The point here is not to make sharing copyrighted material legal. Just to stay one step ahead of the pursuers, the same way the faster zebra will defeat the lions everytime. Make the race for survival a bit harder for them and funnier for the rest of us watching from afar.
The files you have originally are still elesewhere in your computer. They are just not shared as a whole by anyone. Obviously there are enhancements to be made. One must build redundance (a given chunk must be replicated across some hosts so it does not disappear when part of the network goes down). The point here is to make it very difficult to determine and prove a certain file was shared by a certain person, nothing more.
What Kazaa Lite has now is equivalent to blacklists of spammers and spammers domains. We have already determined this strategy alone won't solve the problem.
The next logical step is to combine the lists with a distributed statistical filter capable of identifying RIAA hosts by search pattern and IP pattern. Since it is happening in a connected network, each peer filter can then broadcast its guesses and receive other peers guesses. Locally you can build a trust list based upon the likehood of search comming from a RIAA host.
Obviously this have problems.
One problem is the lack of significant search samples to make decisions. We would have to see an implementation to discover if it is mathematically feasible.
RIAA can also start trying to close down sharers by broadcasting their IP as "riaa-like" from a great number of peers. The way to avoid this is having all peers checking "the evidence". If the sharing IP and its searches do not match RIAA pattern, the call is probably bogus and those IPs broadcasting it are probably RIAA's. Backfire on them...
Another danger is RIAA using a range of IPs large enough to endanger the network connectivity. This is probably too expensive, but RIAA is probably too rich too.
Anyway, my point is that since the data is there (RIAA is searching the networks for the sharers), one can always analyse this data and try to extract as much information as possible from it.
Let us say that instead of putting a file in my "Shared" folder, I run it through a program that splits it in little chunks, mark them in some way and send most chunks away to peers agreeing to host chunks. At the same time I am hosting chunks for other files. So, on the top of the sharing network you have now a distributed storage system.
A search here would also not elicit a direct response. It would only tip the network managing peers to "store" a certain kind of chunk in a certain computer. When all chunks are available they are copied away from the shared space and re-assembled into a whole file.
I never send more than a small piece of a file to any computer. I never shared a whole file. I never received a whole file.
The BitTorrent system works more or less like this, but you only share what you get.
Discovery Channel or National Geographic Channel showed it down here. I even recorded the first two episodes for my son (since they showed it too late for him), but then I found they couldn't decide if their movie was to be a good documentary or a bad soap-opera (the actors were lousy, the script terrible). So I gave up. There were good bit, though. The part about the evolution of the mammal/bird eye was very good.
Sir, the trolls here are fed with a special, moderate, ration. Giving them knowledge makes them overexcited and hard handle. The staff thanks you for your cooperation.
You mean, as long as the government is not able to use the media and the Courts to convince the public a stolen ellection was clean or to lie extensively in order to gain public support for a special interest war abroad? Yes, I agree. But wait...
The maintainence of the economic order requires the consumers to consume. If your product lasts forever there is an upper consumer threshold after which you can close your shop and go home: you will never make a profitable sale again.
With material goods it is only a matter of varying the quality. A car will eventually break for good, a house will fall apart. In the case of digital products, the obsolescence must be forced upon consumers by other means: new features, new standards, refusal to correct bugs (as in Windows 95 and bellow, Oracle 8x and bellow etc).
The point is, why would you buy another compiler if the language stays the same forever and all bells and whistles are already there?
Do you think there a chance for an massless invisible insecticide, without odour or any visible sensation, to fly over there? I mean, I think I know a country where we can buy lots of empty used spray cans...
These 2% are certainly Outlook/Outlook Express users. Let the next version of Outlook and all patches to older versions include filters pre-trainned to filter out to the Junk folder all ordinary spam (Viagra, Nigeria, Mortgage etc). Scare these people into upgrading (virus scare, license expiration, goat from outer space, whatever). Suckers covered, spammers in the red, mission accomplished.
Although some people now advocate using function points instead, but that is another discussion entirely. Anyway, in GNUtopia your capacity to buy goods is proportional to number of lines of code you authored and "deposited" in Savanah. There is also a requirement that the software you contributed for is actually being used by someone outside your family. Under this system, would you be poor or rich?
The point of efficient filtering is making spamming useless. Today a spammer sends a message to 5 million addresses in order to receive 100 answers. Only the absurdly low cost of sending the 5 million messages makes the ridiculously low response rate economically acceptable. And barely so, I bet, in most cases.
If we manage to filter these messages out of those 100 idiots Inboxes, the very act of spamming will be rendered economically senseless, since the response rate will go bellow the cost/benefit threshold. As a side-effect, the bandwidth is claimed back.
I concede some kind of blacklist may be useful here, but as a aditional measure, not as the main spam fighting tool.
After migrating to Mozilla Mail from Eudora and seeing its simple bayesian filter solve my spam problem in a week, I became a firm believer that we can solve this problem without laws, politicians, police or any other bureocracy. All we need is Math and a campaign for filter deployment akin to the innoculation campaigns that erradicated smallpox and polio.
I think that when most of the userbase has trainned filters installed, the spam problem will disappear into irrelevance. The half-a-dozen renitent spammers that will suffer the pains of creating the bland texts capable of fooling the filters can then be blacklisted. Even the Usenet can be retaken this way. And the beauty of it is that each person will have its own set of filters, trainned locally and directed at what that person considers spam.
If you think about it, even the shaddy and inneficient centralized web filters can be thrown away and replaced by this kind of filter, allowing each school and each library to filter only the content its local community considers harmful.
I don't know about the rest of you, but if this dream/wish happens, we (as in "we the people who care about it") will once again have a reason to be very proud, having proved this network is capable of taking care of itself like no previous human technical work could.
Bayesian filters, as presently applied to spam, can be used to filter any text based content (HTML pages, for instance). Mozilla Mail (I have migrated from Eudora some weeks ago) recognises HTML spam without any problem.
The way this kind of text analysis works, implementing your idea is only a matter of developing the browser plugin (or proxy server, for better control and security) and trainning the filter to deny access to certain kinds of HTML pattern. For efficiency, you will probably want to have a cache mechanism in place (one more reason for it to be a proxy). And you get a nice free side-effect: the filter may be school specific and even grade specific. It is only a matter of trainning.
It probably accounts for Achilles shouting "First Greek" when he lands at Troy's beach and all those descriptions of statues of a girl suspiciously similar to a modern actress in Roman poems. And I was really sure Tom Sawyer's pet was not a penguin.
I doubt these most of these modern $100 inkjet printers can live to the 3000th page. Usually they will break well before that and there is no economic sense in fixing them.
Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter, plus a 20 page manual (compilation and installation instructions but mostly internal functions documentantion) and only one mailing list (and one of the most helpful and kind technical mailing lists I ever subscribed).
But then again that was even before the time Mark talks about. An Internet eon...
While I do not deny that Gates and Allen were very lucky to get the original IBM contract, they had to be very smart to beat the competition in the GUI arena during Windows early years. They had some luck there (when Apple, for instance, refused to port their OS to the Intel platform, a move that would probably have left us with Apple at the top). Before v 3.1, Windows could barely run two instances of its own clock at the same time and there were worthy players (GEM, for instance, or the text-based DeskView).
In the development area, Borland and Watcom were the two companies developers cared about. While Visual Basic was an instant hit, its original crippled enviroment couldn't be used for serious development. With Visual C++ Microsoft managed to turn the wind around once again.
As for being "a rich kid with contacts", there are those everywhere. It garantees nothing past the first couple of opportunies. People will see you because they know your Dad, but they will only keep turning to you if you can prove you are good.
But, please, don't misundertand me. I am no BillG fan, I just think one can't really dismiss his intelligence just because one does not like how he uses it (as the original poster did).
If Masters disallowed children-party clowns from being members and the Boy Scouts wouldn't accept three-legged iguana owners, we wouldn't be discussing it, would we?
Get your facts straight, kiddo. It is not like Bill inherited a railroad empire from Dad, he build the godammed illegal monopoly from ground up, starting from a 3 man operation back in the seventies. You may question his business ethics, his excessive greed or whatever, but thinking he can't outsmart most of us with his hands tied and his eyes closed is dumb (and dangerous - underestimating the enemy is the fastest path to a unforgettable defeat).
I am certain I am running 1.4 rc3. The about page, nevertheless, contrary to all reason and to the thingsbeyong reason like the Windows registry, insists it is Mozilla 1.02 (which it can't be, the mail has bayesian filtering, the most recent Orbit theme works, etc).
I even searched for such a bug in Buzilla but found nothing. Must be some WK2 wierdness.
Boycott the RIAA, support independent artists, donate to the EFF, and write lots of letters to your representatives -- and STOP downloading shit that you don't have the legal right to download. Problem solved.
Let us iterate: a) Boycott the RIAA: one could, if the general public could do without Britney. But they can't. So I think they'd better get some Britney for free. They will buy the CD and go to the show, anyway. b)support independent artists: ah, yes. Buy the music from artists the (mostly big corporation controlled) radios do not play, the (mostly big corporation controlled) TVs don't show and the stores don't get (because their dostribution channels won't carry). Where the hell are one supposed to find the independent artists but downloading their work from the Internet? c) write lots of letters to your representatives: yes, they care a lot...
I say the only way out is through civil disobedience. "Download in" until they can't arrest and fine more. While the artists don't have clear means to distribute their work without the middle beings, support them by going to their shows.
This whole issue has been going downstream for a while now. RIAA is so desperate now that I would pity them, were them not an evil organisation that in a sane society would already have been extinct.
Come on, people. I read you saying "They are right, sue the infringers", "Good for them", "I don't care about music pirates". Let me tell you something: you are full of it. The "infringers", the "pirates", the "criminals" are you brother, your son and your neighbour. And they are doing exactly what they should, nailing this industry's coffin byte by byte.
The cartels won't change. Like a dying dinossaur, they will try to survive by every possible way, be it buying laws, buying copyright extensions, using the money they steal from the public and the artists to sue everyone in their way, bribe a few and mindwash the rest.
We can,t expect any help from legislators, they are all already bought. We can't expect any help from the media, the media, the music industry and the movie industry are owned by the same corporations.
We can only expect help from ourselves, they can't sue everyone. Thay can' jail everyone and the Courts will eventually notice that an all-out forced money transfer from the consumers to an industry that refuses to advance is not a possibility.
So please, forget this righteous crap some of you keep regurgitating. Screw what the law RIAA bought says. This is war, RIAA is the enemy and it ends when they and their outdated business model are gone. It is as simple as that.
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The point here is not to make sharing copyrighted material legal. Just to stay one step ahead of the pursuers, the same way the faster zebra will defeat the lions everytime. Make the race for survival a bit harder for them and funnier for the rest of us watching from afar.
The files you have originally are still elesewhere in your computer. They are just not shared as a whole by anyone. Obviously there are enhancements to be made. One must build redundance (a given chunk must be replicated across some hosts so it does not disappear when part of the network goes down). The point here is to make it very difficult to determine and prove a certain file was shared by a certain person, nothing more.
(With many apologies to Paul Graham)
What Kazaa Lite has now is equivalent to blacklists of spammers and spammers domains. We have already determined this strategy alone won't solve the problem.
The next logical step is to combine the lists with a distributed statistical filter capable of identifying RIAA hosts by search pattern and IP pattern. Since it is happening in a connected network, each peer filter can then broadcast its guesses and receive other peers guesses. Locally you can build a trust list based upon the likehood of search comming from a RIAA host.
Obviously this have problems.
One problem is the lack of significant search samples to make decisions. We would have to see an implementation to discover if it is mathematically feasible.
RIAA can also start trying to close down sharers by broadcasting their IP as "riaa-like" from a great number of peers. The way to avoid this is having all peers checking "the evidence". If the sharing IP and its searches do not match RIAA pattern, the call is probably bogus and those IPs broadcasting it are probably RIAA's. Backfire on them...
Another danger is RIAA using a range of IPs large enough to endanger the network connectivity. This is probably too expensive, but RIAA is probably too rich too.
Anyway, my point is that since the data is there (RIAA is searching the networks for the sharers), one can always analyse this data and try to extract as much information as possible from it.
Let us say that instead of putting a file in my "Shared" folder, I run it through a program that splits it in little chunks, mark them in some way and send most chunks away to peers agreeing to host chunks. At the same time I am hosting chunks for other files. So, on the top of the sharing network you have now a distributed storage system.
A search here would also not elicit a direct response. It would only tip the network managing peers to "store" a certain kind of chunk in a certain computer. When all chunks are available they are copied away from the shared space and re-assembled into a whole file.
I never send more than a small piece of a file to any computer. I never shared a whole file. I never received a whole file.
The BitTorrent system works more or less like this, but you only share what you get.
Discovery Channel or National Geographic Channel showed it down here. I even recorded the first two episodes for my son (since they showed it too late for him), but then I found they couldn't decide if their movie was to be a good documentary or a bad soap-opera (the actors were lousy, the script terrible). So I gave up. There were good bit, though. The part about the evolution of the mammal/bird eye was very good.
Sir, the trolls here are fed with a special, moderate, ration. Giving them knowledge makes them overexcited and hard handle. The staff thanks you for your cooperation.
You mean, as long as the government is not able to use the media and the Courts to convince the public a stolen ellection was clean or to lie extensively in order to gain public support for a special interest war abroad? Yes, I agree. But wait...
The maintainence of the economic order requires the consumers to consume. If your product lasts forever there is an upper consumer threshold after which you can close your shop and go home: you will never make a profitable sale again.
With material goods it is only a matter of varying the quality. A car will eventually break for good, a house will fall apart. In the case of digital products, the obsolescence must be forced upon consumers by other means: new features, new standards, refusal to correct bugs (as in Windows 95 and bellow, Oracle 8x and bellow etc).
The point is, why would you buy another compiler if the language stays the same forever and all bells and whistles are already there?
Do you think there a chance for an massless invisible insecticide, without odour or any visible sensation, to fly over there? I mean, I think I know a country where we can buy lots of empty used spray cans...
And bayesian filters false negatives usually won't kill, just annoy.
These 2% are certainly Outlook/Outlook Express users. Let the next version of Outlook and all patches to older versions include filters pre-trainned to filter out to the Junk folder all ordinary spam (Viagra, Nigeria, Mortgage etc). Scare these people into upgrading (virus scare, license expiration, goat from outer space, whatever). Suckers covered, spammers in the red, mission accomplished.
Although some people now advocate using function points instead, but that is another discussion entirely. Anyway, in GNUtopia your capacity to buy goods is proportional to number of lines of code you authored and "deposited" in Savanah. There is also a requirement that the software you contributed for is actually being used by someone outside your family. Under this system, would you be poor or rich?
The point of efficient filtering is making spamming useless. Today a spammer sends a message to 5 million addresses in order to receive 100 answers. Only the absurdly low cost of sending the 5 million messages makes the ridiculously low response rate economically acceptable. And barely so, I bet, in most cases.
If we manage to filter these messages out of those 100 idiots Inboxes, the very act of spamming will be rendered economically senseless, since the response rate will go bellow the cost/benefit threshold. As a side-effect, the bandwidth is claimed back.
I concede some kind of blacklist may be useful here, but as a aditional measure, not as the main spam fighting tool.
And there is one reason for profit corporations exist-- to make money. This is a surprise why?
The real quote would be: And there is one reason for Courts to exist-- to help corporations make money. This is a surprise why?
After migrating to Mozilla Mail from Eudora and seeing its simple bayesian filter solve my spam problem in a week, I became a firm believer that we can solve this problem without laws, politicians, police or any other bureocracy. All we need is Math and a campaign for filter deployment akin to the innoculation campaigns that erradicated smallpox and polio.
I think that when most of the userbase has trainned filters installed, the spam problem will disappear into irrelevance. The half-a-dozen renitent spammers that will suffer the pains of creating the bland texts capable of fooling the filters can then be blacklisted. Even the Usenet can be retaken this way. And the beauty of it is that each person will have its own set of filters, trainned locally and directed at what that person considers spam.
If you think about it, even the shaddy and inneficient centralized web filters can be thrown away and replaced by this kind of filter, allowing each school and each library to filter only the content its local community considers harmful.
I don't know about the rest of you, but if this dream/wish happens, we (as in "we the people who care about it") will once again have a reason to be very proud, having proved this network is capable of taking care of itself like no previous human technical work could.
Bayesian filters, as presently applied to spam, can be used to filter any text based content (HTML pages, for instance). Mozilla Mail (I have migrated from Eudora some weeks ago) recognises HTML spam without any problem.
The way this kind of text analysis works, implementing your idea is only a matter of developing the browser plugin (or proxy server, for better control and security) and trainning the filter to deny access to certain kinds of HTML pattern. For efficiency, you will probably want to have a cache mechanism in place (one more reason for it to be a proxy). And you get a nice free side-effect: the filter may be school specific and even grade specific. It is only a matter of trainning.
It probably accounts for Achilles shouting "First Greek" when he lands at Troy's beach and all those descriptions of statues of a girl suspiciously similar to a modern actress in Roman poems. And I was really sure Tom Sawyer's pet was not a penguin.
I doubt these most of these modern $100 inkjet printers can live to the 3000th page. Usually they will break well before that and there is no economic sense in fixing them.
Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter, plus a 20 page manual (compilation and installation instructions but mostly internal functions documentantion) and only one mailing list (and one of the most helpful and kind technical mailing lists I ever subscribed).
But then again that was even before the time Mark talks about. An Internet eon...
While I do not deny that Gates and Allen were very lucky to get the original IBM contract, they had to be very smart to beat the competition in the GUI arena during Windows early years. They had some luck there (when Apple, for instance, refused to port their OS to the Intel platform, a move that would probably have left us with Apple at the top). Before v 3.1, Windows could barely run two instances of its own clock at the same time and there were worthy players (GEM, for instance, or the text-based DeskView).
In the development area, Borland and Watcom were the two companies developers cared about. While Visual Basic was an instant hit, its original crippled enviroment couldn't be used for serious development. With Visual C++ Microsoft managed to turn the wind around once again.
As for being "a rich kid with contacts", there are those everywhere. It garantees nothing past the first couple of opportunies. People will see you because they know your Dad, but they will only keep turning to you if you can prove you are good.
But, please, don't misundertand me. I am no BillG fan, I just think one can't really dismiss his intelligence just because one does not like how he uses it (as the original poster did).
If Masters disallowed children-party clowns from being members and the Boy Scouts wouldn't accept three-legged iguana owners, we wouldn't be discussing it, would we?
Get your facts straight, kiddo. It is not like Bill inherited a railroad empire from Dad, he build the godammed illegal monopoly from ground up, starting from a 3 man operation back in the seventies. You may question his business ethics, his excessive greed or whatever, but thinking he can't outsmart most of us with his hands tied and his eyes closed is dumb (and dangerous - underestimating the enemy is the fastest path to a unforgettable defeat).
I am certain I am running 1.4 rc3. The about page, nevertheless, contrary to all reason and to the thingsbeyong reason like the Windows registry, insists it is Mozilla 1.02 (which it can't be, the mail has bayesian filtering, the most recent Orbit theme works, etc).
I even searched for such a bug in Buzilla but found nothing. Must be some WK2 wierdness.
Boycott the RIAA, support independent artists, donate to the EFF, and write lots of letters to your representatives -- and STOP downloading shit that you don't have the legal right to download. Problem solved.
Let us iterate:
a) Boycott the RIAA: one could, if the general public could do without Britney. But they can't. So I think they'd better get some Britney for free. They will buy the CD and go to the show, anyway.
b)support independent artists: ah, yes. Buy the music from artists the (mostly big corporation controlled) radios do not play, the (mostly big corporation controlled) TVs don't show and the stores don't get (because their dostribution channels won't carry). Where the hell are one supposed to find the independent artists but downloading their work from the Internet?
c) write lots of letters to your representatives: yes, they care a lot...
I say the only way out is through civil disobedience. "Download in" until they can't arrest and fine more. While the artists don't have clear means to distribute their work without the middle beings, support them by going to their shows.
This whole issue has been going downstream for a while now. RIAA is so desperate now that I would pity them, were them not an evil organisation that in a sane society would already have been extinct.
Come on, people. I read you saying "They are right, sue the infringers", "Good for them", "I don't care about music pirates". Let me tell you something: you are full of it. The "infringers", the "pirates", the "criminals" are you brother, your son and your neighbour. And they are doing exactly what they should, nailing this industry's coffin byte by byte.
The cartels won't change. Like a dying dinossaur, they will try to survive by every possible way, be it buying laws, buying copyright extensions, using the money they steal from the public and the artists to sue everyone in their way, bribe a few and mindwash the rest.
We can,t expect any help from legislators, they are all already bought. We can't expect any help from the media, the media, the music industry and the movie industry are owned by the same corporations.
We can only expect help from ourselves, they can't sue everyone. Thay can' jail everyone and the Courts will eventually notice that an all-out forced money transfer from the consumers to an industry that refuses to advance is not a possibility.
So please, forget this righteous crap some of you keep regurgitating. Screw what the law RIAA bought says. This is war, RIAA is the enemy and it ends when they and their outdated business model are gone. It is as simple as that.