Brian W. Carver -- Share Alike

The SCO Letter Lies

The letter SCO sent to Fortune 1000 companies today says in part:

The ABI Code identified above is part of the UNIX Derived Files and, as such, must carry USL / SCO copyright notices and may not be used in any GPL distribution, inasmuch as the affirmative consent of the copyright holder has not been obtained, and will not be obtained, for such a distribution under the GPL. (emphasis mine)

Assume for a moment that SCO does hold the copyright on these files (which I seriously doubt). Then the italicized portion is simply false. These files are part of the Linux distribution. Caldera (part of SCO) distributed Linux and these very files under the GPL. So, SCO has already given the permission they now claim that they have not given. Their have been a number of subtle contradictions in their statements since this all started, but this one is blatant. And recall that's only on the assumption they hold the copyright on these files at all. VERY doubtful. The Slashdot crowd has probably already shown that claim to be false too.
UPDATE: Sorry. I was wrong. Linus himself already proved they don't hold the copyright on these files.

MPAA's New Tactic

I went out to the movies Saturday night. Before the film, in the barrage of advertisements that seems to get lengthier every time, I saw an ad by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The ad featured a stunt man describing how difficult his work is and showing car chases with cars flipping over. Then suddenly, this stunt man starts saying, "When you download a movie. That's wrong." And the ad starts talking about "piracy" and refers viewers to respectcopyrights.org.

This ad made me mad, but not because I don't respect copyrights. They are the law, and so I respect them. What frustrated me was it represented the continuation of the entertainment industry only seeing the issue from their limited and short-sighted perspective. They have a captive audience and then what they feed that audience is this distorted part of the complex story that is copyright policy today.

As I said, I respect copyrights, but here's some other things I respect that their ad ignores:
I respect

• the Constitution that says the exclusive rights of authors is to last for limited times while most current copyrights will still be in effect after your children are dead.
  
• the privacy of individuals not to have their personal information handed over by their ISPs based only on the word of the entertainment industry, rather than a judge-approved subpoena.
  
• the right of an individual to be considered innocent until proven guilty, rather than labeled a "pirate" who "steals" "property."
  
• the creative contributions of those who make derivative works, whose work is now frustrated by the extensive breadth and length of copyright.
  
• those who innovate new technologies that are now thwarted by a monopolistic entertainment industry.
  
• those who introduce intriguing new business plans for success in a digital era, rather than clinging hopelessly to outdated modes of business through endless litigation.
  
• the rights of a legal purchaser of a DVD or CD to enjoy that product on the platform of their choice, in the country of their choice, and in the form of their choice.
  
• the rights of fair use.

The MPAA's ad shows that they still don't get it. They simply want to push their narrow view on people, and refuse to respect these things that I, and so many other people, respect. Until they wake up, I expect them to face continuing problems and shrinking profits. Just don't believe them when they try to explain the cause of their troubles, because their problems don't come from downloaders. Their problems are of their own creation.

Update: Here is the stuntman ad, plus all the others.

Music Downloading OK under Canadian Law

New York Times is reporting that Downloading Music off P2P networks is legal under Canadian law. Problem is: uploading music is illegal under Canadian law. Simple point: There is an inherent contradiction in their position. At least a few people would have to be illegally uploading music in order to enable the perfectly legal downloading!

I too believe downloading should be legal, but this position makes little sense.

Cringely on e-Voting

Cringely argues that the best solution to e-Voting is Canada's pencil and paper method. I agree that this has a number of advantages. But Cringely makes the same mistake that so many make when thinking about this issue: he fails to think about the disabled voter at all.

We have a principle regarding voting: A person should vote without any assistance or interference from any other person.

Why is this a good principle? Well, we want people to vote privately so that they vote their conscience, not what the other person might want them to vote. We don't want people to be strong-armed into voting for someone they didn't want to vote for. We don't want anyone to know who someone else voted for. And so on. This makes sense.

Now take the blind voter and the voter with extreme fine motor skill difficulties. How can we preserve their privacy and allow them to vote without interference in a paper and pencil system?

The blind voter, if they can read braille, could be given an alternate ballot that they would be able to read on their own. But already, the paper and pencil solution that Cringely advocates has been abandoned in part. The blind voter using a touchscreen system can wear headphones that audibly confirms her selections.

How about a voter who cannot manipulate a pencil well enough to put their X in the spot next to their candidate? It's not clear that there is a solution for these voters within the paper and pencil regime that doesn't involve a third-party filling out the ballot for them. However, many of these who could not use a pencil, might be able to use a touchscreen.

It's difficult, but not impossible to handle the touchscreen voting machine security issues. You do the following:

1. All software used must be open source and reviewed by a diverse committee of computer software experts.
2. The compilation of the software must be supervised by similar experts using an open source compiler on neutral hardware.
3. The touchscreen machines should be a hybrid-type that prints an optical scan card, visually and audibly verifiable by the voter.
4. The optical scan machine should be manufactured by a different company than the one making the touchscreen machines.
5. When the optical scan machine counts the ballot it should be audibly (and perhaps visibly) verifiable by the voter.
6. The printed optical scan ballot should have a perforated paper receipt that merely allows a voter to match his receipt to his ballot. It would not indicate his votes. (For instance, the optical scan ballot would have #366450 printed both on the ballot and the torn off receipt.)
7. The optical scan ballot itself would be placed in a locked box at the polling location and they would be hand counted in re-counts.
8. A certain percentage of random recounts would be mandatory.
9. The physical security of the polling location and the voting machines would be guaranteed from the time of software compilation until the end of vote counting.

Complex, yes, but achievable. The question then becomes whether guaranteeing the privacy of those with motor skill disabilities justifies the expense of the above system. If not, then perhaps I'd agree with Cringely (with the proviso of alternative braille ballots). If on the other hand it does justify the expense, then I believe the above system is our best e-voting solution.

Here are the reasons for each of the above:

1. The software has to be open source so that we know that Diebold and friends are not writing software that counts inaccurately, whether on purpose or accidentally.
2. The compilation has to be supervised because even good clean code can be modified to behave differently with various compilation flags and tricks that have been demonstrated.
3. The touchscreen prints an optical scan card so that there is a paper trail that a human can read, both for verification at that moment by the voter and later for recounts. It also provides visual verification for most voters and audible verification for the blind.
4. The optical scan machine is manufactured by a different company so that those printing the ballots cannot design an optical scanner that systematically misreads the ballot. It's an added check in the system.
5. To know that the optical scan machine is accurately counting the vote, the voter should be able to see or hear it counting her vote, as an added confirmation at the polling location. Visibly for most voters and for privacy, and audibly for the blind.
6. The ballot has a detachable paper receipt so that if there is ever any question about a particular ballot, that ballot can be matched up with that voter, who can then confirm their vote.
7. The paper ballots are hand recountable so that we don't have to trust the machines if they appear to be making mistakes.
8. Random mandatory recounts force the software makers to be honest, because their mistakes or fraud will be caught.
9. The physical security of the machines is guaranteed because all the above is useless if you allow crooks physical access to the machines at any stage in the process.

Make sense? The positive to Cringely's paper and pencil system is likely low cost, but it adds problems for the disabled and increases the time until results are available. The positives for the hybrid e-voting system I just described are the nearly instantaneous results and the maximizing of unfettered access for the disabled. It's downside is likely high cost. But I'm not sure that hiring all these partisan vote counters doesn't cost a chunk of change too. I'm assuming Cringely is putting that cost on the parties rather than citizens at large. If so, we just need to know the actual costs of each system so that we can make an informed choice.

Tell ABC to let the Voters Decide

I just sent this e-mail to ABC's Peter Jennings and NightLine in response to ABC's decision to cut off coverage of the Kucinich, Sharpton, and Mosley-Braun campaigns.
---
Hi,

I'm writing to say I'm disturbed by ABC's decision to cut off its coverage of the Kucinich, Sharpton, and Mosley-Braun campaigns. Without a single vote being cast, ABC is deciding whose message should get to voters. This is wrong.

The choice of these three is especially problematic, as in my view, they have put forth some of the best positions on the issues of any of the candidates. Their contributions to the debates keep the other candidates honest and force them to deal seriously with the issues.

You would be better off cutting Lieberman, Gephart, and Kerry. They've had their chance in politics and blown it. Whether ABC is aware of it or not, the Democrats in this country are fed up with these Republicrats that are indistinguishable from their opposition. How many Americans bought Al Franken's or Michael Moore's recent books? Millions. Do you think those people are voting for these idiots that voted for this disastrous war? Hell no.

It is my current intention to vote for Kucinich if he is still running at the time of the California primary. I know many others who intend to do the same. And my favorite comment by any candidate in a debate thus far comes from Ms. Mosley-Braun. While detailing the wage disparity facing women vs. men, especially black and latina women, she pointed out that latinas are paid 56 cents on the dollar compared to men. Then she said, "And you can't buy a dollar loaf of bread for 56 cents." Damn right.

Let the people decide, not ABC. Once several state primaries pass, some candidates will drop out on their own. But before populous states like New York and California have their primaries, it is simply wrong for ABC to decide who voters will be enabled to learn about.

I look forward to your announcement changing this unfair policy.

Brian W. Carver
[contact info snipped]

FSF's Savannah Servers Compromised

Slashdot readers learned recently that Debian's servers were compromised. More info. And then learned that a kernel exploit was apparently the means of attack. It appears that the Free Software Foundation's servers have been compromised using the same exploit. The servers are back up in part. You may recall, Savannah is a central point for development, distribution and maintenance of GNU Software. With two extremely similar attacks on the two Free-est of Free Software projects, the question has to be asked: Does someone hold a grudge against Free Software? Who stands to gain from these sites having security vulnerabilities based within the Linux kernel? Or is it just a coincidence? The acts of a random cracker? Either way, what can the community do to catch this/these criminal(s)? (This was a rejected Slashdot submission of mine.)

Funny Animation

Oh my goodness. I have no idea who these people are or what they are up to, but this video/animation is mighty funny.

Fallen Soldiers

The Washington Post provides this last letter written home (pdf) by Sgt. Michael Bitz. It will probably make you cry. It is part of a larger tribute the Post has put together called Faces of the Fallen. See also letters from Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse and Lance Corporal Andrew Aviles. It's one thing to read that seven U.S. soldiers were killed today or yesterday. It's another to click around that site looking at their photographs, looking at their ages, and realizing they're gone. They've got moms, dads, wives, husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters whose lives are forever changed.

Kucinich Ad

Kucinich has a new ad up that a conservative blogger I won't link to thought distasteful. Judge for yourself. One can argue that the deaths of U.S. soldiers ought not be used for political gain in a campaign. But that's not the story here. People are in fact dying. These deaths are caused in large part by the policies and actions of our current administration. If a candidate for President can't say, "Hey! I have a better plan that will cost fewer American lives!" then something is wrong.

Especially when the reasons we were given for this conflict (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction posing a threat to the world's safety and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda) have proven to be a sham, and instead we see corporate administration backers seemingly rewarded with reconstruction contracts, it might just be unethical NOT to say something about this. Otherwise, we sit idly by while more Americans die.

And for what? We're still waiting to find out. It's not Al Qaeda. We've apparently given up on finding Osama. It's not Saddam. We can't find him either. It's not weapons of mass destruction. They never existed. The new reason is apparently to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. But it's fairly clear the administration really doesn't care about that either, because they've just decided the new governmental structure has to be set up by election time '04, like it or not. Otherwise Bush won't get to fly in on another aircraft carrier and declare victory again. That could look bad for him and might hurt him in the polls! Whether the Iraqi's get a workable long-term solution matters far less to Bush than whether he gets to keep his job another four years.

Oh. And let's place a bet. If he does win, I bet he takes another month-long vacation. Don't remember that? Yeah that was the 32 days he spent in Crawford playing golf and watching his dogs chase armadillos right before 9/11. Time when he could have been acting on the explicit warnings the outgoing members of the Clinton administration gave him, that Osama should be a top priority. But, if you'll recall, a missile defense system seemed like a better priority to this administration. That's another topic though...

On the ad: American soldiers are dying. That can happen under any President, and even when a Democrat is elected in '04, it will continue to happen. But, if it is going to happen, we owe it to them, their families, and ourselves to know for sure just why they are dying and we had better be confident it is a worthy cause. I can't say for sure that I know that right now. That's a problem that requires attention.

Congressional District Gerrymandering

You may have heard in the news over the last year about the big battle over re-drawing the Congressional districts in Texas. The Democrats fled the state to prevent a quorum, so that the Republicans couldn't force them to accept this bizarre re-districting map that guarantees more Republican seats next election. The Democrats in Texas eventually lost that battle.

You might not recall that the same thing happened in Pennsylvania, and now the crazy map there is being challenged in the Supreme Court. This New Yorker article details partisan gerrymandering like none I've ever read. Here's a particularly shocking excerpt:

A Democrat first elected to Congress in 1994, [Frank] Mascara represented a district in the rugged industrial country south of Pittsburgh. “My district had been more or less the same for about a hundred years,” Mascara told me on the porch of his house in Charleroi, which overlooks a glass-making plant on the banks of the Monongahela River. The son of a steelworker and the first member of his family to go to college, Mascara worked his way through county politics until he won his seat in the House. “A lot of people couldn’t believe that a congressman lived in a house like mine,” he said, noting its aluminum siding and probable resale value of about thirty-five thousand dollars. “But that’s the kind of guy I am,” he said. “I go to church down the street. I represent the average person.”

With the Republicans in charge in Harrisburg, Mascara knew he would be little more than a spectator to the redistricting process. “I still thought my district would for the most part remain intact,” he said. “That didn’t occur.” Mascara had met me at a McDonald’s in Charleroi’s ragged downtown, and then led me to his home on a quiet street called Lincoln Avenue, where we parked because he has no garage. From his porch, he pointed to our cars. “The cars are in the twelfth congressional district, and my house is in the eighteenth,” he explained. “When they drew the new lines, they started in Allegheny County, which is north of here, and made, like, a finger out of that district, and the finger went down the middle of the street where I live. The line came down to my house and stopped.” The Republicans’ meticulous line-drawing through Charleroi was designed to force Mascara into a primary battle with his fellow-Democrat John Murtha, which it did. Murtha defeated Mascara, ending his congressional career and reducing the Democratic presence in the House by one.

The story suggests how unpredictable the Supreme Court is on this issue. I really hope they mandate a non-partisan solution like Iowa now has, because this gerrymandering nonsense is a frightening attack on our Republic.

SCO's Open Letter on the GPL

Wow. SCO is sunk. Their CEO, Darl McBride, just wrote another open letter explaining why they think the GPL is unconstitutional and invalid. It demonstrates such an amazing lack of understanding of the GPL, that if this truly represents their legal strategy, they are doomed. The overall strategy seems to be to paint the GPL's author, the FSF, and its adherents, e.g., Red Hat, as anti-profit, anti-copyright, anti-capitalist scumbags and from that to then conclude that the GPL is all those things as well, and hence based on a bewildering leap-of-logic from Eldred v. Ashcroft, claim that the GPL is contrary to the purpose of Copyright, and hence unconstitutional. The key problems with his letter are:

Most of the letter is an ad hominem attack against the FSF and Red Hat. The strategy seems to be, put Richard Stallman on the stand, let him say some outrageous stuff that many wouldn't agree with, and then look reasonable in contrast. You'd then have to count on a jury to be dim-witted enough to fall for such a strategy, rather than parsing out the actual issues.

The FSF is indeed anti-software patent, and also is indeed in favor of Copyright reform, but they cannot be characterized as completely anti-Copyright for the simple reason that the GPL is itself a Copyright License intended to work within existing Copyright Law. That McBride does not know (or chooses to ignore) this fact is one of his largest downfalls. It will be a simple counter to his argument to point this out.

The GPL is not anti-profit. Indeed, it explicitly allows for people to charge whatever fees they can get for service to GPL-licensed software.

We live in a country where people are free to do what they like with the products of their work. If Darl's argument were sound, then it would be unconstitutional for a painter to paint beautiful artworks and then give them away. He would be ignoring Copyright's purported profit-based motivation and by Darl's reasoning therefore be engaged in unconstitutional activity. This is absurd. If someone writes a piece of software and wants to license it in a less-restrictive manner than Darl does, that's their choice. They can even donate it to the public domain, something the GPL explicitly does not do.

No one is forcing Darl to use the GPL if he doesn't like it. The software industry is not threatened by the GPL, unless they are incapable of creating equally good products and providing equally desirable service. He can slap "All rights reserved." on the software he writes himself all day long, and nothing the FSF does will stop him. Now, if it's crap, then no one may care about SCO's crappy software. But's that a business problem everyone faces, and it has nothing to do with the GPL. You got to give the people what they want!

When all is said and done only one of two possibilities present themselves. Either SCO's understanding of its own business, its own past actions, and of the basic legal facts surrounding their business is so amazingly lacking that they could only be characterized as total idiots, OR their pretense of such idiocy and their sham hand-waving legal arguments are in fact criminal attempts to artificially inflate their stock price or to damage the business of their competitors. Idiots or criminals. Those are their options.

Brazil's GNU/Linux Free Cybercafes

BBC News has an article describing Brazil's GNU/Linux Free Cybercafes. Two and one-half years ago there were about three million people in Sao Paulo without any access to computers. Now, about 250,000 people are using the nearly 100 net cafes.

Since last year, all the centres have been using the free operating system GNU/Linux.

"The government is the biggest software buyer," said Ms Tibirica. "We can save a lot of public money using the free software solution."

She pointed out that the free software has many advantages: no need to pay for licences and it is possible to use a simpler version of the computer, with one server and several thin clients - computers without hard disks.

These computers, according to Ms Tibirica, cost a quarter of the price of a machine and have reduced maintenance costs.

The government has plans within the next few months to buy 10,000 more computers for schools. Let's hope this doesn't turn out like the metric system. When the rest of the world is running Free Software, hopefully the U.S. will get on board too.

Guantanamo Defense Lawyers Fired By Pentagon

The Guardian reports:

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned...

A former military lawyer with good contacts in the US military legal establishment said that the first group of defence lawyers the Pentagon recruited for Guantanamo balked at the commission rules, which insist, among other restrictions, that the government be allowed to listen in to any conversations between attorney and client...

"The first day, when they were being briefed on the dos and don'ts, at least a couple said: 'You can't impose these restrictions on us because we can't properly represent our clients.'

"When the group decided they weren't going to go along, they were relieved. They reported in the morning and got fired that afternoon."

...the Guardian understands from a uniformed source with intimate knowledge of the mood among the current military defence team, six lawyers strong, that there is deep unhappiness about the commission set-up.

"It's like you took military justice, gave it to a prosecutor and said, 'modify it any way you want'," the source said. "The government would like to say we have done these commissions before. But what happened after [the Nazi cases] was the military justice system changed. What we have done is stupid. It is, I would say, an insult to the military, to the evolution of the military justice system. They want to take us back to 1942."

Similar stories at BBC News, The Scotsman, Al-Jazeera, and
The Sydney Morning Herald.

I would say that we need a Constitutional Amendment to stop this administration's behavior, but as it turns out, we already have several intended to do just that.