Computer Science

"Events may appear to us to be random, but this could be attributed to human ignorance about the details of the processes involved."

"The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

"He who believes this (atomism) may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them."

"How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?"

"The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) -- technology designed to restrict the public. Describing it as "copyright protection" puts a favorable spin on a mechanism intended to deny the public the exercise of those rights which copyright law has not yet denied them."

"If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed."

"We also concluded that any single-machine locks and keys, or special time-out and self-destruct programs, would be onerous to our best customers and not effective against clever thieves. Because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers."

"The answer to the machine is in the machine."

"Trusted systems presume that the consumer is dishonest."

"There is a cost associated with DRM, and that is lost sales of content."

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

"By treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing -- the very outcome the owners of intellectual property wish to avoid. How stupid can you get? … The good news is that the brain-dead, colossally wasteful, artistically homogenizing old order of the recording industry is committing collective, time-delayed suicide in court."

"Why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse."

"In my opinion, content protection and rights management exist only as vestigial efforts to preserve existing models of content sales for as long as the bulk of the consumer market remains clueless. History has shown every content-protection scheme invented for consumer-grade goods to have almost no impact on piracy, and little impact on casual copying, except when it has doomed the technology carrying it. This is inevitable."

"Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet."

"We see no technical impediments to the darknet becoming increasingly efficient... We believe it probable that there will be a few more rounds of technical innovations... Finally, consumers themselves are likely to rebel against "footing the bill" for these ineffective content protection systems... increased security (e.g. stronger DRM systems) may act as a disincentive to legal commerce... In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security."

"My personal opinion (not speaking for IBM) is that DRM is stupid, because it can never be effective, and it takes away existing rights of the consumer."

"The development of the Internet has... created significant challenges to any distribution model which depends on scarcity... The financial and skill barriers to making content available globally have simply fallen away... The application of technology to this problem, if it is to be effective, must therefore in some way reestablish a point of scarcity on behalf of the rights holder. However, this raises a fundamental paradox, [which is] the business of publishers lies in providing access rather than in preventing it... Nevertheless, unless copyright is to be abandoned as a mechanism for trading in intellectual property entirely, it will be essential to find an answer to this paradox... They [rights holders] also recognized that those approaches would be ineffective unless the law itself provided enhanced protection for those processes and systems."

"We conclude that given the current and foreseeable state of technology the content protection features of DRM are not effective at combating piracy."

"It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers."

"We said [to the record companies]: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."

"It's a polite fiction... Lawyers and technologists continue to sell this snake oil of control, whether it's from the court and the police [RIAA legal jihad], or whether it's coming from technology [DRM]... When I was 14, I told girls I loved them to sleep with them too. It was a fiction. Steve Jobs just leaves a little money on the table. We see Jobs and Gates making promises to the content industry that they have no intention of keeping. It's the promise you make to move forward. The content owner wants to hear it. If we're honest we'd say to the content owners "we're not going to succeed from what we can tell..." But we don't say it. We'll say what we need to say to get it... Once you reach the realization that it isn't going to solve our problems, then you begin to embrace the alternatives."

"The key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the movie studios got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way. It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer."

"To recap: we decided to end the Google Video download to own/rent (DTO/DTR) program, and are now refocusing our Google Video engineering efforts. The week before last, we wrote to Google Video DTO/DTR program customers to let them know that videos they'd already bought would no longer be playable."

"Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos [...] If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.""

"DRM is used to lock consumers to proprietary technology. It is used to control supply and push higher prices. It is used to undermine practices we have long defined as fair use so they can be shifted to fee-based."

"DRM's primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers."

"During the next 10 years, millions of programmers and users will utilise this system."

"In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. [...] What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable [...]."

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

"Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune."

"Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society."

"Data, seeming facts, apparent asso­ciations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all."

"You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information."

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists."

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?"

"As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"There's no going back, and there's no hiding the information. So let everyone have it."

"It used to be said that information is power. As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the board of the New York Times Co., rightly says, "Information is now ubiquitous. Power is understanding.""

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information."

"Information is not lost in black holes, but it is not returned in a useful way. It is like burning an encyclopaedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read."

"people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information."

"The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

"Wisdom is dead. Long live information."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."