, and relatively unlikely that a
broker will be able to earn significant Mojo by careful pricing - recent
clients are configured such that the economic brakes on resource usage are
sharply curtailed or removed entirely.
It's my impression that, given the changes in the venture capital and
software markets, they've refocused their efforts away from P2P filesharing
and towards speedy realtime content delivery, whereby people with limited
net connections can maximize their incoming bandwidth by pulling (or
getting pushes) from multiple other parties simultaneously, somewhat
similar to what Morpheus/Kazaa are doing, or what Bram Cohen (a Mojo Nation
alumnus) is doing with BitTorrent.
The economics seemed to attract people who wanted to experiment with
pricing, etc., but that wasn't necessarily a market or constituency which
is interesting to investors or businesspeople.
>A related question - I ran into a friend of mine who had just finished an
>internship in options trading. He suggested it might be worth looking at >options on spare disk space or other resources, as a means of figuring out
>how to make Mojo-type systems eventually profitable in the real world. Now
>I have a copy of Natenberg's _Option Volatility and Pricing_ to look at...
It seems like there ought to be an interesting market here, but I know and
worked with several people (with good financial backgrounds) who flogged
this for awhile and never got anywhere. I guess a big part of the problem
is that there's such a big difference in the perceived value of a
megabyte/month of online storage.. if you're on the provider side, you
think that's pretty expensive, as you've got the investment & etc required
in building a data center, providing bandwidth to reach customers, paying
staff, etc - but if you're on the customer side, you look at an 80 Gb drive
at Fry's in the Sunday newspaper for $160 and think about a $500 1.5mb/s
frame relay connection, and wonder why the service guys want $3 per
Mb/month..
and then the Mojo guys come along and make it sound like the people with
the cheap frame relay connections and commodity PC hardware ought to be
able to set up data centers in their back bedrooms or on their old laptops,
but so far all of the business models proposed involve paying those guys up
front for an indefinite period of storage, so there's no strong incentive
to actually store the data for long, especially not if you can resell that
same disk space 3 or 4 or 50 times.
Seems like the guys who really have hard data about options for bandwidth
and disk usage are the disaster recovery guys. And that market hasn't been
so great lately either, Comdisco declared bankruptcy and is their disaster
recovery unit is getting swallowed up by Sungard, I think.
Anyway, yeah, the Enron guys thought there was something interesting to be
done in bandwidth futures, too, but I don't know if they ever really got
anything done before their demise beyond some demonstration projects.
--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy.
1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National
disgrace.
Pardon me. I see what I wrote is subject to misinterpretation. I WAS NOT
suggesting that
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
should be a front-page Slashdot story (in my dreams, maybe, but
that was not my suggestion here...)
The censorware.org material has long been retrieved, and is mostly back up
now at http://censorware.net. As to
not having a separate backup, we mistakenly trusted Michael Sims as webmaster.
As you see, the destruction was done by Michael Sims,
now a Slashdot editor. There is also a great deal of other politics not
mentioned my essay. This had, and has, a significant impact on
publicizing recent and future
anti-censorware work.
In a moment of frustration over all the grudge-holding politics,
compared to front-page slots being wasted on months-old triplicates
(not duplicates, triplicates), I vented some of my feelings about
Slashdot's editorial lackings in my posting. I shouldn't have done it.
This is the Softman vs Adobe case, which has already been
covered on Slashdot before, not just
once
but
twice
And it's months-old news by now!
Grumble, grumble, are front page slots really
going begging?
It's unseemly to complain. But at a certain level, it's very sad that
I can't get any Slashdot
coverage
for my
anti-censorware work these days, because of
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
while months-old news is recycled over and over. Really guys,
if you need a good story, I have plenty of deserving ones that are
languishing for lack of journalistic backing!
Hmm. I'm obviously biased, partial, self-interested, etc. But topics
such as
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
wouldn't be a half-bad way of making the issues relevant to the students.
I've often called censorware "electronic book burning".
That is, ask the students: What would it be like to be Montag?
How's it feel to have The Hound (take it as a symbol for the legal system)
nipping at your heels, or seeing it devour others? To have your employer
give you an "out" for your activities, and would you take it? What
if someone could advance their career by
doing ill to fellow booklovers?
Now, honestly,
Jon Johansen and DeCSS is actually a better individual example. It's
not inconceivable that one of the students could find themselves in a
similar situation (below is one of my favorate quotes, where Jon is
responding to reporter Declan McCullagh, given
Declan was arrogantly giving Jon a hard time for not immediate
returning Declan's request for comment):
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 21:26:23 +0100
From: Jon Johansen (Micro Media ADB) digitech@m...
Subject: [Livid-dev] Wired article on legal threats
I assume you've read a great deal of articles
on the subject? If you have, you might have
noticed that I'm only 15 years old; which
means I go to school. Norway is GMT+01. You
should be able to figure out the time difference,
and when I would be available for comment:)
That is,
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in metaphor. But there's real
battles going on right now, right this minute, and there's real-life
opportunities to be Montag. But beware The Hound.
(1)
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is
of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2)
the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3)
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4)
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work.
They're trying to make an argument which goes to at least
element #4. Remember, this an EFFECT test. That's
not the same as
the idea of being possible to do it with much more work
before these sorts of PVRs
The "rationale" for
"it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the
genre, actors or other words in the program description."
is "explained" further down:
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond'
and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film
recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on
the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause
substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and
other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.
IANAL, but I think the idea is reaching to come up with a
negative effect on the copyrighted work itself, so as to undermine
the longstanding law that personal use of VCRs is fair use.
Farsite is just one of several projects at Microsoft Research and
other labs around the world that will render operating systems all but
unrecognizable in 10 years.
Ahem... ahem... I feel like I'm karma-whoring here, but...
How long has it taken for Microsoft to make an OS that simply DOES NOT CRASH?!
With around 15 years of work and refinement, they may just about
have gotten to that point with Win2000 and WinXP. How much effort did it take them to do long file names, for heaven's sake?
Let's not even get into issues about the quality of multitasking.
I simply can't take a prediction seriously that a (real) Borg Operating System
will be a reality in 10 years. Especially coming from Microsoft. Heck, I
wouldn't believe such a prediction from an OS company I respect. But
from Microsoft??? Consider the source.
In only one of the e-mail accounts, I provided all of the
information requested (name, address, demographics, etc.)
during the registration process, and I used this e-mail
address just one time - to purchase a gift certificate from
Borders.com. Less than a week later, the spam started
rolling in - jamming the in-box with more spam than the
other new accounts I had created.
The writer seems to think spammers couldn't get the address
unless they got it from Borders.com.
This may be unfair. What spammers sometimes
do is to dictionary-attack ISPs, trying lists of
usernames (after all, what do they care if the mail bounces - it's
not like it's THEIR problem...). Once they find an address works,
(by not having it bounce), they sell it to other spammers as a
"verified" address. I saw something similar happen where an
account I only used to received a few mailing lists (never send) suddenly received
a huge upsurge in spam. The list-maintainers were above reproach,
they hadn't sold the user list. What seemed to have happened is
that spammer found the address in a dictionary-attack, and then
it was all over...:-(
Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The article has a (probably unintentionally) funny comment about that:
The two sides settled
out of court in June, and Greenspun gave up his
fight for control. The terms of the settlement were
not disclosed, but Greenspun has since purchased
an RV and an airplane.
[Forwarded by Seth David Schoen to the dvd-discuss list]
----- Forwarded message from Cindy Cohn -----
We did not drop the Felten case, of course, the decision was made by the
clients, but we support them in it. Obviously we believe that all
researchers should be protected, not just those at big institutions.
We felt that the government's unequivocal statement that the DMCA did not
reach "attempting to study access control technology" was very broad--broad
enough to reach all researchers. (See footnote 5, government's motion to
dismiss) Of course we would have preferred an enforceable court decision to
that effect, but it seems that both the government's statement and the
RIAA's statements along the same lines meant that the Felten case wasn't
going to be the best vehicle to ensure that protection, since we would have
had to spend at least a year more fighting about even whether we could have
a live case before we even got to the bigger questions.
While we want to be able to pick the fact situations and clients who carry
this flag, and not leave that to the content holders, we may not have that
luxury. Or perhaps once a sufficent number of these threats occur with the
content holders backing down only after lawsuits are filed, the courts will
see that this is a broader issue that they should address.
Either way, it's not like we're going away. We filed an amicus brief about
1201 in the Elcomsoft case on Monday and have been working with several
other folks who face DMCA uncertainties. And of course we will be closely
watching the situation and if the government or content holders try to
interfere with legitimate research again, we'll be there.
Cindy
Cindy A. Cohn Cindy@eff.org
Legal Director www.eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel: (415)436-9333 x 108
Fax: (415) 436-9993
I'd like to keep the replies down, since this can go on
forever, so I'll combine two here and may not reply to all responses:
You seem to think that if someone is a Libertarian, then any criticism
of a pro-government figure must be politically motivated.
Sorry, but that's simply not logical.
a) Someone is a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian
and
b) Knows some of the best technical sources,
but
c) Ignores them, and derides them, in favor of political sources which
state exactly what a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian wants to hear
THEN, inductively, they are politically motivated.
Indeed, this seems like a sound chain of inductive logical reasoning to me.
Please do not reply with trivial counter-arguments, such as the idea
that we can never fully know the contents of a person's mind, and thus
no statement about their motivations can ever be proved in an absolute
sense.
[Combining replies]
It implies that McCullagh's motivations are not political, but
career-oriented ("yellow journalism", as the poster said it).
Correction: It implies for that LiViD article series,
his motivations were, etc. You've incorrectly imputed to me the
logical fallacy of hasty generalization.
Look, can I point out you haven't made one focused rebuttal? That is,
every response is either to something I didn't say (a straw man,
or imputed hasty generalization), or the trivial objection that
an induction can't be absolute like a deduction.
You offered no evidence that his motivation was based on political
leanings. Therefore,...
Utterly incorrect. In fact, I did almost the exact opposite.
I pointed to the very specific discussion in the
debunking by Salon, and I do so again. I also pointed
to many places establishing that he does have those leanings,
and discussing (seriously or humorously, as the case may be)
their impact on his writings. PLEASE read the references
before trying for cheap irony.
Slashdot Mirror
- Purchasable karma - for a small additional fee, of course
...
- VIP chat with (insert your most-loved Slashdot editor here)
- Voting-out of (insert your most-hated Slashdot editor here)
- Priority consideration in the story-submission queue
- Higher rankings in comment submission
Suggest a few of your own! (I've kept my ideas non-obscene, since this is just meant in good fun).Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
City Of Ladue et al. v. Gilleo
But I doubt it'll help with the DMCASig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
So this is why I feel sorry for him: As you've just shown, O'Reilly's ad-hominem worked. Rather than looking at the evidence, you reacted to how O'Reilly framed the issue. Now, while "having a weblog" does not a journalist make, O'Reilly is a prominent publisher, not some random geek writing a diary. TheoDP will not be able to have his reply to the personal attack heard in a comparable manner, unless it's picked up by someone else in the media. That's a situation which draws my sympathy.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
The three selected entries were patents. The other one (#25) was not. So while it might have been closer in a conceptual sense, it arguably wasn't as close in a patent-law sense.
Though the statement on the BountyQuest 1-Click prior art page gives me pause:
That's disturbingly PR-ish for me, as if they are saying in a twisted way that this prior art actually proves that their patent was a valid innovation (i.e., look at all this relevant earlier work, and they didn't actually invent "1-Click", so Amazon must have innovated!).Anyway, I've probably spent more time on this than I should have. Chalk it up to my extreme sympathy for those subject to journalist attack, because of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
And I've learned some great things by being willing to listen to the target.
TheoDP briefly laid out his complaint in his own words in a Usenet Posting
At the very least, this makes me dubious about the claim by O'Reilly that TheoDP wouldn't explain the relevance of his material.
Hmm, let's compare, O'Reilly claims, regarding TheoDP:
Now let's look at a news report published at the time : (I've added emphasis below) How interesting. I assume TheoDP is Ted Conway.Pending further evidence. I'm inclined to side with TheoDP. It looks like the power of journalism again. Throw the mud, make the smear, virtually no-one will ever check the evidence, and the target can't fight back. Yes, my experiences do color my view here.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
You can't have it both ways. Pick one.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Though I admit it would be very nice if caffeine actually did lengthen life (as opposed ot just making it seem to be lived faster) ...
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
"The defendant is hereby charged with murder, rape, robbery, and being obnoxious".
The prosecution does this because 1) They like to throw lots of mud and see if it sticks, and 2) Sometimes they hope that with the serious crimes, the judge or jury will pile-on the "being obnoxious" charge, and establish case law that can be used later against true enemies-of-the-state.
Then the stories can be "Defendant charged with being obnoxious".
And the web-discussion runs "If being obnoxious is a crime, we are all criminals. 1984, Orwell, Rand etc. etc."
So the problem is that the "being obnoxious" charge often isn't the reason for the case itself. It's a kitchen-sink or mudslinging aspect. On the other hand, it is there, and the fact that the prosecution is trying for it still remains a problem. These situations sometimes aren't simple.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
You'll note the word censoring isn't in the essay. In this context, it makes for too easy a target, for a distracting high-noise side-argument of getting into a definition-of-censorship debate.
I talk about the corruptions and temptations of the power of journalism, and similar issues. Note I'm not the only person who has such a view of Michael Sims' actions. For example, Jonathan Wallace's account corroborates mine.
But there is a deep irony here (and my message is not completely off-topic). The destruction of censorware.org did (and still does) a lot of harm to the cause of promoting freedom of expression. More personally, I was just musing that were I to find myself in legal trouble for free-speech work, as other programmers have, I sure hope I'd get as much favorable press as has been given to the raisethefist guy. It is one of my biggest worries that Michael Sims, yes that Michael Sims, the poster of the story, would further abuse his editorial position at Slashdot, behave in a spiteful manner similar to how he has done in the past with censorware.org, and make my legal position worse, out of score-settling revenge.
Given how Michael Sims behaves, I think it's an extremely reasonable worry.
And there is the irony for you.
But, c'mon guys - if Microsoft pulled something like this, I can hardly imagine the stories it would generate. Most especially that privacy policy change!
I agree with the other comments that the privacy policy change looks like a preparation to sell the data as an asset, in a buy-out or merger. It is certainly extremely suggestive. If it were in fact to concern being cracked or similar, then the logical place to say that is in the "security" section. Instead, it's a free-standing section that effectively disclaims the entire previous policy for extremely vague reasons. That's certainly a BIG change.
Again, what would the Slashdot story be, if Microsoft did that in one of its services?
I should hasten to add that I don't believe there's anything silly, like a specific quid-pro-quo directive. Rob is an extremely nice person that I've seen. But this is the essence of a conflict-of-interest. The idea that our guys are good, upstanding, moral, they never would do something bad ... It may be a
sincere belief on the part of the writer, but that's why it's a problem.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Yes, publically defending changes made by your owner, especially considering how those changes would likely be savaged if done by an opponent, raises deep issues of conflict of interest which deserve better than such an offhand dismissal.
After all, how different is "You get what you pay for after all", from "If you don't like our click-wrap license, don't use the software"?
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
From: Greg Broiles
Subject: Re: Pricing spare resources and options?
At 01:44 PM 11/18/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>The recent comments on Mojo Nation prompted me to look at their site
>again. I don't see much guidance on how to set prices for network
>services. There's a mention someplace that business customers will build
>pricing schemes on top of Mojo Nation, but not much indication of what
>these schemes might be.
>
>So what is the "right" way to price resources? (Preferably beyond the
>obvious "supply and demand.")
Unfortunately, one of the evolutionary steps in Mojo Nation's development has been their abandonment, for the most part, of user-visible and user-configurable economics; they deliberately made it difficult to see how many Mojo are held by the local broker, and relatively unlikely that a broker will be able to earn significant Mojo by careful pricing - recent clients are configured such that the economic brakes on resource usage are sharply curtailed or removed entirely.
It's my impression that, given the changes in the venture capital and software markets, they've refocused their efforts away from P2P filesharing and towards speedy realtime content delivery, whereby people with limited net connections can maximize their incoming bandwidth by pulling (or getting pushes) from multiple other parties simultaneously, somewhat similar to what Morpheus/Kazaa are doing, or what Bram Cohen (a Mojo Nation alumnus) is doing with BitTorrent.
The economics seemed to attract people who wanted to experiment with pricing, etc., but that wasn't necessarily a market or constituency which is interesting to investors or businesspeople.
>A related question - I ran into a friend of mine who had just finished an
>internship in options trading. He suggested it might be worth looking at
>options on spare disk space or other resources, as a means of figuring out
>how to make Mojo-type systems eventually profitable in the real world. Now
>I have a copy of Natenberg's _Option Volatility and Pricing_ to look at...
It seems like there ought to be an interesting market here, but I know and worked with several people (with good financial backgrounds) who flogged this for awhile and never got anywhere. I guess a big part of the problem is that there's such a big difference in the perceived value of a megabyte/month of online storage .. if you're on the provider side, you
think that's pretty expensive, as you've got the investment & etc required
in building a data center, providing bandwidth to reach customers, paying
staff, etc - but if you're on the customer side, you look at an 80 Gb drive
at Fry's in the Sunday newspaper for $160 and think about a $500 1.5mb/s
frame relay connection, and wonder why the service guys want $3 per
Mb/month ..
and then the Mojo guys come along and make it sound like the people with the cheap frame relay connections and commodity PC hardware ought to be able to set up data centers in their back bedrooms or on their old laptops, but so far all of the business models proposed involve paying those guys up front for an indefinite period of storage, so there's no strong incentive to actually store the data for long, especially not if you can resell that same disk space 3 or 4 or 50 times.
Seems like the guys who really have hard data about options for bandwidth and disk usage are the disaster recovery guys. And that market hasn't been so great lately either, Comdisco declared bankruptcy and is their disaster recovery unit is getting swallowed up by Sungard, I think.
Anyway, yeah, the Enron guys thought there was something interesting to be done in bandwidth futures, too, but I don't know if they ever really got anything done before their demise beyond some demonstration projects.
--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy.
1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.
The censorware.org material has long been retrieved, and is mostly back up now at http://censorware.net. As to not having a separate backup, we mistakenly trusted Michael Sims as webmaster.
As you see, the destruction was done by Michael Sims, now a Slashdot editor. There is also a great deal of other politics not mentioned my essay. This had, and has, a significant impact on publicizing recent and future anti-censorware work.
In a moment of frustration over all the grudge-holding politics, compared to front-page slots being wasted on months-old triplicates (not duplicates, triplicates), I vented some of my feelings about Slashdot's editorial lackings in my posting. I shouldn't have done it.
And it's months-old news by now!
Grumble, grumble, are front page slots really going begging? It's unseemly to complain. But at a certain level, it's very sad that I can't get any Slashdot coverage for my anti-censorware work these days, because of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) while months-old news is recycled over and over. Really guys, if you need a good story, I have plenty of deserving ones that are languishing for lack of journalistic backing!
That is, ask the students: What would it be like to be Montag? How's it feel to have The Hound (take it as a symbol for the legal system) nipping at your heels, or seeing it devour others? To have your employer give you an "out" for your activities, and would you take it? What if someone could advance their career by doing ill to fellow booklovers?
Now, honestly, Jon Johansen and DeCSS is actually a better individual example. It's not inconceivable that one of the students could find themselves in a similar situation (below is one of my favorate quotes, where Jon is responding to reporter Declan McCullagh, given Declan was arrogantly giving Jon a hard time for not immediate returning Declan's request for comment):
That is, Fahrenheit 451 takes place in metaphor. But there's real battles going on right now, right this minute, and there's real-life opportunities to be Montag. But beware The Hound.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
How long has it taken for Microsoft to make an OS that simply DOES NOT CRASH?!
With around 15 years of work and refinement, they may just about have gotten to that point with Win2000 and WinXP. How much effort did it take them to do long file names, for heaven's sake? Let's not even get into issues about the quality of multitasking.
I simply can't take a prediction seriously that a (real) Borg Operating System will be a reality in 10 years. Especially coming from Microsoft. Heck, I wouldn't believe such a prediction from an OS company I respect. But from Microsoft??? Consider the source.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
----- Forwarded message from Cindy Cohn -----
We did not drop the Felten case, of course, the decision was made by the clients, but we support them in it. Obviously we believe that all researchers should be protected, not just those at big institutions.
We felt that the government's unequivocal statement that the DMCA did not reach "attempting to study access control technology" was very broad--broad enough to reach all researchers. (See footnote 5, government's motion to dismiss) Of course we would have preferred an enforceable court decision to that effect, but it seems that both the government's statement and the RIAA's statements along the same lines meant that the Felten case wasn't going to be the best vehicle to ensure that protection, since we would have had to spend at least a year more fighting about even whether we could have a live case before we even got to the bigger questions.
While we want to be able to pick the fact situations and clients who carry this flag, and not leave that to the content holders, we may not have that luxury. Or perhaps once a sufficent number of these threats occur with the content holders backing down only after lawsuits are filed, the courts will see that this is a broader issue that they should address.
Either way, it's not like we're going away. We filed an amicus brief about 1201 in the Elcomsoft case on Monday and have been working with several other folks who face DMCA uncertainties. And of course we will be closely watching the situation and if the government or content holders try to interfere with legitimate research again, we'll be there.
Cindy
Cindy A. Cohn Cindy@eff.org
Legal Director www.eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel: (415)436-9333 x 108
Fax: (415) 436-9993
I think that if:
a) Someone is a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian
and
b) Knows some of the best technical sources,
but
c) Ignores them, and derides them, in favor of political sources which state exactly what a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian wants to hear
THEN, inductively, they are politically motivated.
Indeed, this seems like a sound chain of inductive logical reasoning to me.
Please do not reply with trivial counter-arguments, such as the idea that we can never fully know the contents of a person's mind, and thus no statement about their motivations can ever be proved in an absolute sense.
[Combining replies]
Correction: It implies for that LiViD article series, his motivations were, etc. You've incorrectly imputed to me the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.
Look, can I point out you haven't made one focused rebuttal? That is, every response is either to something I didn't say (a straw man, or imputed hasty generalization), or the trivial objection that an induction can't be absolute like a deduction.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)