Slashdot Mirror

MJ writes "Evan Brown has finally lost his 7 year court battle over ownership of thoughts in his brain. Judge Henderson of the 219th District Court in Collin County, Texas granted DSC Communications Corporation, Inc (now Alcatel, USA) a Final Judgement granting DSC ownership of Mr. Brown's idea of a reverse compiler that Mr. Brown claims to have begun formulating twelve years before his employment at DSC and during his off-time while at DSC. Mr. Brown has received media coverage in print, televion and on the Internet: The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law, Wired, Computerworld. This rings similar to previous Slashdot articles on employer/employee IP rights."

gle was one of many readers to write about an interesting security problem: "If you own an Alcatel DSL modem, you will be interrested to know that virtually anybody on the planet is probably able to reconfigure you modem, steal your passwords, sniff your data, install a custom firmware into it, or just break it for fun. Lack of proper authentification, and various back-doors have been pointed out amongst various design flaws. The man who discovered this is Tsutomu Shimomura, who got famous at getting Kevin Mitnick arrested. Alcatel claims 36% share of the DSL market, with more than 1.7 million units installed ..." So if you have DSL, you might want to check the label on the side of the modem about now.

Yesterday we totally nuked the Linux Counter by linking it on these pages. Steve sent us a link to a detailed page on the Slashdot Experience contains logs and the like, documenting the server going crunch. I'm reposting it because yesterday the server spent several hours down and I'd like more people to have a chance to register their Linux box. Drop on in, fill out the form and let the world know that you run Linux. When you can't track sales to determine an OSs market share, things get tricky. Update: 02/25 11:47 by CT : That didn't take long. Guess you guys have more work to do over there (sigh).

Jason told me about this extraordinary story of a guy who took 15 years to solve a problem in his free time, only to find that his employer for 2 years (DSC now part of Alcatel) is suing him for the idea. While this story started a long time ago, it's still plodding on. Although I was sceptical, Time, Wired, and others back his story. What's his idea? A method to convert machine code back to a high level language. Would it help him to GPL it? That would make it available to DSC, but would allow him to come up with the best implementation before they do. Since the idea would be out of the bag, DSC couldn't do very much about it, right? Update: 02/11 12:45 by S : Evan pointed out to me that if he GPL'd the idea, he'd be in contempt of court and stuck in jail.