fight in courts != jailed programmers
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 2
This is how
the dmca will have to be fought - in the courts.
How is this different from what I said?
DMCA is being fought in the courts, by the EFF. We don't need to have Dmitry in jail to do that. 2600 was censored by DMCA and the lower courts (1st amendment). Felten was censored by RIAA (1st amendment).
Why is Dmitry required to martyr himself so that our courts may make the right ruling on this law?
Heavens to mergetroid, he's not even out on bail at this point!
EFF is already going after the DMCA. Check out their DMCA Project Pages.
If you feel strongly about what they're doing (as I do), then join or make a donation (I did).
There's no need for Dmitri or anyone else to rot in jail while the legal maneuvering continues. We don't need to martyr anyone (esp. not foreign nationals) - we need the law overturned.
Yup. One point that has been made on the Free-Sklyarov mailing list is that if Elcomsoft's eBookReader is a ``digital lock pick'', well then, lockpicks are legal (in most of the US).
Text of Adobe's original press release is given below. Judge for yourself!
-Renard
(Revving up Adobe PR machine...)
These are the key points that will be developed in the FAQ below:
Adobe's goal is the receive assurance from Elcomsoft that they will not sell or distribute their illegal digital lock pick.
To protect the intellectual property of eBook authors and publishers, Adobe asked the Department of Justice to help stop the sale of this security cracking code.
Adobe welcomes the input of "White Hat" security experts that inform us of possible security weaknesses. Dmitri Sklyarov was not arrested for presenting a scholarly paper.
The Department of Justice made the decision to arrest Sklyarov.
Adobe's goal in the Elcomsoft case is to help protect the copyrighted works of authors, artists, developers and publishers. Adobe reported this suspected eBook authors' copyright violation to the U.S. Attorney's office. Based on the information gathered in the investigation (see affidavit ), the U.S. Government chose to take legal action to stop the sale of the for-profit security cracking code, and unilaterally decided to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov.
Elcomsoft found a security weakness and made no effort to communicate what it found to Adobe. Instead, the company distributed a software product for profit that can be used to compromise copyrighted works in the United States, violating U.S. law. Adobe took every measure likely to be successful to get Elcomsoft to cease and desist. Adobe's legal department sent letters to Elcomsoft, their ISP and their credit card clearing house used to offer these products for sale. Adobe forwarded the case to the U.S. Attorney's office only after Elcomsoft failed to respond and/or cease and desist. Our goal has been to stop the sale of the program in the U.S.
Contrary to some reports, the issue is not that Adobe alerted the U.S. government about an expert exposing security weaknesses. In fact, Adobe encourages its customers and the software community, including White Hat security experts, to provide feedback on the performance of its software in order to make improvements. Adobe's concern is that a "digital lock pick" is being distributed to enable others to compromise the copyrighted works of authors, artists, developers and publishers, which is why Adobe alerted the U.S. Attorney's office.
Corporate
Q: How are your customers, the publishing community, responding to this? A: The Electronic Frontier Foundation considers themselves a leading civil liberties organization that works to protect right in the digital world. We are in constant communication with our customers who are also concerned about issues of privacy and protection of digital property. There is strong support from the publishing community, as evidenced by the statement from the American Association of Publishers. While the laws to enforce the protection of digital media are in their infancy, we believe they are based on the same principles as traditional media--protect the copyrights of authors, artists, developers and publishers while balancing the right to fair use.
Q: What's going on with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)? A: We are engaged in discussions with the EFF to work together to address this situation. We believe a mutual frank discussion of how best to resolve the current issues will benefit Adobe and EFF.
Q: As a result of this case, what is Adobe doing to strengthen the security of its products?
First a quick summary (apologies to those who read the article). Historically the billowing shower-curtain theorists have been divided into two camps:
Those who appealed to the chimney effect - hot air rising within the shower causes cool air to come in from below. This hypothesis can be readily defeated by taking a cold shower and observing that the curtain billows nonetheless.
Those who appealed to the Bernoulli principle - decreased pressure exerted by air in motion - the same physics that allows airplanes to fly and causes two sheets of paper to stick together when you blow between them (try it!). This hypothesis also seemed a bit shaky since (a) the air in a shower never seems to move that fast; and (b) there's a potential confusion of cause and effect going on here (for the shower curtain to billow, clearly something must be happening with the air pressure...).
Now comes David Schmidt to demonstrate that both of these camps are wrong (in this he and Cecil agree). His theory instead focuses on the deceleration of the water droplets by the air producing a cyclone effect within the shower. This theory is similar to, but distinct from, the ``entrainment'' theory that Cecil put forward so many years ago. And to me, significantly more believable.
The same dynamics that causes hurricanes, right there in our very bathrooms! Score one for Schmidt and his finite element approach to a classic problem.
so far all we've got here is one member's
post on anandtech.
anyone got proof of this one?
this is where your 'traditional' media outlet - hegemonic or not - has the leg up on slashdot - they would have called the AG's office for confirmation before running an item like this.
Remember, too, that the 3rd Circuit and Judge Jackson have an extended history of "disagreement" when it comes to MS.
It was Judge Jackson who originally ruled that the inclusion of IE with W98 was "illegal tying", and the 3rd Circuit that overturned that decision, saying that companies must be left free to innovate. In return, Judge Jackson mocked that decision in some of his interviews with the press - and also addressed it specifically in the last set of rulings.
Everyone knew then that, given the history, this appeal would be subtitled "Payback Time for Judge J". By taking this approach, the Appeals Court can embarrass him without actually overturning the whole legal process (which is actually proceeding in a rather orderly fashion, imho).
Dan Gillmore (columnist for Mercury News) makes the best point imho when he
quotes an interview with Steve Ballmer that
appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.
Recall that this is the CEO of Microsoft talking
- a smart guy, who certainly knows the difference between, e.g., "using" and "incorporating into your source code", or for that matter, "open source" and "GPL".
When seen in context with the Mobile Internet Toolkit EULA (which also deliberately misconstrues the Open Source "use") all of this reveals that the mere fact of a moral debate between MS and Open Source advocates is all that MS wants, and sufficient for their victory. More precisely, MS is interested in:
Tarnishing the "pure" reputation of Open Source so that they may:
Eventually forbid all MS developers (and consumers?) from using Open Source products; and
Continue to embrace and extend the code of other businesses, researchers, and government in classic fashion; without
Facing strong political pressure from businesses, consumers, and the US government.
Post-antitrust-action Microsoft has learned the importance of politics and has chosen to attack Open Source politically as well as in the marketplace. Their strategy is postmodern in the sense that they do not need to convince anyone that MS wears white hats and Open Source black; as long as the typical business/consumer/Congressperson sees MS and OS hats as existing on some larger grey continuum, they will be free to proceed with their agenda.
Well, the mind snatchers certainly got you! I recommend picking up Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity or, if you prefer, some more modern treatment of the subject. General relativity is one of the great achievements of humankind, beautiful in its elegance, supported at this point by countless independent experiments, and readily comprehensible by anyone with a mathematical bent.
Just one of the highlights:
Spacetime curvature is produced by mass-energy
Trajectories of free-falling objects (satellites; planets; binary neutron stars...) are "straight lines" (geodesics) in this curved spacetime
"Gravity" is the force we impute to explain the bending of these "straight line" trajectories into, i.e., orbits
Thus (contrary to your comment above) spacetime curvature is caused by matter, and indeed has "gravity" as its effect.
Math does not create physics.
I could not agree more - and I too will believe in wormholes when and only when I see (observational evidence of) one. However, physical theories developed with the language of mathematics have proven remarkably fruitful in guiding observations. One of the best examples of this is Einstein's near-prediction of the expansion of the universe, several years before it was discovered by Hubble. (Failing to predict this expansion was Einstein's self-termed biggest mistake.)
the same physical mechanism that is responsible for gravitational time
dilation might also be responsible for the red-shifting of light over astronomical distances.
Exactly correct! Redshifting of light is redshifting of light, and the universe was smaller, denser, and hence more gravitationally bound in the past.
Or did you mean to discredit the theory?
Cheers,
Renard
ps Apologies for staying off-topic; I have no idea what's causing the anomalous "acceleration" of the Pioneer probes.
Ah, now that I've read the CNET piece, I understand.
The problem with the Ad Agencies (and the Actors' Union, for that matter) is that they don't understand that streaming radio is radio, not ``online advertising.''
Online advertising is when I see an interesting banner or link on a web site, click it, and get a web page, movie, or catchy jingle in return. If the Actors want to be paid extra for that, fine.
Radio is when I listen to cool music or dialogue (audio content), and ``pay'' for that content by also listening to the advertisements that are broadcast with that content. This is what streaming radio does, and it's not at all like online advertising.
Consider what would happen if we were to listen to these radio broadcasts by shortwave, from thousands of miles away. Would that suddenly qualify the Ad actors for their online bonus? And yet that's all that streaming amounts to.
Anyone listening to a streaming broadcast is holding up their end of the advertising bargain 100%. There is no reason to treat the stream any differently from the radio broadcast itself.
Of course, if the station wants to replace some of the local ads in their stream with ads more relevant to their new expanded market, well, that's one of the wonders of this streaming technology now isn't it?
Rep. Boucher understands the necessity of getting back our traditional fair use rights - that much is clear, and very reassuring. Unfortunately there is a devil in the details:
If a person purchases over the Internet copyrighted material, whether it is music or a video clip or text
of some kind, and if there is the absolute assurance that upon transfer of that material to another party, that the original
version of it which was purchased is destroyed. If that condition is met, then the first sale doctrine, in my view, should apply
as certainly in the online world as it does in the physical world today.
In a digital world, though, it is precisely the case that such assurance can never be offered...
At least, not without just the sort of intrusive fair use-infringing infrastructures that he (thank heavens) has the courage to speak out against.
There is an urgent need an agreement that will simultaneously protect copyrights and the home recording rights
of TV viewers. In the mean time, I very much hope that the content community will not attempt unilateral approaches to
protecting content, which would either defeat home recording rights, or degrade the quality of digital television broadcasts.
I respectfully disagree. The Clipper Chip was stopped by just the coalition of politics-savvy digerati and ordinary privacy-conscious folks (including some who happened to be members of Congress) that you dismiss here.
People will postpone or cancel their upgrades - their earnings-growth and stock-price-enhancing upgrades - if they know that they are also paying for it in blood. Moreover, they will reliably pursue the better, liberty-enabled option if it is presented to them. DIVX (the players, not the software) never went anywhere, and region-free DVD players are much more popular in the regions that don't get the first releases than they are here in Region 1 (where I have yet to even hear of a DVD I wouldn't be able to play).
We must continue to fight to educate the public - the battle will only be lost once we despair.
The best you can do is to state I am not able to break it and then let the crypto community rip it apart.
I'll just run through the counterexamples:
A one-time pad is unbreakable;
Quantum cryptography, which is cryptographically the same as a one-time pad, but allows you to send the pad over an insecure channel, is unbreakable;
Rabin's proposal, which is cryptographically the same as a one-time pad, but allows you to share the pad over an insecure channel as long as you have the ability to communicate in a way that will not be immediately compromised by the eavesdropper, is unbreakable. This can be accomplished, i.e., via Diffie-Hellman key construction or conventional public-key cryptography.
Any particular implementation of these methods will, of course, be subject to numerous attacks. This point is made best in the article by Robert Morris, formerly of the NSA, who suggests "the three B's: burglary, bribery, or blackmail."
5. What measures has Microsoft taken to ensure that its Kerberos specification is only distributed to persons who are capable of entering into a binding contract in jurisdictions where such an agreement would be enforceable?
Consider: a user in the Cayman Islands or somewhere else out of contractual reach of MS and the click-wrap downloads the spec, strips the legalese and posts it to Slashdot.
The user didn't break the law (of his/her country) and neither did Slashdot (which didn't download anything from MS at all).
If no one broke the law, how could the law be broken? Only if it started out that way.
Rumors of the demise of black holes have been greatly exaggerated. For an explanation of how ``Yilmaz Gravity'' disagrees with results of Newton as well as Einstein (oops!) see Charles Misner's 1995 article from Nuovo Cimento:
Consider two cases that may illuminate the current situation:
(A) Imagine a publisher taking the MS specification and running off 10,000 copies, sans license, to distribute to developers around the world at $10 a pop. That's copyright infringement. MS could quite clearly get the publisher to stop.
(B) Now consider a "vandal" who prints the spec. out on flyers which s/he plasters on billboards, in coffee shops, and on telephone poles throughout the city. The vandal (AC) may be infringing the MS copyright, but is the city? The telephone company? The coffee shops?
No! But the mere fact that the Publisher (A) may have obtained the material in question in a "legal" manner (B) does not allow the Publisher to violate copyright.
Similarly, the mere fact that an AC has posted the MS specs on Slashdot (a copyright violation) does not excuse the Slashdot population from honoring that copyright (or facing the consequences of its violation).
Thus it should be entirely within Slashdot's rights to archive ALL posts, even those containing copyrighted materials (e.g. the proverbial screenplay).
Slashdot is NOT responsible for user comments. Users are responsible for user comments. And Users are ALSO responsible for obeying legal restrictions on the use of other user's comments.
Instead of slapping the wrists of your misbehaving (as you see it) fans, why don't you issue a moral challenge to them?
Offer your entire catalog as MP3's, available for download at $1 a pop, and shame your fans into paying for the music they listen to.
No one would have any excuse at that point, and you could pursue the remaining renegades with the full force of the fan community behind you (instead of against).
What is this idea that we can dispense with cryptography and other security technologies (most often, yes, developed by lone-genius types) now that we as citizens have identified corporations as the more powerful threat?
How does Neal Stephenson think we will manage to establish even the first links of trust in our larger social communities without code we can see, that we know can do the job of protecting our data and validating our identity?
How does Whitfield Diffie think that lone programmers will protect themselves against exploitive corporations, in that vital interim before the union can come to their aid, except by using the tools that he has provided us with?
Why does Tim Berners-Lee agonize about pursuing government regulation of industry, if that is the best way to preserve a Web for all of us to freely use and enjoy?
Most of all, why does Ellen Ullman have such a chip on her shoulder about libertarians? I've never seen so many poisoned darts shot at this relatively public-minded crowd.
It wasn't clear why readers would find this preferable to reading books in their traditional form...
How about this: cheap; instant access; portable (if you have a Palm or PDA); cool. Not bad for a first try.
Simon & Schuster's stunt... render[ed]... the bound book less valuable, significant and lucrative, virtually overnight.
And yet authors have been publishing short stories and book excerpts in magazines for a century or two without killing off the industry. Are the people who downloaded "Bullet" now less likely to buy the next Stephen King hardcover?
The ferocious interactivity of almost all successful Web sites... is completely alien to the way newspapers or publishing work.
Is this such a bad thing? Artistic genius is non-interactive: consider Thoreau at Walden. Maybe we don't want every segment of our culture polling the Internet for an instant response. In any case, 400,000 downloads is ferocious interactivity of a sort - perhaps the publishers need to begin somewhere.
For [publishers,] entering the 21st Century means distributing [the] usual product in bytes instead of paper and ink.
No. On the contrary, it means distributing the usual product both in bytes and in paper and ink. Here, I hope, all Slashdotters can agree: the pressure to distribute digital content will fast become irresistible. S&S was only experimenting, on a small scale, with one way to make digital distribution real and profitable. (Note: They succeeded.)
Yet... online and off, the enormous public appetite for books persists.
Exactly. And just as Project Gutenberg hasn't gutted the market for Shakespeare, making selected bits and pieces of books available for free download isn't going to kill contemporary book publishing.
Q. Once it has the TRUSTe seal, have you ever kicked out a site for doing something?
No, we've come very close, but we haven't had to do it.... [A] lot of these are just misunderstandings.... [T]he resolution... may result in a change in the privacy policy, the business model, or what have you.
And later:
As their Web sites evolve, we've got to ensure that the privacy statement evolves. It's an ongoing process.
This is wrong two ways.
First, it is a weak standard. All a web site has to do to keep their TRUSTe seal forever is to perform a mea culpa after each "violation" and then change their policy. They don't even need to return to any previous state of "protection."
However, a site only needs to sell my email address to a spammer ONCE for me to have lost my privacy completely. This is what "trust" means -- we as users are dependent on the site's good behavior; we must trust them.
TRUSTe's policy of closing the privacy-policy's barn doors after the user data have escaped is entirely inadequate to the task at hand.
What is needed is a civil liability for the damage that such betrayals of trust cause.
The paper is a serious and interesting one. It may be theoretically possible for regions with oppositely-directed thermodynamic arrows of time to exist. But within our own universe there are good reasons to believe that, in fact, they do not.
We observe the real universe to have its origin in a state of extraordinarily low entropy -- immediately after the Big Bang, matter/energy was uniformly distributed throughout its entire volume to the level of one part in 100,000 (the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, as measured by the COBE satellite). Thermodynamically speaking, then, there was only one way for the universe to go -- towards gravitational clumping, collapse, the formation of stars and galaxies, and other sources of entropy (like us). This establishes the thermodynamic arrow of time for the universe.
The actual existence of regions with opposite arrows of time depends, in Schulman's paper, on the ending of the universe in a Big Crunch. But there are two problems with this.
All existing astronomical evidence points to a universe that will expand indefinitely (and may even be accelerating). Even with Dark Matter, there's just not enough mass around to hold it back.
Even if the universe were to end in a Big Crunch, there is no reason to think this would be a state of extremely low entropy.
Thus even if the paper is correct it is not relevant, in an astronomical sense.
I'll end by pointing out that there are several less dramatic solutions to the "Dark Matter" problem -- now that we know neutrinos have mass, for example, it becomes pretty easy to imagine that there are other more-massive weakly interacting particles out there, the WIMPs, and that these could easily have evaded our detection efforts to date (good reason to continue upgrading the experiments!). A slightly more daring alternative postulates the existence of "mirror matter" which interacts even more weakly with the ordinary stuff that we're made of. Neither of these types of matter, nor for that matter antimatter, should be thought of as travelling backwards in time.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this different from what I said?
DMCA is being fought in the courts, by the EFF. We don't need to have Dmitry in jail to do that. 2600 was censored by DMCA and the lower courts (1st amendment). Felten was censored by RIAA (1st amendment).
Why is Dmitry required to martyr himself so that our courts may make the right ruling on this law?
Heavens to mergetroid, he's not even out on bail at this point!
-Renard
If you feel strongly about what they're doing (as I do), then join or make a donation (I did).
There's no need for Dmitri or anyone else to rot in jail while the legal maneuvering continues. We don't need to martyr anyone (esp. not foreign nationals) - we need the law overturned.
-Renard
Yup. One point that has been made on the Free-Sklyarov mailing list is that if Elcomsoft's eBookReader is a ``digital lock pick'', well then, lockpicks are legal (in most of the US).
It's breaking and entering that's a crime.
-Renard
-Renard
(Revving up Adobe PR machine...)
These are the key points that will be developed in the FAQ below:
Adobe's goal in the Elcomsoft case is to help protect the copyrighted works of authors, artists, developers and publishers. Adobe reported this suspected eBook authors' copyright violation to the U.S. Attorney's office. Based on the information gathered in the investigation (see affidavit ), the U.S. Government chose to take legal action to stop the sale of the for-profit security cracking code, and unilaterally decided to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov.
Elcomsoft found a security weakness and made no effort to communicate what it found to Adobe. Instead, the company distributed a software product for profit that can be used to compromise copyrighted works in the United States, violating U.S. law. Adobe took every measure likely to be successful to get Elcomsoft to cease and desist. Adobe's legal department sent letters to Elcomsoft, their ISP and their credit card clearing house used to offer these products for sale. Adobe forwarded the case to the U.S. Attorney's office only after Elcomsoft failed to respond and/or cease and desist. Our goal has been to stop the sale of the program in the U.S.
Contrary to some reports, the issue is not that Adobe alerted the U.S. government about an expert exposing security weaknesses. In fact, Adobe encourages its customers and the software community, including White Hat security experts, to provide feedback on the performance of its software in order to make improvements. Adobe's concern is that a "digital lock pick" is being distributed to enable others to compromise the copyrighted works of authors, artists, developers and publishers, which is why Adobe alerted the U.S. Attorney's office.
Corporate
Q: How are your customers, the publishing community, responding to this?
A: The Electronic Frontier Foundation considers themselves a leading civil liberties organization that works to protect right in the digital world. We are in constant communication with our customers who are also concerned about issues of privacy and protection of digital property. There is strong support from the publishing community, as evidenced by the statement from the American Association of Publishers. While the laws to enforce the protection of digital media are in their infancy, we believe they are based on the same principles as traditional media--protect the copyrights of authors, artists, developers and publishers while balancing the right to fair use.
Q: What's going on with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)?
A: We are engaged in discussions with the EFF to work together to address this situation. We believe a mutual frank discussion of how best to resolve the current issues will benefit Adobe and EFF.
Q: As a result of this case, what is Adobe doing to strengthen the security of its products?
First a quick summary (apologies to those who read the article). Historically the billowing shower-curtain theorists have been divided into two camps:
- Those who appealed to the chimney effect - hot air rising within the shower causes cool air to come in from below. This hypothesis can be readily defeated by taking a cold shower and observing that the curtain billows nonetheless.
- Those who appealed to the Bernoulli principle - decreased pressure exerted by air in motion - the same physics that allows airplanes to fly and causes two sheets of paper to stick together when you blow between them (try it!). This hypothesis also seemed a bit shaky since (a) the air in a shower never seems to move that fast; and (b) there's a potential confusion of cause and effect going on here (for the shower curtain to billow, clearly something must be happening with the air pressure...).
Now comes David Schmidt to demonstrate that both of these camps are wrong (in this he and Cecil agree). His theory instead focuses on the deceleration of the water droplets by the air producing a cyclone effect within the shower. This theory is similar to, but distinct from, the ``entrainment'' theory that Cecil put forward so many years ago. And to me, significantly more believable.The same dynamics that causes hurricanes, right there in our very bathrooms! Score one for Schmidt and his finite element approach to a classic problem.
-Renard
anyone got proof of this one?
this is where your 'traditional' media outlet - hegemonic or not - has the leg up on slashdot - they would have called the AG's office for confirmation before running an item like this.
-renard
It was Judge Jackson who originally ruled that the inclusion of IE with W98 was "illegal tying", and the 3rd Circuit that overturned that decision, saying that companies must be left free to innovate. In return, Judge Jackson mocked that decision in some of his interviews with the press - and also addressed it specifically in the last set of rulings.
Everyone knew then that, given the history, this appeal would be subtitled "Payback Time for Judge J". By taking this approach, the Appeals Court can embarrass him without actually overturning the whole legal process (which is actually proceeding in a rather orderly fashion, imho).
-Renard
When seen in context with the Mobile Internet Toolkit EULA (which also deliberately misconstrues the Open Source "use") all of this reveals that the mere fact of a moral debate between MS and Open Source advocates is all that MS wants, and sufficient for their victory. More precisely, MS is interested in:
- Tarnishing the "pure" reputation of Open Source so that they may:
- Eventually forbid all MS developers (and consumers?) from using Open Source products; and
- Continue to embrace and extend the code of other businesses, researchers, and government in classic fashion; without
- Facing strong political pressure from businesses, consumers, and the US government.
Post-antitrust-action Microsoft has learned the importance of politics and has chosen to attack Open Source politically as well as in the marketplace. Their strategy is postmodern in the sense that they do not need to convince anyone that MS wears white hats and Open Source black; as long as the typical business/consumer/Congressperson sees MS and OS hats as existing on some larger grey continuum, they will be free to proceed with their agenda.-Renard
- Spacetime curvature is produced by mass-energy
- Trajectories of free-falling objects (satellites; planets; binary neutron stars...) are "straight lines" (geodesics) in this curved spacetime
- "Gravity" is the force we impute to explain the bending of these "straight line" trajectories into, i.e., orbits
Thus (contrary to your comment above) spacetime curvature is caused by matter, and indeed has "gravity" as its effect. I could not agree more - and I too will believe in wormholes when and only when I see (observational evidence of) one. However, physical theories developed with the language of mathematics have proven remarkably fruitful in guiding observations. One of the best examples of this is Einstein's near-prediction of the expansion of the universe, several years before it was discovered by Hubble. (Failing to predict this expansion was Einstein's self-termed biggest mistake.) Exactly correct! Redshifting of light is redshifting of light, and the universe was smaller, denser, and hence more gravitationally bound in the past.Or did you mean to discredit the theory?
Cheers,
Renard
ps Apologies for staying off-topic; I have no idea what's causing the anomalous "acceleration" of the Pioneer probes.
The problem with the Ad Agencies (and the Actors' Union, for that matter) is that they don't understand that streaming radio is radio, not ``online advertising.''
Online advertising is when I see an interesting banner or link on a web site, click it, and get a web page, movie, or catchy jingle in return. If the Actors want to be paid extra for that, fine.
Radio is when I listen to cool music or dialogue (audio content), and ``pay'' for that content by also listening to the advertisements that are broadcast with that content. This is what streaming radio does, and it's not at all like online advertising.
Consider what would happen if we were to listen to these radio broadcasts by shortwave, from thousands of miles away. Would that suddenly qualify the Ad actors for their online bonus? And yet that's all that streaming amounts to. Anyone listening to a streaming broadcast is holding up their end of the advertising bargain 100%. There is no reason to treat the stream any differently from the radio broadcast itself.
Of course, if the station wants to replace some of the local ads in their stream with ads more relevant to their new expanded market, well, that's one of the wonders of this streaming technology now isn't it?
-Renard
yeah, and i'll give you one guess whether they "are" or "are not" so affected, too... --renard
If a person purchases over the Internet copyrighted material, whether it is music or a video clip or text of some kind, and if there is the absolute assurance that upon transfer of that material to another party, that the original version of it which was purchased is destroyed. If that condition is met, then the first sale doctrine, in my view, should apply as certainly in the online world as it does in the physical world today.
In a digital world, though, it is precisely the case that such assurance can never be offered...
At least, not without just the sort of intrusive fair use-infringing infrastructures that he (thank heavens) has the courage to speak out against.
-Renard
There is an urgent need an agreement that will simultaneously protect copyrights and the home recording rights of TV viewers. In the mean time, I very much hope that the content community will not attempt unilateral approaches to protecting content, which would either defeat home recording rights, or degrade the quality of digital television broadcasts.
Too late!
Renard
People will postpone or cancel their upgrades - their earnings-growth and stock-price-enhancing upgrades - if they know that they are also paying for it in blood. Moreover, they will reliably pursue the better, liberty-enabled option if it is presented to them. DIVX (the players, not the software) never went anywhere, and region-free DVD players are much more popular in the regions that don't get the first releases than they are here in Region 1 (where I have yet to even hear of a DVD I wouldn't be able to play).
We must continue to fight to educate the public - the battle will only be lost once we despair.
-Renard
I'll just run through the counterexamples:
- A one-time pad is unbreakable;
- Quantum cryptography, which is cryptographically the same as a one-time pad, but allows you to send the pad over an insecure channel, is unbreakable;
- Rabin's proposal, which is cryptographically the same as a one-time pad, but allows you to share the pad over an insecure channel as long as you have the ability to communicate in a way that will not be immediately compromised by the eavesdropper, is unbreakable. This can be accomplished, i.e., via Diffie-Hellman key construction or conventional public-key cryptography.
Any particular implementation of these methods will, of course, be subject to numerous attacks. This point is made best in the article by Robert Morris, formerly of the NSA, who suggests "the three B's: burglary, bribery, or blackmail."-Renard
Unfortunately, unless someone else came up with the idea before Rambus submitted their patent (not before it was accepted), the patent remains valid.
So the antitrust arguments seem like the most promising avenue at this point.
--Renard
The user didn't break the law (of his/her country) and neither did Slashdot (which didn't download anything from MS at all).
If no one broke the law, how could the law be broken? Only if it started out that way.
Charles Misner is one of the three authors (with John Wheeler and Kip Thorne) of Gravitation, the standard reference work on GR.
Anyone in favor of a stationary Solar System over our current, orbiting configuration, please raise your hand.
(A) Imagine a publisher taking the MS specification and running off 10,000 copies, sans license, to distribute to developers around the world at $10 a pop. That's copyright infringement. MS could quite clearly get the publisher to stop.
(B) Now consider a "vandal" who prints the spec. out on flyers which s/he plasters on billboards, in coffee shops, and on telephone poles throughout the city. The vandal (AC) may be infringing the MS copyright, but is the city? The telephone company? The coffee shops?
No! But the mere fact that the Publisher (A) may have obtained the material in question in a "legal" manner (B) does not allow the Publisher to violate copyright.
Similarly, the mere fact that an AC has posted the MS specs on Slashdot (a copyright violation) does not excuse the Slashdot population from honoring that copyright (or facing the consequences of its violation).
Thus it should be entirely within Slashdot's rights to archive ALL posts, even those containing copyrighted materials (e.g. the proverbial screenplay).
Slashdot is NOT responsible for user comments. Users are responsible for user comments. And Users are ALSO responsible for obeying legal restrictions on the use of other user's comments.
Offer your entire catalog as MP3's, available for download at $1 a pop, and shame your fans into paying for the music they listen to.
No one would have any excuse at that point, and you could pursue the remaining renegades with the full force of the fan community behind you (instead of against).
Just a thought.
How does Neal Stephenson think we will manage to establish even the first links of trust in our larger social communities without code we can see, that we know can do the job of protecting our data and validating our identity?
How does Whitfield Diffie think that lone programmers will protect themselves against exploitive corporations, in that vital interim before the union can come to their aid, except by using the tools that he has provided us with?
Why does Tim Berners-Lee agonize about pursuing government regulation of industry, if that is the best way to preserve a Web for all of us to freely use and enjoy?
Most of all, why does Ellen Ullman have such a chip on her shoulder about libertarians? I've never seen so many poisoned darts shot at this relatively public-minded crowd.
How about this: cheap; instant access; portable (if you have a Palm or PDA); cool. Not bad for a first try.
Simon & Schuster's stunt... render[ed]... the bound book less valuable, significant and lucrative, virtually overnight.
And yet authors have been publishing short stories and book excerpts in magazines for a century or two without killing off the industry. Are the people who downloaded "Bullet" now less likely to buy the next Stephen King hardcover?
The ferocious interactivity of almost all successful Web sites... is completely alien to the way newspapers or publishing work.
Is this such a bad thing? Artistic genius is non-interactive: consider Thoreau at Walden. Maybe we don't want every segment of our culture polling the Internet for an instant response. In any case, 400,000 downloads is ferocious interactivity of a sort - perhaps the publishers need to begin somewhere.
For [publishers,] entering the 21st Century means distributing [the] usual product in bytes instead of paper and ink.
No. On the contrary, it means distributing the usual product both in bytes and in paper and ink. Here, I hope, all Slashdotters can agree: the pressure to distribute digital content will fast become irresistible. S&S was only experimenting, on a small scale, with one way to make digital distribution real and profitable. (Note: They succeeded.)
Yet... online and off, the enormous public appetite for books persists.
Exactly. And just as Project Gutenberg hasn't gutted the market for Shakespeare, making selected bits and pieces of books available for free download isn't going to kill contemporary book publishing.
See the eink.com web site.
Q. Once it has the TRUSTe seal, have you ever kicked out a site for doing something?
No, we've come very close, but we haven't had to do it.... [A] lot of these are just misunderstandings.... [T]he resolution... may result in a change in the privacy policy, the business model, or what have you.
And later:
As their Web sites evolve, we've got to ensure that the privacy statement evolves. It's an ongoing process.
This is wrong two ways.
First, it is a weak standard. All a web site has to do to keep their TRUSTe seal forever is to perform a mea culpa after each "violation" and then change their policy. They don't even need to return to any previous state of "protection."
However, a site only needs to sell my email address to a spammer ONCE for me to have lost my privacy completely. This is what "trust" means -- we as users are dependent on the site's good behavior; we must trust them.
TRUSTe's policy of closing the privacy-policy's barn doors after the user data have escaped is entirely inadequate to the task at hand.
What is needed is a civil liability for the damage that such betrayals of trust cause.
We observe the real universe to have its origin in a state of extraordinarily low entropy -- immediately after the Big Bang, matter/energy was uniformly distributed throughout its entire volume to the level of one part in 100,000 (the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, as measured by the COBE satellite). Thermodynamically speaking, then, there was only one way for the universe to go -- towards gravitational clumping, collapse, the formation of stars and galaxies, and other sources of entropy (like us). This establishes the thermodynamic arrow of time for the universe.
The actual existence of regions with opposite arrows of time depends, in Schulman's paper, on the ending of the universe in a Big Crunch. But there are two problems with this.
- All existing astronomical evidence points to a universe that will expand indefinitely (and may even be accelerating). Even with Dark Matter, there's just not enough mass around to hold it back.
- Even if the universe were to end in a Big Crunch, there is no reason to think this would be a state of extremely low entropy.
Thus even if the paper is correct it is not relevant, in an astronomical sense.I'll end by pointing out that there are several less dramatic solutions to the "Dark Matter" problem -- now that we know neutrinos have mass, for example, it becomes pretty easy to imagine that there are other more-massive weakly interacting particles out there, the WIMPs, and that these could easily have evaded our detection efforts to date (good reason to continue upgrading the experiments!). A slightly more daring alternative postulates the existence of "mirror matter" which interacts even more weakly with the ordinary stuff that we're made of. Neither of these types of matter, nor for that matter antimatter, should be thought of as travelling backwards in time.