The nearly featureless PostScript viewer GhostView ( http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ ) does me fine for most PDF viewing chores. If a document needs more attention than can be read on screen in a few minutes, I'm just going to send it to a printer anyway.
If it's full of "interactive content," then, well, you shouldn't have made it a PDF, since I'm pretty unlikely to jump through hoops to discover what you're trying to say. Use HTML or PowerPoint or what have you if you really need interactivity. My distrust of active content is high when it's not running in a sandbox like a well-configured browser. Simple hyperlinks are a possible exception, as long as there's no attempt to obfuscate the URI and action.
I don't understand why a digital HD video spec needs to include limits on the H/W of the image in the first place. Shouldn't it just be arbitrary? It doesn't exactly take revolutionary technology to scale digital video to a given screen size & manage the differences in aspect ratio.
Am I missing something here? I can play 1080i MP4 files on a 720p screen. Ignoring the lack of source material for a minute, I could hypothetically have a file @ 2880 * 1620 and still play it on my current setup. Further, if my graphics card and TV both handled resolutions that high, is there any reason it wouldn't go through my DVI connection at this res?
Sooner or later (preferably sooner) we need a public, open forum for idea submission, to serve as a massive clearinghouse full of what will one day be "prior art" in the public domain. Today, the most basic abstract entities and processes (e.g. OneClick) can fall out of the public idea space & into someone's patent portfolio. If ideas start being publicly described, catgegorized, related & strung together into systems in the simplest form feasible and as early as possible, there's at least some chance of substantiating claims of prior art and obviousness when challenging IP infringement claims in court.
So... any volunteers to help with the design of the Taxonomy of Obvious Ideas (tooi.org)?
What's really needed is a database containing strategies and tactics to use in these defenses, along with a realtime track record of their effectiveness.
For starters, how about the following:
-Enter into evidence a stack of 100 fake screenshots with an affadavit showing (truthfully) that a high school kid produced them in 15 minutes. -Enter into evidence a boilerplate document explaining how IP_Address != Defendant, with a few dozen real-world examples (open wi-fi router, etc.) for non-nerds. -Move for dismissal unless plaintiff provides a computer name or MAC address of the specific computer on which the infringing action took place, and provide at least prima facie reason for presuming that infringing action happened on a computer under the defendant's control and/or was committed by the defendant personally. -Move that the IP address of the RIAA investigator's computer be disclosed & entered into evidence, so that their claim can be compared with logs from defendant's router or IP history (if applicable). -Move that defendant's independent computer forensics expert be able to seize and inspect the PC from which the screenshot was taken, to search for (dis)confirmation of said infringement & plaintiff's discovery thereof.
Ultimately, Joe Average needs to be able to win one of these without a lawyer if the **AA is ever going to be deterred in this arena. Joe needs a flowchart telling him *exactly* what to do and say at each turn of events, with the accompanying documents for submitting motions conveniently linked in. Yes, the flowchart will often terminate in "you're hosed," but it's a start anyway.
True enough. There's probably going to be an eternal tug-of-war between high and low entry barriers. That which is too cheap, fast & easy to utilize (like SMTP connections) tends to create boatloads of noise for every unit of signal. On the other hand, systems with excessively high entry barriers create very little noise at all, but not much signal either.
But even in the eBay example, brick laptopping activity is at least *hindered* by having a reputation system in place, since the "gain reputation" step in your sequence involves accumulating a comparatively expensive resource (feedback). How many positive feedbacks must one acquire to unload a boatload of DOA laptops? Two negatives in ten would put the seller's rating below most buyers' trust threshold. You're right that the reputation system doesn't stop him, but at least it slows him down a bit.
That said, an obvious shortcoming is the fact that a seller can still game the system by doing oodles of low-dollar transactions quite admirably, but then rip people off on the big dollar ones. Each time she sells 100 of some $1.00 item at cost & gets a positive point on each, she can turn around and sell a $349 paperweight that she garbage-picked, get a negative feedback, and still enjoy a 99% rating. That's not a failing of reputation systems in general, it's a shortcoming with this particular implementation, and it could be remedied by smartening up the system a bit (e.g., start applying a partial weighting on feedback, to account for the dollar value of the transaction being rated).
The speed is significantly better. Still noticably slower than a reg'lar connection, but no longer is it so slow that impatient folks like me abandon it altogether.
The quickest way to give it a speed test (after all, if you're testing speed you probably don't want to be slow about it;-)) is to download and run Torpark -- it's portable, pre-configured to establish a Tor circuit, and it pretty much runs right out of the box.
If you want to help the speed even more, be a good citizen and run a Tor server.
Identity systems can provide real value even if they're pseudonymous and even if IDs are easily acquired: Attach an externally-queryable reputation system (with privacy policies, of course) that makes one's *history* a commodity worth accumulating. Factors in one's reputation could include length of tenure & types of transactions.
Think about it... anyone can get an eBay ID, but have you seen many spambots with a high feedback score? Whether allowed or not, there's not *that* much benefit in getting a new ID. Sure, you might be able to escape the stigma of your past transgressions, but the cost of doing so includes becoming a newbie, an unknown. Using the eBay example, many folks (myself included) won't engage in transactions over about $10 with people having short tenures, few transactions, or poor feedback scores.
Ultimately, I don't need to someone's real identity in order to make a sound decision about whether to engage in a transaction with them - I just need to know that I'm really dealing with the person that's legitimately associated with the ID. So IMO, if an identity system provided robust security against spoofing, an effective history evaluation mechanism, and an effective privacy policy implementation, I'd be all for it, even if it cost a few bucks.
The above qualifications don't seem to apply to the system in TFA - at least not at present. If they get something that robust off the ground though, I'll change my evaluation of them from "expensive row in a database" to "useful and valuable service."
Pardon my nerdocratic hubris here, but IMO Wikipedia would be a fantastic petri dish for evolving a robust reputation system, and the result could be useful in a wide variety of applications that facilitate pseudonymous communication & transactions.
In the beginning, I'm sure this would just gather data & have little to no impact on the content. But over time, it could well become increasingly effective at improving content quality as its designers started to identify patterns & meaningful correlations in the collected data.
This isn't so different from SPAM filters that need constant training, or PageRank, or eBay feedback scores, or AVN forum posting rules, etc. One needn't restrict the reputation data to any one data species; you could use a composite of community feedback + usage statistics + genetic algorithms etc., and over time tweak the weight any category of data is given to account for its sample size, its expected margin of error, and its track record in terms of predictive power.
Sure, it's a time consuming undertaking & it'll take patience before we see results, but I don't see the real difficulty being in rigging up the system; I think the real difficulty will be in defining exactly what constitutes a quality article.
Now, take a minute to share a utopian dream with me: Imagine the day when registered Wikipedia users with good reputations will be able to make edits from a Tor connection.:-)
Good point, and my personal experience on several occasions backs up that saying as well. However, I have to think that when one's *primary* purpose is to write propoganda, and furthermore one does so in an environment where competing information sources are restrained, accuracy is bound to be *unusually* poor. If a presumption of inaccuracy in news stories has some validity in free countries where fact-checking is easy and embarassing mistakes are public matters, how much truer is it likely to be in a climate where those pressures are removed?
On another less on-topic point, I've never seen an individual news agency become a ubiquitous punchline or "bad example" like Fox News has, and it's starting to puzzle me. Ok, they employ Geraldo, O'Reilly, and they use New York Post / Enquirer style marketing and graphics, and those are pretty inviting targets for ridicule. But that notwithstanding, the frequency of "Fox News" mentions in this kind of context far surpasses any similar references to a news agency that I've ever seen before, and that's including Enquirer and Weekly World News jokes. Until now, I've never seen such a meme, where some news outlet becomes a default metaphor for "inaccuracy" or "bias." So what's behind this? Rivera's and O'Reilly's are punditry & special interest programs (i.e., not regular news programming per se), and the only attempt I've seen to do a methodologically sound and peer-reviewed study of news bias showed theirs to be marginally closer to center than the average outlet (among major newspapers and major news networks). Anyway, I don't mean to gripe or dangle flamebait out there; just curious if there's any comprehensive, non-anecdotal data behind this perception - i.e., is there some aggregate study or rigorous investigation that shows Fox News to be less accurate than its competitors? Or, even if their bias and accuracy are roughly comparable (quantitatively) to those of its competitors, could it be that the direction of the bias goes against popular sentiment, so popular sentiment will in turn tend to view the organization uncharitably?
You cannot just put in a disk, answer a few yes or no questions and then start using MCE. Au contraire; I am a developer on MS platforms, and I've also been a sys admin. I've been building hobby systems for about 11 years. After buying a 56" Samsung HDTV, I decided to "do MCE right" by starting with bare metal & selecting each piece of hardware very carefully for this special-purpose system.
To get a reliable & stable system took me six weeks. FYI, I can usually do a PC from bare metal (I do them often for friends) in about 3 hours, and they don't generate "support calls." Between install issues, Windows Update snafus, DRM issues and driver issues, MCE drove me nuts for all of the six weeks it took me to finally nail it. And I still can't do 30% of what I bought it to do - namely, timeshift HDTV cable programming (sorry, cable provider decided to lock out FireWire) and archive certain of my recordings to DVD Video (M$ DRM in MCE prevents you from burning recorded shows from certain channels - like all of HBO and Showtime's channels). There is no solution that I know of for the first problem, but switching to MythTV would most definitely take care of the second.
In short, even for an experienced Windows system builder, building a MCE box right is a daunting task. I've toyed with a few linux distros lately, and given my experience with those, I can't imagine MythTV being worse. You could be thinking in terms of prebuilt MCE systems, but even those create a boatload of conundrums for users, and since there *are* sources for MythTV boxes prebuilt, it would be unfair to make an apples-to-oranges comparison of prebuilt-MCE machines to DIY Myth ones. I for one am about ready to willingly forfeit the fruits of my six-week ordeal and start all over with Myth. I have a working, stable HD system now, but I'm pissed off enough now that I don't care; I want one without artificial restrictions on what I can do with my recorded programs.
That's a good point; I hadn't thought of looking at it as two sides of the same coin, but now that you mention it, it makes sense to.
So the leapfrog game might ultimately be bidirectional. I don't think that necessarily means the Good Guys shouldn't play, though. Starting with an open standard would provide one advantage for those on the side of privacy; one of the biggest problems with DRM schemes (both strategically *and* ethically) is their dependence on secrecy. Conversely, Tor's source code is freely available - http://tor.eff.org/ - and yet it's far from trivial to trace individual users.
While you have me thinking in these terms though, how about turning one of the DRM-ers own weapons against them - the DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions? A P2P software suite can be open yet can contain an EULA that prohibits circumventing its privacy features in order to identify individual users against their wishes. I wouldn't depend on that alone, mind you, but it would be amusing to see how the RIAA would deal with the Catch-22 of having to use self-incriminating evidence to sue individual users of such a system.
Exactly. That is the kind of data that either needs to be discarded, or it needs to be stored in such a form that it can only be retrieved via a secret key known only to the user. Distributing data storage across multiple organizations (so that no single entity has enough data to reconstruct the original) might help facilitate this. Making the system secure is a daunting enough task; making it secure *and* responsive will take some collaborative genius.
I really hope someone is up to the task though; any guarantee of unfettered speech rights that I can think of requires the possibility of strong anonymity and/or pseudonymity. Rules that depend on human obedience are not strong and reliable deterrents to infringement.
I agree with your statement: "The root of the problem is that many of the organizations that emerged from the latter half of the twentieth century are actually too large for people to effectively be in control of."
The only effective strategy I see against this is to promote policies which facilitate more vigorous competition from smaller organizations and upstarts. Many of the factors that create oligopolies are artificial constraints rather than market forces. Economy of scale is one thing, and IMO it's good and right that this favors the larger organization. IP law run amok is quite another thing though, and here it seems our policy does anything but what it was created to. Fixing the system without damaging freedom of speech and of trade is a tough nut to crack though.
I'm sure it's much too late for Google to do this, but there's a huge vacuum in the market for a new company to offer similar services but with strong privacy protections. To be worth a flip, such services would need to use technological means to secure users' privacy; strong policy alone is insufficient.
Data warehousing has obvious benefits to me as a user. I like having my mail archive on a server where it's accessible from anywhere. I like having personalized search results, and having personalized plugins on my homepage. I don't like neo-Nazis, but to me, the threat of the loss of speech and privacy rights is far more dangerous than the harm that can be caused by those taking advantage of same for nefarious ends.
I'd like to see EFF (or some similar organization) sponsor a coding contest for creating strong privacy systems within a personalized data warehousing environment. I could see building blocks in such a system consisting of encrypted data, client-side only keys, and encrypted keys or hashes maintaining the links between user accounts and their data.
The problem that needs solving is that any company which maintains and can access user data on its servers may at some time be compelled to divulge such data at the request of a government. By storing the data in the clear, the company may well have sacrificed its prerogative to differentiate between "good" and "evil" government requests. On the other hand, a company cannot divulge data that it cannot access. It could forward a subpoena or similar instrument to an anonymous user on behalf of a government, but a truly secure system would not allow it to inspect, cross-reference or mine the data without the user's knowlege and consent.
Too many people (myself included) will be hesitant to establish an account with a lesser-known or unknown service. It would work for the wonderful folks who are determined to make the donation, but those fine developers will still see a drop in donation income compared to using the PayPal button.
It's frightening to consider that one currency services company has enough influence to make or break someone who depends on e-pay income. Perhaps eGold would be a viable alternative; it doesn't have the user base that PayPal has, but it's one of the more likely to hit critical mass -- especially if people who use it would recommend it to family and friends.
IMO, privacy concerns dictate that e-pay services ought to be item-agnostic. If consumers show this industry that they're willing to tolerate item inspection & transaction interference, then we'll eventually see coercive marketing tactics a-la "brand encouragement" / "brand discouragement" on our credit cards (you may buy Glenfiddich with your Chaize Weesa Card, but not Glenlivet...) Zoikes!
We're probably going to have to agree to disagree. Yes, I think by and large, large corporations can as bad as lawyers (99% give the rest a bad name). But despite all the things people feel like they get away with, even large corperations are ultimately the more accountable, in that they don't enjoy the Sovereign Immunity that government agencies do.
I also can't help but see a tension between some of your statements: You cast privatization as a bad thing, but also think politicians have too much money. The problem with that is that politicians do much more damage with the public money they manipulate and control than they can ever do with the comparative pittance they accumulate in campaign contributions. Case in point: The Social Security "IOU" fund.
Another problem with these arguments is that privatization isn't exclusively a government contract scenario where politicians can gerrymander the vendor selection process and get kickbacks in return. Privatization can be as simple as allowing competition where the government had monopolies in the past (as I wish they'd done with SSRI). After all, if they don't control your retirement savings, they can't double & triple mortgage it can they?
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, remember that I specifically used the phrase "with civilian privacy oversight" in my comments about third party data storage. That's a key element to the types of solutions I propose; you need an EFF-type organization sitting between your data and any request to access it, gov't initiated or otherwise.
The databases with citizen information in the government's possession are proportional to the number, size and scope of our government's agencies.
Frankly, it serves us right to have the government mining all this information about us; we let them accumulate it in the first place. When failures happen in the institutions we expect to be protecting our health and safety, we demand better interagency communication. Well, here it is.
Each new aspect of our lives that we grant entitlement status to -- which we think should be secured and managed by the public sector for every citizen -- creates a new information sink about those citizens. You can't dump that kind of information into the government and then expect there to be an impenetrable wall protecting it *from* the government. It's not going to happen, no matter how much indignation and idealism we hurl at the issue.
Just wait 'til we have universal health care; anytime someone needs treatment for a chemical burn, they can probably expect a knock on their door asking for an explanation of how the injury happened. But hey, we're clamoring for the House & Senate to ride in on their white horses & fix health care for us, so in our collective subconscious, we must want things that way.
If you want to firewall data like this from willy-nilly government sifting, find a way to move it outside the government. Clamor for a bill forcing agencies to contract out their data storage to organizations with strict charters and civilian privacy oversight. Better yet, clamor loudly for a bill giving all Americans the right to opt out of any government service or program that collects private data and stores it in a government-controlled warehouse, Social Security and Census Bureau included. Force private & non-profit alternatives to exist for most of these data-collecting agencies, and force the agencies to use third-party data warehouses for those services where direct private alternatives aren't possible. Ultimately though, if you want the benefit of public services, then there is some consequential loss of privacy, plain and simple.
None of what I suggest will happen in our lifetimes, of course, but privacy is already evolving into a commodity in its own right. As such, this will eventually affect the public sector to the extent that it is exposed to normal economic pressures.
...using the Good and Proper outlets for such content, i.e., the co-branded ones with integrated advertising. You can't have them running off willy nilly, trying to decide what content is important to them without guidance.
You see, it doesn't matter what's important to the customer *now*; eventually, they will tearfully see the Light and come to appreciate the wise guidance bestowed upon them by the anonymous bandwidth throttlers.
I guess it comes down to what features are important in a particular household. I don't switch DVDs often enough to need button-click access to my entire collection. In fact, even a 6-disk changer for audio CDs has 4 about slots too many for me; I'm not sure why, but it just ends up being simpler for me to handle A/V media one disc at a time.
Also, I prefer that strangers *not* be able to monkey with my home theater stuff without my help. My technophobic wife can handle it just fine, and that's all that really matters.
Movies that are worth $4.00 worth of disk space get it, those that aren't don't. I'm happy with the setup, and the old DVD player has been collecting dust ever since I built the HTPC.
Just my $0.02 + state, county & municpal taxes, void where prohibited. YMMV, of course.
Are we starting from scratch for this comparison? If so, then in my house it would go something like this:
A) HDTV dual-tuner Media Center PC w/1TB RAID + 600GB non-RAID storage, $1900
B) DVD Player +
HD PVR Equipment & Monthly Subscription +
CD Player / Recorder +
AM/FM Tuner +
(Many things simply not practical or available as individual components) = $???
Besides that, we get a lot of added conveniences out of going the PC route: Our entire photo album & home video archive is available in the living room (where we can quickly slideshow a particular set of pics on the widescreen TV); Need to return a DVD somewhere but haven't watched it yet? No problem, back it up, watch and delete later (yes, we really delete without sharing or burning); Our entire music collection is searchable & it gets output to the stereo amp in digital optical quality; In addition to AM/FM radio, we have dozens of options for streaming music from Internet sources like Pandora.
Also, we can skip those pesky, "mandatory" 10 minute indoctrination pieces at the beginning of DVDs, and we can acquire and play content at HDTV resolutions.
The most valuable feature of all, though, is that when we get stuck in one of those "who the hell is that actor?" or "what else have I seen her in?" conundrums, we can just pause and get the imdb answer without leaving the couch. All the other features combined? $1900 (incl. 1TB RAID-5). That last feature alone? Priceless.
Slashdot Mirror
Having a permanent backup you can store in a cupboard has something to do with DRM. Not everything, but certainly something.
I think their "worst" calculation is acutally a composite measure, like (badness * max(popularity,notoriety)).
No joke, I've seen them hanging from the back of large, powerful trucks on the expressways around me.
I've not seen them very often, mind you, but every couple months or so I see another one (or pair, as it were).
The nearly featureless PostScript viewer GhostView ( http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ ) does me fine for most PDF viewing chores. If a document needs more attention than can be read on screen in a few minutes, I'm just going to send it to a printer anyway.
If it's full of "interactive content," then, well, you shouldn't have made it a PDF, since I'm pretty unlikely to jump through hoops to discover what you're trying to say. Use HTML or PowerPoint or what have you if you really need interactivity. My distrust of active content is high when it's not running in a sandbox like a well-configured browser. Simple hyperlinks are a possible exception, as long as there's no attempt to obfuscate the URI and action.
I don't understand why a digital HD video spec needs to include limits on the H/W of the image in the first place. Shouldn't it just be arbitrary? It doesn't exactly take revolutionary technology to scale digital video to a given screen size & manage the differences in aspect ratio.
Am I missing something here? I can play 1080i MP4 files on a 720p screen. Ignoring the lack of source material for a minute, I could hypothetically have a file @ 2880 * 1620 and still play it on my current setup. Further, if my graphics card and TV both handled resolutions that high, is there any reason it wouldn't go through my DVI connection at this res?
Sooner or later (preferably sooner) we need a public, open forum for idea submission, to serve as a massive clearinghouse full of what will one day be "prior art" in the public domain. Today, the most basic abstract entities and processes (e.g. OneClick) can fall out of the public idea space & into someone's patent portfolio. If ideas start being publicly described, catgegorized, related & strung together into systems in the simplest form feasible and as early as possible, there's at least some chance of substantiating claims of prior art and obviousness when challenging IP infringement claims in court.
So... any volunteers to help with the design of the Taxonomy of Obvious Ideas (tooi.org)?
What's really needed is a database containing strategies and tactics to use in these defenses, along with a realtime track record of their effectiveness.
For starters, how about the following:
-Enter into evidence a stack of 100 fake screenshots with an affadavit showing (truthfully) that a high school kid produced them in 15 minutes.
-Enter into evidence a boilerplate document explaining how IP_Address != Defendant, with a few dozen real-world examples (open wi-fi router, etc.) for non-nerds.
-Move for dismissal unless plaintiff provides a computer name or MAC address of the specific computer on which the infringing action took place, and provide at least prima facie reason for presuming that infringing action happened on a computer under the defendant's control and/or was committed by the defendant personally.
-Move that the IP address of the RIAA investigator's computer be disclosed & entered into evidence, so that their claim can be compared with logs from defendant's router or IP history (if applicable).
-Move that defendant's independent computer forensics expert be able to seize and inspect the PC from which the screenshot was taken, to search for (dis)confirmation of said infringement & plaintiff's discovery thereof.
Ultimately, Joe Average needs to be able to win one of these without a lawyer if the **AA is ever going to be deterred in this arena. Joe needs a flowchart telling him *exactly* what to do and say at each turn of events, with the accompanying documents for submitting motions conveniently linked in. Yes, the flowchart will often terminate in "you're hosed," but it's a start anyway.
True enough. There's probably going to be an eternal tug-of-war between high and low entry barriers. That which is too cheap, fast & easy to utilize (like SMTP connections) tends to create boatloads of noise for every unit of signal. On the other hand, systems with excessively high entry barriers create very little noise at all, but not much signal either.
But even in the eBay example, brick laptopping activity is at least *hindered* by having a reputation system in place, since the "gain reputation" step in your sequence involves accumulating a comparatively expensive resource (feedback). How many positive feedbacks must one acquire to unload a boatload of DOA laptops? Two negatives in ten would put the seller's rating below most buyers' trust threshold. You're right that the reputation system doesn't stop him, but at least it slows him down a bit.
That said, an obvious shortcoming is the fact that a seller can still game the system by doing oodles of low-dollar transactions quite admirably, but then rip people off on the big dollar ones. Each time she sells 100 of some $1.00 item at cost & gets a positive point on each, she can turn around and sell a $349 paperweight that she garbage-picked, get a negative feedback, and still enjoy a 99% rating. That's not a failing of reputation systems in general, it's a shortcoming with this particular implementation, and it could be remedied by smartening up the system a bit (e.g., start applying a partial weighting on feedback, to account for the dollar value of the transaction being rated).
The speed is significantly better. Still noticably slower than a reg'lar connection, but no longer is it so slow that impatient folks like me abandon it altogether.
;-)) is to download and run Torpark -- it's portable, pre-configured to establish a Tor circuit, and it pretty much runs right out of the box.
The quickest way to give it a speed test (after all, if you're testing speed you probably don't want to be slow about it
If you want to help the speed even more, be a good citizen and run a Tor server.
Identity systems can provide real value even if they're pseudonymous and even if IDs are easily acquired: Attach an externally-queryable reputation system (with privacy policies, of course) that makes one's *history* a commodity worth accumulating. Factors in one's reputation could include length of tenure & types of transactions.
Think about it... anyone can get an eBay ID, but have you seen many spambots with a high feedback score? Whether allowed or not, there's not *that* much benefit in getting a new ID. Sure, you might be able to escape the stigma of your past transgressions, but the cost of doing so includes becoming a newbie, an unknown. Using the eBay example, many folks (myself included) won't engage in transactions over about $10 with people having short tenures, few transactions, or poor feedback scores.
Ultimately, I don't need to someone's real identity in order to make a sound decision about whether to engage in a transaction with them - I just need to know that I'm really dealing with the person that's legitimately associated with the ID. So IMO, if an identity system provided robust security against spoofing, an effective history evaluation mechanism, and an effective privacy policy implementation, I'd be all for it, even if it cost a few bucks.
The above qualifications don't seem to apply to the system in TFA - at least not at present. If they get something that robust off the ground though, I'll change my evaluation of them from "expensive row in a database" to "useful and valuable service."
Pardon my nerdocratic hubris here, but IMO Wikipedia would be a fantastic petri dish for evolving a robust reputation system, and the result could be useful in a wide variety of applications that facilitate pseudonymous communication & transactions.
:-)
In the beginning, I'm sure this would just gather data & have little to no impact on the content. But over time, it could well become increasingly effective at improving content quality as its designers started to identify patterns & meaningful correlations in the collected data.
This isn't so different from SPAM filters that need constant training, or PageRank, or eBay feedback scores, or AVN forum posting rules, etc. One needn't restrict the reputation data to any one data species; you could use a composite of community feedback + usage statistics + genetic algorithms etc., and over time tweak the weight any category of data is given to account for its sample size, its expected margin of error, and its track record in terms of predictive power.
Sure, it's a time consuming undertaking & it'll take patience before we see results, but I don't see the real difficulty being in rigging up the system; I think the real difficulty will be in defining exactly what constitutes a quality article.
Now, take a minute to share a utopian dream with me: Imagine the day when registered Wikipedia users with good reputations will be able to make edits from a Tor connection.
Good point, and my personal experience on several occasions backs up that saying as well. However, I have to think that when one's *primary* purpose is to write propoganda, and furthermore one does so in an environment where competing information sources are restrained, accuracy is bound to be *unusually* poor. If a presumption of inaccuracy in news stories has some validity in free countries where fact-checking is easy and embarassing mistakes are public matters, how much truer is it likely to be in a climate where those pressures are removed?
On another less on-topic point, I've never seen an individual news agency become a ubiquitous punchline or "bad example" like Fox News has, and it's starting to puzzle me. Ok, they employ Geraldo, O'Reilly, and they use New York Post / Enquirer style marketing and graphics, and those are pretty inviting targets for ridicule. But that notwithstanding, the frequency of "Fox News" mentions in this kind of context far surpasses any similar references to a news agency that I've ever seen before, and that's including Enquirer and Weekly World News jokes. Until now, I've never seen such a meme, where some news outlet becomes a default metaphor for "inaccuracy" or "bias." So what's behind this? Rivera's and O'Reilly's are punditry & special interest programs (i.e., not regular news programming per se), and the only attempt I've seen to do a methodologically sound and peer-reviewed study of news bias showed theirs to be marginally closer to center than the average outlet (among major newspapers and major news networks). Anyway, I don't mean to gripe or dangle flamebait out there; just curious if there's any comprehensive, non-anecdotal data behind this perception - i.e., is there some aggregate study or rigorous investigation that shows Fox News to be less accurate than its competitors? Or, even if their bias and accuracy are roughly comparable (quantitatively) to those of its competitors, could it be that the direction of the bias goes against popular sentiment, so popular sentiment will in turn tend to view the organization uncharitably?
You cannot just put in a disk, answer a few yes or no questions and then start using MCE. Au contraire; I am a developer on MS platforms, and I've also been a sys admin. I've been building hobby systems for about 11 years. After buying a 56" Samsung HDTV, I decided to "do MCE right" by starting with bare metal & selecting each piece of hardware very carefully for this special-purpose system.
To get a reliable & stable system took me six weeks. FYI, I can usually do a PC from bare metal (I do them often for friends) in about 3 hours, and they don't generate "support calls." Between install issues, Windows Update snafus, DRM issues and driver issues, MCE drove me nuts for all of the six weeks it took me to finally nail it. And I still can't do 30% of what I bought it to do - namely, timeshift HDTV cable programming (sorry, cable provider decided to lock out FireWire) and archive certain of my recordings to DVD Video (M$ DRM in MCE prevents you from burning recorded shows from certain channels - like all of HBO and Showtime's channels). There is no solution that I know of for the first problem, but switching to MythTV would most definitely take care of the second.
In short, even for an experienced Windows system builder, building a MCE box right is a daunting task. I've toyed with a few linux distros lately, and given my experience with those, I can't imagine MythTV being worse. You could be thinking in terms of prebuilt MCE systems, but even those create a boatload of conundrums for users, and since there *are* sources for MythTV boxes prebuilt, it would be unfair to make an apples-to-oranges comparison of prebuilt-MCE machines to DIY Myth ones. I for one am about ready to willingly forfeit the fruits of my six-week ordeal and start all over with Myth. I have a working, stable HD system now, but I'm pissed off enough now that I don't care; I want one without artificial restrictions on what I can do with my recorded programs.
That's a good point; I hadn't thought of looking at it as two sides of the same coin, but now that you mention it, it makes sense to.
So the leapfrog game might ultimately be bidirectional. I don't think that necessarily means the Good Guys shouldn't play, though. Starting with an open standard would provide one advantage for those on the side of privacy; one of the biggest problems with DRM schemes (both strategically *and* ethically) is their dependence on secrecy. Conversely, Tor's source code is freely available - http://tor.eff.org/ - and yet it's far from trivial to trace individual users.
While you have me thinking in these terms though, how about turning one of the DRM-ers own weapons against them - the DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions? A P2P software suite can be open yet can contain an EULA that prohibits circumventing its privacy features in order to identify individual users against their wishes. I wouldn't depend on that alone, mind you, but it would be amusing to see how the RIAA would deal with the Catch-22 of having to use self-incriminating evidence to sue individual users of such a system.
Let me add one to your list:
-- Open standard for _robustly pseudonymized P2P;
Just because the problem exists in the legal sphere doesn't mean the solution needs to.
Exactly. That is the kind of data that either needs to be discarded, or it needs to be stored in such a form that it can only be retrieved via a secret key known only to the user. Distributing data storage across multiple organizations (so that no single entity has enough data to reconstruct the original) might help facilitate this. Making the system secure is a daunting enough task; making it secure *and* responsive will take some collaborative genius.
I really hope someone is up to the task though; any guarantee of unfettered speech rights that I can think of requires the possibility of strong anonymity and/or pseudonymity. Rules that depend on human obedience are not strong and reliable deterrents to infringement.
I agree with your statement: "The root of the problem is that many of the organizations that emerged from the latter half of the twentieth century are actually too large for people to effectively be in control of."
The only effective strategy I see against this is to promote policies which facilitate more vigorous competition from smaller organizations and upstarts. Many of the factors that create oligopolies are artificial constraints rather than market forces. Economy of scale is one thing, and IMO it's good and right that this favors the larger organization. IP law run amok is quite another thing though, and here it seems our policy does anything but what it was created to. Fixing the system without damaging freedom of speech and of trade is a tough nut to crack though.
I'm sure it's much too late for Google to do this, but there's a huge vacuum in the market for a new company to offer similar services but with strong privacy protections. To be worth a flip, such services would need to use technological means to secure users' privacy; strong policy alone is insufficient.
Data warehousing has obvious benefits to me as a user. I like having my mail archive on a server where it's accessible from anywhere. I like having personalized search results, and having personalized plugins on my homepage. I don't like neo-Nazis, but to me, the threat of the loss of speech and privacy rights is far more dangerous than the harm that can be caused by those taking advantage of same for nefarious ends.
I'd like to see EFF (or some similar organization) sponsor a coding contest for creating strong privacy systems within a personalized data warehousing environment. I could see building blocks in such a system consisting of encrypted data, client-side only keys, and encrypted keys or hashes maintaining the links between user accounts and their data.
The problem that needs solving is that any company which maintains and can access user data on its servers may at some time be compelled to divulge such data at the request of a government. By storing the data in the clear, the company may well have sacrificed its prerogative to differentiate between "good" and "evil" government requests. On the other hand, a company cannot divulge data that it cannot access. It could forward a subpoena or similar instrument to an anonymous user on behalf of a government, but a truly secure system would not allow it to inspect, cross-reference or mine the data without the user's knowlege and consent.
Who might be up to such a challenge?
Too many people (myself included) will be hesitant to establish an account with a lesser-known or unknown service. It would work for the wonderful folks who are determined to make the donation, but those fine developers will still see a drop in donation income compared to using the PayPal button.
It's frightening to consider that one currency services company has enough influence to make or break someone who depends on e-pay income. Perhaps eGold would be a viable alternative; it doesn't have the user base that PayPal has, but it's one of the more likely to hit critical mass -- especially if people who use it would recommend it to family and friends.
IMO, privacy concerns dictate that e-pay services ought to be item-agnostic. If consumers show this industry that they're willing to tolerate item inspection & transaction interference, then we'll eventually see coercive marketing tactics a-la "brand encouragement" / "brand discouragement" on our credit cards (you may buy Glenfiddich with your Chaize Weesa Card, but not Glenlivet...) Zoikes!
We're probably going to have to agree to disagree. Yes, I think by and large, large corporations can as bad as lawyers (99% give the rest a bad name). But despite all the things people feel like they get away with, even large corperations are ultimately the more accountable, in that they don't enjoy the Sovereign Immunity that government agencies do.
I also can't help but see a tension between some of your statements: You cast privatization as a bad thing, but also think politicians have too much money. The problem with that is that politicians do much more damage with the public money they manipulate and control than they can ever do with the comparative pittance they accumulate in campaign contributions. Case in point: The Social Security "IOU" fund.
Another problem with these arguments is that privatization isn't exclusively a government contract scenario where politicians can gerrymander the vendor selection process and get kickbacks in return. Privatization can be as simple as allowing competition where the government had monopolies in the past (as I wish they'd done with SSRI). After all, if they don't control your retirement savings, they can't double & triple mortgage it can they?
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, remember that I specifically used the phrase "with civilian privacy oversight" in my comments about third party data storage. That's a key element to the types of solutions I propose; you need an EFF-type organization sitting between your data and any request to access it, gov't initiated or otherwise.
The databases with citizen information in the government's possession are proportional to the number, size and scope of our government's agencies.
Frankly, it serves us right to have the government mining all this information about us; we let them accumulate it in the first place. When failures happen in the institutions we expect to be protecting our health and safety, we demand better interagency communication. Well, here it is.
Each new aspect of our lives that we grant entitlement status to -- which we think should be secured and managed by the public sector for every citizen -- creates a new information sink about those citizens. You can't dump that kind of information into the government and then expect there to be an impenetrable wall protecting it *from* the government. It's not going to happen, no matter how much indignation and idealism we hurl at the issue.
Just wait 'til we have universal health care; anytime someone needs treatment for a chemical burn, they can probably expect a knock on their door asking for an explanation of how the injury happened. But hey, we're clamoring for the House & Senate to ride in on their white horses & fix health care for us, so in our collective subconscious, we must want things that way.
If you want to firewall data like this from willy-nilly government sifting, find a way to move it outside the government. Clamor for a bill forcing agencies to contract out their data storage to organizations with strict charters and civilian privacy oversight. Better yet, clamor loudly for a bill giving all Americans the right to opt out of any government service or program that collects private data and stores it in a government-controlled warehouse, Social Security and Census Bureau included. Force private & non-profit alternatives to exist for most of these data-collecting agencies, and force the agencies to use third-party data warehouses for those services where direct private alternatives aren't possible. Ultimately though, if you want the benefit of public services, then there is some consequential loss of privacy, plain and simple.
None of what I suggest will happen in our lifetimes, of course, but privacy is already evolving into a commodity in its own right. As such, this will eventually affect the public sector to the extent that it is exposed to normal economic pressures.
...using the Good and Proper outlets for such content, i.e., the co-branded ones with integrated advertising. You can't have them running off willy nilly, trying to decide what content is important to them without guidance.
You see, it doesn't matter what's important to the customer *now*; eventually, they will tearfully see the Light and come to appreciate the wise guidance bestowed upon them by the anonymous bandwidth throttlers.
I guess it comes down to what features are important in a particular household. I don't switch DVDs often enough to need button-click access to my entire collection. In fact, even a 6-disk changer for audio CDs has 4 about slots too many for me; I'm not sure why, but it just ends up being simpler for me to handle A/V media one disc at a time.
Also, I prefer that strangers *not* be able to monkey with my home theater stuff without my help. My technophobic wife can handle it just fine, and that's all that really matters.
Movies that are worth $4.00 worth of disk space get it, those that aren't don't. I'm happy with the setup, and the old DVD player has been collecting dust ever since I built the HTPC.
Just my $0.02 + state, county & municpal taxes, void where prohibited. YMMV, of course.
Are we starting from scratch for this comparison? If so, then in my house it would go something like this:
A) HDTV dual-tuner Media Center PC w/1TB RAID + 600GB non-RAID storage, $1900
B) DVD Player +
HD PVR Equipment & Monthly Subscription +
CD Player / Recorder +
AM/FM Tuner +
(Many things simply not practical or available as individual components) = $???
Besides that, we get a lot of added conveniences out of going the PC route: Our entire photo album & home video archive is available in the living room (where we can quickly slideshow a particular set of pics on the widescreen TV); Need to return a DVD somewhere but haven't watched it yet? No problem, back it up, watch and delete later (yes, we really delete without sharing or burning); Our entire music collection is searchable & it gets output to the stereo amp in digital optical quality; In addition to AM/FM radio, we have dozens of options for streaming music from Internet sources like Pandora.
Also, we can skip those pesky, "mandatory" 10 minute indoctrination pieces at the beginning of DVDs, and we can acquire and play content at HDTV resolutions.
The most valuable feature of all, though, is that when we get stuck in one of those "who the hell is that actor?" or "what else have I seen her in?" conundrums, we can just pause and get the imdb answer without leaving the couch. All the other features combined? $1900 (incl. 1TB RAID-5). That last feature alone? Priceless.
Never really checked out the TorrentChannel before. Here's a gem:
_ alien_agenda
New World Order and the Alien Agenda -
http://torrentchannel.com/new_world_order_and_the