Theoretically, a copyright exists the moment a document is created, which is to say that if I have a half-written story somehwere which someone takes and finishes, I still have copyright to the original story and they have violated my copyright without including the section I wrote via attribution a.k.a. without my express consent. Now, copyright law was a lovely idea when the world was traversable in months, only a small fraction of the population could read and write, and everything was committed to paper, but the dawn on fast travel, the Internet, and digital media makes it iffy, because it requires much more effort to establish that a work is in fact yours to begin with and then the possibility a work gets onto the Internet will cause so many copies to be created that anything short of a global corporation is going to have the resources to sue everyone for infringement. The gist of the article is simple -- the old way of handling copyright (and by extension, intellectual property) is ineffectual at best.
The Moon is suddenly becoming a hot zone, with the Japanese and Chinese having satellites orbiting it and the United States thinking about a return, both publicly and via private-sector initiatives. Makes you wonder who will discover the Monolith in Tycho first...
How can you be shocked? This is government we're talking about... doesn't matter the country. As soon as you give one group of people anywhere the power to run the whole show, they break down into three categories:
Power Brokers - the people who actually run things (and not necessarily having been elected to do so)
Bureaucrats - the paper pushers, who created the red tape that keeps anyone from actually know what's going on or where the money came from/went to
Grunts - the people who do the actual work, usually for very little money compared to 1) and 2), who will do things the way that's easiest, despite the rules
I think this mess happened due to 3):
"Contrary to all HMRC standing proceedures two password protected discs containing a full copy of HMRC's entire data in relation to the payment of child benefit was sent to the National Audit Office by HMRC's internal postal system operated by the courier TNT.
"The package was not recorded or registered."
Some guy/gal knew the data had to get out and couldn't be bothered to send it via courier or registered mail. Plopped the discs in an envelope, licked it, stamped it, and dumped it in the post.
Yes... destroy all the records! Leave 'em guessing!
Seriously, it's preposterous to talk of data retention strategies and forcing people to be part of national data banks when there's absolutely no talk about how you're going to make it secure. I would like to think a data center where personal data for users/citizens is kept would be run more like Fort Knox than the McDonald's Drive-Thru.
If all you do is crop and polish the occasional JPEG from your digital camera, you might not notice. But if you're any kind of professional, Gimp is a joke.
But isn't the point? Most average users will only want a photo manip program to clean up their digital photos and help them store them. Photoshop is bloat for anyone except the advanced user -- even Elements seems a bit overdone. The idea is to sell OSS to people and show them that it has the functionality they need without all the excess that they don't. Most average users aren't going to need one-one-hundredth of what is in Photoshop, whereas Gimp may allow them to easily clean up their personal photos and send them out at Christmastime.
Didn't this happen with Windows 2000? And Windows XP? Of course nobody wants to change to Vista! Everybody has an Windows OS that's working for them right now, they've invested a lot of time, effort, and money into it to get it working, and they don't want have to go though all the headaches with a brand new OS. Vista's problems aside, this just make sense from an IT standpoint -- changing to a new OS it time and money intensive.
"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding.
He should have asked the ice man, the milk man, the telephone operator, etc. They probably thought their industries would never change, until one day they were handed pink slips. When they walked outside, the world had changed. That's the constant -- change. That's a CEO's job -- to anticipate, recognize, and plan for, change. Not only is he a little late in recognizing this (the damage that's been done isn't going to be undone anytime soon), but he hasn't done a very good job doing his job.
I am not confusing anything. In fact, the tech community in general cannot agree on a solid definition of hacking. After all, he did not "hack" anything -- e.g. brute force his way into any system. He set up a Tor node and sniffed some packets, information that was already released into the wild via network. He was able to take this data and pull out pertinent information -- which might be part of the more popular definition of a "hack". The fact is, the word "hack", "hacker", or "hacking" should not be used at all. If he is a security consultant, then he explored a network vulnerability, published his results, and apparently drew the ire of foreign governments for showing them that using Tor for secret communications was not a good idea. A "hacker" as I define it, would have taken that data and used it for nefarious purposes, which he clearly did not.
No more than anybody else's... listen, the guy just exposed a major security flaw that has an impact on diplomatic communications all over the world. On the one hand, the guy's doing a job no one else thought to do, and to let governments know that their secrets are easily tapped. Governments should be funding his work, to see if he can come up with a solution to the problem. But being governments, they're a bit paranoid (even the Swedes) and heavy-handed. This guys knows about a security vulnerability -- what else does he know? So they drag him in and give him the "treatment".
The Swedish hacker who perpetrated the so-called hack of the year...
From the article, paragraph 2:
Dan Egerstad, a security consultant, intercepted data carried over a global communications network...
Emphasis mine. So what is he? If he's a hacker, the raid is just desserts. If he's a security consultant, and he's exposed this flaw, he's being persecuted. Frankly, I don't know what he really is, but it seems like the press is schizophrenic on this issue. It just goes to show that when it comes to technology, the mainstream press is a bit low on clarity and high on sensationalism.
Which goes back to the question of: is this an actual document or something someone crafted? When you think about it, both sides have a reason to use dis-information. If you wanted to give the United States a global black eye, then this is just the kind of document you'd want "leaked". And of course, the U.S. Government is in the unenviable position of either a) denying it's a real document and having no one believe them or b) confirming it is an actual document and facing withering ridicule. And given their track record of late, neither answer is going to be believed.
I would think they would not implement the AT&T team's solution given it did not reach the 10% mark, however AT&T has the lead in reaching that mark unless someone comes up with some quantum leap in design./p.
It's hard to say. On the one hand, it could be that the current system is good enough that improvements are minutely incremental, though 8+% is pretty good if you ask me. On the other, it may be that the system is so fraught with dependencies and/or the relationships are so variable that it's hard to make gigantic leaps in sophistication. Look at Amazon's recommendation system: pretty good overall but still makes some egregious errors. Add the tagging system to the mix and it's possible to lead the recommendations astray. I don't know how Netflix works (I don't have to watch movies on TV, let alone rent them), but I have to think it would be very similar to Amazon.
I really don't think this is a case of corruption, so much as one of protectionism. Listen, gambling web sites are only a threat because most of them operate offshore and therefore the suckers who use them are funneling their money to small Caribbean islands, not into the coffers of the States or the Federal Government. So, here's a bill that seeks to build casinos in Massachusetts while at the same time preventing gambling dollars from slipping the country. You have a State government trying to fund its programs off the backs of the poor (not unlike what happens with lotteries). It's not overt corruption, unless of course some of the new MA casino money makes its way into the pockets of the governor. This bears watching.
Yes, but you're asking Facebook to do this... which is kind of like putting Barney Fife into "Die Hard" and expecting the same results. You can't stop the pervs from thinking their thoughts and don't think for a second that if they had their access cut off to Facebook, they'd suddenly be out of the child loving business -- they'd just get out their trench coats and bags of candy and head back to the streets. At least then the cops might have a better shot at them.
This is just another "think of the children" moment and will continue to inflame the debate over social networking services. There will be the chorus of "if you don't like it, don't use it" followed by "about time someone makes them clean up their act", concluded with "someone has to be held accountable".
Look people, as long as Facebook, MySpace, et. al. do not go to extraordinary lengths to screen applicants (e.g. send in a physical application form along with corroborating evidence, doing background checks), then anyone using those services takes their chances, not unlike soliciting a prostitute or buying merchandise off of eBay. If parents are so worried about their minor children using these services and falling under the thrall of malevolent lotahrios, then they need to monitor (or outright block) their children's network access and hold accountable others who might provide those services to their children.
This is like the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike to hold back the flood, while a 30-foot crack in the dam starts spraying water. It looks good on paper but any hardcore perv will find ways around things and keep right on doing what they do until they get arrested.
You're forgetting... the original Enterprise used toggle switches, especially in Engineering. You can bet Scotty wouldn't trust just any old switch to fiddle with antimatter.
When all is said and done, Google is actually not a charismatic company that can make this new platform happen in a big way. Google hopes that people will code new applications for the phone. People have had eons to program for the Windows smartphones and nothing has come of it. What's so different now?
What? How does that compute? And why would he compare programming Windows smartphones to the Google phone? First off, the phone does not exist yet -- Google is just trying to create buzz and stir up interest. I think they already have a pretty good start on this, and won't roll it out until they've worked with a few other companies to stack the phone with features/functionality. As he does far too often, Dvorak is blowing smoke. He's not to be taken seriously as a technology predictor.
When I lived in Vermont as a kid, he was someone to look up to. He's been a Senator for a very long time, and I believe his judgment on a great number of issues has been without reproach. This, however, appears to be a case where he is out of his league. I also find it disturbing given some information from his Wikipedia entry:
In 2004 Senator Leahy was awarded the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Champion of Freedom Award for efforts in information privacy and open government.
So on the one hand he's trying to champion the people's cause. On the other hand:
In March, 2004, Leahy and Orrin Hatch introduced the Pirate Act backed by the RIAA as part of an on-going crusade against Internet file sharing.
In July, 2004, Leahy and Orrin Hatch introduced the INDUCE Act aimed at combating copyright infringement.
I know it's meant to be funny, but strangely it's one of the reasons I haven't ditched my land-line to go all wireless. Mobile phones, especially those that try to do everything, aren't particularly good at anything and the more things you cram onto them, the greater their vulnerability profile. My wife just traded her old broken-down phone for a T-Mobile Shadow, and it's not the world's greatest phone (it runs Windows Mobile, but that isn't the root of the problem). The sound quality is horrendous and I haven't tried the MP3 player in it, but I'm not holding out hope.
I don't think we're at the point where phones can handle multiple tasks well, and using one is leaving yourself open to all sorts of mischief.
Grain of truth to this idea. Given the Internet's rate of replication, the fact that anyone can put their information ideas on it, and the fact that the information can be modified and transformed almost at will means that copyright can no longer function as originally intended. Is it possible for a copyright holder to sue the tens of millions of people who may take a piece of work and replicate/reproduce it? Even a large corporation doesn't have infinite resources. This is what the RIAA is trying to do with music, but it's finding the road pretty tough to slog over.
The problem is your average consumer is a sheep -- Pink Floyd knew what they were talking about. You can't get enough people interested in the idea (voting is important, DRM is bad, copyright is broken, etc.), because they don't really see how it impacts them... until it does. And even then, only a few people go out and bang the war drum to try and stir up resistance. When we're talking hundreds of millions of consumers being affected but only thousands stepping up to do anything about it, you're looking at an uphill fight.
Slashdot Mirror
Theoretically, a copyright exists the moment a document is created, which is to say that if I have a half-written story somehwere which someone takes and finishes, I still have copyright to the original story and they have violated my copyright without including the section I wrote via attribution a.k.a. without my express consent. Now, copyright law was a lovely idea when the world was traversable in months, only a small fraction of the population could read and write, and everything was committed to paper, but the dawn on fast travel, the Internet, and digital media makes it iffy, because it requires much more effort to establish that a work is in fact yours to begin with and then the possibility a work gets onto the Internet will cause so many copies to be created that anything short of a global corporation is going to have the resources to sue everyone for infringement. The gist of the article is simple -- the old way of handling copyright (and by extension, intellectual property) is ineffectual at best.
The Moon is suddenly becoming a hot zone, with the Japanese and Chinese having satellites orbiting it and the United States thinking about a return, both publicly and via private-sector initiatives. Makes you wonder who will discover the Monolith in Tycho first...
How can you be shocked? This is government we're talking about... doesn't matter the country. As soon as you give one group of people anywhere the power to run the whole show, they break down into three categories:
I think this mess happened due to 3):
"Contrary to all HMRC standing proceedures two password protected discs containing a full copy of HMRC's entire data in relation to the payment of child benefit was sent to the National Audit Office by HMRC's internal postal system operated by the courier TNT."The package was not recorded or registered."
Some guy/gal knew the data had to get out and couldn't be bothered to send it via courier or registered mail. Plopped the discs in an envelope, licked it, stamped it, and dumped it in the post.
Yes... destroy all the records! Leave 'em guessing!
Seriously, it's preposterous to talk of data retention strategies and forcing people to be part of national data banks when there's absolutely no talk about how you're going to make it secure. I would like to think a data center where personal data for users/citizens is kept would be run more like Fort Knox than the McDonald's Drive-Thru.
But isn't the point? Most average users will only want a photo manip program to clean up their digital photos and help them store them. Photoshop is bloat for anyone except the advanced user -- even Elements seems a bit overdone. The idea is to sell OSS to people and show them that it has the functionality they need without all the excess that they don't. Most average users aren't going to need one-one-hundredth of what is in Photoshop, whereas Gimp may allow them to easily clean up their personal photos and send them out at Christmastime.
Didn't this happen with Windows 2000? And Windows XP? Of course nobody wants to change to Vista! Everybody has an Windows OS that's working for them right now, they've invested a lot of time, effort, and money into it to get it working, and they don't want have to go though all the headaches with a brand new OS. Vista's problems aside, this just make sense from an IT standpoint -- changing to a new OS it time and money intensive.
He should have asked the ice man, the milk man, the telephone operator, etc. They probably thought their industries would never change, until one day they were handed pink slips. When they walked outside, the world had changed. That's the constant -- change. That's a CEO's job -- to anticipate, recognize, and plan for, change. Not only is he a little late in recognizing this (the damage that's been done isn't going to be undone anytime soon), but he hasn't done a very good job doing his job.
I am not confusing anything. In fact, the tech community in general cannot agree on a solid definition of hacking. After all, he did not "hack" anything -- e.g. brute force his way into any system. He set up a Tor node and sniffed some packets, information that was already released into the wild via network. He was able to take this data and pull out pertinent information -- which might be part of the more popular definition of a "hack". The fact is, the word "hack", "hacker", or "hacking" should not be used at all. If he is a security consultant, then he explored a network vulnerability, published his results, and apparently drew the ire of foreign governments for showing them that using Tor for secret communications was not a good idea. A "hacker" as I define it, would have taken that data and used it for nefarious purposes, which he clearly did not.
I don't usually reply to my own stuff, but here's Wired's report on the raid and what Egerstad actually did.
No more than anybody else's... listen, the guy just exposed a major security flaw that has an impact on diplomatic communications all over the world. On the one hand, the guy's doing a job no one else thought to do, and to let governments know that their secrets are easily tapped. Governments should be funding his work, to see if he can come up with a solution to the problem. But being governments, they're a bit paranoid (even the Swedes) and heavy-handed. This guys knows about a security vulnerability -- what else does he know? So they drag him in and give him the "treatment".
From the article, paragraph 1:
The Swedish hacker who perpetrated the so-called hack of the year...From the article, paragraph 2:
Dan Egerstad, a security consultant, intercepted data carried over a global communications network...Emphasis mine. So what is he? If he's a hacker, the raid is just desserts. If he's a security consultant, and he's exposed this flaw, he's being persecuted. Frankly, I don't know what he really is, but it seems like the press is schizophrenic on this issue. It just goes to show that when it comes to technology, the mainstream press is a bit low on clarity and high on sensationalism.
Which goes back to the question of: is this an actual document or something someone crafted? When you think about it, both sides have a reason to use dis-information. If you wanted to give the United States a global black eye, then this is just the kind of document you'd want "leaked". And of course, the U.S. Government is in the unenviable position of either a) denying it's a real document and having no one believe them or b) confirming it is an actual document and facing withering ridicule. And given their track record of late, neither answer is going to be believed.
I would think they would not implement the AT&T team's solution given it did not reach the 10% mark, however AT&T has the lead in reaching that mark unless someone comes up with some quantum leap in design./p.
It's hard to say. On the one hand, it could be that the current system is good enough that improvements are minutely incremental, though 8+% is pretty good if you ask me. On the other, it may be that the system is so fraught with dependencies and/or the relationships are so variable that it's hard to make gigantic leaps in sophistication. Look at Amazon's recommendation system: pretty good overall but still makes some egregious errors. Add the tagging system to the mix and it's possible to lead the recommendations astray. I don't know how Netflix works (I don't have to watch movies on TV, let alone rent them), but I have to think it would be very similar to Amazon.
I really don't think this is a case of corruption, so much as one of protectionism. Listen, gambling web sites are only a threat because most of them operate offshore and therefore the suckers who use them are funneling their money to small Caribbean islands, not into the coffers of the States or the Federal Government. So, here's a bill that seeks to build casinos in Massachusetts while at the same time preventing gambling dollars from slipping the country. You have a State government trying to fund its programs off the backs of the poor (not unlike what happens with lotteries). It's not overt corruption, unless of course some of the new MA casino money makes its way into the pockets of the governor. This bears watching.
I was thinking of Keith Laumer's "Bolo" stories actually... how long till we have a completely self-aware tank?
Yes, but you're asking Facebook to do this... which is kind of like putting Barney Fife into "Die Hard" and expecting the same results. You can't stop the pervs from thinking their thoughts and don't think for a second that if they had their access cut off to Facebook, they'd suddenly be out of the child loving business -- they'd just get out their trench coats and bags of candy and head back to the streets. At least then the cops might have a better shot at them.
This is just another "think of the children" moment and will continue to inflame the debate over social networking services. There will be the chorus of "if you don't like it, don't use it" followed by "about time someone makes them clean up their act", concluded with "someone has to be held accountable".
Look people, as long as Facebook, MySpace, et. al. do not go to extraordinary lengths to screen applicants (e.g. send in a physical application form along with corroborating evidence, doing background checks), then anyone using those services takes their chances, not unlike soliciting a prostitute or buying merchandise off of eBay. If parents are so worried about their minor children using these services and falling under the thrall of malevolent lotahrios, then they need to monitor (or outright block) their children's network access and hold accountable others who might provide those services to their children.
This is like the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike to hold back the flood, while a 30-foot crack in the dam starts spraying water. It looks good on paper but any hardcore perv will find ways around things and keep right on doing what they do until they get arrested.
You're forgetting... the original Enterprise used toggle switches, especially in Engineering. You can bet Scotty wouldn't trust just any old switch to fiddle with antimatter.
It was either that or call them Goobs... neither sounds all that appealing.
What? How does that compute? And why would he compare programming Windows smartphones to the Google phone? First off, the phone does not exist yet -- Google is just trying to create buzz and stir up interest. I think they already have a pretty good start on this, and won't roll it out until they've worked with a few other companies to stack the phone with features/functionality. As he does far too often, Dvorak is blowing smoke. He's not to be taken seriously as a technology predictor.
When I lived in Vermont as a kid, he was someone to look up to. He's been a Senator for a very long time, and I believe his judgment on a great number of issues has been without reproach. This, however, appears to be a case where he is out of his league. I also find it disturbing given some information from his Wikipedia entry:
In 2004 Senator Leahy was awarded the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Champion of Freedom Award for efforts in information privacy and open government.So on the one hand he's trying to champion the people's cause. On the other hand:
In March, 2004, Leahy and Orrin Hatch introduced the Pirate Act backed by the RIAA as part of an on-going crusade against Internet file sharing.In July, 2004, Leahy and Orrin Hatch introduced the INDUCE Act aimed at combating copyright infringement.
I know it's meant to be funny, but strangely it's one of the reasons I haven't ditched my land-line to go all wireless. Mobile phones, especially those that try to do everything, aren't particularly good at anything and the more things you cram onto them, the greater their vulnerability profile. My wife just traded her old broken-down phone for a T-Mobile Shadow, and it's not the world's greatest phone (it runs Windows Mobile, but that isn't the root of the problem). The sound quality is horrendous and I haven't tried the MP3 player in it, but I'm not holding out hope.
I don't think we're at the point where phones can handle multiple tasks well, and using one is leaving yourself open to all sorts of mischief.
Grain of truth to this idea. Given the Internet's rate of replication, the fact that anyone can put their information ideas on it, and the fact that the information can be modified and transformed almost at will means that copyright can no longer function as originally intended. Is it possible for a copyright holder to sue the tens of millions of people who may take a piece of work and replicate/reproduce it? Even a large corporation doesn't have infinite resources. This is what the RIAA is trying to do with music, but it's finding the road pretty tough to slog over.
The problem is your average consumer is a sheep -- Pink Floyd knew what they were talking about. You can't get enough people interested in the idea (voting is important, DRM is bad, copyright is broken, etc.), because they don't really see how it impacts them... until it does. And even then, only a few people go out and bang the war drum to try and stir up resistance. When we're talking hundreds of millions of consumers being affected but only thousands stepping up to do anything about it, you're looking at an uphill fight.