RE: [Marxism] File sharing: it's the communist thing to do

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eli writes:

>>Today the Venezuelan press reports that the government has  formally
issued a decree (English translation) which prioritizes the use of free/open
source software over proprietary systems in government entities.<<

This has actually been in the works for quite some time. This move by
Venezuela and similar moves by Brazil and --of all places-- Munich have been
covered in the CNN en Español program, "Adelantos," which keeps a pretty
close watch on the intersection of technology, politics and ideology. If you
happen to get cable and have the CNN Spanish-language network on it on your
cable system, sometimes it is worth a look.

In the same vein, Mark Shuttleworth, the South African übergeek who became a
multimillionaire in the late 90's tech boom and who, despite his last name,
had to hitch a ride to space with the Russians (like pretty much everyone
else nowadays, come to think of it) is involved in a (relatively) new Linux
distro called "Ubuntu." 

>From the web site:

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu
also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux
distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

Judging by the volume of posts on the ubuntu email lists, it is developing a
large base of people who are at least experimenting with it, because it is a
no-risk way of people with windows boxes to dip their toes in the free
software world.

On the technical side, this is the same sort of idea as Knoppix, and I think
may actually be based on it, i.e., a "live" CD distro -- download, burn it
to CD, then boot from that CD and all of a sudden you have a free (as in
"freedom" as well as in "free beer") software box even if Mr. Bill still
sits on the hard drive. And for a while they are also willing to send you
the distro through the mail for free. They insist on sending a minimum of 10
copies so you can turn your friends onto it, too.

One thing though -- all these new fancy bootable Linux distributions require
fairly up to date (Win XP-class) yet plain vanilla sort of hardware (plain
especially for networking and video, manufacturers do not provide drivers).
The very latest releases won't boot on anything less than 128 megs of RAM,
and even that is painful. But if you search around there are also Linux
distributions tailored to Pentium-class Windows 3.1/win95-era computers.
Support for wireless networking (802.11, whether of the a, b or g flavors)
is supposed to be spotty, but although I wound up with an assortment of this
stuff from three different manufacturers from a hardware review project,
nothing I had was supported. There is no support that I know of for Home
Phoneline networking, which is what BellSouth and others are giving
customers who order extra-cost home networking packages.

Meanwhile I am happy to report that especially the movie studios and game
vendors keep encouraging kids to rely on shared software rather than bought.


All the hottest game releases for the PC that anyone in my family is
interested in, from the Sims2 to KOTOR (that's Star Wars -- Knights Of The
Old Republic) rely on purposely defective CD's being used as "keys" that
have to be in the drive to run the game -- and because of the deliberate
mangling of the data and formatting on the CD, they are very hard to copy.

Fortunately, it is true that anything like this you do in hardware can be
emulated in software (and actually, it is a "software" virtual image of some
aspect of the "hardware" [the CD] that unlocks the program so it can be run,
there is no real physical "lock" or "key"). 

It usually doesn't take but a week or two after the game is released for a
"No CD" crack to become available on file-sharing networks, and people also
share their ISO's (an entire CD in an image file) of the disks. This helps
teach the young'uns to turn to eMule and other file sharing clients to find
the needed crack, because who wants to have to remove their favorite music
CD from the drive to play a game?

As for the movie studios, they persist in their practice of refusing to sell
their movies on DVD (never mind as files online) until many, many moons
after theatrical release, helping to keep the online file-sharing population
at quite a few million simultaneous users (usually about 3-1/2 million on
emule/edonkey and related, 2-1/2 million 
on the FastTrack network (Kazaa, etc.), a hundred thousand on the gnutella
network, and God knows how many on bit torrent, which according to
packet-sniffing studies, accounts for the biggest portion of the traffic.

Back when Napster first started getting all that free publicity -- it now
seems like EONS ago -- it had a couple of hundred thousand simultaneous
users, and actually peaked at a  million and a half before being shut down.
And that was overwhelmingly music files. Although there were programs to
disguise ISO's and videos as music files and fool the Napster program, it
wasn't very practical because of the primitiveness of the Napster protocol.

Today's clients feature things like "swarm" downloading from multiple
sources, breaking the file into multiple parts for downloading, downloads
which resume automatically after being interrupted, unique file hashes to
make sure it is the same file despite different names, and forced sharing
(at least of already-received parts of the files being downloaded). Many
also include IP-blocking software which prevents known cop/copyright cartel
internet addresses from connecting to you. 

What is still needed, and people are working on this, are programs that make
it harder to detect the source IP of shared files. Theories for how to do
this have been widely discussed; and there have been some claims to have
done this but I've not seen them verified.

This is important because the copyright cartel lawsuit offensive continues
unabated, at least in the United States. Although it is true that those
being hit with lawsuits are ovewhelmingly unsophisticated users who don't
know how to use the settings to prevent others from getting a list of all
their shared files and limiting their number, the victimization of
individual users casts a pall over the whole file-sharing scene.

Joaquín



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism