Woah!!! Careful, folks...though it's tempting to draw parallels, this ruling has nothing to do with patents! It's about the government's right to exercise prior restraint on speech, specifically source code. The ruling barred the government from restricting Professor Bernstein from posting crypto code on the Web. That's it. The language connnection is certainly important in this context, however...as the ruling says:
"...First, it is not at all obvious that the government's view reflects a proper understanding of source code," the ruling stated. "Source code is not meant solely for the computer, but is rather written in a language intended also for human analysis and understanding."
The ruling went on to say that code is used to convey ideas.
"Cryptographers use source code to express their scientific ideas in much the same way that mathematicians use equations or economists use graphs," the opinion stated. "We conclude that encryption software, in its source code form and as employed by those in the field of cryptography, must be viewed as expressive for First Amendment purposes, and thus is entitled to the protections of the prior restraint doctrine."
That's enormously important! (Well, it will be if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn it. *grin*) Cryptographers (and in the larger sense, all programmers) have been limited in that their "language" (source code) was not given the same protections under the Constitiution as other "languages" (math equations, etc.). This ruling is clear and unambiguous in it's ruling regarding this; an excellent case to put before the Supreme Court. I look forward to the case...
Christian Antkow's (Disruptor) Plan...
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Q3T on Mac First
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On a somewhat unrelated (but highly amusing) topic, Disruptor's plan update mentions that a messageboard experiment that failed...
"It worked fine under a light load, but once people started pounding on it, the entire system slowed to a crawl and it took about a minute to process the CGI http requests, resulting in a really bad cascading effect of backed up processes. Lesson learned: WinCGI (using VB6 to create CGI's) just doesn't cut it under a heavy load. Each CGI process consumed about 4 megs of memory due to the VB6 overhead. Gross and completely unnacceptable. (hardware: Dual P2-333 w/512 megs of RAM, NT4 SP4)"
HA! This machine failed with a TEST msgboard?? Hell, isn't/. still running on a single CPU PII450 w/ 512 MB? MOST impressive, NT/WinCGI! *sigh...* You just gotta wonder sometimes...
Slashdot Mirror
At least now we can wait for March for /. to merge the AOL and Netscape content icons...*grin*