What is Digg?153 Comments
- ltbarcly, on 10/12/2007, -5/+101@Phennim
"Morally illegal"???? You are completely mishmashing two very distinct things. Legality has no effect on morality. An act can be both moral and legal or moral and illegal (illegal immoral, legal immoral). Examples are:
Going one mile an hour over the speed limit (illegal, moral)
Intentionally hurting someones feelings whenever possible, eventually leading them to suicide (legal, immoral)
Downloading a file from the internet (illegal/legal depending on file, moral?)
Not knowing the difference between morality and legal code (priceless?) - quentinp, on 10/12/2007, -5/+52Digital Semantics.
- glitch1501, on 10/12/2007, -4/+33brightnet does not sound as cool as darknet
- LycoLoco, on 10/12/2007, -5/+33Wow, a link with the word "porn" in it isn't safe for work?
- mikaellindberg, on 10/12/2007, -12/+37I agree, this whole thing is just clinging to the wordings of the laws in an attempt in finding loop holes. All in all, you still have access to stuff you never payed the copyright holder for, the only difference is that you break the law as a group and not as a person.
Still, it's an interesting technical idea. - DASH, on 10/12/2007, -5/+28^ NSFW!
- TheReport, on 10/12/2007, -10/+33you know what else is a dupe, people like you constantly pointing out on ever single thread that has been posted before that it is a dupe. Please stop now, its making my head hurt. Is there a ***** Dupe Patrol that wastes their lives away by going to every dupe article and stating that its a dupe. Do you massively jizz in your pantaloones knowing that youve pointed out to the masses that the article we are reading has already been posted before. Here is some word of advice, next time you see a dupe i want you to slit your wrists and die, thanks alot bye bye now.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+25Then BURY it as 'Duplicate' and move on! Why the hell do you people need to comment on every dupe? Nobody cares to hear it.
- Beamerboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19How do you presume anyone knows what you do with those bytes?
If I send you 30 blocks that were generated when I inserted a video of my wedding for my friends to download and you use those blocks to build part of your windows XP Pro iso, how am I breaking the law? All I did was insert my wedding video, what you choose to do with that data is entirely upto you and not my responsibility.
Using the same example:
RIAA Investigator searches the brightnet for an infringing work. He starts to download that works and pulls blocks from everyone else in the cluster, but the blocks he is pulling were not generated from infringing works, they were generated from User A's cat photos and User Bs homework and User C's collection of linux distros and User n's Website mirror.
None of those users are sending copyrighted works to the RIAA investigator, the RIAA investigator is merely generating Britney's latest album.
That RIAA investigator then goes through the litigation procedure based on his illegal sequencing of your 0s and 1s. The lawyer shows the judge "Look I can build this song from these data blocks!" the Defendent A shows the judge "Look, I can rebuild pictures of my cat's from EXACTLY THE SAME data blocks! That evil man just chose to use my kitty to make a Britney song!!!" Judge tells the RIAA lawyer to ***** off an stop making songs out of pussies. - PradaPete, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21if you can play or display the content that is represented by that data, it doesn't matter if the bits of it can be copyrighted or not.
This is just useless semantics which any 2nd-rate media attorney will shred to pieces in seconds, and judges will not understand it anyway.
Judge: "Did you play the song from your computer without paying for it or no?"
Nerd: "Well yes I did but technically I..."
Judge: "Shut up...you are guilty now let me get back to my hookers and coke" - Zippo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Tricksy Hackerses!
- 4zumanga, on 10/12/2007, -16/+33The law isn't stupid. You will still get in trouble for intent. This is like the people who think they can get around paying for TV by routing it through their printer or something similarly stupid.
- ltbarcly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13@Phennim
Suppose the company comes to your house and watches you use the toaster you bought at walmart. And when you put a bagel in it they sue you for using the toaster to toast a bagel, because the agreement on the side of the box (which you didn't sign or read) says that the toaster is only licensed by the manufacturer to toast white bread.
Then they sue you for $5000 dollars, claiming that they need to be compensated not just for the bagel you toasted, but for the bagels you probably toasted when they weren't there to watch you. Do you consider this fair? You are violating the terms of toaster use, therefore using your criteria you are acting in an immoral way.
What if Sealy sued people for sleeping on couches? Can Ford sue you if you squeeze 8 people in a car that only seats 6? (instead of buying another car)
If you take a picture of the Eiffel tower from the street, can France sue you for selling copies of that picture? Sue you for giving copies of the picture to friends?
What if I hear a song on the radio, and then I get out my guitar and play that song into a microphone and listen to it from time to time. If I don't distribute copies of my recording, can the record company sue me? Is keeping a copy of me singing a song ok?
What if I hear a song on the radio and record it onto a tape. Is that illegal? Should I be jailed or fined for this?
What if I'm really really smart, and I hear a song, and I type 1's and 0's into a computer, purely from memory, and those 1's and 0's combine to make a file which can be played and sounds exactly like the song I heard, but isn't a recording since I recreated it from scratch? Could I give away copies of this file that I typed in in binary based on nothing but memory?
What if I just borrow a friends CD and listen to it until I'm sick of it and give it back? Is that moral?
What if I borrow a friends CD and make a copy, listen to the copy until I'm sick of it, then break the copy in half and return the original disk?
What if I borrow the cd and make a copy, then return the original a few minutes before I break the copy in half?
What If instead of breaking the copy in half, I return the copy and break the original?
Suppose I never break the copy, but I never listen to it again?
Suppose I only listen to the copy when I know for a fact my friend isn't listening to the original, so that I save gas by not driving over to his house to borrow the CD?
What if we both listen to the cd so that we both are listening for 1 overlapping second? Is this now immoral?
Suppose a friend and I make a copy of his CD, and agree that we will only listen to the same song at the same time while we are in the same room, but using separate headphones so we don't disturb anyone?
What if we get out of sync and we end up accidently listening to totally different songs?
What if I just make a copy of the CD and listen to it how I feel like and people who buy in to big corporate ***** about owning sounds or data kiss my ass? - JeffS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13They lost me at "Have Nothing. Pwn Everything."
- spraguep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Yeah this has nothing to do with the thread OP.
I think most people here didn't read the article...
In order to find a file you NEED the exact URL/ID to pull it out of the network. This isn't like P2P. It is more like BT in that you need a file or information to find the file. You can push files into this network but you're the only one who can ever access them unless you publish the key.
Unlike BT a file is a bunch of random chunks stored across lots of servers (in theory). A file isn't going to be store as a single chunk ever, that would break the system.
And since multiple files can share the same chunks you can't get nailed for hosted copyright material, because a single chunk isn't specific to 1 file ever. - Beamerboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10the source is available to be built on multiple platforms, if you read the information on sourceforge, you would know that :)
- notfred, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12It's *****. You might as well claim that a compressed file isn't the original file, and thus not subject to the same copyright.
- TheReport, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12You cant have pinknet there is some website out there who already is pinknet you are gonna be brownnet
- dkarlson, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Very informative article. I'd heard about something like this before -- perhaps it was a different implementation of a like idea. Truly a fantastic and paradigm-shifting idea.
- karmajunkie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12fredsterss: Personally, i think its *you* who doesn't understand the law. I understand the intent and implementation of the brightnet system quite well. in order for someone to assemble the finished file from its non-copyrighted chunks, there has to be some key somewhere that specifies which chunks and in which order to assemble them. that key is for all intents and purposes a copyrighted work, and you'll get just as much legal hassle from it.
- jcr13, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Ah... this is an old, old project (slashdotted several years ago??) This was the project that inspired my Monolith project way back when.
But there's much more to it than that.
"The Big Hack," which is the mother project of the OFF, is some sort of online "alternative reality game," where you cannot tell what is real and what is not. There are various "characters" posting to the boards on that site.
One of these characters, "White Raven," contacted me by email out of the blue (as I recall) a few years ago asking for help. He claimed to be a blind hacker that programmed with a digital screen reader. He made a big deal on the boards about being blind, and his icon featured a figure with a blind person's walking cane---thus, I cannot tell whether he is really blind or not (and it certainly adds dramatic flavor).
Anyway, according to White Raven, the "players" on the Big Hack site sucked him in to their game without him realizing it and he started working on implementing their ideas in the form of the OFF. Actually, according to him, even the Big Hack folks thought of it as real at first, but the parent company (the umbrella over the Big Hack website) switched to calling it a game later on for some unknown reason---apparently to screw White Raven somehow.
I can't remember what help White Raven was asking for---maybe help in releasing or promoting the OFF software. We actually spoke on the phone once, and he seemed like a nice enough guy.
As you can imagine, my head was swimming with "real or not?" questions at that point, and I decided not to get involved.
However, the underlying ideas stuck with me after my various exchanges with White Raven, and I eventually explored those ideas in my own way with the Monolith project. I do give credit to White Raven at the bottom of the Monolith website (http://monolith.sf.net)
Still, some questions remain: What is The Big Hack? Who is White Raven, really? Is any of this real, or is it all just part of an "alternative reality" game?
Jason Rohrer - huitseeker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7For other references, notice the footnote at the end of the page :
This work builds on previous technology pioneered by David Madore in his paper, “Method of free speech on the Internet: random pads”
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/freespeech.html
And D.A. Madore's comment on this page :
[The idea] is a small variation on the protocol described in section 6.3 ("Anonymous Message Broadcast") of Bruce Schneier's book on cryptography.
Mentioned book's title being, of course "Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C". - Sirocco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7You nailed it; but what they have achieved is a way to (hopefully) insulate participants from lawsuits because of the sharing process. The question is whether courts will see participating in this program the same as seeding a torrent.
- cazabam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8OK, so you transmit a bunch of numbers and a formula. Perfectly legal. Fine, I'm with you there. Putting that together and getting another number? Also fine, if you're into that sort of thing.
The problem occurs when you burn that number to a CD and use it to install a copy of Windows XP Pro that's had the activation hacked out of it. Up until you did that, you were quite legally copying numbers to each other. At that point, you became a software pirate.
The point is that all they have done is legalised the transmission from place to place - they haven't legalised the practice of copyright infringment, whichever way up you turn it. As soon as your legally copied number 'becomes' a cracked copy of Windows by virtue of you using it as such, then it is still piracy. - guyincognito, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6you just wanted to use the word paradigm
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"I fileshare too, but I also call it what it is: pirating."
you steal stuff? dang, i just copy it - scottybowl, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9"did you listen to an internet radio broadcast without paying for it"?
"yes"
"ok then" - cremate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@cazabam
I think you are missing the point. To this day, no one in the US has been sued over receiving copyrighted material. It has always been the uploads. This method will at least make the RIAA change their tactics to where they cannt just sue an IP Address (which is the disturbing part of all of this). - demonicume, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10Dupe Nazis... i got a wheel on my mouse. if i see something that i think i maybe, might have, could have seen before - i scroll on. most of us arent Digg freaks, so if it doesnt make the front page and stay there for the entire day - i miss it. i work, i dont have time to check Digg ever 5 minutes - and i dont want new articles and their comments filling up my inbox either. i gotta get my digg between complete system failures and classes of morons.
thanks anyways. - Beamerboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6PradaPete,
I appreciate what you are saying, but the manual you refer to is also inserted into the block cache and downloaded in the same way. My kitty pictures could very well make up some of the blocks you download for making that manual, which you then use as a reference for rebuilding the blocks into child porn. You are not downloading said manual from a single source, everything is in the block cache including the recipe.
I could for example make a recipe (or manual) for making the blueprints to a nuclear device. If I then insert that recipe into the cache, I get another recipe for rebuilding the recipe, i then do the same with that recipe for the recipe and get a recipe for a recipe for a recipe and so on and so forth, each generation of this "new recipe" is further and further away from the original recipe but can still be used to make the original recipe and thus make the blueprint.
And thats the point, no-one is sending you a piece of a blueprint for a nuclear device, they are sending you independently useless data. It only becomes useful once you decide how to sequence that data with other data.
So lets look at another example involving the RIAA.
Say for example, the RIAA try to entrap users into downloading recipes from them and use that as evidence of intent (which is tenuous at the very least since in reality they would need to prove you uploaded infringing works, as downloading in themajority of the world is -not- illegal, but we will go with the assumption that intent can be used just for the sake of argument). It simply will not work, because of the way the system works, I might request a bunch of blocks from that RIAA dude's "recipe list" but they might be to help build the pictures of my friend's kitty which he inserted last week, and not for infringing purposes at all. The recipes are just arbitrary blocks the same as everything else and can be used to build completely different data (including other recipes, photos, movies, games, web pages, linux distros etc etc etc).
I hope that clarifies things a little more. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"How does the system prevent people from overloading it with spam or useless data?"
Simple, no data is useless, if you upload a 10 hour video of you eating different kinds of jelly, the network can then split it up into chunks that can be used for other data, so in theory my peanut butter (part 1 of my fav Interpol song) could be extracted from your jelly (video). I grab the bread (part 2) out a little grain (random porn [and part 3]) and water (nsync's greatest hits [and part 4]). Record company A has copyrighted the sandwich, but they have no rights over the parts. It's pretty yummy. - Foo667, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6That's not really freenet's purpose at all.
- B111, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
-- Angela Carter - theoallardyce, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7That makes sense mathematically but the problem is, the courts dont care about the maths. As far as the courts are concerned, if A looks like B then its the same thing. It doesnt matter if theres a distinct binary difference, it doesnt matter if A was constructed from random noise using multi-purpose blocks, a court will take one look at the user interface that lets someone search for something and download it and they will conclude that its exactly the same as any other system. At the very most this system will simply cause some amendment to be passed.
- kiwifish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You're technically completely right, Cazabam. One interesting thing though: "what this system does very nicely is reduce the target of blame to exactly one person: the receiver. The senders don't know what you'll use it for, but you do.".... Perfectly correct! And this has 2 interesting consequences. One is that the entire system can be nothing but legal *until you're in the privacy of your own home*. At the point at which you recreate the file and perhaps break the law, you're in the privacy of your own home with no-one watching, not the RIAA, not the MPAA, and so unless you're in the habit of having tea and crumpets with RIAA lawyers while you pirate Britney, lawsuits become difficult.
Even more important though, is that (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure) All of the RIAA lawsuits have been for _distribution_ of copyrighted works. But as you yourself just stated, 'the senders don't know what you used it for' (Kittys or Britneys) and so is it even vaguely possible to hold them accountable in any way shape or form?
Of course, the moral aspect is a different argument, but from a pragmatic approach looking at current lawsuits... well, at the very least it's an interesting debate.
Edit: Great minds think alike, cremate ;) - Beamerboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5A lot of people, including yourself, seem to be assuming that anyone can prove what you made with 0s and 1s. Your example doesn't fit though because you are talking about publishing what you have done, which in reality is not going to happen. You are not going to publish a video of yourself building windows xp from all these blocks (well you could but you would be a moron).
There would need to be someone present when you rebuild all this data into the sequence you want (whether it be Gentoo DVD or Microsoft Windows XP) who would then need to give evidence in a court as a witness.
Personally the only people welcome in my house are my friends, they enter my house with my consent. The police or RIAA etc are not legally permitted to enter my house without either my permission (or in the case of the police, the court's permission).
Are you suggesting that new laws will be passed in order to force all people on the planet to have a resident Copyright Protection Agent in their homes 24 hours a day to prevent you from being able to build infringing works? Because in reality, that is the only way they can proove what you have done with the data. - williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Most of the RIAA cabana boys here are shouting "But it's still infringement!"
So what.
The problem, for them, is that this type of p2p network makes policing infringement extremely difficult, maybe impossible in practical terms. If you can't detect distribution, then you can't detect infringement.
Then what? Post an RIAA goon in everyone's house?
Yeah, maybe it's still infringement. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What will you do about it? - cazabam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6You say it's obvious, but reading the comments above mine you wouldn't think so ...
- gnyffel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The concept reminds me of another project - Monolith. The program obfuscates a given set of file into non-copyrightable chunks.
http://monolith.sourceforge.net/ - aeoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yes, in the privacy of your own home. So, yes, the very final act can signal unlawful intent, but until that very final point, there is no evidence for such. This means that RIAA/MPAA could still be busy catching "thieves", but this way they really have to work at it, instead of randomly spamming their lawsuits across the network IP's.
As a consequence of this, RIAA/MPAA will be unable to sue dead people, 5 year old girls and so on.
Just looking at it from the point of view of limiting collateral legal damage to the truly innocent whose IP somehow got mixed up, it's a good system. - PacoBell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I dunno, Wired has a section called Infoporn. NSFW too o_O?
- ejstacey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5This has been around for a while in other forms, the OFF system is just trying to make it as popular as bittorrent.
Right off the bat I don't think it'll work... there's not enough pressure by the RIAA/MPAA to make the casual user switch from bittorrent to something else... and that's assuming they've made it to bittorrent from limewire/kazaa. Sure they've shut down some sites, and threatened others, but there are still a million more torrent sites ought there.
Plus, it's windows-only at the moment... if you want it to be embraced by the Linux/MacOS crowd (a small but vocal community compared to Windows), you should have some native support. - cjhowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Was there some radical change in the interpretation of copyright law?
I was under the impression that the act of distributing, not receiving the copyrighted work, was the crime committed. If you're sending out a non copyrighted number, you're not distributing a copyrighted work.
Now you can make the argument that when you put all of those pieces together in the correct order to create the copyrighted work then you've committed a crime. However, in order to be found in violation of the law, someone has to witness you enjoying the finished work. RIAA/MPAA evidence that this program, random bits, and instruction set on how to put it together is no longer enough to show violation. It's equivalent to having a copy of the anarchist's cookbook, orange juice and ^$%% doesn't make you a terrorist. - hobbified, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4anon52: You think not, but you're entirely wrong. You do not have the right to "public performance", which means to perform the work for "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its acquantainces". So if you were to take your boombox into a party, or just a room full of people that you don't know, that's potentially illegal... depending on how a judge decides to interpret the word "substantial", anyway.
Just another example of how the law and common sense should NOT be in the same thought.
Oh, and IANAL. - rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This is pretty cool. Although I disagree with the premise of the article when they suggest that the only reason to use a darknet is because what people are sharing there is illegal. There are other legidimate reasons to use a darknet. I use one frequently to share files that I've created that I don't necessarily want to be public yet--like work files etc. There are good legidimate, legal uses for darknets.
- faulkner, on 10/12/2007, -15/+19http://socialporn.com/
- banderbe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Wow there are lots of stupid people on this thread.
Nobody is saying that OFF will not allow people to violate copyright laws.
Nobody is saying that now it's okay to post copyrighted content to the OFFnet and send the 3-tuple hash and file size to all your buddies.
A person caught reconfiguring OFF blocks into a copyrighted product could obviously be tried and convicted for violating copyright.
The difference with the OFFnet is that publishing copyrighted content and transmitting copyrighted content cannot be determined. Its illegality is not relevant; of course it is still illegal.
I could publish a copy of a video game and if I am the only one who holds the 3-tuple hash and file size, then I have not violated any copyright law. I can use the OFFnet to store my own private data, and keep it private.
I would however put myself in a bad place if I shared my keys with the public. It would not be hard to prove that so and so website hosts a forum where keys for copyrighted data are traded.
The author's points are valid and correct in that no longer can RIAA go after people simply for downloading blocks of data, or for participating in a network transmitting blocks of data.
The law isn't broken until someone takes action demonstrating an intent to reconstruct the blocks into copyrighted data.
This is a good day folks. Be happy. Everyone wins. - prthealien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You will end up with the same result, but no one will be able to randomly sue you. You are downloading data that has been reduced to noise. This noise may be reconstructed in the privacy of your computer, but no one will be able to know.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Why not stop bickering and ranting about people who call a dupe, and just bury their comment / block them.
It keeps the signal to noise ratio a little higher without all the unnecessary banter. - cazabam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5All it will mean is that they will stop targetting the distributors and start targetting the individuals. Oh wait ... they already do. So what has this gained anybody except another moving target?
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