American Protective League
What's the historical record on trying to make the general public into informats? It seems that the U.S. has been there and done that during the first Red Scare.
Support Bloggers' Rights!
What's the historical record on trying to make the general public into informats? It seems that the U.S. has been there and done that during the first Red Scare.
I think I was talking to Cory or someone about case sensitivity (for filenames and directories) in filesystems. It seems obvious to me that the case sensitivity of the Unix filesystem is the right thing and a feature, but why is that? Is it possible that filesystems should merely preserve case?
I can think of a few reasons, but they seem inadequate to many users. Can anybody help me out?
My father got me a subscription to The Sun, an interesting magazine which reminds me in some ways of Harpers or The New Yorker. The writing inside seems serious, interesting, and careful, and reminds me of Wendell Berry and other writers who might be mentioned in the same breath.
At this point, I'm used to reading mainly advocacy, headline news, editorial, academic papers, and, of course, techne. So it's surprising (a nice surprise) to be reminded that there is such a thing as an essay.
Plus, the current issue of The Sun contains a photograph (uncaptioned) which I recognize as the bike path bridge across the Connecticut River between Northampton and Amherst, so it makes me nostalgic. (The magazine isn't even published in New England, yet still it has pictures of my home town!)
A film series in Berkeley sponsored by MSRI looks like great fun. I should be able to make it to a few of the films.
I was writing about trusted computing and the claim that trusted computing systems give you new features without taking away features you had before. This seems to be true of Palladium and TCPA (although we'll find out a lot more about TCPA later on this month when the TCPA Promoter Companies come by EFF to give us a briefing).
In particular, the suggestion is that you can run any software which you could run before. E.g. in the Palladium FAQ
"Palladium" brings additional capabilities to the PC but does not interfere with the operation of any program that runs on current PCs. "Palladium" never imposes itself on processes that do not request its services; "Palladium" features must be requested by a program. So the MP3 player you have today will still work on a "Palladium"-enabled PC tomorrow.[...] "Palladium's" security chip (the SSC) and other features are not involved in the boot process of the OS or in the OS's decision to load an application that doesn't use a "Palladium" feature and execute it. Because "Palladium" is not involved in the boot process, it cannot block an OS, or drivers or any non-"Palladium" PC application from running. Only the user decides what "Palladium" applications get to run. Anyone can write an application to take advantage of "Palladium" APIs without notifying Microsoft (or anyone else) or getting its (or anyone else's) approval.
So there seems to be a clear technical sense in which you can do what you did before and you are only gaining capabilities and not losing them.
Still, people who believe this may still believe that Palladium is not a good thing overall for many users, or will still introduce disadvantages. How can that be?
To argue that point by analogy, you'd want to find examples of where gaining something, or possessing something you didn't possess before, is a disadvantage to you in the end. Specifically, if possible, you'd want to try to find cases where gaining an ability, or having an ability is a bad thing, or cases in which you might want to have fewer capabilities.
Here are a few such examples, offhand:
I wrote about this before in April of 2000, and I mentioned the Sirens, the time-lock safe, an essay by Robin Hanson, and holding copyrights when you're being sued by someone who wants to censor you. The latter was the occasion for my mentioning the problem in the first place. If you hold a copyright or a trademark, someone can sue you, be awarded the copyright or trademark in a judgment or a settlement, and then use it to try to censor you and third parties. This is especially likely to happen in reverse-engineering cases where someone publishes software produced by means of reverse-engineering and is then sued.
One possible conclusion in this case is that it's better for an organization like the FSF to hold copyrights than for you, as a software author, to hold them yourself, if litigation is likely. The incentives for you as a litigation defendant will not necessarily favor the outcome which you would ideally prefer in the abstract. Faced with risks like losing your home or livelihood, you might agree to something which is not beneficial to the public or to your cause.
This is also true for personal property in litigation. If you own personal property, it can be taken from you, so owning property can be a serious disadvantage in case of litigation.
The concrete argument which I'm hinting at by analogy is that having the new "ability" to decrypt certain things only subject to conditions of someone else's devising may not be a net benefit for you, even though it's a new ability you didn't have before. And the market effects of having everyone gain this ability may particularly not be a net benefit for you.
This reminds me that some people still think the Industrial Revolution was a bad deal for the public. I find that hard to believe, but it did bring about things like industrial pollution and repetitive strain injuries, from which I'm suffering even as I type this sentence.
Speaking of winners and losers in the course of progress: In May of last year I quoted a DRM business model pitch -- since altered -- which compared the progress wrought by DRM to a genocide:
The author's second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley 1996) bought this observation into focus by pointing out that historical frontiers were typically tamed by displacing property-averse, communitarian, indigenous tribes (such as the American Indians and the Open Source movement) by property-conscious, capitalistic newcomers. Although the displacement of primitive economic systems is devastating to those displaced, the advanced economic order that follows is ultimately far more productive and capable than the primitive economic system that preceded it.
I continue to find this analogy really shocking, and perhaps its author did, too, because he subsequently took that paragraph off of his web site. (I should get a copy of Superdistribution and see whether it actually says this.)
Rep. Lofgren and Rep. Boucher have now both introduced significant DMCA reforms. These bills are useful because they directly attack the harshest consequences of 1201 -- the fact that 1201 makes many circumvention acts and technologies illegal even when they are not aimed at an infringing purpose.
Problem: the entertainment industries don't want to have to prosecute actual infringers, if they can instead roll back the Betamax standard and control the actions of the much smaller number of providers of technologies. A reformed DMCA would put the focus back on the infringers and shift it away from technology providers, and so Jack Valenti has immediately insisted that it would be useless.
"You could still learn [French] by sitting in a café and watching, noticing that when someone says 'Un café, s'il vous plais', they get this thing that looks like coffee. You could guess that those words meant 'A coffee please'."(Tridge)
Contact: Seth David Schoen