So, Cryptonomicon was great, and this makes we want to read A Deepness in the Sky, but this all pales the shock of seeing Galaxy Quest beat The Matrix. Unless that category was, "Best Science Fiction Comedy", I can't imagine how a spoof of trekkies could win out over one of the most awesome visualizations of a science fiction concept on the silver screen, ever.
And hopefully, battle.net will actually work
normally by then. I'm probably not the only
one who would pay to get reliable service
there. Not only am I tired of lag (on a fast
box and a T1), but I'm annoyed at their architecture, which lets Duriel mow you down before the tomb of tal rasha even loads.
If you were concerned you might not have a life because you play it too much, check out the auctionwatch info about what in-game items are selling for on E-bay.
It's been mentioned before, and perhaps the reason it isn't popular is the cost of filing for a patent. But wouldn't it be great if instead of tons of "innovations" going into the public domain by virtue of there being no patent, if a foundation funded the patenting of many critical innovations, and would allow them to be used without royalty under the simple agreement that the licensee could not file a patent infringement lawsuit without the approval of a board of review or something. The board might permit a patent suit on a true innovation, but it would be up to a panel of real experts rather than a clueless judge and bought-and-paid-for expert testimony.
Imagine if, to file a patent suit without infringing yourself, you had to give up the rights to... blowfish/twofish, banner ads, png graphics,
client-to-client file-sharing directory services (the Napster patent, hahaha), and so on and so forth.
I sympathize with the question. In terms of laws which regular employers, those pertaining to sexual harassment are some of the worst. I'd tend to suggest an application layer monitor that checks keywords, and completely ignores messages which do not contain them -- carnivore, anyone?
Really, we need an adjustment of the law. The judicial interpretation of the law has led to some amazing rulings regarding sexual harassment. Not only has it wrongly cost many companies money, time, and employees, but it has trivialized the truly evil sexual harassment which still goes on everywhere. It should always be the case that a company has a chance to rectify a situation after the fact. Any large company should have a contact person in HR who can receive a complaint, and companies should not have liability unless they fail to respond to a complaint. Anyone who can file a lawsuit can surely take a complaint to HR first; otherwise, I'd say they are motivated by greed and/or spite, and not just the desire to have a healthy workplace environment.
Of course, it won't come as any surprise to slashdot readers that the country is in love with litigation, but the longer I work, the more I witness incidents where the spectre of litigation protects only the wicked, as it were.
I'm thinking there's a decent chance that this will work for R2D2 because there's so much other footage to base him on. They can render him using old footage as a planning mechanism, and not lose the "personality" (and why pay an actor twice when you have a computer??)
If this were star wars, in 2000 instead of over
20 years ago, and they did the robot from scratch in CGI, I think they'd have a problem... they might want to call it Jar Jar.
I had a couple of thoughts on this. First: the MPAA sucks.
Second: Is this the first step before they try to ban posting a URL? Because honestly, is there even a point to banning a link when people can cut and paste? What would happen if a browser automatically converted an "http://" string into a link? Would that be a legal link, or make the plaintext URL posted into an illegal activity? And finally, isn't it easy to see the relation between this and a journalist getting arrested because they listed the address of a crackhouse. (Clearly promoting the sale of illicit drugs)
Third: Having not yet used gnutella, but knowing its operation in theory, I wonder if you could tag documents, release them over gnutella, and have a type of linking system where you could easily "browse" by hooking into the gnutella framework. Publish a webpage, and it is anonymous and uncensorable? I can't even imagine how the MPAA sleeps nights. Has anyone done this yet?
Star Wars, episode 2: the Demise of Jar Jar Binks
subtitling would read:
"Now those of us over 10 can go see Star Wars movies again with peace of mind intact."
And this has always been a problem with being a "fringe" consumer. You want to view dvds on WHAT OS? Meanwhile, I have a pretty defeated attitude in regards to, say, boycotting DVDs. The majority of the consuming public are only going to use them on dvd players.
The DMCA is a federal law, passed by congress (in 1998, I believe). Since you mention virginia, you're probably thinking of the UCITA, which is the even-more-ridiculous software law, which would abuse open-source software writers in a variety of ways, and abuse consumers of commercial software likewise. (permits software to scan your drive for unlicensed software, permits intrusion onto your computer from afar to delete "offending" software, and requires warrantys on software (bye, OSS))
Indeed, and I think the summary nicely reveals that clearly the point that people buying a DVD have a right to view it as they please has not been made. However, this is unsurprising, as this was actually a predicted result when the DMCA was being considered as law. If a poor precedent is set, expect the DMCA to protect any and all information with enough lawyers. Why even encrypt with a key? They could have xor'd the content against a 16bit key, and sued just the same.
I'm going to take the time and write my legislators about repealing the provisions of the DMCA which enact the absurd restrictions on reverse engineering encryption systems, just because they protect copyrighted works. The criminality of that activity should require a burden of proof that it was intended for the illegitimate access to the protected work.
This is ridiculous. The government is monitoring
communications and won't reveal the manner in
which they do it? The FBI should be forced to comply with FOIA requests for any and all documents related to Carnivore. The FBI is the servant of the citizenry, not its keeper, and should be put back in its place.
I think we should pass a law prohibiting politicians and members of the government from discussing or promoting laws which contradict, restrict, or attempt to invalidate constitutional rights. Try to restrict free speech? Get tossed. Get fined. I'd love to see Orrin Hatch on trial for "attempting to violate the inalienable rights of constituents". Hah!
I agree that corporations have perverted copyright in legal cases to their own end, and bolstered their claims with DMCA.
However, that has nothing to do with Napster. Napster, in my mind, is not about copyright protection. It's about the independence of transport method. Let's say that 90% of all pirate videos were shipped fedex, and accounted for 90% of fedex's business (haha). Would fedex be a pirate courier service? No.
The same goes for Napster. It may be USED for a lot of piracy, but that doesn't make it responsible. It has the same policy as any ISP: they don't patrol their users, but they'll take action when it is reported to them. As shown with the Metallica/Dre lawsuit.
For me, nothing was more telling that this slashdot comment. The artist complains, "So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition." Marilyn Hall Patel should have heard HIM in court.
I myself have 5 or 6 domains. I would never expect them to be disputed, but as they're not along a common theme, etc, why regard it as squatting? Whereas someone who registers, say, the names of 100 musicians in a day, is clearly doing so very intentionally. The point, really, is that it is hard to prove intent to squat on a domain, and the benefit of the doubt should be on the side of the registrar. And what the hell? If you haven't registered by now...:P
Let's say someone set up juliaroberts.com, and it was a fan site, and they registered it in good faith. Should she be able to take it away? I'd say not. Obviously the microsof.com guy was abusing microsofts trademark on their name, because he was posting a page related to the software industry. But this has come up before, for example, when the people who produce Archie Comics went and sued a parent who registered veronica.org (which is a dead site now), after his daughter Veronica was born.
Incidentally, you can find a nice collection of these blurbs here.
All in all, its most people with money for lawyers trampling on people without, and it is generally just disgusting abuse of IP law. The guy who once owned tatooine.com doesn't have it any more. And there's not even a web page there.
One obvious indication of squatting is people mass-registering domain names. But I'd say unless squatting is clear, first come, first serve. And even with a squatter, they should be reimbursed for all domain fees paid.
I'm just thankful we have 2600 to push some buttons and stand up for people.
This is exactly where my dilemna comes from. But RSAs patents really push the limit because they are not pure math. They are an entire construct which uses math in a previously-unthought-of way to encrypt communications. No one else thought it up (barring the claims of that group in the UK gvmt.), even though it was long needed, and public-key cryptography was quite an advance. Of course, I think their patent is overbroad -- for example, I'm not so sure patents based on elliptical curves rather than primes should have been considered under their patent, since their method did not use them. But it WAS novel, even if it based on always-present mathematical principles. I'm not even disagreeing, really, just saying why I'm ambivalent about this.
Marcus Ranum is great, and he's a great speaker, but he's wrong. It is true that the mass distribution of hacking tools has created a mass of script kiddies. This is an offset of a lot of kids, possibly alienated and marginalized, with excellent basic computer skills and too much time, and not enough legitimate purpose. They do it as a method for asserting themselves. A lot of hacks are a bit like "tagging". You can't drive up 101 in silicon valley without seeing tags all over the overpasses.
Full disclosure allows people responsible for security to verify vulnerabilities, patch holes, etc. The no-disclosure alternative leads to an unknown mass of hackers, out there trading amongst themselves. It will not stop distribution, even to kiddies, who will spend endless hours on #supah_hot_shells on irc pining away for a new tool. Meanwhile, with no public disclosure, who will protect us?
You guessed it, Network Flight Recorder. It, and a cadre of other companies like it, will share their secrets with each other under the blanket of draconian NDAs.
Part of the problem is just that we've recently had a lot of distributed dos attack "exploits". The problem being, you can prevent yourself from being part of it, but you can't prevent yourself from being a victim of it. There's nothing worse that running a tight ship, tuning your box(es) to be safe, and then eating 200megs of smurf because some user with a shell on your machine kicked some flooding fool off #stay_away_flooders.
Still, the smurf problem (and those like it) are not insurmountable, and people are now aware the problem must be dealt with in an automated way, and they're working on it. Meanwhile, law enforcement will grow more adept at tracking this sort of thing. As many people have pointed out, few connections to the net are truly anonymous. Meanwhile, cooperative logging will grow more likely. Logs will stream offsite immediately to a super-safe host, so even if you break into a system, your tracks are set in stone, etc. Meanwhile, those of us who just want safe boxes can keep them safe.
That's a great article, and I find myself agreeing and disagreeing. (I could patent ambiguity and ambivalence;))
First, there is clear abuse which needs addressing. Professional epigrammist? Please. I'm no lawyer, but I find it amazing that such a person could EVER win in court, if only because of fair use.
Both the epigrams and weak patents come back to the root of the problem: you obviously shouldn't permit IP protection for "the obvious". Obvious phrases, and obvious patents are the bane of IP. Whether it is a patent on web links that (gasp) change color, or a catchy phrase which anyone could have come up with (and 10 people probably have), that's a major problem. But the issue is that we don't have a good way to handle it. If we go to court, anyone can buy expert witnesses. "It was obvious", "It was innovention" -- and the judge is supposed to impartially decide? One possible solution would be the court independantly selecting the 3 most qualified experts themselves, deciding on their testimony, and the loser of the case is liable for expert testimony payment.
Trademark law is also grossly abused. I'm all for letting McDonald's fend off "MacDonald's Big Mic", but I've known too many people who've been on the wrong end of this dirty stuff. For example, people who've registered legitimate domains, only to LATER have someone register a trademark against it, then file a trademark claim. How absurd is that? I own animal.com, say, and have free info for zoologists. Someone who wants to sell pets, say, registers an "animal.com" trademark and then sues. I had it first, sure, but if I didn't do any commerce, I can lose. That's a fictitious example, but one ecommerce project I've worked on, I've watched exactly that happen to someone (who's domain we ALSO wanted to acquire, and they were forced to sell to someone because they couldn't afford to defend themselves legally).
It's time to get back to our roots: things should require public recognition for trademark status. No more "Mug O' Coffee" for Denny's. Things should have to be truly non-obvious for patenting. (Hi, Amazon!) Copyrights should be for distinctly original work -- no patenting a phrase anyone could turn in a witty moment.
Finally, we need a way to level the legal field so that the legal system can't just be used for intimidation. At the risk suddenly sounding like Katz gone wild: corporate america has really run wild, and their need to protect themselves helps stimulate the kill-or-be-killed mentality.
The point where I really get ambivalent is "discovery" of things which really can't be invented, but really are novel. Obviously, RSAs legendary patents are primarily a mathematical construct, they are clearly novel, and I would be hard pressed to label such an advance "discovered" instead of "invented". (And I'm skeptical about the benefits of denying a patent on such cases, in terms of motivation)
All in all, a very good read, although some parts were weak. I don't see spielberg making jurassic park without the chance to cash in (movies cost bank). But a strong case that IP law has gone too far, and is too easily subverted, and most of all, too hard for the layman (who it should arguably protect most effectively) to take advantage of.
AHAHAHAHA. That's funny enough to make me wish I had some moderator points;)
Re:the death of napster is coming. And so what?
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Bravo, then. I totally admire the sentiment. The time has come for the middlemen to go away. But that doesn't mean copyright is gone -- it is there to protect the artist. Should you be able to download the king story, then resell it for $.50? (Of course, no need in this case, since people can steal it directly from him) Of course not. It's his, he has the right to be paid. As far as the record companies and book publishers go, shoo. Of course, I personally like paper books. Sorry trees, sorry internet, but I like to lay down and turn pages. When you think of book publishers, there probably ARE a lot of writers who like them. Let's say you're John Grisham. Do you NEED a publisher? Of course not. You can take your book, have a book produced print up a couple hundred thousand copies, and get a 3rd party to sell lots to book stores. Will people buy an independantly published Grisham novel? Of course.
I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers? In its heydey, when its technology and UI was superior, that was one thing. But the huge gap is gone, and I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports. It's often been pointed out how things like C# can go down the tubes because they can't get developer critical mass. I wonder how the mac keeps it going? Anyone out there a Mac developer? Is it just an easy port? A roommate of mine used to develop simultaneously with codewarrior, but those were simple apps...
MSNBC is surprisingly bold in their reporting
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At work, I occasionally play "OSS zealot" to a friend's "MS zealot". Both of us really just prefer using the technology that best suits whatever we're out to do, but it gives rise to pokes and jabs about the others "position". If I had to pick a site I sent more "haha, look at this" articles to him from, it would be MSNBC. They're surprisingly thorough, early, and knowledgeable, imo, regarding many issues which other news sources ignore. And if there's any testament, its that I get so many "triumph of OSS" articles of them.
Given who owns MSNBC, they're a pretty good organization.
the death of napster is coming. And so what?
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The more I read about their legal strategy and corporate practices, the more I grow convinced that Napster is doomed.
"Sharing" is breaking the law. I saw today on CNBC that Napster intended to argue that sharing music via Napster was like "loaning a friend a tape". Baloney. Sending a copy of a song to a thousand people a day in perfect digital form is hardly the same.
Napster should be standing or falling (and it SHOULD stand) on the idea that it has legitimate purposes (sharing free/uncopyrighted/etc music). The fact that people pirate the hell out of it means nothing. When people put up web pages with songs to download, they don't go demanding that ISPs stop providing a web page service.
But if Napster has painted themselves into a terrible legal corner -- defending true piracy -- they will lose, and IMHO, rightly so. People DO have the right to their work. I think its great if people don't need or want big record companies (and I'm hoping the RIAA is doomed), but artists should have the right to choose.
That said, "so what if Napster loses"? There will be another. Do these people REALLY think its that hard to write a directory service and a client? Please. I'm surprised some open source software hasn't already pre-empted Napster entirely. But something will be right along.
As has been said on/. many a time: you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Have fun, RIAA, because even if Napster loses, you're not in for a fun time.
In massively multiplayer online games, most notably MMORPGs, integrity is everything. If people can't trust the integrity of other characters, they won't bother spending the time to build them. I think a lot of attention needs to be paid about how to keep server-side certain pieces of critical data.
First, the tradeoff: anything you keep server side on a trusted server is safe. Anything you load client side you can assume for the sake of argument will be possibly modified by a player. So, let's take a MMORPG: you have characters, monster, and various abilities all interacting. What is responsible for the integrity? The server needs to be. First, the all important player character should be totally stored server-side. No information about stats/abilities/etc is kept locally, and the server never reads any from the client. It just sends a scenario and accepts commands. A pristine client interprets options from the server to provide an interface, but just because you locally manage to send a "super fireball" command when you only have a regular "fireball", doesn't mean the server should parse that. It should obviously return an error. (and probably flag you for some sort of observation, cheater!)
In any event, the dichotomy between client and server matches that between cause and effect -- never let clients dole out effects, only accept input.
On to the more difficult problem, which is when the information you pass to the client is more than they should have, based on the fact that you cannot transmit it as-needed due to bandwidth/cpu/latency limitations. This is where innovation needs to occur. Things like handing over partial maps, or possibly breaking maps/info up into smaller pieces and giving them all out encrypted, then handing decryption keys over real time. (And this would be an art in itself? Would 16-bit XORs work? Or would someone find a way to analyze all 65k combinations for consistency and break through in sufficient time to gain an advantage?)
In a game which was not time-sensitive, obviously, this stuff should be kept server side. For example, I've never played age of kings, but I've played HOMM2/3, which are turn-based strategy games. In those cases, all data could be kept server-side, other than the revealed portion of the map. Because the players play each turn in succession, time is not a real issue. A few seconds for pulling data is not that important.
Anyhow, good article. This is definitely one of the biggest problems facing MMO gaming, and as multiplayer becomes more important to games, and as more games go MP-only, this will be critical. Bandwidth and lower latency will help alleviate the problem, but there's a lot of room, I think, for clever protection from cheaters.
Slashdot Mirror
So, Cryptonomicon was great, and this makes we want to read A Deepness in the Sky, but this all pales the shock of seeing Galaxy Quest beat The Matrix. Unless that category was, "Best Science Fiction Comedy", I can't imagine how a spoof of trekkies could win out over one of the most awesome visualizations of a science fiction concept on the silver screen, ever.
And hopefully, battle.net will actually work normally by then. I'm probably not the only one who would pay to get reliable service there. Not only am I tired of lag (on a fast box and a T1), but I'm annoyed at their architecture, which lets Duriel mow you down before the tomb of tal rasha even loads.
If you were concerned you might not have a life because you play it too much, check out the auctionwatch info about what in-game items are selling for on E-bay.
It's been mentioned before, and perhaps the reason it isn't popular is the cost of filing for a patent. But wouldn't it be great if instead of tons of "innovations" going into the public domain by virtue of there being no patent, if a foundation funded the patenting of many critical innovations, and would allow them to be used without royalty under the simple agreement that the licensee could not file a patent infringement lawsuit without the approval of a board of review or something. The board might permit a patent suit on a true innovation, but it would be up to a panel of real experts rather than a clueless judge and bought-and-paid-for expert testimony.
Imagine if, to file a patent suit without infringing yourself, you had to give up the rights to... blowfish/twofish, banner ads, png graphics, client-to-client file-sharing directory services (the Napster patent, hahaha), and so on and so forth.
I sympathize with the question. In terms of laws which regular employers, those pertaining to sexual harassment are some of the worst. I'd tend to suggest an application layer monitor that checks keywords, and completely ignores messages which do not contain them -- carnivore, anyone?
Really, we need an adjustment of the law. The judicial interpretation of the law has led to some amazing rulings regarding sexual harassment. Not only has it wrongly cost many companies money, time, and employees, but it has trivialized the truly evil sexual harassment which still goes on everywhere. It should always be the case that a company has a chance to rectify a situation after the fact. Any large company should have a contact person in HR who can receive a complaint, and companies should not have liability unless they fail to respond to a complaint. Anyone who can file a lawsuit can surely take a complaint to HR first; otherwise, I'd say they are motivated by greed and/or spite, and not just the desire to have a healthy workplace environment.
Of course, it won't come as any surprise to slashdot readers that the country is in love with litigation, but the longer I work, the more I witness incidents where the spectre of litigation protects only the wicked, as it were.
Obviously, and if you didn't detect my note of sarcasm: did you really expect Lucasfilm to exhibit any of those qualities?
I'm thinking there's a decent chance that this will work for R2D2 because there's so much other footage to base him on. They can render him using old footage as a planning mechanism, and not lose the "personality" (and why pay an actor twice when you have a computer??)
If this were star wars, in 2000 instead of over 20 years ago, and they did the robot from scratch in CGI, I think they'd have a problem... they might want to call it Jar Jar.
I had a couple of thoughts on this. First: the MPAA sucks.
Second: Is this the first step before they try to ban posting a URL? Because honestly, is there even a point to banning a link when people can cut and paste? What would happen if a browser automatically converted an "http://" string into a link? Would that be a legal link, or make the plaintext URL posted into an illegal activity? And finally, isn't it easy to see the relation between this and a journalist getting arrested because they listed the address of a crackhouse. (Clearly promoting the sale of illicit drugs)
Third: Having not yet used gnutella, but knowing its operation in theory, I wonder if you could tag documents, release them over gnutella, and have a type of linking system where you could easily "browse" by hooking into the gnutella framework. Publish a webpage, and it is anonymous and uncensorable? I can't even imagine how the MPAA sleeps nights. Has anyone done this yet?
Star Wars, episode 2: the Demise of Jar Jar Binks subtitling would read: "Now those of us over 10 can go see Star Wars movies again with peace of mind intact."
And this has always been a problem with being a "fringe" consumer. You want to view dvds on WHAT OS? Meanwhile, I have a pretty defeated attitude in regards to, say, boycotting DVDs. The majority of the consuming public are only going to use them on dvd players.
The DMCA is a federal law, passed by congress (in 1998, I believe). Since you mention virginia, you're probably thinking of the UCITA, which is the even-more-ridiculous software law, which would abuse open-source software writers in a variety of ways, and abuse consumers of commercial software likewise. (permits software to scan your drive for unlicensed software, permits intrusion onto your computer from afar to delete "offending" software, and requires warrantys on software (bye, OSS))
Indeed, and I think the summary nicely reveals that clearly the point that people buying a DVD have a right to view it as they please has not been made. However, this is unsurprising, as this was actually a predicted result when the DMCA was being considered as law. If a poor precedent is set, expect the DMCA to protect any and all information with enough lawyers. Why even encrypt with a key? They could have xor'd the content against a 16bit key, and sued just the same.
I'm going to take the time and write my legislators about repealing the provisions of the DMCA which enact the absurd restrictions on reverse engineering encryption systems, just because they protect copyrighted works. The criminality of that activity should require a burden of proof that it was intended for the illegitimate access to the protected work.
This is ridiculous. The government is monitoring communications and won't reveal the manner in which they do it? The FBI should be forced to comply with FOIA requests for any and all documents related to Carnivore. The FBI is the servant of the citizenry, not its keeper, and should be put back in its place.
I think we should pass a law prohibiting politicians and members of the government from discussing or promoting laws which contradict, restrict, or attempt to invalidate constitutional rights. Try to restrict free speech? Get tossed. Get fined. I'd love to see Orrin Hatch on trial for "attempting to violate the inalienable rights of constituents". Hah!
I agree that corporations have perverted copyright in legal cases to their own end, and bolstered their claims with DMCA.
However, that has nothing to do with Napster. Napster, in my mind, is not about copyright protection. It's about the independence of transport method. Let's say that 90% of all pirate videos were shipped fedex, and accounted for 90% of fedex's business (haha). Would fedex be a pirate courier service? No.
The same goes for Napster. It may be USED for a lot of piracy, but that doesn't make it responsible. It has the same policy as any ISP: they don't patrol their users, but they'll take action when it is reported to them. As shown with the Metallica/Dre lawsuit.
For me, nothing was more telling that this slashdot comment. The artist complains, "So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition." Marilyn Hall Patel should have heard HIM in court.
I myself have 5 or 6 domains. I would never expect them to be disputed, but as they're not along a common theme, etc, why regard it as squatting? Whereas someone who registers, say, the names of 100 musicians in a day, is clearly doing so very intentionally. The point, really, is that it is hard to prove intent to squat on a domain, and the benefit of the doubt should be on the side of the registrar. And what the hell? If you haven't registered by now... :P
Let's say someone set up juliaroberts.com, and it was a fan site, and they registered it in good faith. Should she be able to take it away? I'd say not. Obviously the microsof.com guy was abusing microsofts trademark on their name, because he was posting a page related to the software industry. But this has come up before, for example, when the people who produce Archie Comics went and sued a parent who registered veronica.org (which is a dead site now), after his daughter Veronica was born.
Incidentally, you can find a nice collection of these blurbs here.
All in all, its most people with money for lawyers trampling on people without, and it is generally just disgusting abuse of IP law. The guy who once owned tatooine.com doesn't have it any more. And there's not even a web page there.
One obvious indication of squatting is people mass-registering domain names. But I'd say unless squatting is clear, first come, first serve. And even with a squatter, they should be reimbursed for all domain fees paid.
I'm just thankful we have 2600 to push some buttons and stand up for people.
This is exactly where my dilemna comes from. But RSAs patents really push the limit because they are not pure math. They are an entire construct which uses math in a previously-unthought-of way to encrypt communications. No one else thought it up (barring the claims of that group in the UK gvmt.), even though it was long needed, and public-key cryptography was quite an advance. Of course, I think their patent is overbroad -- for example, I'm not so sure patents based on elliptical curves rather than primes should have been considered under their patent, since their method did not use them. But it WAS novel, even if it based on always-present mathematical principles. I'm not even disagreeing, really, just saying why I'm ambivalent about this.
Marcus Ranum is great, and he's a great speaker, but he's wrong. It is true that the mass distribution of hacking tools has created a mass of script kiddies. This is an offset of a lot of kids, possibly alienated and marginalized, with excellent basic computer skills and too much time, and not enough legitimate purpose. They do it as a method for asserting themselves. A lot of hacks are a bit like "tagging". You can't drive up 101 in silicon valley without seeing tags all over the overpasses.
Full disclosure allows people responsible for security to verify vulnerabilities, patch holes, etc. The no-disclosure alternative leads to an unknown mass of hackers, out there trading amongst themselves. It will not stop distribution, even to kiddies, who will spend endless hours on #supah_hot_shells on irc pining away for a new tool. Meanwhile, with no public disclosure, who will protect us?
You guessed it, Network Flight Recorder. It, and a cadre of other companies like it, will share their secrets with each other under the blanket of draconian NDAs.
Part of the problem is just that we've recently had a lot of distributed dos attack "exploits". The problem being, you can prevent yourself from being part of it, but you can't prevent yourself from being a victim of it. There's nothing worse that running a tight ship, tuning your box(es) to be safe, and then eating 200megs of smurf because some user with a shell on your machine kicked some flooding fool off #stay_away_flooders.
Still, the smurf problem (and those like it) are not insurmountable, and people are now aware the problem must be dealt with in an automated way, and they're working on it. Meanwhile, law enforcement will grow more adept at tracking this sort of thing. As many people have pointed out, few connections to the net are truly anonymous. Meanwhile, cooperative logging will grow more likely. Logs will stream offsite immediately to a super-safe host, so even if you break into a system, your tracks are set in stone, etc. Meanwhile, those of us who just want safe boxes can keep them safe.
That's a great article, and I find myself agreeing and disagreeing. (I could patent ambiguity and ambivalence ;))
First, there is clear abuse which needs addressing. Professional epigrammist? Please. I'm no lawyer, but I find it amazing that such a person could EVER win in court, if only because of fair use.
Both the epigrams and weak patents come back to the root of the problem: you obviously shouldn't permit IP protection for "the obvious". Obvious phrases, and obvious patents are the bane of IP. Whether it is a patent on web links that (gasp) change color, or a catchy phrase which anyone could have come up with (and 10 people probably have), that's a major problem. But the issue is that we don't have a good way to handle it. If we go to court, anyone can buy expert witnesses. "It was obvious", "It was innovention" -- and the judge is supposed to impartially decide? One possible solution would be the court independantly selecting the 3 most qualified experts themselves, deciding on their testimony, and the loser of the case is liable for expert testimony payment.
Trademark law is also grossly abused. I'm all for letting McDonald's fend off "MacDonald's Big Mic", but I've known too many people who've been on the wrong end of this dirty stuff. For example, people who've registered legitimate domains, only to LATER have someone register a trademark against it, then file a trademark claim. How absurd is that? I own animal.com, say, and have free info for zoologists. Someone who wants to sell pets, say, registers an "animal.com" trademark and then sues. I had it first, sure, but if I didn't do any commerce, I can lose. That's a fictitious example, but one ecommerce project I've worked on, I've watched exactly that happen to someone (who's domain we ALSO wanted to acquire, and they were forced to sell to someone because they couldn't afford to defend themselves legally).
It's time to get back to our roots: things should require public recognition for trademark status. No more "Mug O' Coffee" for Denny's. Things should have to be truly non-obvious for patenting. (Hi, Amazon!) Copyrights should be for distinctly original work -- no patenting a phrase anyone could turn in a witty moment.
Finally, we need a way to level the legal field so that the legal system can't just be used for intimidation. At the risk suddenly sounding like Katz gone wild: corporate america has really run wild, and their need to protect themselves helps stimulate the kill-or-be-killed mentality.
The point where I really get ambivalent is "discovery" of things which really can't be invented, but really are novel. Obviously, RSAs legendary patents are primarily a mathematical construct, they are clearly novel, and I would be hard pressed to label such an advance "discovered" instead of "invented". (And I'm skeptical about the benefits of denying a patent on such cases, in terms of motivation)
All in all, a very good read, although some parts were weak. I don't see spielberg making jurassic park without the chance to cash in (movies cost bank). But a strong case that IP law has gone too far, and is too easily subverted, and most of all, too hard for the layman (who it should arguably protect most effectively) to take advantage of.
AHAHAHAHA. That's funny enough to make me wish I had some moderator points
Bravo, then. I totally admire the sentiment. The time has come for the middlemen to go away. But that doesn't mean copyright is gone -- it is there to protect the artist. Should you be able to download the king story, then resell it for $.50? (Of course, no need in this case, since people can steal it directly from him) Of course not. It's his, he has the right to be paid. As far as the record companies and book publishers go, shoo. Of course, I personally like paper books. Sorry trees, sorry internet, but I like to lay down and turn pages. When you think of book publishers, there probably ARE a lot of writers who like them. Let's say you're John Grisham. Do you NEED a publisher? Of course not. You can take your book, have a book produced print up a couple hundred thousand copies, and get a 3rd party to sell lots to book stores. Will people buy an independantly published Grisham novel? Of course.
I'm sure that's not true for everyone, though.
I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers? In its heydey, when its technology and UI was superior, that was one thing. But the huge gap is gone, and I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports. It's often been pointed out how things like C# can go down the tubes because they can't get developer critical mass. I wonder how the mac keeps it going? Anyone out there a Mac developer? Is it just an easy port? A roommate of mine used to develop simultaneously with codewarrior, but those were simple apps...
At work, I occasionally play "OSS zealot" to a friend's "MS zealot". Both of us really just prefer using the technology that best suits whatever we're out to do, but it gives rise to pokes and jabs about the others "position". If I had to pick a site I sent more "haha, look at this" articles to him from, it would be MSNBC. They're surprisingly thorough, early, and knowledgeable, imo, regarding many issues which other news sources ignore. And if there's any testament, its that I get so many "triumph of OSS" articles of them.
Given who owns MSNBC, they're a pretty good organization.
The more I read about their legal strategy and corporate practices, the more I grow convinced that Napster is doomed.
/. many a time: you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Have fun, RIAA, because even if Napster loses, you're not in for a fun time.
"Sharing" is breaking the law. I saw today on CNBC that Napster intended to argue that sharing music via Napster was like "loaning a friend a tape". Baloney. Sending a copy of a song to a thousand people a day in perfect digital form is hardly the same.
Napster should be standing or falling (and it SHOULD stand) on the idea that it has legitimate purposes (sharing free/uncopyrighted/etc music). The fact that people pirate the hell out of it means nothing. When people put up web pages with songs to download, they don't go demanding that ISPs stop providing a web page service.
But if Napster has painted themselves into a terrible legal corner -- defending true piracy -- they will lose, and IMHO, rightly so. People DO have the right to their work. I think its great if people don't need or want big record companies (and I'm hoping the RIAA is doomed), but artists should have the right to choose.
That said, "so what if Napster loses"? There will be another. Do these people REALLY think its that hard to write a directory service and a client? Please. I'm surprised some open source software hasn't already pre-empted Napster entirely. But something will be right along.
As has been said on
In massively multiplayer online games, most notably MMORPGs, integrity is everything. If people can't trust the integrity of other characters, they won't bother spending the time to build them. I think a lot of attention needs to be paid about how to keep server-side certain pieces of critical data.
First, the tradeoff: anything you keep server side on a trusted server is safe. Anything you load client side you can assume for the sake of argument will be possibly modified by a player. So, let's take a MMORPG: you have characters, monster, and various abilities all interacting. What is responsible for the integrity? The server needs to be. First, the all important player character should be totally stored server-side. No information about stats/abilities/etc is kept locally, and the server never reads any from the client. It just sends a scenario and accepts commands. A pristine client interprets options from the server to provide an interface, but just because you locally manage to send a "super fireball" command when you only have a regular "fireball", doesn't mean the server should parse that. It should obviously return an error. (and probably flag you for some sort of observation, cheater!)
In any event, the dichotomy between client and server matches that between cause and effect -- never let clients dole out effects, only accept input.
On to the more difficult problem, which is when the information you pass to the client is more than they should have, based on the fact that you cannot transmit it as-needed due to bandwidth/cpu/latency limitations. This is where innovation needs to occur. Things like handing over partial maps, or possibly breaking maps/info up into smaller pieces and giving them all out encrypted, then handing decryption keys over real time. (And this would be an art in itself? Would 16-bit XORs work? Or would someone find a way to analyze all 65k combinations for consistency and break through in sufficient time to gain an advantage?)
In a game which was not time-sensitive, obviously, this stuff should be kept server side. For example, I've never played age of kings, but I've played HOMM2/3, which are turn-based strategy games. In those cases, all data could be kept server-side, other than the revealed portion of the map. Because the players play each turn in succession, time is not a real issue. A few seconds for pulling data is not that important.
Anyhow, good article. This is definitely one of the biggest problems facing MMO gaming, and as multiplayer becomes more important to games, and as more games go MP-only, this will be critical. Bandwidth and lower latency will help alleviate the problem, but there's a lot of room, I think, for clever protection from cheaters.