Much as the GPL turns copyright against itself, could trusted computing be turned against itself by creating a class of software that doesn't run on computers where trusted computing is turned on?
Food for thought.... perhaps....
Of course, it is far from perfect, and one thing that really annoys me are the increasingly frequent misuse of moderation, whether deliberate or simply as a result of an overactive sense of political correctness.
Now, this might seem like whining, ok, it is whining, but how could anyone justify moderating this down as flamebait?! I mean, who seriously thinks that the British need to be protected from such racist insults? It is reminiscent of LA County recently asking their suppliers not to use terms such as "master" and "slave" when referring to equipment. Perhaps on
Anyway, I am going to keep this story around and post examples of moderator abuse in the comments afterwards, others are free to do the same.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this picture. The so-called "Truenames" patent, filed in 1997, is little-more than a marketspeak-friendly name slapped on a decades old and widely known technique in computer science called "hashing". A hashing algorithm takes a file, and produces a "signature" for that file, a short set of letters and numbers that, for any two identical files, will always be the same. This technique has often been used to detect identical files, or to verify the integrity of software downloaded over the Internet. Clearly, it requires very little imagination to suppose that hashing might also prove useful when verifying the integrity of files on a P2P network.
This, of course, puts Mr Broes' quote in a somewhat sinister new light. In a classic example of P.R "doublespeak", what he refers to as protection, most would see as an anti-competitive offensive, and what he refers to as commercialization, most would refer to as extortion. Yes, the implication of recent public statements from Altnet is that they plan to use their government granted monopoly on an obvious idea to force other P2P companies, through threat of litigation, into cooperating with whatever scheme they are cooking up.
It is hard to overstate the bitter irony of a company, their main innovation being the loathed spyware, threatening real innovators in the P2P space for using a technique that Altnet made no contribution toward but which they now claim as their property. Altnet's initial targets seem to be designed to place them on the moral high-ground, as most are companies trying to track down copyright infringers on P2P networks. It may only be a matter of time, however, before they attack Shareaza, BitTorrent, eDonkey or others.
Fortunately, all is not lost. Firstly, given the facts I have just outlined, this patent should be overturned if anyone fights it, it obviously fails the non-obviousness requirement for patents, and there is plenty of prior art out there.
Secondly, the Federal Trade Commission recently published a report acknowledging the problems with the US patent system and making a number of recommendations which will make it harder for Truenames-style patents to be granted in the future, and easier to challenge those that have already been granted.
In the EU, concerned citizens and subjects mounted a spirited opposition to the attempted introduction of US-style software patents, and were successful in getting the European Parliament to amend the proposal such that software patents were not permitted. The battle in the EU is far from over, but it is heartening to see rank and file computer enthusiasts and small businesses raise their voice and be heard over the paid lobbyists of big software.
So, danger on the horizon, but also hope. With luck Altnet will renounce patent-blackmail as a business model. With even more luck the FTC's recommendations will be implemented, and the EU will listen to the voice of their citizenry with respect to software patents. In the mean time, those threatened by Altnet must stand firm or risk emboldening them and those like them even further.
Anyway, the project lay dormant for a while, but now I want to find someone to take it over - anyone interested should email me at ian@locut.us.
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Zero Install is designed to make the process of installing new software completely transparent. It achieves this by mapping a filesystem to HTTP. for example, if you wanted to install The Gimp, you would simply run it from
This idea, of breaking down the barriers between the local filesystem and the Internet to effectively eliminate the notion of installation definitely seems like the way forward. This is the kind of convenience that tools such as Debian's apt-get begin to provide - however 0Install takes it to its ultimate conclusion.
The next step, then, would be to build an entire Linux distribution around the 0Install principal. This would also benefit from upcoming filesystem innovations which allow set operations on directories (for example, having two directories and creating a new virtual directory that contains everything the two real directories do). At the simplest level this would eliminate things like the $PATH variable.
Creating a new Linux distribution that isn't afraid to make bold advances such as those outlined above will be the true next step in the evolution of operating systems - it won't be brain surgery, just elegantly combine a number of technologies (such as Linux, 0Install, and the new Reiser FS) that are already out there or in development.
There are those that have accused me of being a self-publicist (you know who you are), but I think this latest episode demonstrates that not everyone that gets some publicity for something did it through shameless self-promotion.
I was following a debate on Slashdot about an Intel engineer who had admitted (under considerable duress) that he was a terrorist. Many people took this to imply that he was actually guilty. In an attempt to wake people up to the seriousness of what was going on I posted a comment under my slashdot nickname (but making no further attempt to identify myself) explaining that I was leaving the US, and how concerned I was about the direction this country was going. Admittedly, I used somewhat hyperbolic language, and gave fans of Godwin's Law the opportunity to indulge in the meta-arguments that they enjoy so much, but it was just a throwaway comment on
As a result of this I got one phonecall from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and an article in the Irish Times, followed by a request from GrepLaw to do an interview. As always, I accepted these requests to discuss what I had said - I learned long ago that whether you talk to them or not, journalists will write a story - and it is far better that you have the opportunity to inject your perspective than to leave it up to them and their editors.
Bottom line - it might make people feel better to imagine that the amount of coverage someone gets is directly proportional to the size of their inflated egos, but it isn't always true. Of course, sometimes it is
It wasn't until a recent email conversation with Cory Doctorow, started by a
Here, I outline a fictional debate between Cory and I, using various extracts from our conversations and comments, which I hope gives a fair indication of Cory's viewpoint:
Me: As an Irish citizen living in the US - I have decided that it is time to leave this country - it is starting to look, smell, and act as Germany did during the 1930s.
Cory: It's a shame that [you] violated Godwin's Law, as it gives those who would distract us from the real issue here a handy red herring to toss into the fray, i.e., pointless arguments about the appropriateness of a comparison to Nazi Germany.
Me: I think the comparison with *1930s* Germany is apt, although a comparison with 1940s Germany would not be, you can't invoke Godwin's law when the conversation *really is* about Nazi Germany
;-) Cory: The point for me of G's law is not its aptness -- I happen to agree that it is an apt analogy, and I speak as someone who lost a significant fraction of his family in the death camps.
The point of G's law is that comparisons to Nazi Germany immediately end all discussion about the subject at hand and instead divert the whole debate to an argument about the aptness of the comparison.
Me: In some cases, however, a discussion about the aptness of the comparison is actually useful, and gets to the core of the issue.
Cory: My point is that Doctorow's Corollary To Godwin's Law is that anyone who wishes to be an effective rhetorician should completely expunge the notion of Nazi comparisons from his bag of tricks, because it creates a vulnerability to an attack that is otherwise neutralized ("My opponent is of such poor judgement and callous insensitivity that he believes it's appropriate to make comparisons to Nazi Germany!").
Me: Well, I am not so sure I agree with you there. *If* a comparison to Nazi Germany is pertinent then an effective rhetorician will be sufficiently skilled to counter this kind of ad hominem attack. They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and what more important lesson for society than the events in Germany during the Nazi period.
Refusing to use such an important lesson of history in debate for fear of exposure to fallacious arguments seems like an unfortunate surrender of a powerful tool for those who wish to fight against fascism. For this reason - I have never been entirely comfortable with Godwin's Law.
Unfortunately this is where the debate must end as I still await Cory's response to my last comment.
I would be curious to hear some third-party opinions on this, since Godwin's Law is one of the Internet debate doctrines that never rang true for me.
Anyway, bottom line is that I now propose:
Clarke's Law: Anyone that invokes Godwin's Law in an argument automatically loses the meta-argument
I would propose that someone come up with a unified Linux daemon which handled all configuration information - keeping it all in a well-ordered datastructure, perhaps based on XML. The idea would not be dissimilar to the Windows registry, although it could incorporate a number of features to make it even better:
I think such a mechanism would be one of a variety of necessary stages to creating a new environment which can be built around a Linux kernel to bring it closer to the kind of unified integrated approach we see in OSX.
Yeah - weird name, I know. All other comments welcome.
Addendum 8/1/03: Sorry for those that tried this and found it to be down - the problem was that I use a Java daemon to do the donkey-work but I couldn't find a VM that would run on the server I was using (which has a weird setup). Finally I got it working using Kaffe - hopefully it will prove to be stable.
First, what do we mean by "bias"? It is a difficult question to answer exactly; examples would include political left or right-wing bias, nationalist bias, anti-Microsoft bias, and bias based on race. The dictionary definition is "A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment." Implicit in the mechanism I am about to describe is a more precise definition of bias; it is the aptness of this definition that will determine the effectiveness of this approach.
Visitors to websites such as Amazon and users of tools like StumbleUpon will be familiar with a mechanism known as "Automatic Collaborative Filtering" or ACF. Amazon's recommendations are based on what other people with similar tastes also liked, this is an example of collaborative filtering in action. There are a wide variety of collaborative filtering algorithms, which range widely in terms of sophistication and processor requirements, but all are designed to do more or less the same thing: anticipate how much you will like something based on how much similar people liked it. One way to look at it is that collaborative filtering tries to learn your biases and anticipate how they will influence how much you like something.
My idea was to use ACF to determine someone's bias towards or against a particular article, and then attempt to remove the effect of that bias from their vote. The effect of their bias is assumed to be the difference between their anticipated vote based on ACF, and the global average vote for that article. Having determined this, we can then take their vote, and remove the effect of their bias from it.
Let's look at how this might work in practice. Joe is a right-wing Bill O'Reilly fan who isn't very good at setting aside his personal views when rating stories. Joe has just found an article discussing human rights abuses against illegal Mexican immigrants. Joe, not particularly sympathetic to illegal Mexican immigrants, gives the article a score of 2 out of 5. On receiving Joe's rating, our mechanism uses ACF to determine what it might have expected Joe's score to be. It notices that many of the people who tend to vote similarly to Joe (presumably also O'Reilly fans) also gave this article a low score - meaning that according to our ACF algorithm - Joe's expected vote was 1.5. Now we look at the average (pre-adjusted) vote for the story and see that it is 3 - we then assume that Joe's anticipated bias for this story is 1.5 minus 3 or -1.5. We use this to adjust Joe's vote of 2 to make it an actual vote of 3.5 - which means that Joe's adjusted vote for this story is actually above average once his personal bias has been disregarded!
So, how well will this system work in practice - and what is it really doing? What are the implications of this mechanism for determining someone's bias? Is it fair?
I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions, but it might be useful to think of it in terms of punishment: when your vote is adjusted by a large amount, then you are being punished by the system as your vote will have an effect different from that which you intended.
The way to minimize this punishment is for your votes as predicted by the ACF algorithm to be as close to what the average vote is likely to be as possible. The worst thing you can do is to align yourself with a group of people who consistently vote in a manner in opposition to the majority.
I have been trying to think of scenarios where it might be bad for people to do the former, or bad for them to do the latter, but so far I haven't come up with anything. What kind of collective editor would such a system be? What kind of negative side effects might it have? I am curious to hear your opinions.
When complete I will probably submit it to
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
