Oh, geez, not this again. [LWN.net]

Oh, geez, not this again.

Posted Mar 25, 2008 19:36 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
In reply to: Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It (Boston Review) by engineer_1
Parent article: Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It (Boston Review)

That "complete crackpot" has been proven right time and again by subsequent events, such as
when he predicted that software patents would become a threat to free software, way back in
the early 90s.  Or when he highlighted the "TiVoisation" problem, which has subsequently
become more of an issue with other vendors.

Sure, he's dogmatic, he's insistent, he's stubborn...but he's also RIGHT most of the time.

(Log in to post comments)

Oh, geez, not this again.

Posted Mar 26, 2008 2:55 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Looks like we might be dealing with a case of differing personal definitions of the word
"crackpot".  Dogmatic, insistent, and stubborn are arguably good qualifications for the status
of crackpot.

BTW, it didn't take a Nostradamus to see from the beginning that patents would become a
problem for any software creators who wouldn't or couldn't pay royalties or enter into
cross-licensing agreements like everybody else, once their work became popular enough to be
noticed.  I suppose that the real prediction, there, would have been that such works *would*
become popular enough to be noticed.  But since Unix itself had started out as a popular Free
code base, subsequently taken proprietary once it got big enough to notice, that prediction is
not exactly an amazing one, either.

Oh, geez, not this again.

Posted Mar 26, 2008 8:07 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Looks like we might be dealing with a case of differing personal definitions of the word
"crackpot". Dogmatic, insistent, and stubborn are arguably good qualifications for the status
of crackpot.

What your calling 'crackpot' basically describes most of the forward thinking people,
visionaries, and remarkable thinkers that ever had the good wisdom to question their society's
status quo in the face of wide-spread opposition. In other words your saying that in order to
not be a crackpot a person must be a conformist...

So what if the guy is wrong sometimes? (or a lot of the times)

Then thank god for all the crackpots in the world, because without them there would be almost
zero forward progress for humanity.

Frankly I am on the side of RMS for this one. Jonathan Zittrain's solution is a incredibly
poor one.

Even on a very base technical terms it's very bad... Any sort of software can be subverted.
Who watches the watchers? If you have a kernel-level root kit on a PC then it's impossible to
trust any sort of monitoring software. So you would have to make extraordinary changes to the
PC platform to make some sort of hardware/software mixture for monitoring your OS... which
itself is still going to be vulnerable; everything has bugs.

And, how exactly, is having some huge and complex piece of software/hardware that monitors and
analyzes _running_software_ as it's executed (which is the only way it could possibly work,
since otherwise it would be completely blind to any runtime vulnerabilities) could ever
possibly be 'unobtrusive'?

Also all of this must work completely out of the control of a user, or be tied into a central
authority.. because if it's not then it will easily be abused by malicious users to fool other
people into a false sense of security (in order to create a environment were they are
vulnerable to further attacks) and send faulty or malicious information to them. This sort of
thing is why you can't hand out signed SSL certificates like candy and expect them to be any
use at all.

If this system itself is subverted by a attacker or abused by a authority then it could cause
all sorts of problems and cause a exponentially more damage then any sort of threat it could
combat.

It's the same sort of thing people are trying to do with DRM. And it will have the same
problems and same flaws and I have the same general objections to allowing that sort of thing
on my computer.

(and speaking of visionary-ism people like RMS and Eben Moglen said the true problem for Free
software in the near future is not going to be from DRM, but from the computer security
industry. DRM is easy (essentially a solved problem) in comparison to the potential problems
caused by surrendering freedoms/privacy/responsibility for the sake of imaginary security.
This sort of thing described by this guy is what they have been talking about for quite some
time now. It's a pervasive attitude.)

Personally I would not want to submit myself to this sort of thing. Thank god for Free
software so I don't have to.

Not this, indeed.

Posted Mar 27, 2008 4:06 UTC (Thu) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

Perhaps, but unlike most people (and I might hazard a guess that that includes you), RMS actually did something about it. All progress depends on the unreasonable man and all that.