sourcefrog : issues

Turnbull off to a good start

Turnbull's first day in the cabinet as environment and water guru, and it's pissing down in Sydney. Well done Malc.

posted Wed 24 Jan 2007 in /issues | link

More on student unionism

I should have made it more clear that I'm not particularly in favour of compulsory student unionism; I'm just annoyed by facile arguments against it.

I think one major difference is that unlike many taxes, compulsory student union fees are fixed, regardless of the ability to pay. This would be similar to everyone having to pay $20,000 per year in income tax regardless of how much they earned.

It's not really similar: $20k is perhaps half the average income, but even when I was a moderately poor student my income was more than twice the union fee of ~$180. So it's really comparable to everyone paying $1400 per annum. (Which, when you put it that way, sounds pretty good.) And of course many taxes are unrelated to income.

(Not that this would hold any water with the user-pays approach espoused by Julian, mind you: since people get the same benefit, they should pay the same amount. Indeed, strictly applying user-pays, we should tax poor people *more* because they're more likely to use healthcare, social security, prisons, etc...)

Why is there such a strong objection by the student unions to HECS fees which don't need to paid until people are able to, and at the same time strong support for up front union fees?

Because student unions tend to have a socialist, redistributivist bent, and so to want government services to be funded by a wide base, not just the people who use them. So for example the Women's Room should be funded by all students, not just women who use it, and universities should be funded by all taxpayers not just students. If they could get their funding from federal consolidated revenue (ie from all taxpayers) and not just from students, then I think they would. It is consistent, although I don't really agree.

Surely if the student unions are correct about the importance of the services, they will be able to convince the majority of the students (who being able to qualify for university courses should be reasonably intelligent) that the fees are going to a good common cause, and that they should continue to pay the fees.

Right, and you can make the exact same argument about taxes: if I feel that, say, hospitals are good, I ought to join a private HMO or pay my own bills or donate to a charitable hospital. I wouldn't personally go that far, but the logical conclusion of Julian's argument is no compulsory taxation at all.

One argument for compulsory taxation is redistributive, another is the free-rider effect: I benefit from the existence of the judicial system, even if I don't directly use it in any particular year. Similarly: all students supposedly benefit from their representatives' participation in the university senate.

Having said all that I think you could probably wind back the union budgets a great deal and try to make them more representative and efficient. I don't see why compulsory fees should go to fund political, religious, sports or recreational societies. I have nothing against clubs, but it's clearly something people will pay for themselves, and people who don't participate shouldn't be forced to fund them. But then I think that goes for a lot of state and federal programs too.

Therefore, I'd like to see competition between different unions: if one university wants to have a low-taxing union, why not let them? Why is this a federal government issue at all? (Well, I know why, but that's a different story.)

posted Thu 24 Mar 2005 in /issues/politics | link

Note on Student Unionism

On Radio Nartional today, Julian Barendse, President, Australian Liberal Student Federation argues that university students shouldn't have to pay student union fees because they might not make use of all the services, or they might feel the council doesn't represent them. Why not apply this logic at all levels: I make use of few federal government services and dislike many ministers, so why do I have to pay tax?

(Well, I understand the social contract argument, but it disappoints me that Julian apparently doesn't.)

Alternatively, why not put it to the test: let each university student and faculty decide whether they want a compulsory union, and how much the levy should be. Let the Good Universities Guide rate each one on the quality and cost-effectiveness of their unions.

posted Wed 23 Mar 2005 in /issues/politics | link

An earnest plea to web spammers

Hi,

If you would like to run ads for asian midget facial porn sites on sourcefrog, please just write and ask me. Advertisements can be hosted for very reasonable rates. Sending so many web spam attempts, looks tacky and achieves nothing.

Yours, etc.

posted Thu 18 Nov 2004 in /issues/spam | link

For ever and ever

JohnHoward.blogspot.com:

Even when I'm dead, Australians will elect my corpse over the Australian Loser Party, 'cause they will know that my corpse has a proven track record and that it will keep interest rates low. Speaking of which, that was one of the best parts of this election. I reckon that the whole interest rate thing really showed how heaps smart Australians are. 'Cause like, even though every economist in the country said that they wouldn't rise under the Loser Party, Aussies were smart enough to listen to me instead. That's 'cause Australians know I'm honest and reliable and stuff.

posted Fri 29 Oct 2004 in /issues/politics | link

O'Gara's reportage

More from Groklaw on Maureen O'Gara, IBM, SCO, and the courts.

posted Sun 24 Oct 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

The real reason for invading Iraq

The Economist's review of Bush's presidency gives this explanation for his foreign policy. [Sub required, mail me if you would like to see the whole text.]

It is not surprising that such a conservative president produced such a conservative response to September 11th. For a while the terrorist attacks both unified the country and turned Mr Bush into the most popular president since the second world war. Democrats and Republicans in Congress joined hands to sing "God Bless America"; the vast majority of the country supported Mr Bush's immediate decision to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. But in the months after the felling of the Taliban, Mr Bush drove a wedge into the heart of American politics.
One reason why Mr Bush proved so divisive was that he embraced such a radical response to September 11th. He did not think that fighting terrorism was just a matter of bringing individuals to justice: that approach had been tried in the 1990s and resulted in catastrophic failure. He did not think it was just a matter of improving security at home: terrorists would always find a way to get through even the most cunning security systems. He argued that you need to take the battle to the enemy camp: first, by destroying terrorists in their home base and, second, by revolutionising the Middle East. America's traditional policy of cuddling up to the region's dictators and kleptocrats had turned the region into a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. What was now needed was a radically new approach, in which America would throw its weight behind the liberating force of democracy.

Mr Bush's decision to remove Saddam may have been highly controversial. But at least it sprang from a positive vision of regional transformation (people who say he took the huge risk of invading Iraq to improve his election chances are misjudging where the true political risks lay). Much less admirable is Mr Bush's willingness to exploit September 11th for partisan gain. In the mid-term elections in 2002 the Republicans relentlessly portrayed the Democrats as weak on terrorism. In Georgia they even campaigned successfully against Senator Max Cleland—a man who had lost three limbs in Vietnam—on the grounds that he was soft on homeland security.

Whether "revolutionising" the Middle East again will improve things has yet to be seen.

posted Sun 24 Oct 2004 in /issues/politics | link

Blame W

Phil Greenspun:

If we can say "we didn't vote for W" we are considered good citizens of the world. George W. Bush attracts all of the hatred.
Maybe we should take advantage of the fact that we have our scapegoat in place. We can make a list of all of the countries that we need to invade, install puppet governments in, or steal their natural resources. If W. loses the election we go on a big military spree until mid-January and then Kerry can come in and say "We had nothing to do with the fact that Bush kicked your asses but sadly the U.S. government never apologizes for anything or returns any loot."

posted Mon 18 Oct 2004 in /issues/politics | link

Mandatory registration for free information

A number of news sites, such as The Age, have started requiring registration to read.

On this point consider the registration agreement for the wonderful bugmenot.com [from boingboing]:

What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?
What percentage would you be comfortable with?

Annual Income (in US dollars)

Explain how a search engine like Google would function if no content was publicly accessible:

How many sexual partners have you had in your life?

To some extent it's a technical problem: I don't mind disclosing that I'm a 46yo Anguilan herpetologist, but I do mind filling out a clumsy and longwinded form &mdash just to read a story that they very likely lifted from AP or Reuters anyhow. So I pretty much just close the window on these things.

I can sympathize with publishers wanting more tightly targetted ads (or, as they call them these days, "articles".) So I'd like to propose a less awful way to find this out: put a little survey next to the articles, asking people for random information. Explain that it helps make the site sustainable. Ask one question at a time, and make it voluntary: "what state do you live in?", "how old is your car?", etc.

posted Mon 11 Oct 2004 in /issues/privacy | link

Liberals on homeopathy

AJ points to this ABC story in which Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan says:

The testing regime that's being used [for chemical contamination of water catchments] has difficulty in identifying chemicals at a homoeopathic level, down to the level where it slowly poisons you rather than taking a gut full of poison, which you're inclined to sick up.

(I'm not sure if the spelling error originated in Heffernan's statement or the ABC report.)

What is a homeopathic level, anyhow? Homeopathy uses active substances, repeatedly diluted by 1:10, 1:100 or 1:50,000 dilution dozens of times, for a total dilution factor such as 1:10⁴⁰⁰. At such astronomically high dilutions not a single molecule of the substance will remain.

In other words, the testing regime Heffernan criticizes has difficulty identifying chemicals when not a single molecule is present in the whole state. What a shocking failure! Maybe we ought to bring in dowsers to check whether the vibrations of the chemicals are still present?

And the Liberals say the Greens are kooky...

posted Tue 28 Sep 2004 in /issues/politics | link

SpamAssassin turns 3.0

I'm happy to see that SpamAssassin has shipped v3.0. It includes a feature I have long desired: scoring based on the IPs of URLs included in the message: if I get anything containing http://asdhaslhdaskljhd.teenage-goat-sex.biz/ then I almost certainly don't want to see it.

SpamAssassin already made it hard for spammers to use keywords like "viagra"; now they shouldn't be able to point to sites about them either. "Tell me, what good is an open proxy when you are unable to speak?" [*]

Well done, guys.

(I am kind of sad that they removed the cute cartoon ninjas from the logo; they were about half the reason I originally installed it.)

posted Thu 23 Sep 2004 in /issues/spam | link

Liberals on "Liberals"

The Economist says:

Mr Howard's policies are doing Australia no good, especially as relations with Indonesia (and elsewhere in Asia) have grown fractious in recent years. The Bali bombing in October 2002, which killed many Australians, heightened the fear of terrorism. Worries about unsustainability surround the buoyant economy. Domestically, Aboriginal grievances have yet to be assuaged. A flawed referendum on republicanism in 1999 produced a result out of step with the wishes of most Australians.

Who is a social and economic liberal supposed to vote for? Not the "Liberals" (more accurately, Conservatives). Not the centrist ALP, with more than 50% of conference votes still controlled by unions. More tax, please from the Greens and Democrats doesn't hold much appeal either.

AJ replied, as I had hoped. To respond:

The article is surprisingly short and opinionated, therefore verges on mere assertion. I'm not sure where it came from in the print magazine; maybe from the short articles at the front. Anyhow.

"X is no good" is an English idiom meaning "X is bad", not "X has absolutely no good aspects whatsoever."

You realise there's more to the economy than just property prices, right?

Right, but [e]conomists seem to believe that a bubble in property prices followed by a sharp decline could cause a more widespread downturn. The larger part of the wealth of a majority(?) of Australians is tied up in real estate.

If the [republic] referendum was flawed, that's a good thing too.

That's a bizarre position. Why spend time and money running a flawed referendum? According to at least some credible surveys, most Australians want to move towards a republic although not on the specific terms offered. Howard's referendum was designed to give the impression of listening, without truly reflecting our wishes.

I agree with AJ that the Liberals may be quite liberal on economic issues — conservative parties often are. But I don't want to choose economic or social liberties; why can't I have both? (I suppose what I'm really asking is: why is there no moderate liberal/libertarian party in Australia?)

I can't believe someone would be merely too timid to say "Sorry" but bold enough to go to war. I think this is what the Economist means when they aim to take part in a severe context between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.

Starkoff, Esq is stuck for good candidates.

Kate Lundy seems like a good deal, according to Linux Australia people who've dealt with her. I think she needs a new web design though.

posted Tue 21 Sep 2004 in /issues/politics | link

Anti-piracy ads and copynorms

David wrote two good pieces on the MPAA's anti-downloading propaganda.

I bought a copy of Secretary a while ago. The supposedly anti-piracy locks in the player are used to run ten minutes of ads at the start of the disk. I don't mind them putting them on there, but I do object to not being able to skip ads on a DVD I paid for, just as I can rip ad wrappers off a magazine. I think next time I watch it, I'll make a point of ripping it onto a hard disk first, so that I can cut them off and re-record it.

The MPAA's current strategy seems to be to grab away all fair-use rights. I don't think this influences norms; it just makes people laugh. It gives me a reason to copy this disk (for personal use) when previously I had none. (Stupid region coding is another reason; lack of resale rights for downloaded music is another.)

As a society we are in the process of working out new copynorms. Technology has made something possible, and now we need to work out what is the polite way to use it. I can imagine a similar process after the advent of the telephone or the birth-control pill.

How do norms evolve? Several forces interact: reasoning from fundamental ethics (the golden rule, etc), law, extension from previous patterns, reaction to events.

Saying "copying is illegal" only weakly affects norms because it begs the question of whether it should be illegal. Time-shifting TV shows or copying music onto an iPod is illegal in Australia, but you'd have to go a long way to make it socially unacceptable.

Saying "copying is theft" is also unconvincing because it's clearly not exactly the same as theft of rivalrous goods. We need to collectively decide whether that is a useful analogy or not. Other analogies are possible: it's considered OK to use someone's ideas, but polite to acknowledge them.

Linux and open source software is demonstrating that harsh control is not the only possible way to produce complex intellectual goods.

You need not accept the WMP EULA, which permits Microsoft to make arbitrary changes to your PC. On the other hand, by using an alternative like mplayer, you can be technically illegal but still doing things that are absolutely ethically reasonable: watching purchased DVDs in your own home. Iterating through this shifts the copynorms: Secretary is not reasonable; mplayer is reasonable. By extension, people who want to ban Linux DVD players are not reasonable, and their ads are silly.

Kim Weatherall has more good bits on this, and rather better informed than the ramblings of this hack.

posted Tue 21 Sep 2004 in /issues/copyright | link

The Business of Drug Dealing in Milwaukee

John Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute writes:

How have poor people responded to changes in the economy and in social welfare programs? It should surprise no one that there has been no one kind of response: some have gone back to school or enrolled in various training programs; others have found good jobs and struggle to keep them; many others settle for temporary service jobs, hoping to land a permanent job by working hard; an undetermined number have moved, looking for work or an easier life elsewhere; still others have stayed, but have given in to despair and find solace in alcohol or drugs. One lesson of economic restructuring is that without better education and training, workers in poor communities will not be directly helped by the "good jobs" being created by today's information-driven economy.

There is, however, another, less talked about response, that has far-reaching implications for our society. It is fundamentally a lower-class response by men and women with little formal education and few formal skills. Thousands of poor people across Milwaukee are forming their own businesses and through diligence and hard work have been creatively struggling to "make it." A few of these businesses are legal ventures, like small stores or other tax-paying companies. But those few minorities who form legal businesses are typically better educated and have at least limited access to capital.

By contrast, most businesses being started today in poor neighborhoods are off-the-books. These small businesses include streetside car-repair operations, hair-cutting and unreported child care in private homes, street vending, sales of questionable goods, ad hoc house painting companies, and dozens of other types of businesses entered into by enterprising young men and women. Being poor and not finishing high school does not mean a person is lazy or dumb and doomed to go nowhere. If the jobs won't be created by either the public or the private sector, then poor people will have to create the jobs themselves. And they are doing just that.

[from The Economist]

posted Fri 10 Sep 2004 in /issues/drugs | link

What the ACS is all about

The Australian reports that The Australian Computer Society likes the Greens' plan for licensing of IT workers.

I've only read the policy summary, not the details, but it seems broadly reasonable. Obviously it's not practical to have a single certification that covers the whole IT industry, from helpdesk to web designer to CNE to kernel hacker. But I can imagine some kind of revocable certificate saying you're technically and ethically sound to work on particular safety/privacy/security/business-critical systems.

The free market seems to be working pretty well as far as qualifications for particular products or techologies — Microsoft certification, Linux Professional Institute certification, HP certification, Red Hat certification, etc. But for the most serious jobs perhaps the public has an interest in minimum standards.

The reason I mention this, though, is this surprisingly frank statement from Edward Mandla, president of the ACS:

That's what the ACS is all about[:] how do you get employers to say they prefer ACS members?

I'm glad we've got that straight, then. Jobs for the boys.

posted Thu 9 Sep 2004 in /issues | link

"Linux doesn't exist"

Computerworld speaks to SCO Australian directory: Kieran O'Shaughnessy, who says

IBM has transformed Linux from a bicycle to a Rolls-Royce, [...]

What a compliment. A Rolls Royce, that you can download for free and copy as many times as you wish. (IBM have done sterling work, though I don't think they would claim sole credit.)

SCO, [O'Shaugnessy] said, doesn't just expect financial compensation but removal of the stolen code.

This is a striking change from the position SCO have held in court over the last year. If only it were true: everyone could be easily satisfied, and SCO could stop bleeding $60,000 per day on lawyers.

All he needs to do is send a reasonably detailed and justified explanation of what SCO code is in Linux, and it'll be gone. When owners have wanted to remove their code before, it's been done within a week.

Of course SCO have no legal right to demand any copyrighted code be removed: for years they've been publishing it under the GPL, which gives broad rights to redistribute. Any removal would be at the discretion of the maintainers, but I think it would probably be done.

(Groklaw points out that SCO say they still haven't sought a second opinion on whether their bizarre theories will stand up in court.)

Linux doesn't exist.

I guess I'd better save this and log off...

I want to see Boies explain to a judge that SCO has spent man-years and millions of dollars suing over something that doesn't exist.

[thanks to LWN]

Get your free Rolls Royce at kernel.org — O'Shaughnessy

posted Tue 7 Sep 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

O'Gara, DiDio, Forbes on SCO

Maureen O'Gara, Laura DiDio and Forbes Magazine stake their position on the SCO lawsuit. We can check back in six months or a year and see how right they were.

The Independent, reprinted in the Canberra Times, has a superbly accurate description of Forbes Magazine:

That mysterious publication Forbes Magazine has, for the first time, published a list of the 100 most powerful women in the world, and very fascinating reading it makes too. Not for its insights into the world of powerful women, because in many respects it is a ludicrous and rather embarrassing compilation, but as a demonstration of a particular way of looking at the world.

I called the magazine a mysterious publication, because, for the life of me, I can't really see what the magazine is doing, or what it provides for its readers. It's a strange kind of anthology of pieces about the very rich, corporate existence, and fairly unreadable think pieces, but something about it suggests to me that it isn't really read by opinion-formers or genuinely powerful people. It looks much more like corporate pornography, giving middle-management dreamers fodder for their fantasies, and this sort of exercise, basically meaningless, hardly seems useful or instructive.

posted Thu 2 Sep 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

Spammer's advice column: choosing an OS

69 N   Aug 24 Stacey Hopper ( 134) never use illegal Windows software

Great idea

posted Wed 25 Aug 2004 in /issues/spam/wierdness | link

Labour and porn

From the Australian last week, via AJ

All internet service providers would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers under a radical plan to protect children being pushed by federal Labor MPs.

Yobbo gets to the nub of the matter; see also Jason Soon and Mark Gallagher.

Why doesn't some enterprising ISP offer a filtered service that concerned parents and schools can use? Surely this already exists? It wouldn't require any technical knowledge on the part of the parents. It also wouldn't impose any additional cost or suppression of free speech on adults who choose not to use it.

If anyone was worried about people accidentally seeing offensive material surely punishing spammers would be a more useful step. Just the other day two people on a samba mailing lists were annoyed by porn spam.

I listened to Hamilton's interview with JJJ, but there doesn't seem to be a transcript available. However, there are similar opinions in this Australian opinion piece.

The report that inspired this Labor move seems to still be secret, but a gaping nonsequiter is apparent in Hamilton's public statements. He says that sexual images encourage teenage boys to think about women as sexual objects — already a dodgy assumption. But then he proposes banning only the most hardcore porn, and allowing good healthy erotica. Surely if we wanted to try to make teenage boys not obsess about sex we ought to ban all depictions of the human form: no page-three girls; no underwear ads; no olympic beach volleyball or diving. Burqa, anyone?

By the way: why on earth is a government-funded report secret from the taxpayers who paid for it?

posted Tue 24 Aug 2004 in /issues/censorship | link

Spamusement rocks

jmason pointed out Spamusement: truly a thing of beauty.

Subject: Where did you go?

posted Fri 13 Aug 2004 in /issues/spam | link

Wierd spam

Some people seem to have really wierd and specific fetishes:

From: "Hostelries F. Misadventure" <ricketiest@nesd.net> Subject: Average Teen Cumming movies Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 21:38:41 -0400

Precisely average teens?

posted Thu 15 Jul 2004 in /issues/spam/wierdness | link

Spam of the Day du Jour

From nqqap@loggain.nu Mon Jul 12 20:14:29 2004 From: "Yesenia Brooks" <nqqap@loggain.nu> Subject: chat with assholes on the internet!

Thanks, but no. I do that enough already.

posted Wed 14 Jul 2004 in /issues/spam/wierdness | link

Growing Boies

Groklaw says:

Law.com has the most eye-opening article about David Boies and his firm. It is an older article, from February of 2003, which is just after SCO retained the firm, and the article explains some of the puzzling things we've noticed, like the abundance of typos in their legal pleadings. When you retain Boies, Schiller, you are expecting David Boies, that level of quality. According to the article, that isn't always what you get.

posted Mon 12 Jul 2004 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link

Annotated Induce Act

Via Lessig, The Obsessively Annotated Introduction to the INDUCE Act.

Also wikipedia:Copynorm:

As used by copyright theorists, the term copynorm (or more frequently copynorms) is used to refer to a normalized social-standard regarding the ethical issue of duplicating copyrighted material.

More on Colour of bits

AJ says:

I don’t really think that view’s helpful: colours that you can’t actually see don’t make things easier to reason about; and while sometimes you have to come up with terms to describe things because there’s no more meaningful way to look at things, this isn’t one of those cases.

The word colo[u]r is reasonably well established in science for things that you can't actually see: consider page coloring or quark colors. Part of the charm of Matthew's essay is that it maps copyright into a concept that is both strange but familiar to computer scientists: suppose there are colors you can't see. (We use magic in a similar sense, without implying belief in the supernatural.)

Matthew says, correctly(?) that you can't determine whether a particular bit string is copyrighted just by examining the bits. AJ thinks

It’s not irrecoverable though – there’s no reason why you can’t just provide the software with all the information it actually needs: working out who the current copyright holder is could be made as easy as querying the Library of Congress’s website, or some similar body, governmental or private as appropriate. As long as you have the information your function actually needs, determining the copyright status of some bits is straightforward.

This is a decent practical approximation but not actually true: it's possible that you could have independently recreated the bits without copying them. Checking whether the string was previously registered for copyright doesn't imply the string was actually copied. Conversely, the fact that a string is not registered with the Library of Congress doesn't mean it is not copyrighted.

So this is to say: we can have an external lookup table which, given a string of bits, indicates what colour they are likely to have. But it will give false positives (independently recreated) and negatives (copyrighted but not registered).

Of course, as we see on Mediawatch, for nontrivial strings the chances that a string would be spontaneously reinvented become low. All this says though, is that there are some domains where the heuristic is accurate. Copyright is still not a function of the bits, nor even a function of the bits and the LoC.

The colour of copyright persists on bits across arbitrary transformations: consider human translation into a different language. AJ's oracle could not detect the colour, but the law could. It would similarly fail on the XOR-pad thought experiment Matthew describes.

I think AJ demonstrates Matthew is right: even computer scientists who know a lot about IP will get mixed up as long as they think of copyright as an attribute of bitstrings.

David Starkhoff has more links. The essay provoked an ANSI-standard Intellectual Property flamewar on copyfight,

What Colour are your bits?

By way of Seth: Matthew Skala wrote a good essay entitled What Colour are your bits?

Seth also has a beautiful passage from Lincoln:

Both [Union and Confederacy] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Cory Doctorow on DRM

Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about DRM, which is now available in wiki form. (It's published using MoinMoin, a descendent of my pikipiki code. Truly we all stand on each others shoulders.) Appetizers:

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall.

anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."

"A Moral Chernobyl"

Christopher Hitchens on Abu Ghraib and consequences.

posted Fri 18 Jun 2004 in /issues/politics | link

First Nobel Prizewinner forced to reverse-engineer?

jmason quotes The Common Thread: Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome, by John Sulston, head of the Sanger Centre, and a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine:

Once the first fluorescence sequencing machines arrived, it became clear that we had to take control of the software. The machines worked well, but ABI (jm: the vendor) wanted to keep control of the data analysis end by forcing their customers to use their proprietary software. ...

I could not accept that we should be dependent on a commercial company for the handling and assembly of the data we were producing. The company even had ambition to take control of the analysis of the sequence, which was ridiculous. ...

So, one hot summer Sunday afternoon, I sat on the lawn at home with printouts spread all around me and decrypted the ABI file that stored the trace data. ... Within a very few days, Rodger and his group had written display software that showed the traces - and there we were. The St Louis team joined in, and they all went to decrypt more of the ABI files, so that we had complete freedom to design our own display and analysis systems. It transformed our productivity. Previously we'd only been able to get the traces as printouts, which we bound together in fat notebooks ....

I certainly feel that between us we did push ABI back a bit and denied to them complete control of this downstream software. It was the first experience of the kind of battle for control of information that I seem to have been fighting with commercial companies ever since: a foretaste of the much larger battles that would later surround the human genome.

From this summary, his experience is remarkably similar to that of Richard Stallman several years earlier, when the frustration of closed-source printer software helped motivate him to start the GNU project. (The section from Free as in Freedom is also very good.) I think my favourite part of FaiF is the epilogue:

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. Stepping out of the ghostwriter role, Haley delivers the book's epilogue in his own voice. The epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and "spy" by the Nation of Islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get Malcolm X's life story on paper.

While I hesitate to compare this book with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I do owe a debt of gratitude to Haley for his candid epilogue. Over the last 12 months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable.

posted Tue 15 Jun 2004 in /issues/patents | link

Samizdat Sources

Many of the primary sources for AdTI's Samizdat have come out and rebutted the book. I'm counting here only the people who were contacted in Brown's "extensive interviews".

Here is the current status:

David Bloch, attorney: Explicitly is not speaking about Linux/Unix, only copyright law in general, but his remarks are recast to denigrate Prof Lions.
Eric Levenez: "My Unix chart is not a representation about copyright or patent," but AdTI uses it to imply Linux is a derived work from Unix.
Nikolai Bezroukov: Says that Linus did not write Linux by himself, but rather with help from other contributors. That's hardly news. His conclusions are not universally accepted.
Linus Torvalds: Only quoted, not interviewed by Brown. Torvalds says Brown did not even email him. Admits Linux was written by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. If only Brown had asked in the first place!
Andrew Tanenbaum: Tells AdTI that Linux is "free of any Minix code", but they don't want to believe him. Reply to Brown, who he calls, kindly, "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". Brown says Tanenbaum is animated but tense, perhaps trying to imply Tanenbaum has something to hide. Replies again: he does not suffer fools like Brown gladly. Brown also seems to think Amsterdam is in Finland.
Petri Kutvonen, Helsinki University: Tells AdTI "I doubt if Linus ever did see a single line of original Unix code", but they don't want to believe him either.
Jason Kipnis from Weil, Gotshal & Manges: Tries to explain what "derived work" means in copyright law, but Brown doesn't seem to be listening.
Eric Raymond: Very unhappy at his words being twisted by Brown.
Ilkka Tuomi: Tuomi's paper on contributions to the kernel is cited to support Brown's theory that there is a conspiracy by Linus to not give credit to contributors from India and China. Brown doesn't name any such contributor. Tuomi says this is not a valid interpretation of his data, and gives four reasons why Brown is wrong.
Fred N. van Kempen: Tries to explain to AdTI the difference between (illegal) copyright infringement and (legal, ethical, normal) building on previous work. Well, anyone who knows anything about programming, especially the art of OS design and programming, knows one does not "invent" an OS. AdTI don't seem to understand this fundamental point.
Dennis Ritchie: Quoted out of context on the Lions book. Says the only interview was a brief email.
Richard Stallman: He did not create an operating system. He wrote a kernel. What Linus released in 1991 was not a mature kernel, it was barely a functioning kernel. It took a couple of more years for him to arrive at a kernel with functionality comparable with the kernel of Unix. Nonetheless, it is true he got Linux to work in an amazingly short time, much less time than the Hurd needed. My only comment on that is that he clearly a good programmer. Brown again chooses not to believe his well-informed primary source. Stallman says that Brown deliberately confuses his terms, and that Linus really wrote the kernel.
Dev Mazumdar: States perfectly ordinary and reasonable policies about corporate contributions to open projects. Brown seems to feel they he says something against Linus but I don't see why, and Brown doesn't say why he quotes Mazumdar.
Charles Mills, a due diligence consultant: Tells Brown that leakage of proprietary code into open projects is far less of a problem than open code being appropriated by proprietary projects. That seems to directly contradict Brown's thesis that corporate code leakage into Linux is common and a big problem. I don't know why he quotes Mills. It later turns out that AdTI didn't interview Mills and Jones at all, but rather lifted the text from a private bulletin board. The owner of the board describes this as extraordinarily shoddy journalism.
Henry Jones of Intersect Technology Consulting: I know and work with plenty of companies that permit such OSS participation during working hours... Smart companies allow talent to work on non-company projects (charity, civic, etc.). Smart companies are now developing robust OSS strategies processes, and staffing....Nobody's laughing at Richard Stallman any more. This also seems unremarkable. I don't understand why Brown quotes him. It certainly doesn't help Brown's case. As for Mills, the so-called interview was nothing of the kind.
David Banks: Oracle and other database suppliers face a growing threat from below: "open source" databases, which give customers a free or low-cost alternative to commercial products. Brown claims to be in favor of free markets, etc. But he sees giving customers a lower-cost option as a problem.

In summary: every primary source in Samizdat either contradicts Brown, is ignored or misinterpreted by Brown, or has later rebutted him. Not one person interviewed in the book has said they feel it correctly reports what they said. Not one person interviewed in the book agrees with its conclusions.

Bear in mind that AdTI says:

Brown's account is based on extensive interviews with more than two dozen leading technologists in the United States, Europe, and Australia, including Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum.

Some people were not interviewed at all. Other were not extensively interviewed, but asked only a couple of questions. And almost all of those interviewed think Brown is wrong, and many of them dislike his exceptionally shoddy journalism.

Sometimes when one is investigating a topic, some of the people interviewed might disagree with the thesis. But to have every single one feel that the researcher is either wrong or missing the point is quite an outstanding achievement. I would think any person interested in writing a serious book would at that point take a step back and check whether their thesis was really right. A less ethical person might select different sources to support their case. Microsoft/AdTI did not even bother to find sources who agreed with their outlandish theories — they just went to print anyhow.

posted Fri 11 Jun 2004 in /issues/adti | link

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