Just read the "Content is not King" article. It's great. I remember when Bronfman made his speech - I felt that he was wrong but couldn't express or prove it. Odlyszko does that.
That was cute. I wonder why it was modded 'off topic'? I wish negative moderation were reserved for posts that really threaten to flood us in crap. A post that replies to the front-page blurb may be marginally off-topic, but is it worth modding down?
The difference is that copyrights constrain everyone, while contracts only constrain parties to the contract. So if Alice has a copy of MS Office that she downloaded off Gnutella, it looks like someone somewhere broke his license agreement with MS. But Alice is not breaking contract law by using and distributing this program, because she is not a party to the agreement. As for bizarre encryption (content control) schemes, I think recent history shows that without the law backing them up they'll be cracked very fast.
Without actually endorsing Cringely's theory, I'd like to moderate your expression of skepticism.
Although most end-users are running a MS-based operating system, there is simply too much non-MS underlying internet infrastructure for such a radical change in protocol.
According to Cringely, TCP/MS and TCP/IP could coexist for a long time on the same infrastructure. I would guess that TCP/MS would take over in corporate environments first, then in MS-powered e-commerce sites. Government and hobbyist sites would transition last, if ever.
Furthermore, how is it exactly that TCP/MS would prevent things like Code Red from happening?
Filling in the gaps Cringely left, I'll postulate that each packet would be digitally signed with the private key of the individual authorizing that packet. Handling of the packet at the receiving host would be dependent on that host's trust level of the signer. When an infected IIS server S1 makes a TCP connection to a clean IIS server S2, the connection would be at a minimal (public) privilege level. This would cause the resulting thread|process to run at the untrusted/public level. Then, when the buffer overflow hands control to the attacking worm, the worm has only gained 'public' level of access, rather than root. (Yes I know they don't call it root.) In other words, this is a redesign of the OS kernel, not just the protocol. Otherwise it's meaningless.
...it doesn't solve the problem of people launching viruses from public terminals, or obtaining free trial dialup accounts using fictitious information.
Imagine that you have a TCP/MS credential - could be a smartcard, more likely a bit of paper with a RSA private key on it. If you use the library computer, you can only access TCP/IP anonymously. To access TCP/MS, you need your credential, which links every packet you send to your real-world identity. The credential could be available from banks, for example. Maybe even at grocery stores. Just need to provide proof of identity. Likewise, your free dialup account can not be used to send unsigned TCP/MS packets, because unsigned TCP/MS packets never make it through a router.
Anyhow, I take this theory with a grain of salt, but it's remotely possible. All that public key cryptography would put a huge burden on routers, which would be good news for equipment makers left stranded by the end of the bubble.
The only things that prevents GPLd works from being closed up, encrypted and locked away behind onerous contracts and registration schemes is copyright law.
In a world without copyright, who would have the money and motivation to do this? Commercial software publishers need a ban on 'unauthorized' copying to maintain any profit margin at all. Admit it: the GPL is a clever tactic to turn copyright on its head. Also:
Every other copyright and IP related issue includes: non-copylefted political opinions and literary works (which RMS deems more than acceptable)...
I don't think RMS deems copyright of literary works 'more than acceptable'. He's pointed out that copyright made more sense when it was an industrial regulation unlikely to intersect the life of an ordinary person.
I agree with what you said, except for one thing. I doubt if any nuclear weapon deployed by the US or USSR can be subverted by its crew. As far as I know, the weapon is programmed for N different targets and the crew simply chooses a number from 1..N. The crew doesn't know what the numbers represent. The media that specifies the target is encrypted. In the case of the Titan ICBM's it was punched paper tape.
OK, I wish Sklyarov got more press. But I'm reluctant to blame the alleged biases of the media. I'm afraid the story is actually not as newsworthy as geeks think it is. In the time that Sklyarov has been in jail, how many people were arrested in America? Does anyone know or care? Do you care about Joe Shmoe who was arrested for falsifying meat inspection forms in North Carolina? Maybe it's a big deal to the meat industry, maybe it's unjust, but you don't care. You don't have the bandwidth to know and care about all the people arrested in the US in the last couple of weeks. Conspiracy theories aside, the media sells to Joe Sixpack. He wants to see the president fucking interns, Tim McVeigh, the Unabomber, riots, wars. And if the media were willing to go all "high-minded" and ignore what their customers want, they still wouldn't show much of Sklyarov. They'd talk about hungry people hurt by welfare reform, medicare, and other issues that seem important to them. You'd like to make the media show Sklyarov, which would bore the hell out of normal people. Meanwhile, there are a million crackpots with different agendas they'd like the media to cover. None of them are what the consumers want.
I see. You defend your misunderstanding of petitio principii (begging the question) by means of an argumentum ad populum (an appeal to popular opinion).
and that quote illustrates why. If you live in a small town where nobody locks the doors, it's not reasonable to walk into someone's house uninvited. If you connect your computer to a global network and program it to accept TCP connections on certain ports, it is reasonable for people all over the world to connect to those ports. I wonder if Stoll originated the nonsensical comparison between 'unauthorized access' of a corporate/governmental computer and breaking into someone's house. They're not the same at all, but this silly notion underpins a lot of bad thinking and bad law. Stoll was zealously protective of the 'computing resources' of a huge government lab at a time when 'real computers' were out of reach for ordinary people. He could be compared to a royal chef in the middle ages urinating on the excess food from the royal table lest a commoner eat it. I don't agree that security problems have made the web 'experts only'. If you want to run your own web server and you're not an expert, run vanilla Apache and sshd and nothing else. Actual holes in Apache are pretty rare. Or am I missing your point?
Everyone is recommending books that we enjoy, not books that would help the general public. This is ridiculous. When I was a kid I made stuff out of fibreglas. The library had books on fibreglas fabrication aimed at the layman. And they helped. Now ask a bunch of mechanical engineers who design fibreglas structures and they'll probably recommend some book full of differential calculus. If the library had those highly technical books instead, I would never have learned the basics of fibreglas fabrication. To apply that to the current case, the public does not need or want university-level computer science books. They need books about how to accomplish tasks. How to build a PC. How to plug in a PC you bought. How to shop for an ISP and get your computer talking to an ISP. How to make a web page. One book I'd consider appropriate is The No B.S. Guide to Linux. It's a simple book about installing and using Linux for the first time.
I'm afraid you may have missed the point. The poster was pointing out that what looked like a good choice to librarians a few years ago looks a bit silly now. And I'll agree; most computer books in public libraries look pretty silly, especially after the first 10 years have gone by. By the same token, the books chosen today are likely to look pretty silly in a decade, although choosing the right ones could minimize that. For some reason I have this image of the 'library computer book' with a bunch of black-and-white photos in the middle:
Man with glasses and polyester short-sleeved shirt sitting at terminal on expensive computer desk. Caption:The smart terminal allows users to interact with the computer in real time. Courtesy Lear-Seigler corporation.
Woman in skirt and heels is crouching to change a tape on a filing-cabinet sized computer. Caption:Minicomputers are becoming increasingly powerful. The unit pictured here can perform hundreds of mathematical calculations per second. Photo courtesy Honeywell Corporation.
Anyhow, I'm glad libraries keep old irrelevant junk. It gives us a way to measure the passage of time. The commercial world constantly erases and rewrites the past. This is a large part of what DMCA is about - the right of the wealthy to erase the past and rewrite it in their own image, versus the right of the commoner to retain information.
Many posters seem to be naively assuming that dcc uses a checksum such as md5 which would change radically for a minor change in input. Dcc does in fact use md5 as a component but the actual checksum is adapted to the requirement. Download the source tarball, uncompress, untar and read/dcclib/ckfuz1.c. This checksum is clearly designed to be resilient to minor changes. On a deeper note, it's sad that so many Slashdot readers, including apparently CmdrTaco, underestimate others so severely. Do you really thing someone put in the effort to make something like dcc and never thought about how a message could be varied to evade the checksum? And why not read the linked document first? You would have found:
Because simplistic checksums of spam would not be very effective, the main DCC checksum is fuzzy and ignores various aspects of messages. The fuzzy checksum will need to be changed as spam evolves.
Summary: read before you criticize, and recognize that others probably thought the same thing you're thinking.
Re:Huh, funny how the world works.
on
Zeitgeist
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· Score: 3
I liked your post, and I hope you're right. Although given the number of gung-ho pro-Intellectual Property posts on/. I have an unpleasant feeling that there are many young people supporting the IP position. Either that, or a lot of IP supporters still write like teenagers. I wasn't too impressed with Sterling's speech, though. We've been hearing 'sky is falling' threats from environmentalists since at least the 70's. OK, I guess Malthus started it with his claims of overpopulation. We've passed many, many, end-of-the-world deadlines. Did you by any chance link to the wrong speech? I didn't really see the relevance of that speech to your 'generational' idea.
Basing code on the sysobjects table is a bad idea in general though it has its uses....Why you would code anything like this other than for some kind of database modelling tool is unclear to me.
Since I haven't read the whole paper, I'll offer my guess: they wanted to use a built in table for their example. That way they wouldn't have to include the code to create and populate the table, which could be part of the problem. I assume that they originally found the problem on a table they had created, and managed to reproduce the problem on sysobjects for bug reporting.
Your conclusion about stored procedures is entirely misguided.
I'll grant that they have a legitimate role. However, I've seen them overused. I've seen them used to replace foreign key, unique, and check constraints, even to enforce typing which could have been done by declaring the column correctly. Oracle's documentation warns against the performance penalties of such misuse. I've also seen them used as substitute for JOINs, again by programmers who don't have much grasp of SQL. Stored procedures are dangerous because they offer a procedural cop-out to programmers from a procedural background. If you're using them correctly, great.
I'm replying to several posts in which you question the existence of the bug or blame the application programmers based on the fact that you have not encountered this bug. If you have time, read the paper. It explains exactly what the bug is. Any summary is necessarily imprecise; however here's an attempt: the following code works:
SELECT @X = id FROM sysobjects
WHERE id > 0 AND type = 'P' ORDER BY id DESC
And the following code does not work:
select @X = 0
SELECT @X = id FROM sysobjects WHERE id > @X AND type = 'P' ORDER BY id DESC
(I'm skipping a lot). If @X is declared decimal instead of int, the bug goes away. This was Microsoft's proposed fix. Personally, I don't like stored procedures much, particularly Transact SQL which is what this appears to be. In general, a heavy reliance on stored procedures frequently shows a lack of understanding of SQL and data modelling.
I'm also very curious about this. I saw the above rumor on slashdot a while ago. As someone pointed out, it's hard to believe for two reasons:
Would Oracle really pitch an NT-based solution to a Unix vendor? I'd hope they have more sales savvy than that.
Would Red Hat really jeopardize their strategic relations with Oracle over the mistake of a salesperson? No matter how Oracle behaves, they were providing Red Hat with badly needed credibility. I can't believe that Red Hat is at all happy about ceasing to be a supported platform.
Of course, if you sell me a locked metal box without the key, I think I have the right to open that box. So morally, at least, it's breaking and entering someone else's property that's a crime.
People tend to confuse GUI's with automation. To use your time effectively, you need to automate a lot of tasks. The modern IDE does this for you. But it's also possible to automate with Perl, Make, and shell. This may not look as glamorous but it's easier to adapt to changing needs. Anyhow, there are lots of Unix programmers who rarely see a 'command line' - the emacs users.
There are good reasons for not spoon feeding information. While there's no reason to be unpleasant, I would not recommend that you 'teach' people to type 'ls -la'. You won't be doing them any favors. Rather, you'll be reinforcing two unhealthy ideas:
Dependency: Computers are 'hard' and you need an 'expert' to tell you the 'incantation', which of course makes no sense so you write it on a yellow sticky.
Oral culture - this is a characteristic of the Windows world. The Unix world is centered around the written word: RFC's, man pages, and lately HOWTO's. The Windows world is home to undocumented 'tips and tricks' - arbitrary bits of complexity that are handed verbally from one user to another until Microsoft obsoletes them.
Anyhow, I'd show the user both 'ls --help' and 'man ls'. Given the size of ls(1), I wouldn't mind providing navigational hints. But my overriding concern would be to establish a natural path for the user to look up information, a path which the user can retrace without me.
There was a time when such extremes of action were reserved for such things as colonialism, religious persecution and racism.
And all those who stood up to evil systems were ridiculed by people like you. Is it really worth going to jail to sit in the front of the bus? Today a man is in jail in Las Vegas for telling the truth about Adobe's software. How many people have to go to jail before you realize that control of information is serious? The Drug War is absurd, but also very serious to those imprisoned and killed. The civil rights movement is accepted and enobled in retrospect by the same institutions that ridiculed and undermined it. But control of information is the current arena in which individual rights are up against institutional power.
2) A world in which this was all carefully accounted would be so encumbered that it would probably collapse under its own weight
But not everyone has the imagination to foresee such a world. Maybe someone needs to write a dystopian story. I don't think much of Stallman's 'right to read' - it creaks under its ponderous moralizing. Maybe our 'generation' will produce a sci-fi writer who articulates the world of IP gone mad. For those who don't see it yet, the fact that we are able to live as civilized beings in relative leisure, safety and health is due to countless incremental advances in human arts and sciences over millenia. I couldn't be typing this now without language, the alphabet, boolean math and logic, oil exploration and drilling, organic chemistry, mining and smelting of copper, Jewish concepts of the permance and importance of the written word, Christian concepts of the importance of the individual soul, idealistic Americans who advocated universal education, and countless other innovators. Compared to the magnitude of their contribution, mine must necessarily be tiny. How arrogant, then to claim special rights in the 'content' I produce. Can I afford to pay the heirs of all these creators who benefit me? Can I even afford the accounting involved in figuring my debt?
For all the MS-bashing on this story, the bug seems a bit esoteric. All software has bugs.
Huh? "SELECT... ORDER BY..." is by far the most common type of SQL statement in every database project I've worked on. If the data is for human consumption, you always need an ORDER BY clause because relational databases do not store rows in any particular order. If the SELECT is not for human consumption, there are still often good reasons to request sorted data. This is a monumentally grave bug. If the system I'm developing now were on MSQL (thank God it's on Oracle instead) this bug could cause us to 'forget' amounts that are owed to us - in other words assets. Worse, we could forget liabilities and find out later that we've incorrectly reported our financial position to our investors. I would be really surprised to see a bug of this magnitude in Oracle. Oracle has many frustrating limitations and poor design decisions, but I trust it to accurately report the data it is storing.
I think that content protection and Open Source are directly opposed. I don't see how you can have effective content protection on an Open Source platform, except by pushing the protection down to the hardware level where it is no longer really Open Source. Remember, the key idea of Open Source is that you, the user, have control over your computer. The key idea of content protection is that the 'content producer' has a measure of control over the computer.
(That and the fact that any protected HDD's will have a hacked up firmware patch available a few months later;)
That assumes that the maker left the capability for 'unathorized users' (meaning the legal owner) to upload fresh firmware. If they did, the content protection scheme is a joke; merely security through obscurity. If they took content protection seriously, and only allowed cryptographically signed firmware to upload, it's quite possible that the scheme would never be cracked. In effect, you are hoping that the hardware makers will provide the illusion of content protection, lasting long enough to entice 'content producers' to our platform. That might actually work.
You asked if we plan on investing more in the image of Linux and open source, well, we're already investing more than a $1 billion in Linux across the corporation.
The question specifically addressed image, in the light of Microsoft's PR attacks. Not total investment.
Our execs have been featured keynote speakers at a couple of LinuxWorld Expos and smaller conferences all around the world.
That is preaching to the converted. It does not help counteract the deliberate falsehoods which Microsoft is spreading. And he totally evaded question 6, the crux of which was "Will IBM's contributions to open source projects include these patentable ideas..."
IBM's decision to make code available to the open source community is based on interest from the community.
Are you saying that given sufficient community interest you would give up the chance to patent something so it can be freely used in open source code?
Slashdot Mirror
Just read the "Content is not King" article. It's great. I remember when Bronfman made his speech - I felt that he was wrong but couldn't express or prove it. Odlyszko does that.
That was cute. I wonder why it was modded 'off topic'? I wish negative moderation were reserved for posts that really threaten to flood us in crap. A post that replies to the front-page blurb may be marginally off-topic, but is it worth modding down?
The difference is that copyrights constrain everyone, while contracts only constrain parties to the contract. So if Alice has a copy of MS Office that she downloaded off Gnutella, it looks like someone somewhere broke his license agreement with MS. But Alice is not breaking contract law by using and distributing this program, because she is not a party to the agreement.
As for bizarre encryption (content control) schemes, I think recent history shows that without the law backing them up they'll be cracked very fast.
- Although most end-users are running a MS-based operating system, there is simply too much non-MS underlying internet infrastructure for such a radical change in protocol.
- Furthermore, how is it exactly that TCP/MS would prevent things like Code Red from happening?
...it doesn't solve the problem of people launching viruses from public terminals, or obtaining free trial dialup accounts using fictitious information.
Anyhow, I take this theory with a grain of salt, but it's remotely possible. All that public key cryptography would put a huge burden on routers, which would be good news for equipment makers left stranded by the end of the bubble.According to Cringely, TCP/MS and TCP/IP could coexist for a long time on the same infrastructure. I would guess that TCP/MS would take over in corporate environments first, then in MS-powered e-commerce sites. Government and hobbyist sites would transition last, if ever.
Filling in the gaps Cringely left, I'll postulate that each packet would be digitally signed with the private key of the individual authorizing that packet. Handling of the packet at the receiving host would be dependent on that host's trust level of the signer. When an infected IIS server S1 makes a TCP connection to a clean IIS server S2, the connection would be at a minimal (public) privilege level. This would cause the resulting thread|process to run at the untrusted/public level. Then, when the buffer overflow hands control to the attacking worm, the worm has only gained 'public' level of access, rather than root. (Yes I know they don't call it root.) In other words, this is a redesign of the OS kernel, not just the protocol. Otherwise it's meaningless.
Imagine that you have a TCP/MS credential - could be a smartcard, more likely a bit of paper with a RSA private key on it. If you use the library computer, you can only access TCP/IP anonymously. To access TCP/MS, you need your credential, which links every packet you send to your real-world identity. The credential could be available from banks, for example. Maybe even at grocery stores. Just need to provide proof of identity. Likewise, your free dialup account can not be used to send unsigned TCP/MS packets, because unsigned TCP/MS packets never make it through a router.
Also:
I don't think RMS deems copyright of literary works 'more than acceptable'. He's pointed out that copyright made more sense when it was an industrial regulation unlikely to intersect the life of an ordinary person.
I agree with what you said, except for one thing. I doubt if any nuclear weapon deployed by the US or USSR can be subverted by its crew. As far as I know, the weapon is programmed for N different targets and the crew simply chooses a number from 1..N. The crew doesn't know what the numbers represent. The media that specifies the target is encrypted. In the case of the Titan ICBM's it was punched paper tape.
OK, I wish Sklyarov got more press. But I'm reluctant to blame the alleged biases of the media. I'm afraid the story is actually not as newsworthy as geeks think it is. In the time that Sklyarov has been in jail, how many people were arrested in America? Does anyone know or care? Do you care about Joe Shmoe who was arrested for falsifying meat inspection forms in North Carolina? Maybe it's a big deal to the meat industry, maybe it's unjust, but you don't care. You don't have the bandwidth to know and care about all the people arrested in the US in the last couple of weeks.
Conspiracy theories aside, the media sells to Joe Sixpack. He wants to see the president fucking interns, Tim McVeigh, the Unabomber, riots, wars. And if the media were willing to go all "high-minded" and ignore what their customers want, they still wouldn't show much of Sklyarov. They'd talk about hungry people hurt by welfare reform, medicare, and other issues that seem important to them.
You'd like to make the media show Sklyarov, which would bore the hell out of normal people. Meanwhile, there are a million crackpots with different agendas they'd like the media to cover. None of them are what the consumers want.
I see. You defend your misunderstanding of petitio principii (begging the question) by means of an argumentum ad populum (an appeal to popular opinion).
and that quote illustrates why. If you live in a small town where nobody locks the doors, it's not reasonable to walk into someone's house uninvited. If you connect your computer to a global network and program it to accept TCP connections on certain ports, it is reasonable for people all over the world to connect to those ports.
I wonder if Stoll originated the nonsensical comparison between 'unauthorized access' of a corporate/governmental computer and breaking into someone's house. They're not the same at all, but this silly notion underpins a lot of bad thinking and bad law. Stoll was zealously protective of the 'computing resources' of a huge government lab at a time when 'real computers' were out of reach for ordinary people. He could be compared to a royal chef in the middle ages urinating on the excess food from the royal table lest a commoner eat it.
I don't agree that security problems have made the web 'experts only'. If you want to run your own web server and you're not an expert, run vanilla Apache and sshd and nothing else. Actual holes in Apache are pretty rare. Or am I missing your point?
Everyone is recommending books that we enjoy, not books that would help the general public. This is ridiculous. When I was a kid I made stuff out of fibreglas. The library had books on fibreglas fabrication aimed at the layman. And they helped. Now ask a bunch of mechanical engineers who design fibreglas structures and they'll probably recommend some book full of differential calculus. If the library had those highly technical books instead, I would never have learned the basics of fibreglas fabrication.
To apply that to the current case, the public does not need or want university-level computer science books. They need books about how to accomplish tasks. How to build a PC. How to plug in a PC you bought. How to shop for an ISP and get your computer talking to an ISP. How to make a web page.
One book I'd consider appropriate is The No B.S. Guide to Linux. It's a simple book about installing and using Linux for the first time.
For some reason I have this image of the 'library computer book' with a bunch of black-and-white photos in the middle:
- Man with glasses and polyester short-sleeved shirt sitting at terminal on expensive computer desk. Caption:The smart terminal allows users to interact with the computer in real time. Courtesy Lear-Seigler corporation.
- Woman in skirt and heels is crouching to change a tape on a filing-cabinet sized computer. Caption:Minicomputers are becoming increasingly powerful. The unit pictured here can perform hundreds of mathematical calculations per second. Photo courtesy Honeywell Corporation.
Anyhow, I'm glad libraries keep old irrelevant junk. It gives us a way to measure the passage of time. The commercial world constantly erases and rewrites the past. This is a large part of what DMCA is about - the right of the wealthy to erase the past and rewrite it in their own image, versus the right of the commoner to retain information.I think you want Behind Enemy Lines.
Download the source tarball, uncompress, untar and read
On a deeper note, it's sad that so many Slashdot readers, including apparently CmdrTaco, underestimate others so severely. Do you really thing someone put in the effort to make something like dcc and never thought about how a message could be varied to evade the checksum? And why not read the linked document first? You would have found: Summary: read before you criticize, and recognize that others probably thought the same thing you're thinking.
I liked your post, and I hope you're right. Although given the number of gung-ho pro-Intellectual Property posts on /. I have an unpleasant feeling that there are many young people supporting the IP position. Either that, or a lot of IP supporters still write like teenagers.
I wasn't too impressed with Sterling's speech, though. We've been hearing 'sky is falling' threats from environmentalists since at least the 70's. OK, I guess Malthus started it with his claims of overpopulation. We've passed many, many, end-of-the-world deadlines. Did you by any chance link to the wrong speech? I didn't really see the relevance of that speech to your 'generational' idea.
I'll grant that they have a legitimate role. However, I've seen them overused. I've seen them used to replace foreign key, unique, and check constraints, even to enforce typing which could have been done by declaring the column correctly. Oracle's documentation warns against the performance penalties of such misuse. I've also seen them used as substitute for JOINs, again by programmers who don't have much grasp of SQL.
Stored procedures are dangerous because they offer a procedural cop-out to programmers from a procedural background. If you're using them correctly, great.
If you have time, read the paper. It explains exactly what the bug is. Any summary is necessarily imprecise; however here's an attempt: the following code works: And the following code does not work: (I'm skipping a lot). If @X is declared decimal instead of int, the bug goes away. This was Microsoft's proposed fix.
Personally, I don't like stored procedures much, particularly Transact SQL which is what this appears to be. In general, a heavy reliance on stored procedures frequently shows a lack of understanding of SQL and data modelling.
People tend to confuse GUI's with automation. To use your time effectively, you need to automate a lot of tasks. The modern IDE does this for you. But it's also possible to automate with Perl, Make, and shell. This may not look as glamorous but it's easier to adapt to changing needs.
Anyhow, there are lots of Unix programmers who rarely see a 'command line' - the emacs users.
- Dependency: Computers are 'hard' and you need an 'expert' to tell you the 'incantation', which of course makes no sense so you write it on a yellow sticky.
- Oral culture - this is a characteristic of the Windows world. The Unix world is centered around the written word: RFC's, man pages, and lately HOWTO's. The Windows world is home to undocumented 'tips and tricks' - arbitrary bits of complexity that are handed verbally from one user to another until Microsoft obsoletes them.
Anyhow, I'd show the user both 'ls --help' and 'man ls'. Given the size of ls(1), I wouldn't mind providing navigational hints. But my overriding concern would be to establish a natural path for the user to look up information, a path which the user can retrace without me.The civil rights movement is accepted and enobled in retrospect by the same institutions that ridiculed and undermined it. But control of information is the current arena in which individual rights are up against institutional power.
For those who don't see it yet, the fact that we are able to live as civilized beings in relative leisure, safety and health is due to countless incremental advances in human arts and sciences over millenia. I couldn't be typing this now without language, the alphabet, boolean math and logic, oil exploration and drilling, organic chemistry, mining and smelting of copper, Jewish concepts of the permance and importance of the written word, Christian concepts of the importance of the individual soul, idealistic Americans who advocated universal education, and countless other innovators.
Compared to the magnitude of their contribution, mine must necessarily be tiny. How arrogant, then to claim special rights in the 'content' I produce. Can I afford to pay the heirs of all these creators who benefit me? Can I even afford the accounting involved in figuring my debt?
That assumes that the maker left the capability for 'unathorized users' (meaning the legal owner) to upload fresh firmware. If they did, the content protection scheme is a joke; merely security through obscurity. If they took content protection seriously, and only allowed cryptographically signed firmware to upload, it's quite possible that the scheme would never be cracked.
In effect, you are hoping that the hardware makers will provide the illusion of content protection, lasting long enough to entice 'content producers' to our platform. That might actually work.
The question specifically addressed image, in the light of Microsoft's PR attacks. Not total investment. That is preaching to the converted. It does not help counteract the deliberate falsehoods which Microsoft is spreading.
And he totally evaded question 6, the crux of which was "Will IBM's contributions to open source projects include these patentable ideas..." Are you saying that given sufficient community interest you would give up the chance to patent something so it can be freely used in open source code?