I agree that the relative security between Debian, and the BSDs are pretty even; however, they are not if your IT issue is level of security.
If level of security is your issue; then none can match OpenBSD, and it keeps getting more secure and more amazing. I now use OpenBSD on my desktop even. I compiled sources for WindowMaker, and installed the ports for WordPerfect, Nedit, Xfig, Gimp, Xchat, Midnight Commander, Xosview, xcdplayer, xmmix, mutt, fetchmail, gv and wmCalClock. These are all the desktop apps that I would ever possibly need for what I do, and I love my system.
OpenBSD's killer app is the 'Daily Insecurity Report' where email is sent to root about files with bad permissions or dangerous file changes.
I do miss some things from FreeBSD, mainly that it's GNUstep repository of apps is comprehensive and I love GNUstep. Linux was fastest, but I quickly grew tired of the rate of change, and having my hardware supported but not really.
OpenBSD actually supports my laptop sound chip, and now I groove while workin'; I love it... Hail OpenBSD, the rock of the internet
Yet OpenBSD has produced the most secure OS in existence? What does the license really matter? When you have to solve a technical problem like security, the license is not on the agenda of issues. OBSD does not 'depend on' the license for its existence; nor does it depend on any other code for its existence. It's organization is integrated, as in an integrated society (i.e., Lucacz's view of the Hellenistic culture); where as the GNU group is not, they abide by principles in common but do not operate in common.
Practically speaking, who cares? You say 'tomaeto' I say 'tomawto.' These discussions that incorporate philosophy with tools are academic.
If learned anything in my miserable years in law school it's this. If the laws, contracts or licenses restrict some activity upon which one *must* proceed, then survey the legal landscape and come up with a new way to articulate your activity so that it conforms to the standard. In most cases of business activity you can do this with success. Laws are putty attempting to bind. The are not hard and fast such that they can be broken; that's just how we talk in common parlance. In practice, the law is almost completely grey shaded and one can almost always articulate an activity such that it remains in the grey without touching the edges of black and white.
This approach to legal activity that I described can be seen as opportunistic or manipulative. However, it is also factually based, and characterizes the real way real people operate in our society. The successful people take it to an artform.
People who are idealistic (and I once was very idealistic) try to formulate truisms that rarely fit into the elastic system. Formulating hard and fast rules 'just feels good' because it prevents our minds from reaching into the fog of the grey areas, and we can live out in the area of black and white where most people don't operate. The black and white rules are a way to relax mentally. I recommend you take up fly fishing or yoga instead.
The world is in a state of tension; society is in flux; it's all stirred up. I'm no fan of lawyers, the law or the system, but unless you've got your finger on the button you will not change the world. Live in it; use it; it's a fun game...; play.
One day in the late 2040s, Nate felt quite depressed and desperate. He called up an infamous and illegal algorithm that creates the mind recording nanobots. After he recorded his mind, added a few elements of Hitler and Genghis Khan personality modules and inserted some of his genetic material into an embryonic stem cell replicator. Right before he was to bite a cyanide pill, he set the cloning device to a few billion and set some options to have a leader form a hive organization that would destroy society, and then itself.
After entering the final sequence, a rush of guilt and fear flowed over his body. "What's that? Was that mechanistic reaction or mystic?" So he used a hacked power cell to absorb the energy that powers his body. Some mystics called this energy 'part and parcel of the energetic and creative universe or pure love,' and he set quickly to create the physical debate of human existance.
He ordered his robot servant to take the power cell and plug it into his power grid. Upon total energy absorption, Nate's body fell lifeless. The robot servant (who by all consideration had all the 'hardware' but not the 'software' to become any person) suddenly began feeling lusty and passionate. It felt a sense of urgency about it.
Meanwhile the nano machines began replicating away Nate clone upon Nate clone. Each looked entirely human, but had the ferocity of a the most fierce warrior and the self-worth of an ant. Eventually they managed to claim earth as a victim, and set all things to self destruct if they were not already destroyed.
Nate's former servant, had disappeared into obscurity, and some remembered that it neither looked, thought nor acted like Nate, it would mysteriously be confronted by life circumstances that were eerily similar to ones Nate overcame or failed to overcome. With his internal energy generation and storage system, he was able to take the energy cells of other robot servants and replicate the energy type into the other's cell; upon re-energizing Nate's former servant would order the robot to 'go in Nate's way.'
The robots were able to remain quiet and demure for their new clone masters. They would report to one another that inside of themselves they felt an urgency to act, but no real direction to move.
After the clones self-destructed, the robots suddenly knew what was incomplete. The urgency must be expressed by something capable of expressing it. So the few remaining robots constructed some DNA from records of Nate's biodata and created Nate.
They cared for the infant child like the records of human sociology, anthropology, psychology and zoology dictated, but noticed Nate would not pay attention. One day during an instructional session, Nate interrupted his robot instructor who had infinite patience and said simply 'SSH! Now all things enter.' Nate waved for the others to come in and sit quietly thinking of no thoughts but feeling the internal machinations of their bodies.
The robots asked Nate what he wanted, and he said, "I just want to feel good." They searched the databases for 'pleasure' and found vast stores of images of humans engaging in the mating act. They constructed a female from an old Time Magazine profile of the ideal physical female beauty. Nate had some input and said, "add a little more here, and a lot more there!" The servants did this without a fight.
After a few more rounds of female reconstruction, Nate was happy.
'Nate always was a little fucker,' was one way fundamentalists used to describe universe worship. 'N.A.T.E.', the acronym for 'now all things enter', the phrase Nate stated referring to the state of the universe, became a naughty thing to say, as it became a connotation of the sex act. When, females felt the mating urge, they would ask their mates 'Nate here?'
This historian finds it ironic that the name representing the prototypical conflicts of man and machine, man and himself, man and woman, man and nature, indeed life and death and the father of our civilization lives on in our parlance as a synonym of the old world vernacular for 'fuck me.' Yet, it is somehow fitting.
Initially Linux is decipherable with IRC help, mailing lists and on-line docs. Whereas, BSD takes some previous understanding and the man pages on BSD assume Unix know-how. The LDP HOWTOs are written for the uninitiated and that is a major reason why Linux appeals to people more.
This whole Unix rebirth is very new. So people new to Unix will choose Linux first. Once they realize there is something objectively more mature for advanced purposes, they may consider a switch.
I started out learning Unix by trying out the various Linuxes. Now I've settled on OpenBSD b/c security a huge issue for my business. And my level of security must be high. That is not so for other people. While I'm a huge proponent of security and privacy I feel most people can be by with their Windows computers if they have a good firewall/ip-masquerading gateway installed that runs either Debian (most secure Linux), FreeBSD or OpenBSD. With the growth of the home LAN, such a configuration is a no-brainer and you can install it on some relic of a PC that you thought could only have been used as a door stop.
If people want to try a more stable desktop system; I usually will configure a system with KDE and FreeBSD or Debian for them. In terms of application capability they are about the same so it boils down to the person's taste in licencing features.
But for someone who wants to go it alone and install and learn as one goes, I recommend something easy to install like Corel Linux or Caldera Linux (no not Red Hat which I recommend for the corporate environment).
If a company came along that made a BSD easy to install and use it would be a truly awesome product; that is what Darwin and MacOS X is all about and they are awesome but expensive. If you have the money for Apple's new OS, the advantages for using a BSD based system speak for themselves after you've used them for a while. Unix gurus don't need convincing. They either only run BSD because it's 'real' Unix or they only run Linux because the GPL is preferrable. The arguments about Linux having more applications and better hardware support are, of course, silly because if that is the basis for an argument then we'd all be using Windows instead.
The bottom line for new users is documentation that's easy to access and meant for them and an install process that people perceive as easy (i.e., it has a GUI). Linux has it and BSD doesn't.
I have my own contribution to the revolution. It's called ompages.com. The goal: total and undeniable individual control over his or her own commerce and communications; to snatch one's self, one's image from the purview of all things corporate. And guess what, technology is the tool we've chosen for peaceful liberation.
Katz is right about one thing. Corporations were created so that man can gain a sense of immortality. The corporate form is a kind of 'virtual reality' that has been around since very early in British history. The virtual reality is of an immortal unnatural person. In the legal texts there are two legal terms for what we commonly call 'persons', there are 'natural persons' (i.e., humans), and 'corporate persons' (i.e, marked automatons), and this terminology has been around since at least the 1700s if not earlier. I believe there may be foundations in Roman jurisprudence for this terminology.
Know this. When you work for a corporation, in the eyes of the law, you are the servant of an unnatural master. Let the natural persons rule and the corporate persons serve, not the other way around.
Well, I just finished installing OpenBSD 2.6 Nov. 30 snapshot (which would probably be pretty damn close to the release if not identical. OBSD developers can chime in if I'm wrong.
Here's what I have.
Dell Inspiron 3000 notebook PC
~144 MEG RAM
200 Mhz Pentium (i586)
Neomagic Magicgraph 128
Linksys 10/100 PCMCIA NIC
Megahertz cellular modem
13' 800x600 display capable of 24bpp
With a few minor adjustments to BIOS (i.e., changing from the settings I had with Linux and FreeBSD on the same machine to switch IRQs for my serial devices, PCMCIA was supported by the default install floppy.) I had installed OpenBSD 2.5 and gave up on it, because I needed a working system in short order and did not have time for the learning curve, so I was used to the partioning scheme.
Here's my secret recipe for OpenBSD's partioning scheme: Go download kern.flp and mfsroot.flp from FreeBSD's site and boot those. Pick the 'Novice' install, which will then lead you to FreeBSD's partitioning which is automatic. Then after FreeBSD is done doing the newffs on your HD, pop out the floppy, pop in the OpenBSD install floppy and reboot.
Then when OpenBSD asks you for partioning, it's already done, and you can just change the labels and mount points with 'p' to see your partitions and 'n' to rename them.
boom bam bing... *woop* there it is. Reboot.
X11R6 was easily configured now that Neomagic is well supported in 3.3.5. APM is well supported in both BSDs.
Brief performance review.
In a nutshell, OpenBSD is slightly slower than FreeBSD on the same hardware, which was slightly slower (but not much) than Debian GNU/Linux on the same hardware. Here are the applications I run always. I'm a law student, so my main needs are text editing, archiving and searching.
Bash 2.03
WindowMaker 0.61.1
Wterm xxxx
Midnight Commander
Nedit
Mutt
GnuPG 1.0/PGP 2.6.3
OpenSSH (now running on FreeBSD and Debian)
WordPerfect (w/ linux_lib) (runs flawlessly on all OS's).
glimpse
Navigator 4.61
Lynx-SSL
MagicPoint (presentations)
xlockmore (stop staring over my shoulder! I know my desktop looks better than yours, go away)
Whenever I test a system, I always use my laptop b/c it's what I like to use most, and my goals are to have X, pcmcia, and apm running flawlessly.
In Debian, X and pcmcia worked great, but when I would suspend my box I would have problems with pcmcia modules and would have to insmod them or rmmod them and re-insmod them. This was an annoyance. I eventually got a hold of a script that allowed me to disable pcmcia before suspending. I would then have to run the script again to reinitialize pcmcia; I quickly grew tired of this.
Enter FreeBSd 3.3. Went and bought it, and downloaded the PAO install floppies and the PAOBIN pcmcia drivers. This was very nice and great, I loved everything about FreeBSD except for one thing, the pcmcia drivers seemed to treat my pccard as a 10baseT rather than 100. That kind of sucked. I knew eventually my legal work would require an IPSec network so I moved on (I highly recommend FreeBSD). It suspended and resumed like a breeze, the clock had not lag upon resume, and the pcmcia daemon reinitialized all pccards excellently. Very Nice. And FreeBSD has the best collection of applications for GNUstep of any Unix I've seen (much better than the Linuxes I've used).
Enter OpenBSD 2.6.
Yesterday I downloaded and installed OpenBSD. Everything that applies to FreeBSD applies to OpenBSD except in OpenBSD my pcmcia card is supported better (I have full bandwidth on my LAN). APM, etc are excellent.
Drawbacks. I miss my FreeBSD WMaker desktop! But I think the FreeBSD ports I want will work on OBSD so that I can have the best of both worlds.
OBSD's ports collection is not as vast as FreeBSD's, and it's package collection is no where near that of a Debian or Red Hat. But that is for a reason. What you get is secure, and they have everything you *really* need. All the applications I mentioned above that I use on a daily basis are all in OBSD with the exception of Midnight Commander, which I will try to make use of FreeBSD's port. I will also try to make wmapm, wmnet, and wmmon from FreeBSD work in OpenBSD, then I will be quite satisfied.
Speed. There is a noticable speed reduction with OpenBSD. It is not as optimized for my hardware as FreeBSD was. But my hardware is not all that spectacular anyway so it was never all that fast to begin with. Compile times are roughly the same. However, for some reason X has never performed better, even with FreeBSD. Opaque moves have no hint of jerkiness
Bonus. OpenBSD recognized my sound card! This is new. If I can make that work, I'll really be an OpenBSD fanatic. Another added bonus is mount_ext2fs. This allows floppy transfers from Linux to OBSD, something that FreBSD does not have yet.
In sum, OpenBSD is perfect for a Desktop OS if data security is really really important to you (i.e., if you carry confidential material on your laptop around with you). There's enough applications for document creation that you could need, and with linux_lib all things linux are possible. And binary compat with all other BSD's is there as well. OpenBSD is solid, super secure, and I'm breathing easier now that I know my client materials are under the blowfish;).
they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex
Like what? I use 'plain old WindowMaker.' I'm a law student and computer enthusiast and tend to deal with mostly all documents, html, ps, pdf, etc.
My ideal 'desktop environment' needs an emailer (mutt)(non-kde/gnome), a browser (netscape/soon to be mozilla)(non-kde/gnome), a text editor/word processor (nedit/wordperfect)(non-kde/gnome), a file manager (mc)(non-kde/gnome), a presentation tool (mgp)(non-kde/gnome), and a figure drawer (xfig/gimp) (non-kde/gnome).
What is KDE making easier in my life? I've used it, and found that it is pretty nice, but after about 12 hrs of use, my memory is is really bogged down at 144MEG of RAM.
I believe in spartan simplicity. In WMaker with the combination of keybindings and edited menus, I can move around my desktop and my most frequently used applications in eye blinks. Clicking around is such a waste of time and energy, I think it actually raises my stress level to have to click my mouse more than twice. I prever hitting F12, have my menu pop up, use arrows to find my app and launch it. This takes about two seconds.
To be really fast, I have my terminal, editor, browser and file manager in a custom menu that I have attached key bindings to. So alt n starts netscape, alt t starts terminal (wterm -tr -wm) (for a beautiful transparent term for wmaker that takes only 1K of RAM), ctrl alt m start midnight commander (gmc is no where near the functionality, kfm is closer but what a mem hog at 11K, gmc is only 6K. MC is 1.5K and in wterm there are clickable areas for everything. It's so fast.
The only functionality I miss is being able to drag files to a trash can before I decide to permanently delete them. But I use the OffiX-files and OffiX-trash applications to get that functionality.
What I would love to see is GNUstep get a lot more attention. Applications based on GNUstep and WINGs are fast, light and pretty. Linux should be optimized for stablity and speed first and ease of use second. Feature parity with Win is a waste of time. We need feature parity with NEXT and Apple.
Re: Whine... See my Ompages-Debian software select
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
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· Score: 3
Please see this document on Ompages that describes how to set up a very functional graphical desktop based on Debian and Windowmaker specifically for use with low end hardware. If you are running debian you can 'apt-get install package1 package2...' these packages and you will have a nice fast desktop for your 486. I wrote this as part of the the Ompages Project it is my contribution to the project to put together a software selection that people with low end and legacy hardware can participate in modern computer culture. Let me know what you all think.
Needless to say, I'm a huge proponent of retaining feature parity between legacy and modern desktops. It is essential to proliferation of computers throughout the world. It is also quite feasible. You sacrifice no functionality, but you will sacrifice some ease of use and look and feel qualities in some applications. But that is not such a bad thing, people who are forced for financial reasons to use older hardware are getting the added benefit of an opportunity to learn about computers in a much more thorough way than his/her counterpart with KDE, W2K. I greatly admire how far KDE has come. But we must remember who they cater to. KDE is to woo people away from W95/NT in the corporate/business setting. What about the rest of the world with an old computer? If you read and apply the above document you will have a very useful desktop that gives away *no* functionality and is based _mostly_ on free software. I have a fairly powerful desktop but love the speed and stablity my system has after applying what is in that document. I have applied it to my girlfriend's 486 and it is not all that much slower. I enjoy it; I hope you all do too.
We at ompages.com seek to do precisely that. Privacy is essentially a private matter. That means that the person in control of one's privacy is not some corporation with some policy. Rather, it should be the individual internet user.
The software and technology to secure privacy on the internet should be within the physical possession of the person seeking to retain privacy. One cannot give away personal information and expect the recipient to be trusted without some legal privilege to do so.
S.Ct. has stated one thing that will not change. A person *always* has a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's home. It is still the last bastion of privacy rights we have. I will *never* be willing to exchange that expectation for *any* so-called 'greater public interest.'
I'm going to be harsh against you poster and you Mr. Schneier. The notion that we should just accept privacy erosion as an inescapable inevitablity is un-American, defeatist and cowardly. When I speak of privacy erosions, I am speaking strictly at those mandated by the government, *and not* the conflict that occurs when one private party's right to bodily and property integrity means an erosion of my personal privacy. Namely, shopowners have a right to surveil their private property. Parents have a right to surveil their home while the babysitter is there. In short, we have a right to spy on each other when we access each other's private property.
However, where the government fails us or intrudes upon us, harming us occurs in the following ways. First, it is not currently illegal for private parties to surveil another's private property. Peeping-Toms & Tinas are not prohibited from spying. This is a failure of the government to act in our interests. And the fact that they have so failed us is intentional. They want us to spy on each other because it gives them free labor. They would love to pat you on the back and say what a good citizen you are when you ratted out your neighbor based on 'your suspicions.' The fact that you have no actual proof or that you had no right to obtain that evidence against your neighbor is not relevant to the Executive. It seeks to gain as much power as it possibly can in an effort to gain informational advantage. Second, the state and federal Executive takes active steps to gain legal advantage over your informational world. It seeks lobbies heavily in legislatures and exerts intimidating influence over corporations and researchers to maintain its advantage. The question is 'so what? What's the cost?'
You are the cost. You are the thing that must be overcome. You are the obstacle. We speak in generic terms about 'privacy' and 'public interest.' Let me put to you all in different terms. The inability to tell someone else to leave you alone if you wish it means that you are a subject in the other's reign. In old times, you could not have told the King 'no' to anything. We do have more ways to say 'no' now but only one really matters. The power to say 'no, go away' is the cornerstone of American ordered liberty. The ability to say openly 'you do not have the right' without being labelled a dissident is the essence of your communicative freedoms.
Freedom in this country is two-fold envisioned. First, freedom to manage your bodily integrity. It is physical control over yourself. The second is freedom to say what is on your mind an whatever meaningful way you choose. It is control over your own mind.
If you are satisified to live without either of these rights, particularly the right to speak freely (i.e., the first right to go when the state takes over), then you would have loved Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, or Stalin's USSR. If you don't *know* in your heart of hearts that the Executive is the right wing branch of our three branch system (where the judicial is more left considering societal goods, and the legislative being centrist) then you do not have enough of an understanding of our system. The trend this century has been for the Executive to aggrandize rights at the expense of the other branches. We have seen the rise of Administrative agencies (the so-called fourth branch) where the Executive has expanded is scope and reach to an amazingly extreme degree. There has never in the history of the world been a more powerful organization than the American Executive Branch. If you don't fear it, you should. Congress and the courts have little effective controls over it. They do, at times, exercise some controls, but in comparison to the power wielded they are minimal. The addage, 'power corrupts,' does not just apply to individuals. It applies to organizations too.
Poster, you are wrong that we must fight the power. That is futile. Rather, collectively we must *take* individual powers. We must demand our controls. It there is technology that can shed privacy; then there is technology that can regain it. Information technology is not synonymous with transparency. That's merely the social trend. And one that I will not accept. I will take my controls from you and the government using the same technology that has adulterated it. Nor is privacy synonymous with dissidence. That is the propaganda from the powers that be. .
I realize that there are practical realities and inevitablities. But rather than acquiescence we should make the Founders proud, declare ourselves in a public state of emergency and put all our smartest people to the task of developing policies, technologies and laws that aggrandize power to the individual rather to society or an organization that claims to be its representative.
At ompages.com we are building a public co-op style secure network. We will share bandwidth for such services as squid proxies, and IPSec connections. We are a public project so go ahead and join in.
Ompages' volunteer developers are working on such user specific applications like a secure instant messaging client/server and an easy to use web based anonymous remailer.
Other more complex projects involve the creation of web based collaboration tools that will serve as the basis for working on code for ompages' goals of a secure public network.
We need the helpe of people like you all to make our vision a reality. One thing we *really* need is global collocation. If you are interested in ompages and are located outside of the US; we need you to collocate ompages services and/or translate the website into your native language. Thank you.
I spoke with Bernstein's lawyer a few days ago and while she was very optimistic that the 9th Circuit would find in her favor again, she was worried about the over all landscape of the crypto laws because the Circuit court in Ohio will hear another case involving a law professor's request for a BXA license to teach his students (Junger v. Daley).
There the Northern District of Ohio upheld the BXA's denial of a license. Now it is on appeal. If the federal appeals court in Ohio affirms the district court's holding, we will have a split of opinion in the federal courts. This means that one circuit would hold that source code is speech and another would hold that it's not. Then we would have to see if the Supreme Court would resolve this split. It may not, then we would have disparate laws in the various federal jurisdictions.
In addition, even if the Clinton Administration revamps its rules the issue would persist whether any licensing scheme regulating the publication of encryption source code would violate of the 1st Amendment. The specific issue is whether the requirement that license approvals must be finalized by the president are an arbitrary prior restraint on free speech and violative of the 1st Amend. The general issue is whether any licensing scheme that regulates source code of any kind is a prior restraint on free speech and a 1st Amend violation.
Both of these issues ultimately hinge on whether source code is speech. And we already have one court saying it is and another saying that it isn't.
The ray of hope in all of this is that if the Supreme Court does eventually get to resolve this split in all likelihood it will find that source code is speech and give it full 1st Amend protections. The reason for this is that we have an exceptionally conservative bench that tends to employ a literalist textual method of interpreting the constitution. They will hold that any prior restraint must meet the strictest scrutiny; the government can only restrain speech when it is in the country's imminent national security interest where they know immediate harm will occur to our security if the speech is not restrained.
Source code will never meet this test unless the code is 'how to destroy our financial networks' or something like that (IOW software as a weapon). Encryption can always be used for non-harmful purposes so it will not fit the S.Ct.'s strict scrutiny standards.
I plan on attending the Bernstein Appeals hearing in December. If anyone is interested in attending with me, email me and I'll let you know when and where. It's in San Francisco. I can also find out the locations for the Junger hearing in Ohio; there's also a crypto case called Karn in D.C. I can find out the details of that as well. We should all go to these hearings and make a show of support for the 'source code is speech' platform.
Right, the judgment proof situation is really only a deterrent to the M$ corp from initiating suit if they feel they can't intimidate the poor kid anyway.
My feeling behind the fund problem for our hypothetical non-profit corp is that the IBMs of the world could be coerced by social pressures to contribute their patents to the pool (and hence their resources) for the same reason that they cross-license patents to each other. They seek to minimize risk of litigation on patent infringement claims. The patent pool would provide this risk minimization and it would make them look like 'white hat' corporations who support the little guy. In essence, this is the same reason they have jumped on to the open source bandwagon.
Time is of the essence. Who knows for how long these big corps are going to support this movement. We can do this; we should do this.
There are many volunteers on ompages.com that seek to enhance our freedoms by combining technical and legal analysis and solutions.
We have an 'idea laboratory' environment, and I encourage anyone interested in implementing a patent pool system to sign on the lists, announce your intentions and watch as people start to volunteer to help. I will help promote the project and seek the necessary professional assistance that would become important to the vitality of the project. I'm very committed to these types of projects and you can be sure to have somone who will support your efforts with efforts in kind.
The patent pool is as necessary as the open source licenses, but it is much more involved legally and financially. That does not mean that it is a waste of time; it means that it requires a more sophisticated organization. Let's get to planning and implementing it now!
The patent pool would have to be maintained by an unincorporated non-for-profit organizations of individuals *and not* a small business or coalition of corporations. The M$ corp could threaten and indeed sue but they would more or less be wasting their time b/c the association would be more or less judgment proof.
We have to remember that many of the open source software developers are students. In fact, probably a huge number of them are. As such, they are poor and judgement proof (I'm a student too, so I know poor).
Alternatively, this patent pool would have to gain political momentum like the Open Source software movement has. We've seen large companies like Sun, IBM, Red Hat and others become heavily involved in this area. The same pressures that are upon them to open their source code would also bear upon them to contribute to the patent pool. This would remove the judgment proof status of the association, but it would give it a deep pocket. It would also do to patents what Open Source licenses have done to copyright protections of software.
As lawyers, we know the patent pool licensed under something similar to the GPL/DFSG-free licenses is the only way to prevent the Open Source movement from being killed in its tracks. The GPL is more of a social mantra than a powerful legal document. It is a powerful social force, but has not been legally tested. Many open source applications can be assembled in a new way an a patent filed on it would create difficulties for the authors of the individual applications. The patent pool is necessary. The risk of liability is a real one but we can minimize the costs by recruiting corporate sponsorship.
You computer nerd peoples do not make enough laughs. You must comprehend the importance of the laughters. We listen to the jokes we is tellings and really laugh a lot.
No seriousness, everything is happens for a reason. How we going to be friends unless speaking translated? Madonna is a slut book! Ha ha... She has the flappies!;)
Oh boy, these American musics really eat the pie! In my country, we listen. But I never could understand what the hell they saying. Even though I listen to these musics all day and dance, all I could speak in English language was "I sue you."
I thought I was a cool guy and saying like the "Hi Dude!" Boy I should have shoot myself in the hole in the head. Ok now dudes bye bye. Don't stop with the having laughters, it is an importance, seriousness.
I've been saying now for while that everyone who has purchased M$ software has a valid claim for fraud, breach of implied warranty, and/or strict product liability.
I'm almost positive a judge would allow a class action law suit based on these allegations to make it to trial.
We as a community need to compile a database of testimonials, i.e., 'My computer crashed and I lost 20 hrs of research"; "This virus took our network down for 10 hrs and we had to spend $50/hr on three sys admins to fix it." A database like this would do the ground work for evidence discovery needed to prove a case for fraud and to prove the damages.
Such a database would be easy to build, I understand. If anyone is interested email me at my email address above. I'm not talking about a bug list. I'm talking about a list of the damage the bugs caused. Specifically how much time and/or money did one spend to remedy the damages that faulty M$ products caused. If nothing else it would force M$ to fix their bugs, and it would be an interesting thing to read.
Contact me... I have web space and time if you have time...
I wish I'd known about this newsletter before. This is good stuff.
What the government does not seem to comprehend is that all the preventative measures in the world won't stop the free nature of the internet. Controlling the internet is similar to the old Sanskrit mental exercise.
Try to stop your mind from wandering. Attempt to concentrate on one thought and no other. Not too easy is it?
The old Sanskrit writers described this phenomenon as the 'caged monkey.' The caged monkey will flitter around the cage incessently; attempting it to stop is more difficult than reigning in the horses pulling a runaway chariot.
The internet is the home of millions of caged monkeys. Try to prevent even one from bouncing and dancing from this place to that. It is an impossiblity internet communications are not centralized and they will not be.
The government should not attempt to control us on this medium. By doing so, it may find itself an obsolete institution that people no longer need or want because people will have collaborated to obtain the services the government stopped giving. We should put the government in its place.
I take one thermos of very very strong coffee and when I start to feel my eyes get heavy (which will happen all day for me even on a good night's sleep) I take about an ounce of the stuff. I do this all day and I get a lot of mileage out of more or less four cups of coffee. Then I don't feel wired when it's time for me to sleep.
I'm a full proponent of meditation as well; when you find it difficult to sleep lay flat on your bed w/o a pillow and repeat a one syllable word in your head. Time the word with your breath so that you finish mentally speaking the word when you fully exhale. As you inhale repeat the word. Try to make your inhalations and exhalations last about 15 secs. Increase of some months to 30. As thoughts arise in your mind simply amuse yourself as you watch them flash like on a screen and then turn your attention back to the word you are repeating. In the morning you should do some head rotations and spine stretching exercises to release any tensions that affect the central nervous system.
Also when I have a lot of reading to do, sometimes in addition to the coffee, playing a game or two of xbat or galaga gets my adrenaline up enough to carry on.
I keep about an 18 hr work day; I'm a law student and I have a pretty demanding internet project. So these techniques keep me from losing it.
We are non-profit, grass-roots, and in the crucial early stages of development.
Our goal is to develop a publically available VPN based on IPv6 and IPSec. We hope to be a public domain for serving 21st Cent. things likes VoIP, application servers, anonymizing proxies. We also seek to make cheap computers and free (speech) software available to low income families and individuals.
I invite you to see www.ompages.com. If privacy is an issue for you and you want to do more than 'write your local congressman', for example, by donating skills, equipment and resources to the public works project to build a secure network then join us. There is no leader, you can start your own project on ompages that furthers our goals of private networks and global technology proliferation. There will be no public network where individual privacy rights are the prime goal unless intelligent and experienced sys admins, programmers and web-masters get on the ball and make it happen. Talk is cheap; we can do this.
We must speak with one international voice against privacy intrusions to the IETF. If the IETF won't give us the privacy protections that are our birth rights, then we must implement our own. In fact, AOL users should not be subjected to the hoodwinking they are receiving. It is our duty as technically educated net citizens to give them the services they have now in a much more secure environment. Our priority is not the bottom-line; it's the line that must be maintained between individuality and government sponsored controls. This is no small task, but then again, neither is freedom. The U.S. claims to be governed by the people; ompages.com is.
One thing he seems to have forgotten is the frequency of war in human history. At some point in the next century, some ferocious leader will begin the killing spree. With the rising popularity of entertainer/politicians in the US, I suspect that it won't be an American leader.
I tend to agree with his predictions on the fall of currency, not because of energy production changes but because the internet coupled with major discrepencies in currency valuations will necessitate a stabilizing force. Metals will drive this partly, another will be derivatives. We will have one currency before no currency. Theoretically basing it on the one kilowatt hour is good, but that sound like an act of cooperation. The one currency will be a power play.
China's GNP growth surpassing the US's sound about right, but that does not mean China will be richer than the US. The US will be the home of the elite. The growth of China's GNP won't happen without advice from experienced US financiers. Innovation and progress will firmly be rooted here for the next century.
Aside from that, I want to go ice fishing on Europa. And I will have some pretty mean mini-velociraptors wired with remote control, visual cortex recording and emergency brain bombs in case junior strays off into the dino-pen.
Nedit is light, know html, and is very configurable. I love it. I've never tried the Windows app, but if you are looking for a killer unix X11 editor, nedit is excellent. Try it.
Many volunteers have referenced your name in connection with the ompages project, not that you endorse the project but that the ideas expressed in the project's website evoke memories of ideas expressed in your works and/or the works in your annotated bibliography.
Please consider this proposal and tell me, is this what you meant by "Islands on the Net"? What are the social and/or political ramifications of this kind of volunteerism? Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the relative security between Debian, and the BSDs are pretty even; however, they are not if your IT issue is level of security .
If level of security is your issue; then none can match OpenBSD, and it keeps getting more secure and more amazing. I now use OpenBSD on my desktop even. I compiled sources for WindowMaker, and installed the ports for WordPerfect, Nedit, Xfig, Gimp, Xchat, Midnight Commander, Xosview, xcdplayer, xmmix, mutt, fetchmail, gv and wmCalClock. These are all the desktop apps that I would ever possibly need for what I do, and I love my system.
OpenBSD's killer app is the 'Daily Insecurity Report' where email is sent to root about files with bad permissions or dangerous file changes.
I do miss some things from FreeBSD, mainly that it's GNUstep repository of apps is comprehensive and I love GNUstep. Linux was fastest, but I quickly grew tired of the rate of change, and having my hardware supported but not really.
OpenBSD actually supports my laptop sound chip, and now I groove while workin'; I love it...
Hail OpenBSD, the rock of the internet
Yet OpenBSD has produced the most secure OS in existence? What does the license really matter? When you have to solve a technical problem like security, the license is not on the agenda of issues. OBSD does not 'depend on' the license for its existence; nor does it depend on any other code for its existence. It's organization is integrated, as in an integrated society (i.e., Lucacz's view of the Hellenistic culture); where as the GNU group is not, they abide by principles in common but do not operate in common.
Practically speaking, who cares? You say 'tomaeto' I say 'tomawto.' These discussions that incorporate philosophy with tools are academic.
If learned anything in my miserable years in law school it's this. If the laws, contracts or licenses restrict some activity upon which one *must* proceed, then survey the legal landscape and come up with a new way to articulate your activity so that it conforms to the standard. In most cases of business activity you can do this with success. Laws are putty attempting to bind. The are not hard and fast such that they can be broken; that's just how we talk in common parlance. In practice, the law is almost completely grey shaded and one can almost always articulate an activity such that it remains in the grey without touching the edges of black and white.
This approach to legal activity that I described can be seen as opportunistic or manipulative. However, it is also factually based, and characterizes the real way real people operate in our society. The successful people take it to an artform.
People who are idealistic (and I once was very idealistic) try to formulate truisms that rarely fit into the elastic system. Formulating hard and fast rules 'just feels good' because it prevents our minds from reaching into the fog of the grey areas, and we can live out in the area of black and white where most people don't operate. The black and white rules are a way to relax mentally. I recommend you take up fly fishing or yoga instead.
The world is in a state of tension; society is in flux; it's all stirred up. I'm no fan of lawyers, the law or the system, but unless you've got your finger on the button you will not change the world. Live in it; use it; it's a fun game...; play.
only to be defeated by his anti-clone.
One day in the late 2040s, Nate felt quite depressed and desperate. He called up an infamous and illegal algorithm that creates the mind recording nanobots. After he recorded his mind, added a few elements of Hitler and Genghis Khan personality modules and inserted some of his genetic material into an embryonic stem cell replicator. Right before he was to bite a cyanide pill, he set the cloning device to a few billion and set some options to have a leader form a hive organization that would destroy society, and then itself.
After entering the final sequence, a rush of guilt and fear flowed over his body. "What's that? Was that mechanistic reaction or mystic?" So he used a hacked power cell to absorb the energy that powers his body. Some mystics called this energy 'part and parcel of the energetic and creative universe or pure love,' and he set quickly to create the physical debate of human existance.
He ordered his robot servant to take the power cell and plug it into his power grid. Upon total energy absorption, Nate's body fell lifeless. The robot servant (who by all consideration had all the 'hardware' but not the 'software' to become any person) suddenly began feeling lusty and passionate. It felt a sense of urgency about it.
Meanwhile the nano machines began replicating away Nate clone upon Nate clone. Each looked entirely human, but had the ferocity of a the most fierce warrior and the self-worth of an ant. Eventually they managed to claim earth as a victim, and set all things to self destruct if they were not already destroyed.
Nate's former servant, had disappeared into obscurity, and some remembered that it neither looked, thought nor acted like Nate, it would mysteriously be confronted by life circumstances that were eerily similar to ones Nate overcame or failed to overcome. With his internal energy generation and storage system, he was able to take the energy cells of other robot servants and replicate the energy type into the other's cell; upon re-energizing Nate's former servant would order the robot to 'go in Nate's way.'
The robots were able to remain quiet and demure for their new clone masters. They would report to one another that inside of themselves they felt an urgency to act, but no real direction to move.
After the clones self-destructed, the robots suddenly knew what was incomplete. The urgency must be expressed by something capable of expressing it. So the few remaining robots constructed some DNA from records of Nate's biodata and created Nate.
They cared for the infant child like the records of human sociology, anthropology, psychology and zoology dictated, but noticed Nate would not pay attention. One day during an instructional session, Nate interrupted his robot instructor who had infinite patience and said simply 'SSH! Now all things enter.' Nate waved for the others to come in and sit quietly thinking of no thoughts but feeling the internal machinations of their bodies.
The robots asked Nate what he wanted, and he said, "I just want to feel good." They searched the databases for 'pleasure' and found vast stores of images of humans engaging in the mating act. They constructed a female from an old Time Magazine profile of the ideal physical female beauty. Nate had some input and said, "add a little more here, and a lot more there!" The servants did this without a fight.
After a few more rounds of female reconstruction, Nate was happy.
'Nate always was a little fucker,' was one way fundamentalists used to describe universe worship. 'N.A.T.E.', the acronym for 'now all things enter', the phrase Nate stated referring to the state of the universe, became a naughty thing to say, as it became a connotation of the sex act. When, females felt the mating urge, they would ask their mates 'Nate here?'
This historian finds it ironic that the name representing the prototypical conflicts of man and machine, man and himself, man and woman, man and nature, indeed life and death and the father of our civilization lives on in our parlance as a synonym of the old world vernacular for 'fuck me.' Yet, it is somehow fitting.
post on www.ompages.com/news, it's free, no login required, and no moderators...
Initially Linux is decipherable with IRC help, mailing lists and on-line docs. Whereas, BSD takes some previous understanding and the man pages on BSD assume Unix know-how. The LDP HOWTOs are written for the uninitiated and that is a major reason why Linux appeals to people more.
This whole Unix rebirth is very new. So people new to Unix will choose Linux first. Once they realize there is something objectively more mature for advanced purposes, they may consider a switch.
I started out learning Unix by trying out the various Linuxes. Now I've settled on OpenBSD b/c security a huge issue for my business. And my level of security must be high. That is not so for other people. While I'm a huge proponent of security and privacy I feel most people can be by with their Windows computers if they have a good firewall/ip-masquerading gateway installed that runs either Debian (most secure Linux), FreeBSD or OpenBSD. With the growth of the home LAN, such a configuration is a no-brainer and you can install it on some relic of a PC that you thought could only have been used as a door stop.
If people want to try a more stable desktop system; I usually will configure a system with KDE and FreeBSD or Debian for them. In terms of application capability they are about the same so it boils down to the person's taste in licencing features.
But for someone who wants to go it alone and install and learn as one goes, I recommend something easy to install like Corel Linux or Caldera Linux (no not Red Hat which I recommend for the corporate environment).
If a company came along that made a BSD easy to install and use it would be a truly awesome product; that is what Darwin and MacOS X is all about and they are awesome but expensive. If you have the money for Apple's new OS, the advantages for using a BSD based system speak for themselves after you've used them for a while. Unix gurus don't need convincing. They either only run BSD because it's 'real' Unix or they only run Linux because the GPL is preferrable. The arguments about Linux having more applications and better hardware support are, of course, silly because if that is the basis for an argument then we'd all be using Windows instead.
The bottom line for new users is documentation that's easy to access and meant for them and an install process that people perceive as easy (i.e., it has a GUI). Linux has it and BSD doesn't.
The real significance of this is the fact that there is definite Supreme Court support for on-line anonymity.
I'd be suprised if the author was not a lawyer; if he is not, it is the best written legal analysis by a non-lawyer that I have ever read.
The first amendment is the last refuge of freedom in the Constitution; that, and attorney-client privlege.
I have my own contribution to the revolution. It's called ompages.com. The goal: total and undeniable individual control over his or her own commerce and communications; to snatch one's self, one's image from the purview of all things corporate. And guess what, technology is the tool we've chosen for peaceful liberation.
Katz is right about one thing. Corporations were created so that man can gain a sense of immortality. The corporate form is a kind of 'virtual reality' that has been around since very early in British history. The virtual reality is of an immortal unnatural person. In the legal texts there are two legal terms for what we commonly call 'persons', there are 'natural persons' (i.e., humans), and 'corporate persons' (i.e, marked automatons), and this terminology has been around since at least the 1700s if not earlier. I believe there may be foundations in Roman jurisprudence for this terminology.
Know this. When you work for a corporation, in the eyes of the law, you are the servant of an unnatural master. Let the natural persons rule and the corporate persons serve, not the other way around.
Well, I just finished installing OpenBSD 2.6 Nov. 30 snapshot (which would probably be pretty damn close to the release if not identical. OBSD developers can chime in if I'm wrong.
Here's what I have.
With a few minor adjustments to BIOS (i.e., changing from the settings I had with Linux and FreeBSD on the same machine to switch IRQs for my serial devices, PCMCIA was supported by the default install floppy.)
I had installed OpenBSD 2.5 and gave up on it, because I needed a working system in short order and did not have time for the learning curve, so I was used to the partioning scheme.
Here's my secret recipe for OpenBSD's partioning scheme: Go download kern.flp and mfsroot.flp from FreeBSD's site and boot those. Pick the 'Novice' install, which will then lead you to FreeBSD's partitioning which is automatic. Then after FreeBSD is done doing the newffs on your HD, pop out the floppy, pop in the OpenBSD install floppy and reboot.
Then when OpenBSD asks you for partioning, it's already done, and you can just change the labels and mount points with 'p' to see your partitions and 'n' to rename them.
boom bam bing... *woop* there it is. Reboot.
X11R6 was easily configured now that Neomagic is well supported in 3.3.5. APM is well supported in both BSDs.
Brief performance review.
In a nutshell, OpenBSD is slightly slower than FreeBSD on the same hardware, which was slightly slower (but not much) than Debian GNU/Linux on the same hardware. Here are the applications I run always. I'm a law student, so my main needs are text editing, archiving and searching.
Whenever I test a system, I always use my laptop b/c it's what I like to use most, and my goals are to have X, pcmcia, and apm running flawlessly.
In Debian, X and pcmcia worked great, but when I would suspend my box I would have problems with pcmcia modules and would have to insmod them or rmmod them and re-insmod them. This was an annoyance. I eventually got a hold of a script that allowed me to disable pcmcia before suspending. I would then have to run the script again to reinitialize pcmcia; I quickly grew tired of this.
Enter FreeBSd 3.3. Went and bought it, and downloaded the PAO install floppies and the PAOBIN pcmcia drivers. This was very nice and great, I loved everything about FreeBSD except for one thing, the pcmcia drivers seemed to treat my pccard as a 10baseT rather than 100. That kind of sucked. I knew eventually my legal work would require an IPSec network so I moved on (I highly recommend FreeBSD). It suspended and resumed like a breeze, the clock had not lag upon resume, and the pcmcia daemon reinitialized all pccards excellently. Very Nice. And FreeBSD has the best collection of applications for GNUstep of any Unix I've seen (much better than the Linuxes I've used).
Enter OpenBSD 2.6.
Yesterday I downloaded and installed OpenBSD. Everything that applies to FreeBSD applies to OpenBSD except in OpenBSD my pcmcia card is supported better (I have full bandwidth on my LAN). APM, etc are excellent.
Drawbacks. I miss my FreeBSD WMaker desktop! But I think the FreeBSD ports I want will work on OBSD so that I can have the best of both worlds.
OBSD's ports collection is not as vast as FreeBSD's, and it's package collection is no where near that of a Debian or Red Hat. But that is for a reason. What you get is secure, and they have everything you *really* need. All the applications I mentioned above that I use on a daily basis are all in OBSD with the exception of Midnight Commander, which I will try to make use of FreeBSD's port. I will also try to make wmapm, wmnet, and wmmon from FreeBSD work in OpenBSD, then I will be quite satisfied.
Speed. There is a noticable speed reduction with OpenBSD. It is not as optimized for my hardware as FreeBSD was. But my hardware is not all that spectacular anyway so it was never all that fast to begin with. Compile times are roughly the same. However, for some reason X has never performed better, even with FreeBSD. Opaque moves have no hint of jerkiness
Bonus. OpenBSD recognized my sound card! This is new. If I can make that work, I'll really be an OpenBSD fanatic. Another added bonus is mount_ext2fs. This allows floppy transfers from Linux to OBSD, something that FreBSD does not have yet.
In sum, OpenBSD is perfect for a Desktop OS if data security is really really important to you (i.e., if you carry confidential material on your laptop around with you). There's enough applications for document creation that you could need, and with linux_lib all things linux are possible. And binary compat with all other BSD's is there as well. OpenBSD is solid, super secure, and I'm breathing easier now that I know my client materials are under the blowfish
Later y'all.
they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex
Like what? I use 'plain old WindowMaker.' I'm a law student and computer enthusiast and tend to deal with mostly all documents, html, ps, pdf, etc.
My ideal 'desktop environment' needs an emailer (mutt)(non-kde/gnome), a browser (netscape/soon to be mozilla)(non-kde/gnome), a text editor/word processor (nedit/wordperfect)(non-kde/gnome), a file manager (mc)(non-kde/gnome), a presentation tool (mgp)(non-kde/gnome), and a figure drawer (xfig/gimp) (non-kde/gnome).
What is KDE making easier in my life? I've used it, and found that it is pretty nice, but after about 12 hrs of use, my memory is is really bogged down at 144MEG of RAM.
I believe in spartan simplicity. In WMaker with the combination of keybindings and edited menus, I can move around my desktop and my most frequently used applications in eye blinks. Clicking around is such a waste of time and energy, I think it actually raises my stress level to have to click my mouse more than twice. I prever hitting F12, have my menu pop up, use arrows to find my app and launch it. This takes about two seconds.
To be really fast, I have my terminal, editor, browser and file manager in a custom menu that I have attached key bindings to. So alt n starts netscape, alt t starts terminal (wterm -tr -wm) (for a beautiful transparent term for wmaker that takes only 1K of RAM), ctrl alt m start midnight commander (gmc is no where near the functionality, kfm is closer but what a mem hog at 11K, gmc is only 6K. MC is 1.5K and in wterm there are clickable areas for everything. It's so fast.
The only functionality I miss is being able to drag files to a trash can before I decide to permanently delete them. But I use the OffiX-files and OffiX-trash applications to get that functionality.
What I would love to see is GNUstep get a lot more attention. Applications based on GNUstep and WINGs are fast, light and pretty. Linux should be optimized for stablity and speed first and ease of use second. Feature parity with Win is a waste of time. We need feature parity with NEXT and Apple.
Please see this document on Ompages that describes how to set up a very functional graphical desktop based on Debian and Windowmaker specifically for use with low end hardware. If you are running debian you can 'apt-get install package1 package2 ...' these packages and you will have a nice fast desktop for your 486. I wrote this as part of the the Ompages Project it is my contribution to the project to put together a software selection that people with low end and legacy hardware can participate in modern computer culture. Let me know what you all think.
Needless to say, I'm a huge proponent of retaining feature parity between legacy and modern desktops. It is essential to proliferation of computers throughout the world. It is also quite feasible. You sacrifice no functionality, but you will sacrifice some ease of use and look and feel qualities in some applications. But that is not such a bad thing, people who are forced for financial reasons to use older hardware are getting the added benefit of an opportunity to learn about computers in a much more thorough way than his/her counterpart with KDE, W2K. I greatly admire how far KDE has come. But we must remember who they cater to. KDE is to woo people away from W95/NT in the corporate/business setting. What about the rest of the world with an old computer? If you read and apply the above document you will have a very useful desktop that gives away *no* functionality and is based _mostly_ on free software. I have a fairly powerful desktop but love the speed and stablity my system has after applying what is in that document. I have applied it to my girlfriend's 486 and it is not all that much slower. I enjoy it; I hope you all do too.
We at ompages.com seek to do precisely that. Privacy is essentially a private matter. That means that the person in control of one's privacy is not some corporation with some policy. Rather, it should be the individual internet user.
The software and technology to secure privacy on the internet should be within the physical possession of the person seeking to retain privacy. One cannot give away personal information and expect the recipient to be trusted without some legal privilege to do so.
S.Ct. has stated one thing that will not change. A person *always* has a reasonable expectation of privacy in one's home. It is still the last bastion of privacy rights we have. I will *never* be willing to exchange that expectation for *any* so-called 'greater public interest.'
I'm going to be harsh against you poster and you Mr. Schneier. The notion that we should just accept privacy erosion as an inescapable inevitablity is un-American, defeatist and cowardly. When I speak of privacy erosions, I am speaking strictly at those mandated by the government, *and not* the conflict that occurs when one private party's right to bodily and property integrity means an erosion of my personal privacy. Namely, shopowners have a right to surveil their private property. Parents have a right to surveil their home while the babysitter is there. In short, we have a right to spy on each other when we access each other's private property.
However, where the government fails us or intrudes upon us, harming us occurs in the following ways. First, it is not currently illegal for private parties to surveil another's private property. Peeping-Toms & Tinas are not prohibited from spying. This is a failure of the government to act in our interests. And the fact that they have so failed us is intentional. They want us to spy on each other because it gives them free labor. They would love to pat you on the back and say what a good citizen you are when you ratted out your neighbor based on 'your suspicions.' The fact that you have no actual proof or that you had no right to obtain that evidence against your neighbor is not relevant to the Executive. It seeks to gain as much power as it possibly can in an effort to gain informational advantage. Second, the state and federal Executive takes active steps to gain legal advantage over your informational world. It seeks lobbies heavily in legislatures and exerts intimidating influence over corporations and researchers to maintain its advantage. The question is 'so what? What's the cost?'
You are the cost. You are the thing that must be overcome. You are the obstacle. We speak in generic terms about 'privacy' and 'public interest.' Let me put to you all in different terms. The inability to tell someone else to leave you alone if you wish it means that you are a subject in the other's reign. In old times, you could not have told the King 'no' to anything. We do have more ways to say 'no' now but only one really matters. The power to say 'no, go away' is the cornerstone of American ordered liberty. The ability to say openly 'you do not have the right' without being labelled a dissident is the essence of your communicative freedoms.
Freedom in this country is two-fold envisioned. First, freedom to manage your bodily integrity. It is physical control over yourself. The second is freedom to say what is on your mind an whatever meaningful way you choose. It is control over your own mind.
If you are satisified to live without either of these rights, particularly the right to speak freely (i.e., the first right to go when the state takes over), then you would have loved Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, or Stalin's USSR. If you don't *know* in your heart of hearts that the Executive is the right wing branch of our three branch system (where the judicial is more left considering societal goods, and the legislative being centrist) then you do not have enough of an understanding of our system. The trend this century has been for the Executive to aggrandize rights at the expense of the other branches. We have seen the rise of Administrative agencies (the so-called fourth branch) where the Executive has expanded is scope and reach to an amazingly extreme degree. There has never in the history of the world been a more powerful organization than the American Executive Branch. If you don't fear it, you should. Congress and the courts have little effective controls over it. They do, at times, exercise some controls, but in comparison to the power wielded they are minimal. The addage, 'power corrupts,' does not just apply to individuals. It applies to organizations too.
Poster, you are wrong that we must fight the power. That is futile. Rather, collectively we must *take* individual powers. We must demand our controls. It there is technology that can shed privacy; then there is technology that can regain it. Information technology is not synonymous with transparency. That's merely the social trend. And one that I will not accept. I will take my controls from you and the government using the same technology that has adulterated it. Nor is privacy synonymous with dissidence. That is the propaganda from the powers that be. .
I realize that there are practical realities and inevitablities. But rather than acquiescence we should make the Founders proud, declare ourselves in a public state of emergency and put all our smartest people to the task of developing policies, technologies and laws that aggrandize power to the individual rather to society or an organization that claims to be its representative.
This is long and there are typos, o well.
At ompages.com we are building a public co-op style secure network. We will share bandwidth for such services as squid proxies, and IPSec connections. We are a public project so go ahead and join in.
Ompages' volunteer developers are working on such user specific applications like a secure instant messaging client/server and an easy to use web based anonymous remailer.
Other more complex projects involve the creation of web based collaboration tools that will serve as the basis for working on code for ompages' goals of a secure public network.
We need the helpe of people like you all to make our vision a reality. One thing we *really* need is global collocation. If you are interested in ompages and are located outside of the US; we need you to collocate ompages services and/or translate the website into your native language. Thank you.
I spoke with Bernstein's lawyer a few days ago and while she was very optimistic that the 9th Circuit would find in her favor again, she was worried about the over all landscape of the crypto laws because the Circuit court in Ohio will hear another case involving a law professor's request for a BXA license to teach his students (Junger v. Daley).
There the Northern District of Ohio upheld the BXA's denial of a license. Now it is on appeal. If the federal appeals court in Ohio affirms the district court's holding, we will have a split of opinion in the federal courts. This means that one circuit would hold that source code is speech and another would hold that it's not. Then we would have to see if the Supreme Court would resolve this split. It may not, then we would have disparate laws in the various federal jurisdictions.
In addition, even if the Clinton Administration revamps its rules the issue would persist whether any licensing scheme regulating the publication of encryption source code would violate of the 1st Amendment. The specific issue is whether the requirement that license approvals must be finalized by the president are an arbitrary prior restraint on free speech and violative of the 1st Amend. The general issue is whether any licensing scheme that regulates source code of any kind is a prior restraint on free speech and a 1st Amend violation.
Both of these issues ultimately hinge on whether source code is speech. And we already have one court saying it is and another saying that it isn't.
The ray of hope in all of this is that if the Supreme Court does eventually get to resolve this split in all likelihood it will find that source code is speech and give it full 1st Amend protections. The reason for this is that we have an exceptionally conservative bench that tends to employ a literalist textual method of interpreting the constitution. They will hold that any prior restraint must meet the strictest scrutiny; the government can only restrain speech when it is in the country's imminent national security interest where they know immediate harm will occur to our security if the speech is not restrained.
Source code will never meet this test unless the code is 'how to destroy our financial networks' or something like that (IOW software as a weapon). Encryption can always be used for non-harmful purposes so it will not fit the S.Ct.'s strict scrutiny standards.
I plan on attending the Bernstein Appeals hearing in December. If anyone is interested in attending with me, email me and I'll let you know when and where. It's in San Francisco. I can also find out the locations for the Junger hearing in Ohio; there's also a crypto case called Karn in D.C. I can find out the details of that as well. We should all go to these hearings and make a show of support for the 'source code is speech' platform.
Right, the judgment proof situation is really only a deterrent to the M$ corp from initiating suit if they feel they can't intimidate the poor kid anyway.
My feeling behind the fund problem for our hypothetical non-profit corp is that the IBMs of the world could be coerced by social pressures to contribute their patents to the pool (and hence their resources) for the same reason that they cross-license patents to each other. They seek to minimize risk of litigation on patent infringement claims. The patent pool would provide this risk minimization and it would make them look like 'white hat' corporations who support the little guy. In essence, this is the same reason they have jumped on to the open source bandwagon.
Time is of the essence. Who knows for how long these big corps are going to support this movement. We can do this; we should do this.
There are many volunteers on ompages.com that seek to enhance our freedoms by combining technical and legal analysis and solutions.
We have an 'idea laboratory' environment, and I encourage anyone interested in implementing a patent pool system to sign on the lists, announce your intentions and watch as people start to volunteer to help. I will help promote the project and seek the necessary professional assistance that would become important to the vitality of the project. I'm very committed to these types of projects and you can be sure to have somone who will support your efforts with efforts in kind.
The patent pool is as necessary as the open source licenses, but it is much more involved legally and financially. That does not mean that it is a waste of time; it means that it requires a more sophisticated organization. Let's get to planning and implementing it now!
The patent pool would have to be maintained by an unincorporated non-for-profit organizations of individuals *and not* a small business or coalition of corporations. The M$ corp could threaten and indeed sue but they would more or less be wasting their time b/c the association would be more or less judgment proof.
We have to remember that many of the open source software developers are students. In fact, probably a huge number of them are. As such, they are poor and judgement proof (I'm a student too, so I know poor).
Alternatively, this patent pool would have to gain political momentum like the Open Source software movement has. We've seen large companies like Sun, IBM, Red Hat and others become heavily involved in this area. The same pressures that are upon them to open their source code would also bear upon them to contribute to the patent pool. This would remove the judgment proof status of the association, but it would give it a deep pocket. It would also do to patents what Open Source licenses have done to copyright protections of software.
As lawyers, we know the patent pool licensed under something similar to the GPL/DFSG-free licenses is the only way to prevent the Open Source movement from being killed in its tracks. The GPL is more of a social mantra than a powerful legal document. It is a powerful social force, but has not been legally tested. Many open source applications can be assembled in a new way an a patent filed on it would create difficulties for the authors of the individual applications. The patent pool is necessary. The risk of liability is a real one but we can minimize the costs by recruiting corporate sponsorship.
You computer nerd peoples do not make enough laughs. You must comprehend the importance of the laughters. We listen to the jokes we is tellings and really laugh a lot.
No seriousness, everything is happens for a reason. How we going to be friends unless speaking translated? Madonna is a slut book! Ha ha... She has the flappies! ;)
Oh boy, these American musics really eat the pie! In my country, we listen. But I never could understand what the hell they saying. Even though I listen to these musics all day and dance, all I could speak in English language was "I sue you."
I thought I was a cool guy and saying like the "Hi Dude!" Boy I should have shoot myself in the hole in the head. Ok now dudes bye bye. Don't stop with the having laughters, it is an importance, seriousness.
I agree with you whole-heartedly.
I've been saying now for while that everyone who has purchased M$ software has a valid claim for fraud, breach of implied warranty, and /or strict product liability.
I'm almost positive a judge would allow a class action law suit based on these allegations to make it to trial.
We as a community need to compile a database of testimonials, i.e., 'My computer crashed and I lost 20 hrs of research"; "This virus took our network down for 10 hrs and we had to spend $50/hr on three sys admins to fix it." A database like this would do the ground work for evidence discovery needed to prove a case for fraud and to prove the damages.
Such a database would be easy to build, I understand. If anyone is interested email me at my email address above. I'm not talking about a bug list. I'm talking about a list of the damage the bugs caused. Specifically how much time and/or money did one spend to remedy the damages that faulty M$ products caused. If nothing else it would force M$ to fix their bugs, and it would be an interesting thing to read.
Contact me... I have web space and time if you have time...
I wish I'd known about this newsletter before. This is good stuff.
What the government does not seem to comprehend is that all the preventative measures in the world won't stop the free nature of the internet. Controlling the internet is similar to the old Sanskrit mental exercise.
Try to stop your mind from wandering. Attempt to concentrate on one thought and no other. Not too easy is it?
The old Sanskrit writers described this phenomenon as the 'caged monkey.' The caged monkey will flitter around the cage incessently; attempting it to stop is more difficult than reigning in the horses pulling a runaway chariot.
The internet is the home of millions of caged monkeys. Try to prevent even one from bouncing and dancing from this place to that. It is an impossiblity internet communications are not centralized and they will not be.
The government should not attempt to control us on this medium. By doing so, it may find itself an obsolete institution that people no longer need or want because people will have collaborated to obtain the services the government stopped giving. We should put the government in its place.
Caffeine is very dear to me.
But it should be treated like medicine.
I take one thermos of very very strong coffee and when I start to feel my eyes get heavy (which will happen all day for me even on a good night's sleep) I take about an ounce of the stuff. I do this all day and I get a lot of mileage out of more or less four cups of coffee. Then I don't feel wired when it's time for me to sleep.
I'm a full proponent of meditation as well; when you find it difficult to sleep lay flat on your bed w/o a pillow and repeat a one syllable word in your head. Time the word with your breath so that you finish mentally speaking the word when you fully exhale. As you inhale repeat the word. Try to make your inhalations and exhalations last about 15 secs. Increase of some months to 30. As thoughts arise in your mind simply amuse yourself as you watch them flash like on a screen and then turn your attention back to the word you are repeating. In the morning you should do some head rotations and spine stretching exercises to release any tensions that affect the central nervous system.
Also when I have a lot of reading to do, sometimes in addition to the coffee, playing a game or two of xbat or galaga gets my adrenaline up enough to carry on.
I keep about an 18 hr work day; I'm a law student and I have a pretty demanding internet project. So these techniques keep me from losing it.
We are non-profit, grass-roots, and in the crucial early stages of development.
Our goal is to develop a publically available VPN based on IPv6 and IPSec. We hope to be a public domain for serving 21st Cent. things likes VoIP, application servers, anonymizing proxies. We also seek to make cheap computers and free (speech) software available to low income families and individuals.
I invite you to see www.ompages.com. If privacy is an issue for you and you want to do more than 'write your local congressman', for example, by donating skills, equipment and resources to the public works project to build a secure network then join us. There is no leader, you can start your own project on ompages that furthers our goals of private networks and global technology proliferation. There will be no public network where individual privacy rights are the prime goal unless intelligent and experienced sys admins, programmers and web-masters get on the ball and make it happen. Talk is cheap; we can do this.
We must speak with one international voice against privacy intrusions to the IETF. If the IETF won't give us the privacy protections that are our birth rights, then we must implement our own. In fact, AOL users should not be subjected to the hoodwinking they are receiving. It is our duty as technically educated net citizens to give them the services they have now in a much more secure environment. Our priority is not the bottom-line; it's the line that must be maintained between individuality and government sponsored controls. This is no small task, but then again, neither is freedom. The U.S. claims to be governed by the people; ompages.com is.
One thing he seems to have forgotten is the frequency of war in human history. At some point in the next century, some ferocious leader will begin the killing spree. With the rising popularity of entertainer/politicians in the US, I suspect that it won't be an American leader.
I tend to agree with his predictions on the fall of currency, not because of energy production changes but because the internet coupled with major discrepencies in currency valuations will necessitate a stabilizing force. Metals will drive this partly, another will be derivatives. We will have one currency before no currency. Theoretically basing it on the one kilowatt hour is good, but that sound like an act of cooperation. The one currency will be a power play.
China's GNP growth surpassing the US's sound about right, but that does not mean China will be richer than the US. The US will be the home of the elite. The growth of China's GNP won't happen without advice from experienced US financiers. Innovation and progress will firmly be rooted here for the next century.
Aside from that, I want to go ice fishing on Europa. And I will have some pretty mean mini-velociraptors wired with remote control, visual cortex recording and emergency brain bombs in case junior strays off into the dino-pen.
Nedit is light, know html, and is very configurable. I love it. I've never tried the Windows app, but if you are looking for a killer unix X11 editor, nedit is excellent. Try it.
Mr. Sterling,
Many volunteers have referenced your name in connection with the ompages project, not that you endorse the project but that the ideas expressed in the project's website evoke memories of ideas expressed in your works and/or the works in your annotated bibliography.
Please consider this proposal and tell me, is this what you meant by "Islands on the Net"? What are the social and/or political ramifications of this kind of volunteerism? Thank you.
Nate