So again, what burdensome restrictions are we actually talking about?
None, actually -- most responsible gun owners are not upset about being unable to buy automatic weapons or artillery. There are idiots out there who think that having their own machine gun is cool, and they make illegal modifications to a semiautomatic gun, often with dangerous results, like receivers that fall apart. The only people who think that gun control laws in most of America are overly restrictive are people who think they are going to save the neighborhood from criminals and terrorists (and many gun owners, myself included, think that the restrictions are fine or should be amended in sensible ways, like requiring guns to be stored safely).
This is probably not going to happen. For ten years, one filesharing system after another has been shut down, yet people are still downloading (and the RIAA/IFPI/etc. are still in business). It is very unlikely that the majority of downloads correspond to a lost sale.
the artists will (proportionately) benefit just as much as the labels
What is that proportion? The problem here is that what benefits the labels only really benefits a tiny minority of artists in any meaningful way.
(computers) are generally predictable, and do not have the algorithms to judge character, intent, motivation (aka the psychological mind games) that would let them in turn predict the human's actions.
Well, I actually took a course on poker AI, and computers can learn opponents' strategies to at least some degree. There has been some successful work on adaptive strategies that adjust the computer's probability of raising/calling/folding in a given situation based on how an opponent behaved in similar situations.
Typically, a computer poker (Texas Hold'em) player will be organized like this (but other approaches have been studied; this is just what I remember from the Alberta group's research, which seems to have been echoed elsewhere):
Before the flop, use an approximate Nash equilibrium strategy; tables can be found online
Following the flop, randomly (not necessarily uniformly) explore the game tree, computing which move in each round of betting will have the highest expected return based on simulations of the game. Machine learning algorithms can be used to improve the simulation by predicting how an opponent will move.
Now, professional players still generally beat computers, because professional players are particularly good at determining how their opponents play and have a well developed understanding of likely outcomes of the game. Computers do defeat sub-professional players; professional players will probably not last much longer against computers (this is what happened with Chess, after all).
why should Microsoft be in the smart phone business? It's not like smart phones will replace PCs
I would not be so sure about that one. Smartphone OSes seem to work pretty well on tablets, and I suspect that within 5 years we'll be seeing them on low-end laptops or in some sort of laptop/tablet hybrids (not rotating screen, but perhaps removable/easy to hide keyboard). It is also the case that a large number of common computing tasks can now be done using only a tablet or smartphone.
The point here is that Microsoft's relevance in personal computing is fading somewhat.
Proven? The argument is that they don't need to prove anything, just keep the case in limbo indefinitely by exploiting the fact that Kim Doctom is not subject to US laws.
Or in other words, laws do not even matter anymore.
You'll have to look a bit further back than that. The US government has been working for the benefit of corporations, at the expense of citizens, for a long time.
Microsoft failed to conquer a number of new markets over that past decade. Social networking, tablets/smart phones, etc. -- Microsoft is just not winning, and their old strategies of monopoly abuse are not going to help them.
Well it is not just this one article that changed my mind; I think the real turning point for me was GPLv3, which caused me to take a closer look at the issues. Since then, I have come to understand just how deep the difference really is; there is something fundamentally different between the philosophies of "free" and "open." The change is not merely "on the Internet;" we are talking about accepting a different way to view the world.
This is not some insignificant technical detail; if we were talking about changing the location where the bootloader is stored, you might be able to push that argument. This is an attempt by Microsoft to leverage its control of one market (the PC operating system market) to control another market (the market for personal computers) in a way that is detrimental to competitors. Further, the point of the signed bootloader is not to fight bootloader rootkits; the point is to create harder to crack DRM systems, by preventing people from subverting the OS (which is what a rootkit does, and thus the security against certain malware is nothing more than a coincidental side effect here).
The analogy holds: Microsoft tried to use its Windows dominance to break into the web browser market by changing a "technical detail" about how desktop icons are rendered and how files are displayed as icons; likewise, here Microsoft is trying to break into the "media friendly computers where everything must go through an app store" market by changing a "technical detail" about the bootloader.
Remember when we used to make fun of the sort of people who would insist that we should say "free software" and not "open source?" I think by this point in time, we can finally acknowledge that they were right: open source is about software development, not respecting or protecting user freedom.
I find it highly unlikely that you could build a convincing case of monopoly abuse over Secure Boot for x86,
Oh yeah? It was not that hard to build a convincing case for monopoly abuse when it came to Netscape and IE. Remember the process required to remove IE from a system? I suspect that all it would take is to show a court what a user has to do to remove Microsoft's key from their Windows 8 system, and the case would be made right then and there.
According to the human players, poker is largely about mind games.
Really? The pros I have heard have spoken about probabilities, trying to determine your opponents' strategies (are they betting conservatively? do they bet on weaker hands more frequently than expected?), and measuring expected returns quickly. Tells and psychology seem to be a small part of their strategy, and unsurprisingly, professional poker players defeat the AI players despite the fact that computers have no psychology to play against.
If my boss used the law to direct my day to day interactions with my coworkers, I would quit -- that is no environment to work in. Really, the law should only be invoked when the situation is completely out of hand e.g. overt references to a woman being submission, continuing offenses despite friendly warnings and not-too-harsh counterattacks, etc. Yes, someone on the team is probably going to make an offensive remark, and calling in the legal department just kills any hope of a friendly work environment.
Then again, my mother's blue-collar job is one of the few examples I have to work with (I am a grad student, and the dynamic is a lot different, and my last foray into corporate work was at a satellite office where I teleconferenced with my team). There, people did not call in the higher ups to deal with minor offenses, because that would result in a terrible work environment. People bend or even break rules (e.g. playing chess between movements of trains, sending someone to fetch coffee from a nearby cafe, etc. -- harmless infractions, but infractions nonetheless), and once you start calling in lawyers and higher levels of management, that comes to and end -- and usually, whatever offensive comment prompted the call was not nearly as stressful as what the call results in. My mom knew how to handle men who make offensive remarks -- she plays their game better than they can, and they respect her as one of their own (her decades of experience with the equipment and organization help); other women who worked with her knew how to do the same, and the few sexual harassment complaints were limited to extreme or malicious cases.
IT need not be any different; indeed, there is more similarity than you might expect. I have seen IT workers bend/violate rules in various ways (eating snacks in a server room, smoking too close to a building, playing a video game on their workstation, etc.), and I doubt any of them would appreciate upper management types coming in and demanding orthodox compliance with the rules. This applies equally to women; I seriously doubt that a female IT worker wants someone who knows little of IT or the cutlure that surrounds IT to come in and ruin the work environment.
MS Word is not a vocational skill, it is a basic prerequisite for modern life, much like long hand was 100 years ago
No, being able to use a word processor or typesetting program is the equivalent of knowing long hand; MS Word is a specific product which is used because that is what most businesses use (alternatives like LibreOffice are rarely required and often not even allowed). That is a vocational-minded decision, and nothing more -- it is not based on quality and it is certainly not based on an education-friendly license.
I'm talking about things like using Matlab, Autocad, VHDL, HTML, etc.
OK, what about them? Schools teach all of the above; when I was an undergrad in EE, we were required to use Matlab, and we were required to use Cadence, and so forth. It was unusual to even be allowed to use software that is not commonly used in industry.
You don't need to know how transport protocols work to write a web app
Nor do you need to know how to multiply, nor do you need to know what Aristotle taught (or even who he was), etc. I do not dispute any of your examples; I am disputing your premise, which is that vocational training is the goal of education.
We train our students from the womb that they have to go to college to get a high paying job
Well we can certainly agree on that being a problem, and moreover,
They only need the degree to get the job
That is called "credentialism," and it has been one of the most destructive influences on higher education in modern history. Right now, universities are cutting non-vocational programs and focusing their resources and efforts on those programs that provide vocational training. Humanities departments are merged or simply destroyed and core requirements are relaxed; curricula are centered on what the students want, which is a certificate that entitles them to a job. Those rare students who come to college to develop their intellect suffer: fewer opportunities to take interesting courses, shorter library hours, classes that have been watered down, etc.
This is why our country needs a vocational track program similar to what is offered in Germany.
We also need to change the way education is paid for. Here is what I propose:
University education (which is hopefully not just vocational training) should be available at no cost to anyone who meets the requirements for admission; those requirements should be designed to judge a potential student's ability to benefit from the education, and nothing else. Academic requirements at a university should be designed to develop a student's intellect; admissions requirements should be designed to identify students who will benefit from such a program.
Voluntary (i.e. those that are not part of mandatory public education) vocational programs should not be free; a vocational program should be viewed as an investment, because vocational programs exist solely to give a person job certification and lead to improved salaries.
Society needs and benefits from educated people; that is why society should pay for people to develop their intellects. The really hard part is deciding who will benefit from a university education -- that often goes beyond a person's grades, and there would have to be systems in place to ensure that university education is not reserved for the wealthy.
Most people with a little experience under their belt can figure out what to do, and more importantly, anyone with an intermediate understanding of search techniques can find out how to get the job done.
Except that is not what happens; what you see instead are people who try to apply the formulas they were trained to use to situations that they did not learn a formula for. People who have received
There's a slight problem with that: network effects mean that the value of a communication channel scales with some power of the number of people who use it
Which is why standardized protocols are so great. Email is immensely popular, not because Email, Inc. has lots of users, but because anyone can implement email -- there is no monopoly, just a good protocol.
Too bad social networking systems try to divide people by not interoperating.
OK, sure, but there are a large number of child molester forums that are not hidden services (e.g. the recent "dreamboard" bust), and some people want to access those. It would be great for Tor if the pedophiles would just use hidden services and not put the exit node operators at risk, but that is an unrealistic expectation. Hidden services have always been a somewhat secondary feature for Tor; the primary reason people use Tor is to browse the (not-hidden) web.
Pornography and copying files are not universally illegal either. For the purposes of a high school student, the school's rules basically are the law; circumventing a school firewall to read hackaday is only differentiated from a Saudi Arabian citizen accessing Naughty Nurses 2 by the punishment that offender can receive.
The two goals of Tor are censorship busting and privacy enhancement; why focus on controversial things, when there are so many non-controversial things that people are unable to access?
I would've guessed the U.S. government is overall against Tor
The project was started by the US government, as a way to help covert agents hide their activities.
a complication for its law enforcement,
Only shallow-minded cops think that; cops who actually specialize in investigating criminals over the Internet know better than to leave a police IP address in a server log. To put it another way, if the police are investigating a child sex abuse forum where most of the participants are using proxy servers or Tor, the police need to use Tor as well, or they will be detected before any useful evidence can be gathered.
it's different branches of the government working at odds
I think that is practically guaranteed to be the case.
It would be nice to think that everyone would all do it, making it basically impossible to harass individual exit nodes
Like how it is impossible to harass individual pot smokers? Even if there were millions of exit nodes, the police would be harassing exit node operators, just to keep everyone afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
My local mail app ... doesn't expose the contents of my email to data miners
You only send and receive encrypted email? I am impressed!
Hm...I am looking at my email right now, from Google, and I don't see ads...
Oh, wait, I forgot that we were talking about webmail, where the ads are part of the mail client. Carry on then.
So again, what burdensome restrictions are we actually talking about?
None, actually -- most responsible gun owners are not upset about being unable to buy automatic weapons or artillery. There are idiots out there who think that having their own machine gun is cool, and they make illegal modifications to a semiautomatic gun, often with dangerous results, like receivers that fall apart. The only people who think that gun control laws in most of America are overly restrictive are people who think they are going to save the neighborhood from criminals and terrorists (and many gun owners, myself included, think that the restrictions are fine or should be amended in sensible ways, like requiring guns to be stored safely).
If anti-piracy activities increase future sales
This is probably not going to happen. For ten years, one filesharing system after another has been shut down, yet people are still downloading (and the RIAA/IFPI/etc. are still in business). It is very unlikely that the majority of downloads correspond to a lost sale.
the artists will (proportionately) benefit just as much as the labels
What is that proportion? The problem here is that what benefits the labels only really benefits a tiny minority of artists in any meaningful way.
(computers) are generally predictable, and do not have the algorithms to judge character, intent, motivation (aka the psychological mind games) that would let them in turn predict the human's actions.
Well, I actually took a course on poker AI, and computers can learn opponents' strategies to at least some degree. There has been some successful work on adaptive strategies that adjust the computer's probability of raising/calling/folding in a given situation based on how an opponent behaved in similar situations.
Typically, a computer poker (Texas Hold'em) player will be organized like this (but other approaches have been studied; this is just what I remember from the Alberta group's research, which seems to have been echoed elsewhere):
Now, professional players still generally beat computers, because professional players are particularly good at determining how their opponents play and have a well developed understanding of likely outcomes of the game. Computers do defeat sub-professional players; professional players will probably not last much longer against computers (this is what happened with Chess, after all).
why should Microsoft be in the smart phone business? It's not like smart phones will replace PCs
I would not be so sure about that one. Smartphone OSes seem to work pretty well on tablets, and I suspect that within 5 years we'll be seeing them on low-end laptops or in some sort of laptop/tablet hybrids (not rotating screen, but perhaps removable/easy to hide keyboard). It is also the case that a large number of common computing tasks can now be done using only a tablet or smartphone.
The point here is that Microsoft's relevance in personal computing is fading somewhat.
Proven? The argument is that they don't need to prove anything, just keep the case in limbo indefinitely by exploiting the fact that Kim Doctom is not subject to US laws.
Or in other words, laws do not even matter anymore.
Since G.W.
You'll have to look a bit further back than that. The US government has been working for the benefit of corporations, at the expense of citizens, for a long time.
Microsoft failed to conquer a number of new markets over that past decade. Social networking, tablets/smart phones, etc. -- Microsoft is just not winning, and their old strategies of monopoly abuse are not going to help them.
Well it is not just this one article that changed my mind; I think the real turning point for me was GPLv3, which caused me to take a closer look at the issues. Since then, I have come to understand just how deep the difference really is; there is something fundamentally different between the philosophies of "free" and "open." The change is not merely "on the Internet;" we are talking about accepting a different way to view the world.
This is not some insignificant technical detail; if we were talking about changing the location where the bootloader is stored, you might be able to push that argument. This is an attempt by Microsoft to leverage its control of one market (the PC operating system market) to control another market (the market for personal computers) in a way that is detrimental to competitors. Further, the point of the signed bootloader is not to fight bootloader rootkits; the point is to create harder to crack DRM systems, by preventing people from subverting the OS (which is what a rootkit does, and thus the security against certain malware is nothing more than a coincidental side effect here).
The analogy holds: Microsoft tried to use its Windows dominance to break into the web browser market by changing a "technical detail" about how desktop icons are rendered and how files are displayed as icons; likewise, here Microsoft is trying to break into the "media friendly computers where everything must go through an app store" market by changing a "technical detail" about the bootloader.
Remember when we used to make fun of the sort of people who would insist that we should say "free software" and not "open source?" I think by this point in time, we can finally acknowledge that they were right: open source is about software development, not respecting or protecting user freedom.
Microsoft (currently) does prevent or even hinder any one of those alternatives on x86.
I see what you did there...
(For the record, I own an ARM desktop)
I find it highly unlikely that you could build a convincing case of monopoly abuse over Secure Boot for x86,
Oh yeah? It was not that hard to build a convincing case for monopoly abuse when it came to Netscape and IE. Remember the process required to remove IE from a system? I suspect that all it would take is to show a court what a user has to do to remove Microsoft's key from their Windows 8 system, and the case would be made right then and there.
According to the human players, poker is largely about mind games.
Really? The pros I have heard have spoken about probabilities, trying to determine your opponents' strategies (are they betting conservatively? do they bet on weaker hands more frequently than expected?), and measuring expected returns quickly. Tells and psychology seem to be a small part of their strategy, and unsurprisingly, professional poker players defeat the AI players despite the fact that computers have no psychology to play against.
If my boss used the law to direct my day to day interactions with my coworkers, I would quit -- that is no environment to work in. Really, the law should only be invoked when the situation is completely out of hand e.g. overt references to a woman being submission, continuing offenses despite friendly warnings and not-too-harsh counterattacks, etc. Yes, someone on the team is probably going to make an offensive remark, and calling in the legal department just kills any hope of a friendly work environment.
Then again, my mother's blue-collar job is one of the few examples I have to work with (I am a grad student, and the dynamic is a lot different, and my last foray into corporate work was at a satellite office where I teleconferenced with my team). There, people did not call in the higher ups to deal with minor offenses, because that would result in a terrible work environment. People bend or even break rules (e.g. playing chess between movements of trains, sending someone to fetch coffee from a nearby cafe, etc. -- harmless infractions, but infractions nonetheless), and once you start calling in lawyers and higher levels of management, that comes to and end -- and usually, whatever offensive comment prompted the call was not nearly as stressful as what the call results in. My mom knew how to handle men who make offensive remarks -- she plays their game better than they can, and they respect her as one of their own (her decades of experience with the equipment and organization help); other women who worked with her knew how to do the same, and the few sexual harassment complaints were limited to extreme or malicious cases.
IT need not be any different; indeed, there is more similarity than you might expect. I have seen IT workers bend/violate rules in various ways (eating snacks in a server room, smoking too close to a building, playing a video game on their workstation, etc.), and I doubt any of them would appreciate upper management types coming in and demanding orthodox compliance with the rules. This applies equally to women; I seriously doubt that a female IT worker wants someone who knows little of IT or the cutlure that surrounds IT to come in and ruin the work environment.
MS Word is not a vocational skill, it is a basic prerequisite for modern life, much like long hand was 100 years ago
No, being able to use a word processor or typesetting program is the equivalent of knowing long hand; MS Word is a specific product which is used because that is what most businesses use (alternatives like LibreOffice are rarely required and often not even allowed). That is a vocational-minded decision, and nothing more -- it is not based on quality and it is certainly not based on an education-friendly license.
I'm talking about things like using Matlab, Autocad, VHDL, HTML, etc.
OK, what about them? Schools teach all of the above; when I was an undergrad in EE, we were required to use Matlab, and we were required to use Cadence, and so forth. It was unusual to even be allowed to use software that is not commonly used in industry.
You don't need to know how transport protocols work to write a web app
Nor do you need to know how to multiply, nor do you need to know what Aristotle taught (or even who he was), etc. I do not dispute any of your examples; I am disputing your premise, which is that vocational training is the goal of education.
We train our students from the womb that they have to go to college to get a high paying job
Well we can certainly agree on that being a problem, and moreover,
They only need the degree to get the job
That is called "credentialism," and it has been one of the most destructive influences on higher education in modern history. Right now, universities are cutting non-vocational programs and focusing their resources and efforts on those programs that provide vocational training. Humanities departments are merged or simply destroyed and core requirements are relaxed; curricula are centered on what the students want, which is a certificate that entitles them to a job. Those rare students who come to college to develop their intellect suffer: fewer opportunities to take interesting courses, shorter library hours, classes that have been watered down, etc.
This is why our country needs a vocational track program similar to what is offered in Germany.
We also need to change the way education is paid for. Here is what I propose:
Society needs and benefits from educated people; that is why society should pay for people to develop their intellects. The really hard part is deciding who will benefit from a university education -- that often goes beyond a person's grades, and there would have to be systems in place to ensure that university education is not reserved for the wealthy.
Most people with a little experience under their belt can figure out what to do, and more importantly, anyone with an intermediate understanding of search techniques can find out how to get the job done.
Except that is not what happens; what you see instead are people who try to apply the formulas they were trained to use to situations that they did not learn a formula for. People who have received
There's a slight problem with that: network effects mean that the value of a communication channel scales with some power of the number of people who use it
Which is why standardized protocols are so great. Email is immensely popular, not because Email, Inc. has lots of users, but because anyone can implement email -- there is no monopoly, just a good protocol.
Too bad social networking systems try to divide people by not interoperating.
OK, sure, but there are a large number of child molester forums that are not hidden services (e.g. the recent "dreamboard" bust), and some people want to access those. It would be great for Tor if the pedophiles would just use hidden services and not put the exit node operators at risk, but that is an unrealistic expectation. Hidden services have always been a somewhat secondary feature for Tor; the primary reason people use Tor is to browse the (not-hidden) web.
Pornography and copying files are not universally illegal either. For the purposes of a high school student, the school's rules basically are the law; circumventing a school firewall to read hackaday is only differentiated from a Saudi Arabian citizen accessing Naughty Nurses 2 by the punishment that offender can receive.
The two goals of Tor are censorship busting and privacy enhancement; why focus on controversial things, when there are so many non-controversial things that people are unable to access?
Sometimes you just want to read an article on Hackaday, but your authoritarian school district blocks any website about hacking...
It is brave if you live in a country where the police will harass you over your exit node:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-alone-dont-identify-criminals
I would've guessed the U.S. government is overall against Tor
The project was started by the US government, as a way to help covert agents hide their activities.
a complication for its law enforcement,
Only shallow-minded cops think that; cops who actually specialize in investigating criminals over the Internet know better than to leave a police IP address in a server log. To put it another way, if the police are investigating a child sex abuse forum where most of the participants are using proxy servers or Tor, the police need to use Tor as well, or they will be detected before any useful evidence can be gathered.
it's different branches of the government working at odds
I think that is practically guaranteed to be the case.
It would be nice to think that everyone would all do it, making it basically impossible to harass individual exit nodes
Like how it is impossible to harass individual pot smokers? Even if there were millions of exit nodes, the police would be harassing exit node operators, just to keep everyone afraid.
Sounds completely insane for anyone to willingly run such a thing.
Some people are brave enough to run servers that will help political dissidents in China, Africa, and elsewhere.