I agree. Until I got used to the directory structure, it looked like it came straight from hell. Even now that I'm used to it, I think it bears all the signs of being a very old system that has had pieces added to it in a patchwork fashion without any thought of how they would affect the whole.
I'd love to see the directory structure modified a bit (in a planned and logical fashion) to fix this. I'd love to see a system with a directory structure that buried some of the internals a little bit, and made the relationships between subsystems a bit clearer. I think a great directory structure would look something like this:
/system (the place where all the "complex stuff" lives) /bin /boot /dev /etc /misc /proc /tmp /var /programs (maybe even/program files, but that's probably stupid...) /system -->/system/bin /distro (currently/usr/bin) /local (/usr/local/bin) /root (/sbin) /shared /documentation /fonts /icons /graphics /whatever... /home /whoever... /.etc (for all personal configuration files...) /disks /floppy /cdrom /zip /whatever.... /root
The point is to put files in places where normal people are going to be looking for them. Burying some of the more advanced stuff in the/system directory would also make the entire structure more accessible, hiding the complexity enough that the entire operating system would appear more approachable to normal people, while being almost as easy to access as the existing system by the pros.
Obviously, the exact structure should be tested pretty rigorously for usability by a wide number of people, from a wide number of backgrounds (Windows, Mac, Unix, computer newbies, etc.). There's no reason that Linux can't be the most approachable and powerful operating system in existence, it's improving constantly, but I think it will take a few major changes like this to make it happen.
I agree with you completely. The hypocrisy this subject has brought to light has been astounding, and somewhat disturbing. I am astonished that the same community that has been so passionate about discussing the freedom of speech, the openness of ideas, and the danger posed by the concept of intellectual property is behaving as though its ideas are the only ones that have any value.
I do agree that slashdot et. al. didn't handle this issue as well as they could have. Some announcement that they were working on a book before its publication would have been nice. We could have given them thousands of additional comments to choose from.;-)
I'm also not sure whether the book is published under an open-content license. If it isn't, it should be.
I've added this to my user bio:
I grant permission to anyone to reprint my comments in part or whole in any form, with or without contacting me. Anything I post here can be considered public domain. Use it as you will.
Actually, you have a lot *more* power and rights to the works of your mind than to the works of your body, and this has been the case since the very beginning of copyright law, due to the nature of ideas and intellectual works.
Think about it. If you make a chair, you can use it all you want, but the instant you sell it, you no longer have any rights to it at all. It belongs to someone else. If you want something to sit on, you have to make another chair.
Ideas and other works of your mind follow different rules. Sure, you can come up with an idea, and use it all that you want, rattle it around in your own brain, never revealing it to anyone else. It's *yours*, and yours alone, and you can take it with you to the grave, secure in the knowledge that you are the sole owner of your idea.
You can also sell the idea, like you can sell your chair. But, unlike the situation when you've sold the chair, once you've sold an idea to someone, you *still* have it, and you can still sell it to someone else. You can sell the *same* idea to every person on the planet, and still own it. This is immense power.
Also, once you've sold your chair, the person you sold it to owns it. Similarly, the person to whom you sell an idea owns it. So does the next person you sell it to. Once you are exposed to an idea, that idea is yours. "Intellectual property" can be owned by millions of people simultaneously.
To encourage people to sell and share their ideas with others, instead of keeping the ideas to themselves, the framers of the Constitution allowed idea creators a limited time in which to profit from the idea. After that limited time had passed, the idea would enter the public domain, where anyone could do anything with it.
"Intellectual property" enjoys a lot more protection, and gives owners a lot more power, than physical property. It must be balanced against the needs of the society.
There are a lot of things that people are doing to make open-source systems simpler and more powerful. Go to a site like sourcexchange or cosource that lists things that people would like to have done, find (or add) something that you would *love* to see done, and sign up as a sponsor.
I would love to be able to earn a living by designing and writing good free software programs. I would love to be able to look in the help wanted ads to find a job or two that ask for knowledge of linux systems, instead of the dozens that require windows. I would love to be able to have access to linux machines wherever I go.
I haven't booted into windows on my home machine in a couple of months, now. A couple of days ago, I needed to use an on-campus machine for a few minutes, and the only things they have are windows machines. I was truly astonished at how bad windows is. I don't think that I can go back to it. I know I don't want to.
There are some things that I miss, though, things I think Linux needs. Things like consistency--for instance, having key-bindings that work the same from application to application (why need to remember five or ten different ways to save a file?). Linux offers the flexibility to go even further, though. We should be able to come up with a way to choose our own key bindings, that work consistently on every linux app we use.
I would love to see Linux become the standard, and improve from there.
We need to come up with an easy-to-implement protocol to modify key-bindings on the fly. It should also be globalized (at least partially, for common functions...). There is no reason to have to remember five or ten different accelerators just to save a file.
Prior art is definately not enough. What's needed is a giant defensive organization (maybe the FSF...) that holds hundreds, or even thousands, of patents; something that is litterally impossible to get around. Then when EvilCorp, Inc. sues *anyone* to enforce a software patent, they get hit with a massive lawsuit for infringing on ten or twenty patents owned by the free software community.
It's the only way I see to effectively eliminate the idiocy that is software patents.
Imagine that if Amazon.com sued to protect it's one-click shopping patent, they got hit with a lawsuit protecting the shttp: protocol, and another for "selling over the internet", and another for "method to accept credit cards over the internet", and so on.
I've sent this message to my father, hoping that it will help him to understand what is going on here (at least, what I think is going on here). I'd appreciate any feedback. I've quoted bits and pieces of the discussion, here and there...
Hi, dad,
Have you been watching the news recently? There have recently been a number of denial-of-service attacks on prominent web sites--Yahoo, Amazon.com, ebay, CNN, microsoft, and a lot more. Over the last couple of days here, the press has been having a field day with talk of the "rogue hacker" menace. (you know the type.... "Hackers can steal your credit card information...", "Hackers can see your bank accounts, or medical records, or ", "Hackers will kick your dog...". Frankly, I'm getting a little bit nervous.
I want to tell you a little bit about what has been going on in the technical world, so that you won't be dragged along by the hype (hah... as if you would be;-)
First, I've got to say that this whole thing has really interesting timing. There's a message on the web that I think describes the problem very well...
Let's see...
On January 27th, Clinton said he wants to make electronic "law enforcement" a high priority, in his State of the Union speech.
By January 30th, the *always*-silent National Security Agency suddenly *alleges* very publicly, that its main computers -- that process covert communications interceptions from around the nation and world -- had inexplicably crashed from January 24th to the 28th.
Escalating the issue, in the first week of February, Clinton's budget proposes to spend $240-million to massively expand his undetectable, at-a-keystroke, remote wiretapping facilities, to be able to secretly snoop on any phone in the nation. And half of the $240-million is Defense Dept loot -- perhaps from secret NSA appropriations (after all, wiretapping is what they *do*!). Note that another President thought that wiretapping his political opponents was so important that he risked -- and lost -- his presidency, trying to install them.
By February 7th, the world's most prominant online information service -- Yahoo (I don't count AOL as a service:-) -- suffers a massive attack and crashes for hours.
By February 8th, Missouri and Oklahoma phone systems have crashed. It illustrates the horrors of vile cyber-terrorists, but without bothering "important" people in Washington or on the East and West coasts.
Now, also on the 8th, the normally *very* reliable mail-server at Concentric Networks -- a large national ISP -- has been refusing to respond for more than an hour.
What better way to "prove" the need for massively expanded government surveillance, and create a fenzy of support for it?!
Suddenly crackers seem to have become far better than any have ever been before. But then again -- what organization has the best computer and phone-system crackers in the world?! There is "No Such Agency."
--jim-the-paranoic
On slashdot, quite a few people are nervous about it (and can see the *technical* flaws). Check out this recent posting:
Give me a break! 50 ~possible~ addresses? I've worked on a large network (approx 10k nodes) and it never took more that 1/2 hour to find a NIC that was spewing garbage, or one with a duplicate IP. And that was with an old 386 laptop running an old 1992 packet sniffing program!
I'm sorry, but I know what some of these 'companies' are capable of, and they would have to be totally inept to take 4 hours to narrow it down to 50 IP's, and then lose the trace! Only to have it pop up again the next day! Oh! Look there it is again! Hit it with the fuzzy hammer!
It cannot be co-incidence that Prez Clinton wants broader powers for law inforcement; that backdoors will not be included in new internet protocols and that these attacks are ocurring!
These attacks are costing these companies millions and they can't narrow it down!?! Because the man doesn't want it narrowed down!
That's how it begins kids! Fear group X, and let's hunt them down and parade them through town square tarred, feathered and GNU zipped!
Third, I wonder about the sites that have been targeted for the attacks. Simply, they don't make any sense. We geek types definately have some companies on our shit list, but in general, these aren't them. Over the past few months, the only really horrible companies have been etoys.com and the bastards in the movie industry (DVD CCA and MPAA). Also irritating are the recording industry (RIAA) and amazon.com. I think that if the recent attacks were legitimate, these would be the targets.
In December, we were furious at etoys.com for filing a lawsuit against an award winning art group called etoy.com. etoys sued because etoy was too close to their trademarked name, and some people would type in the wrong name and become exposed to art (horror of horrors). The kicker is that etoy.com was on the internet in 1994, but etoys.com didn't exist until 1996. A lot of people were very pissed off about the newcomer suing the old timer for having a similar name... A few crackers tried breaking their systems and such, but it basically went unnoticed. The vast majority just dumped their etoys.com stocks, and publicly announced that the behavior was intolerable. Other investors figured it out, and the share price of etoys.com went from about $80 per share to an all-time low of $15 over the course of the busiest month of the year... etoys.com recently decided to drop their lawsuit.
A number of people (including me) are currently refusing to shop at amazon.com because it received a patent on a particularly obvious little piece of technology, and has been suing to prevent others from using it. The patent is for using a "cookie" (pretty ubiquitous on the web) to automatically send your account information to them when you connect to their web site (basically, so you don't need to log on). Once connected, you can place an order immediately, by just pressing a "buy now" button. They call it one-click shopping. It's a neat trick, but also ridiculously obvious. It's also not that big a deal... boycott, tell your friends about it, complain that the patent office is going insane...
The recording industry really missed the boat. A couple of years ago, they didn't support electronic distribution of music, even though that was the format that people increasingly wanted. It's a lot more convenient to carry a zip disk or cd full of MP3s than it is to carry around a stack of CDs. Finding no support from the recording industry, people started converting their CDs to an MP3 format, and sharing them. Anyway, the recording industry has been making lots of lawsuit type noises recently, in a mindless effort to stuff the djini back into the bottle. They're also trying to introduce a new music format (SDMI) that can't be copied (and will most likely die out within a couple of years). They're largely dismissed as irrelevant, but if you do get a chance to buy an SDMI-compliant device, AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE!
The biggest threat I see to personal liberty right now is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and it's cohort, the DVD CCA. Every real hacker I know is absolutely furious at them. If the denial-of-service attacks on the internet right now were from individual hackers (or even a small group), the MPAA (and it's member companies) logically would have been the first ones hit (maybe even the ONLY group hit). Their story gets a little bit involved.
For the past year or so, Linux hackers have been writing a DVD player for Linux. We want to be able to watch our DVD movies on our computers. One technical problem faced by the Linux coders is that DVDs are encrypted, so one of the first things they had to work on was getting data they could read. On July 15, 1999, the Linux Video project (LiVid) released a program that unlocked the DVD, thereby making it readable; work on the project could then progress.
In November, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) threatened a lawsuit against the programmer who wrote the decryption functions. He pulled it off his site, but other people already had it, and quickly started distributing more copies so that it couldn't ever be suppressed. This is when I got my own copy of the software.
Then things started heating up a bit. The DVD-CCA filed suit against dozens of people (plus 500 john-does) to force them to stop distributing the code, even to force them to stop *linking* to places that distribute the code. Of course, the net effect of that was to bury the sites that had it with requests from people who wanted it.
A couple of weeks ago, the shit hit the fan. The MPAA won an injunction against some people who posted the code on the internet, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The judge specifically ruled that the DCMA (which prohibits the publication of computer programs designed to circumvent copy protection) is constitutional, and does not infringe on the defendants' free speech rights. He also suggested that computer source code is not ordinarily a form of expression, and that, even if it were, Congress could regulate it in order to serve other interests, such as the economic interest of copyright holders.
The DCMA was passed overwhemingly by Congress in 1998 (unanimously by the Senate, voice-vote by the House), and it guts most of our fair-use rights. Under traditional law, copyright does not give copyright-holders the ability to restrict you in certain ways, such as restricting the sale of books you've bought (the "first sale" doctrine) or making a backup copy, or copying a small part of a work ("fair use"). Technology has now given copyright holders the technical ability to restrict those things, and the DMCA makes it a FELONY to produce a device which can circumvent them. So in theory, you have the right to resell or copy work you've bought - but technology can prevent that, and if you circumvent the technology, you're breaking the law. "Fair use" was never explicitly eliminated, but it effectively was.
The punishment for circumventing a copy-protection mechanism is roughly on par with murder.
This is bad for all sorts of reasons.
Obviously.
We can talk more about this if you're interested.
My point is, we hacker types are absolutely furious with the MPAA, and with the DVD-CCA. We're trying to beat them in court (good luck on that one -- our opponent is one of the biggest industries on the planet, with virtually limitless resources), by boycotting movies (and, especially, DVDs), by posting the code EVERYWHERE (so that it can never be suppressed), by coming up with anonymous distribution and code-breaking mechanisms (so that the next time an industry releases an encrypted format, we can all work on breaking it quickly, in safety), and everything else we can think of.
Bottom line, it's ridiculous to believe that ANY hacker would target Yahoo or CNN instead of the MPAA. It just ain't gonna happen. Something else is going on here, and I think it has to do with massively swaying public opinion against us, the dreaded hackers.
I could be wrong. This situation might not be a setup. But it sure as hell smells like one.
--Joel
btw, I'd be glad to e-mail you a copy of the DeCSS decryption code if you'd like. It needs to get into as many hands as possible...
There are a few I can think of, off the top of my head. I'm from a Windows/Macintosh background, so some of these probably exist in closed-source unix environments...
Open-source projects like bind and sendmail are both pretty incredible, and didn't really have any peers when they began. Now, they bind the web together.
When you start looking at the user interface, KDE and Gnome have a lot of advantages over Windows or the Mac. I love the concept of virtual consoles which give you plenty of desktop space for applications. I also love being able to customize the environment completely with Enlightenment. Linux still has some ease-of-use stuff to work out, but it's way ahead of the rest in customization.
One of the things I hate most about the loony-right fringe is that it is virtually impervious to satire. ACs article would be a magnificent satire if it weren't for the huge number of people who actually believe it. Even worse, no matter how insane the concept, no matter how tenuous it's link to the christian bible is, you will find people who believe it completely.
I have had discussions with born-again christians who honestly believe the planet is just 6,000 years old, who believe that dinosaur bones are a satanic plot to hide the truth, who believe that mentally ill people are actually possessed by demons, and so on. Makes it tough to figure out whether someone here is honestly discussing their beliefs, or just trolling.
fyi, when Dan cracked the machine, he just made a couple of tiny changes to the credits page (currently online at http://crack.linuxppc.org/credits.shtml). He changed the number of successful cracks to 1, and added this line to the bottom of the credits: "And Daniel Jacobowitz, because good security isn't always good enough."
Hush now, baby, don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing Ooooh babe, oooh babe, oooh babe Of course mam'll help build the wall.
Hush now, baby, don't you cry, Mama's gonna check out all your girl friends for you Mama won't let anyone dirty get through Mama's gonna wait up till you come in Mama will always find out where you've been Mama's gonna keep you healthy and clean Ooooh babe, ooooh babe, ooooh babe You'll always be a baby to me.
Hush now, baby, don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing Ooooh babe, oooh babe, oooh babe Of course mam'll help build the wall. Hush now, baby, don't you cry, Mama's gonna check out all your girl friends for you Mama won't let anyone dirty get through Mama's gonna wait up till you come in Mama will always find out where you've been Mama's gonna keep you healthy and clean Ooooh babe, ooooh babe, ooooh babe You'll always be a baby to me. (mother, did it need to be so high?)
I agree that Project Gutenberg is a great thing, and I also think it's wonderful that it's getting some additional publicity.
It definately does need to have markup codes, though. I'd personally prefer XML, because it would allow the documents to include book-relevant tags like <chapter number> and such, which would make the e-texts a great deal more machine-readable, and accessible for everyone. (in addition, it would make it a lot easier to re-publish the texts.)
I design and typeset books for a living, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that it's a lot easier to remove or process existing codes than it is to insert them. A machine can easily reformat a marked-up document; if plain text is wanted, a one-line perl script can be written to remove everything within angle brackets. The reverse is not the case. Computers are not currently smart enough to know where to add tags, so right now, every single tag in a document has to be inserted by a person.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Until I got used to the directory structure, it looked like it came straight from hell. Even now that I'm used to it, I think it bears all the signs of being a very old system that has had pieces added to it in a patchwork fashion without any thought of how they would affect the whole.
/system (the place where all the "complex stuff" lives)
/bin
/boot
/dev
/etc
/misc
/proc
/tmp
/var
/programs (maybe even /program files, but that's probably stupid...)
/system --> /system/bin
/distro (currently /usr/bin)
/local (/usr/local/bin)
/root (/sbin)
/shared
/documentation
/fonts
/icons
/graphics
/whatever...
/home
/whoever...
/.etc (for all personal configuration files...)
/disks
/floppy
/cdrom
/zip
/whatever....
/root
/system directory would also make the entire structure more accessible, hiding the complexity enough that the entire operating system would appear more approachable to normal people, while being almost as easy to access as the existing system by the pros.
I'd love to see the directory structure modified a bit (in a planned and logical fashion) to fix this. I'd love to see a system with a directory structure that buried some of the internals a little bit, and made the relationships between subsystems a bit clearer. I think a great directory structure would look something like this:
The point is to put files in places where normal people are going to be looking for them. Burying some of the more advanced stuff in the
Obviously, the exact structure should be tested pretty rigorously for usability by a wide number of people, from a wide number of backgrounds (Windows, Mac, Unix, computer newbies, etc.). There's no reason that Linux can't be the most approachable and powerful operating system in existence, it's improving constantly, but I think it will take a few major changes like this to make it happen.
I do agree that slashdot et. al. didn't handle this issue as well as they could have. Some announcement that they were working on a book before its publication would have been nice. We could have given them thousands of additional comments to choose from. ;-)
I'm also not sure whether the book is published under an open-content license. If it isn't, it should be.
I've added this to my user bio:
I grant permission to anyone to reprint my comments in part or whole in any form, with or without contacting me. Anything I post here can be considered public domain. Use it as you will.
Actually, you have a lot *more* power and rights to the works of your mind than to the works of your body, and this has been the case since the very beginning of copyright law, due to the nature of ideas and intellectual works.
Think about it. If you make a chair, you can use it all you want, but the instant you sell it, you no longer have any rights to it at all. It belongs to someone else. If you want something to sit on, you have to make another chair.
Ideas and other works of your mind follow different rules. Sure, you can come up with an idea, and use it all that you want, rattle it around in your own brain, never revealing it to anyone else. It's *yours*, and yours alone, and you can take it with you to the grave, secure in the knowledge that you are the sole owner of your idea.
You can also sell the idea, like you can sell your chair. But, unlike the situation when you've sold the chair, once you've sold an idea to someone, you *still* have it, and you can still sell it to someone else. You can sell the *same* idea to every person on the planet, and still own it. This is immense power.
Also, once you've sold your chair, the person you sold it to owns it. Similarly, the person to whom you sell an idea owns it. So does the next person you sell it to. Once you are exposed to an idea, that idea is yours. "Intellectual property" can be owned by millions of people simultaneously.
To encourage people to sell and share their ideas with others, instead of keeping the ideas to themselves, the framers of the Constitution allowed idea creators a limited time in which to profit from the idea. After that limited time had passed, the idea would enter the public domain, where anyone could do anything with it.
"Intellectual property" enjoys a lot more protection, and gives owners a lot more power, than physical property. It must be balanced against the needs of the society.
There are a lot of things that people are doing to make open-source systems simpler and more powerful. Go to a site like sourcexchange or cosource that lists things that people would like to have done, find (or add) something that you would *love* to see done, and sign up as a sponsor.
I haven't booted into windows on my home machine in a couple of months, now. A couple of days ago, I needed to use an on-campus machine for a few minutes, and the only things they have are windows machines. I was truly astonished at how bad windows is. I don't think that I can go back to it. I know I don't want to.
There are some things that I miss, though, things I think Linux needs. Things like consistency--for instance, having key-bindings that work the same from application to application (why need to remember five or ten different ways to save a file?). Linux offers the flexibility to go even further, though. We should be able to come up with a way to choose our own key bindings, that work consistently on every linux app we use.
I would love to see Linux become the standard, and improve from there.
We need to come up with an easy-to-implement protocol to modify key-bindings on the fly. It should also be globalized (at least partially, for common functions...). There is no reason to have to remember five or ten different accelerators just to save a file.
It's the only way I see to effectively eliminate the idiocy that is software patents.
Imagine that if Amazon.com sued to protect it's one-click shopping patent, they got hit with a lawsuit protecting the shttp: protocol, and another for "selling over the internet", and another for "method to accept credit cards over the internet", and so on.
Hi, dad,
Have you been watching the news recently? There have recently been a number of denial-of-service attacks on prominent web sites--Yahoo, Amazon.com, ebay, CNN, microsoft, and a lot more. Over the last couple of days here, the press has been having a field day with talk of the "rogue hacker" menace. (you know the type.... "Hackers can steal your credit card information...", "Hackers can see your bank accounts, or medical records, or ", "Hackers will kick your dog...". Frankly, I'm getting a little bit nervous.
I want to tell you a little bit about what has been going on in the technical world, so that you won't be dragged along by the hype (hah... as if you would be ;-)
First, I've got to say that this whole thing has really interesting timing. There's a message on the web that I think describes the problem very well...
On slashdot, quite a few people are nervous about it (and can see the *technical* flaws). Check out this recent posting:Third, I wonder about the sites that have been targeted for the attacks. Simply, they don't make any sense. We geek types definately have some companies on our shit list, but in general, these aren't them. Over the past few months, the only really horrible companies have been etoys.com and the bastards in the movie industry (DVD CCA and MPAA). Also irritating are the recording industry (RIAA) and amazon.com. I think that if the recent attacks were legitimate, these would be the targets.
In December, we were furious at etoys.com for filing a lawsuit against an award winning art group called etoy.com. etoys sued because etoy was too close to their trademarked name, and some people would type in the wrong name and become exposed to art (horror of horrors). The kicker is that etoy.com was on the internet in 1994, but etoys.com didn't exist until 1996. A lot of people were very pissed off about the newcomer suing the old timer for having a similar name... A few crackers tried breaking their systems and such, but it basically went unnoticed. The vast majority just dumped their etoys.com stocks, and publicly announced that the behavior was intolerable. Other investors figured it out, and the share price of etoys.com went from about $80 per share to an all-time low of $15 over the course of the busiest month of the year... etoys.com recently decided to drop their lawsuit.
A number of people (including me) are currently refusing to shop at amazon.com because it received a patent on a particularly obvious little piece of technology, and has been suing to prevent others from using it. The patent is for using a "cookie" (pretty ubiquitous on the web) to automatically send your account information to them when you connect to their web site (basically, so you don't need to log on). Once connected, you can place an order immediately, by just pressing a "buy now" button. They call it one-click shopping. It's a neat trick, but also ridiculously obvious. It's also not that big a deal... boycott, tell your friends about it, complain that the patent office is going insane...
The recording industry really missed the boat. A couple of years ago, they didn't support electronic distribution of music, even though that was the format that people increasingly wanted. It's a lot more convenient to carry a zip disk or cd full of MP3s than it is to carry around a stack of CDs. Finding no support from the recording industry, people started converting their CDs to an MP3 format, and sharing them. Anyway, the recording industry has been making lots of lawsuit type noises recently, in a mindless effort to stuff the djini back into the bottle. They're also trying to introduce a new music format (SDMI) that can't be copied (and will most likely die out within a couple of years). They're largely dismissed as irrelevant, but if you do get a chance to buy an SDMI-compliant device, AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE!
The biggest threat I see to personal liberty right now is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and it's cohort, the DVD CCA. Every real hacker I know is absolutely furious at them. If the denial-of-service attacks on the internet right now were from individual hackers (or even a small group), the MPAA (and it's member companies) logically would have been the first ones hit (maybe even the ONLY group hit). Their story gets a little bit involved.
For the past year or so, Linux hackers have been writing a DVD player for Linux. We want to be able to watch our DVD movies on our computers. One technical problem faced by the Linux coders is that DVDs are encrypted, so one of the first things they had to work on was getting data they could read. On July 15, 1999, the Linux Video project (LiVid) released a program that unlocked the DVD, thereby making it readable; work on the project could then progress.
In November, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) threatened a lawsuit against the programmer who wrote the decryption functions. He pulled it off his site, but other people already had it, and quickly started distributing more copies so that it couldn't ever be suppressed. This is when I got my own copy of the software.
Then things started heating up a bit. The DVD-CCA filed suit against dozens of people (plus 500 john-does) to force them to stop distributing the code, even to force them to stop *linking* to places that distribute the code. Of course, the net effect of that was to bury the sites that had it with requests from people who wanted it.
A couple of weeks ago, the shit hit the fan. The MPAA won an injunction against some people who posted the code on the internet, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The judge specifically ruled that the DCMA (which prohibits the publication of computer programs designed to circumvent copy protection) is constitutional, and does not infringe on the defendants' free speech rights. He also suggested that computer source code is not ordinarily a form of expression, and that, even if it were, Congress could regulate it in order to serve other interests, such as the economic interest of copyright holders.
The DCMA was passed overwhemingly by Congress in 1998 (unanimously by the Senate, voice-vote by the House), and it guts most of our fair-use rights. Under traditional law, copyright does not give copyright-holders the ability to restrict you in certain ways, such as restricting the sale of books you've bought (the "first sale" doctrine) or making a backup copy, or copying a small part of a work ("fair use"). Technology has now given copyright holders the technical ability to restrict those things, and the DMCA makes it a FELONY to produce a device which can circumvent them. So in theory, you have the right to resell or copy work you've bought - but technology can prevent that, and if you circumvent the technology, you're breaking the law. "Fair use" was never explicitly eliminated, but it effectively was.
The punishment for circumventing a copy-protection mechanism is roughly on par with murder.
This is bad for all sorts of reasons.
Obviously.
We can talk more about this if you're interested.
My point is, we hacker types are absolutely furious with the MPAA, and with the DVD-CCA. We're trying to beat them in court (good luck on that one -- our opponent is one of the biggest industries on the planet, with virtually limitless resources), by boycotting movies (and, especially, DVDs), by posting the code EVERYWHERE (so that it can never be suppressed), by coming up with anonymous distribution and code-breaking mechanisms (so that the next time an industry releases an encrypted format, we can all work on breaking it quickly, in safety), and everything else we can think of.
Bottom line, it's ridiculous to believe that ANY hacker would target Yahoo or CNN instead of the MPAA. It just ain't gonna happen. Something else is going on here, and I think it has to do with massively swaying public opinion against us, the dreaded hackers.
I could be wrong. This situation might not be a setup. But it sure as hell smells like one.
--Joel
btw, I'd be glad to e-mail you a copy of the DeCSS decryption code if you'd like. It needs to get into as many hands as possible...
Open-source projects like bind and sendmail are both pretty incredible, and didn't really have any peers when they began. Now, they bind the web together.
When you start looking at the user interface, KDE and Gnome have a lot of advantages over Windows or the Mac. I love the concept of virtual consoles which give you plenty of desktop space for applications. I also love being able to customize the environment completely with Enlightenment. Linux still has some ease-of-use stuff to work out, but it's way ahead of the rest in customization.
I have had discussions with born-again christians who honestly believe the planet is just 6,000 years old, who believe that dinosaur bones are a satanic plot to hide the truth, who believe that mentally ill people are actually possessed by demons, and so on. Makes it tough to figure out whether someone here is honestly discussing their beliefs, or just trolling.
fyi, when Dan cracked the machine, he just made a couple of tiny changes to the credits page (currently online at http://crack.linuxppc.org/credits.shtml). He changed the number of successful cracks to 1, and added this line to the bottom of the credits: "And Daniel Jacobowitz, because good security isn't always good enough."
Hush now, baby, don't you cry
Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
Ooooh babe, oooh babe, oooh babe
Of course mam'll help build the wall.
Hush now, baby, don't you cry,
Mama's gonna check out all your girl friends for you
Mama won't let anyone dirty get through
Mama's gonna wait up till you come in
Mama will always find out where you've been
Mama's gonna keep you healthy and clean
Ooooh babe, ooooh babe, ooooh babe
You'll always be a baby to me.
(mother, did it need to be so high?)
Hush now, baby, don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing Ooooh babe, oooh babe, oooh babe Of course mam'll help build the wall. Hush now, baby, don't you cry, Mama's gonna check out all your girl friends for you Mama won't let anyone dirty get through Mama's gonna wait up till you come in Mama will always find out where you've been Mama's gonna keep you healthy and clean Ooooh babe, ooooh babe, ooooh babe You'll always be a baby to me. (mother, did it need to be so high?)
It definately does need to have markup codes, though. I'd personally prefer XML, because it would allow the documents to include book-relevant tags like <chapter number> and such, which would make the e-texts a great deal more machine-readable, and accessible for everyone. (in addition, it would make it a lot easier to re-publish the texts.)
I design and typeset books for a living, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that it's a lot easier to remove or process existing codes than it is to insert them. A machine can easily reformat a marked-up document; if plain text is wanted, a one-line perl script can be written to remove everything within angle brackets. The reverse is not the case. Computers are not currently smart enough to know where to add tags, so right now, every single tag in a document has to be inserted by a person.
All too often, that person is me. ;-)