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"MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change."

What?!? But Jeremy Reimer has spoken! How dare you claim we should not all follow his example into Linux bliss:
"I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. Since everyone has read Wikipedia, the interface was familiar and so our users needed no training."

I'm glad it was easy for you to install it on your virtual Linux server, could everyone in your office do that? Could your mom? Could your replacement?

While this is a nice idea it doesn't sound like a mainstream solution. My old job had just started a wiki for the FAQs. Few people used it due to login issues and an over-complicated system of finding information. It'll take the kids of today becoming the adults of tomorrow before we can move offices into a completely wiki-type system.

I think we'll all be using Google Docs in the near future, especially if Google Chrome OS does well on netbooks. Google Docs already has a share feature and I'm sure adding a wiki wouldn't be too difficult.

30 songs. The rest is conjectural and not proven

This sure as heck looks like proof to my eyes:

Tenenbaum admitted that the screenshots captured by MediaSentry in August 2004, showing over 800 song files in his KaZaA shared folder, were accurate representations of the contents of that folder. Tenenbaum takes the stand: I used P2P and lied about it

One of the biggest I'd go for is proof of harm.

The copyright owner has the exclusive right of distribution. The damages are assessed according to a statutory formula. He doesn't have to prove how badly he has been harmed.

You can take the UNC and Harvard study into the Congressional hearing. It's place in the courtroom is far less clear.

Considering Harvard's performance in Tenenbaum, I wouldn't be quaking in my boots if did come in.

If it does come in, the others probably will too. The only peer review that ultimately matters in court is that of the jury.

Media Sentry, the company that does the dirty work, is unlicensed as an investigator.

That only matters in cases and in jurisdictions where a "license" is required. The world of the forensics investigator is far removed from that of Spade and Archer.

Tenenbaum said flatly that MediaSentry had got it right:

Tenenbaum admitted that the screenshots captured by MediaSentry in August 2004, showing over 800 song files in his KaZaA shared folder, were accurate representations of the contents of that folder. Tenenbaum takes the stand: I used P2P and lied about it

But I saw that the judge's rationale was that plaintiffs had asked the defendant "are you liable" and he said "yes". It seems to me that when that question was asked, all of the defense lawyers should have levitated out of their seats screaming "Objection!"

In which case, the judge simply asks the attorney to rephrase his question or withdraw it.

It's a "harmless error." Changes nothing.

By that time Tennebaum had buried his defense six feet under and paved it over with cement.

Instead, over and over, Tenenbaum admitted under oath that he used KaZaA, LimeWire, and other peer-to-peer software to download and distribute music to others unknown. "This is me. I'm here to answer. "I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it," he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

"Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings" on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs' attorney Tim Reynolds. "Yes," said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he "lied" in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

"Why did you lie at that point?" asked Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. "It was kind of something I rushed through," responded Tenenbaum. "It's what seemed the best response to give." At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

During Tenenbaum's testimony, plaintiffs' attorney Tim Reynolds walked Tenenbaum methodically through the evidence, extracting scores of one, two, and three-word admissions that he did exactly what plaintiffs have accused him of doing.

"You used KaZaA to download music, right?"

"You used LimeWire to get music without paying for it, right?"

"Your goal was to obtain the maximum amount of music with the minimum amount of wasted effort, right?"

"Yes." "I did." "Yes, I did," Tenenbaum said calmly, over and over and over, in response to Reynolds' questions.

Tenenbaum admitted that the screenshots captured by MediaSentry in August 2004, showing over 800 song files in his KaZaA shared folder, were accurate representations of the contents of that folder.

He admitted that he listened to his copies of all 30 songs he is accused of downloading and distributing--negating Nesson's suggestion that some of them were actually fake files, "spoofs" put on peer-to-peer networks by copyright owners to frustrate users trying to obtain music for free.

And Tenenbaum accepted all of the conclusions of plaintiffs' computer forensics expert, Dr. Douglas Jacobson, as true. "I trust he's a competent professional," said Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum takes the stand: I used P2P and lied about it.

MobileReference, the publisher in question, formats and sells public domain books on Amazon. The only problem is that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are not yet in the public domain, at least not in the US. According to Amazon's statement to Ars Technica, "These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books." When the publisher informed Amazon of this, Amazon moved to rectify the situation. The two books are no longer listed on MobleReference's website, either. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-books-raided-some-kindles.ars

and they were really between a rock and a hard place on this one.

Hacking laws on the books make it illegal to add, modify, or delete data on another person's computer without their consent. I believe it carries a pretty stiff sentence too, because it is a federal statute.

I am pretty sure that Amazon has no consent from anyone when they used their DRM to kill the book, so they could be in some deep water.

Also, since it was an an actual person that punched the enter key when it came time to revoke the DRM license, I wonder if they could be hit with the criminal hacking charge. The fact that invoking DRM controls could land you in the federal pen for 20 years might be a great way get corps to knock that shit off.

MobileReference, the publisher in question, formats and sells public domain books on Amazon. The only problem is that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are not yet in the public domain, at least not in the US. According to Amazon's statement to Ars Technica, "These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books." When the publisher informed Amazon of this, Amazon moved to rectify the situation. The two books are no longer listed on MobleReference's website, either.

But does Amazon's Terms of Service even allow for this kind of "rectification"? Peter Kafka examined the ToS and believes that there is no backing for this move. The ToS makes it sound as if all sales are final:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

One possible loophole would be in the licensing: Amazon cannot license to you something for which it has no rights to license. Also, we suspect that some indemnification clauses in the third party contracts also put the publisher, not Amazon, on the hook for possible infringement problems.

So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon's purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are "changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances." Why Amazon went Big Brother on some Kindle e-books

Perhaps no one pushed the enter key!

What he said

"This is me. I'm here to answer," said Tenenbaum. "I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it," he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

"Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings" on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs' attorney Tim Reynolds.

"Yes," said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he "lied" in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

"Why did you lie at that point?" asked Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. "It was kind of something I rushed through," responded Tenenbaum. "It's what seemed the best response to give." At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

top paying the monthly change, or can't connect/authenticate to the mother ship, then no content for you.
this sort-of already happened, and not with some lame-ass small company - yahoo - ever heard of them? Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it
and MSN were going to do it too: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys.

Ok, these weren't live-only streaming operations, but it's only a few steps from:
stage1: the music player stores music encrypted, plays offline. You need supplier's servers to be online if you want to re-download or port to a new device
stage2: the music player stores music encrypted, ONLY plays when online to contact the key server to validated
stage3: music player only streams encrypted music

top paying the monthly change, or can't connect/authenticate to the mother ship, then no content for you.
this sort-of already happened, and not with some lame-ass small company - yahoo - ever heard of them? Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it
and MSN were going to do it too: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys.

Ok, these weren't live-only streaming operations, but it's only a few steps from:
stage1: the music player stores music encrypted, plays offline. You need supplier's servers to be online if you want to re-download or port to a new device
stage2: the music player stores music encrypted, ONLY plays when online to contact the key server to validated
stage3: music player only streams encrypted music

Arstechnica has an amusing fact about Microsoft's devotion to backwards compatibility:

This gives rise to particularly stupid things like the name of the "system" folder, where all the Windows libraries and programs are kept. In 16-bit Windows, it was called system. In 32-bit Windows, it was called system32. In 64-bit Windows it's called, er, system32 again. Because although there's an API call that programs can make to find out the name of the folder, there are enough programs that don't bother using it and just blindly assume that it's called system32 (even when compiled as 64-bit) that it was better for backwards compatibility to leave it, even though it's chock full of 64-bit files.

32-bit files in turn go into a directory named syswow64. Right, it has 64 in the name, because it contains 32-bit libraries. Make sense? Only in Redmond. All these strange behaviors and clumsy APIs that they've built up over the years have just been plonked wholesale into 64-bit Windows. There's no escape from them.

I'd assume that MS has little interest in trying to compete with their existing (and already hugely effective) low-margin/low-end product sales channels. There are already numerous outfits moving cheap wintels by the palletload, an unsexy job, but one that requires considerable logistical skill.

Where MS's existing sales channels are making very little headway, comparatively speaking, is the high end. These numbers suggest that just over 90% of computers that sold for over $1,000 were macs. That is pretty grim news for MS. Targeting wealthy areas, with retail stores designed to improve brand image, is presumably an attempt to counter that, not move more generic wintels, something that already happens without intervention.

True, this is like MS claiming allowing unauthorized applications and devices on the internet would break the ISP's or Tier 1 provider's routers and then locking up all applications with a App store raking in 30% of the cost compulsorily.

Also, from the response from Apple:

Looking at the four statutory fair use
factors,18 although the use per se of the modified iPhone bootloader and OS on an individual
handset is of a personal nature, it is not a transformative use, and because a jailbroken OS is
often used to play pirated content, the act of jailbreaking should be considered of a commercial
nature since it facilitates obtaining applications without paying fees for the them.

snip...

In sum, the value of the OS software to the iPhone, and therefore to Apple, is that it
enables the iPhone to function as a platform for the mobile computing experience that
differentiates the iPhone from its many competitors. This, in turn, increases the value of Appleâ(TM)s
iPhone copyrights and, again, overall consumer utility, making the iPhone a more attractive
product to consumers.

Huh? WTF? A jailbroken OS is often used to play pirated content? Apple keeps rejecting(censoring?) useful apps that developers and companies have spent lots of time and money on for silly reasons such as political content, duplication of functionality, mature content etc. The real reason is not piracy, it's because Apple wants to keep that 30% cut of all apps sold and control all the content while at the same time not angering AT&T with their approved Apps to keep the ~$17/month that Apple gets paid for each iPhone customer.

Is this what Apple calls the platform for the mobile computing experience? And there are a bunch of people including Jobs calling the iPod touch the equivalent of a netbook. http://www.osnews.com/story/20424/Jobs_on_Cheap_Computers_Netbooks http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/01/the-iphone-and-ipod-touch-apples-netbook.ars Please, no thanks.Do not pervert the word computer to mean a walled garden. Call it a phone, gaming console, e-book reader etc. if you wish. This makes the evil MS look like defenders of freedom in shining armor. God forbid if a company like Apple won the PC wars back in the 80s instead of IBM/PC compatibles. *shudder*

This sounds a lot like the 40-year-old Carterfone decision, where AT&T argued that allowing people to connect third-party devices to their network could disrupt or degrade service. I'm pretty sure that modems and Panasonic phones didn't ruin the telephone system, and I have a feeling that jailbroken iPhones wouldn't be the end of the world, either.

--Bruce

but even when you are as big as Google and get a signoff from the top levels of the company

Not really, Apple doesnt care how big you are if you dont play by their rules. However when you have two people on he board of directors, you get to make the rules.

Hi,

please tell me: How many time has transparent aluminium been discovered by now?
I think about five to six times... E.g. in 2005

Please don't wake me up the next time someone discovers it :-).

CU, Martin

I like how both the article and the Slashdot submission completely ignore that file-sharing has dropped in the UK, especially among teens. Though I know this was posted on Slashdot to give pro-pirates the idea that sales are thriving in spite of piracy, this story doesn't disprove the effect piracy has on sales--if anything, it bolsters the idea that sales go up when piracy goes down.

Ha, that's one kind of crack that can be fixed. Just replace the screen with plastic
like Apple should have done in the first place, if Jobs wasn't so obsessed with form over practicality.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/09/fix-a-cracked-iphone-screen-on-the-cheap.ars

(then again, replacing cracked screens at $250 a pop is nicely practical from Apple's viewpoint.)

German police let that one slip, so did a few other arrests.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_SSL_Interception_letters_-_Bavaria_-_Digitask
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/01/bavarian-government-caught-looking-for-skype-backdoor.ars
The rest of Russia's problem is what? A revenue drop from its diaspora?
But they do have a point, the way the "Skype" codec is moving into many free and closed applications.
The Russians miss the good old days when they could track a sat phone and send a guided bomb down (Dzokhar Dudayev)?
But then the NSA did help with that one :)

If Microsoft only allowed you to sync a Zune to WMP people would be up in arms.

You know what would be worse? If dumped their "PlaysforSure" DRM and opened their own music store with DRM that doesn't work on anything but the Zune? Oh wait, they already did that.

Whew, for a second there, everyone was scratching their heads wondering if Microsoft had something up their sleeve. Not so, apparently.

Personally I'm glad they can go back to making themselves obsolete and unneeded. We would forever be stuck with them if they slowly open sourced parts parts of their operating system like Adobe's doing with its Flash SDK. Really the situation is win-win in my mind: If Microsoft doesn't open source code and work with developers, the developers are just going to roll their own or go elsewhere. Conversely, if Microsoft open sources some of its stuff (like, truly opens it up with GPLv3) then we get to meet them halfway and maybe they'll be a valuable part of the community (supress laughter, it may happen yet). Granted, they've been very creative with things like the MsPL but people see through those ruses pretty quickly.

They're faking their embrace of open source now but open source is actually affecting them. This seems to be tacit acknowledgment that they need to support this on open source; no more "la la la I can't hear you!" It's a choice Microsoft can make soon now: relevance or extinction. Marketing can only keep them in the game for so long.

If they could be made to use the least resources possible to get the job done, then it would probably end up saving a fair amount of money long term.

Finally found the term they used: "power gating". Here's an Ars article about it.

The relevant bit:
Traditionally, Intel has been able shut down an unused core by cutting its active power, but even though it's in a sleep state, that core is still dissipating plenty of power because of leakage current. Intel's power gating technique involves a new transistor design, and it lets Intel cut the leakage current, as well, so that the sleeping core's power dissipation drops to near zero.

AMD also has some term they use for this, but I can't find it.

The question is what happens when you really *do* need the processing power? It seems to me that they should focus on lowering the power draw during peak usage, which I understand they may do by designing many-multi-core CPUs (16+) that run at relatively low frequencies.

Keeping in mind that Apple doesn't make the batteries, they have to have some degree of trust in their suppliers. I doubt anyone can picture Apple stupid enough to bait PR nightmares and lawsuits when their image is very important to their business model. Apple's typical reaction is the industry best-case product-problem-coverup-job - do everything reasonable to stick a lollypop in the mouth of anyone that screams, and quietly correct the problem so it doesn't happen again. They're unlikely to admit fault, that would just fan the flames. (pun?)

Batteries lately though do seem to be a serious problem all around for everyone. DSLAM phone boxes blowing up down the street, laptops and ipods catching fire, liio batteries puffing up like balloons. Inadequate testing if you ask me. New technology trying to get rushed into a highly competitive new market, skip the tests it's good enough, just ship it. Then stuff blows up catches fire, or generally misbehaves. But right now rechargeable batteries are making a shambles out of Moore's Law.

This isn't really news any more than the 5 o-clock rush hour. Blame Apple, blame Sony, whatever, it's going to happen. It's not anywhere outside the bell curve yet.

Unless you live in England and the government decides to force you to hand over your encryption key. With Vanish, you *can't* hand over the encryption key because you never had it in the first place.

<pedantic>
Unfortunately, TFS -- and to a lesser extent, TFA -- seems to be ripe with exaggerated claims: "'Our goal was really to come up with a system where, through a property of nature, the message, or the data, disappears.'" and "After eight hours, the message will be impossible to unscramble and will remain gibberish forever."

No. Unless I am missing something from TFA, it is like any other "secure" encryption scheme: merely very, very difficult to break. Given a fast enough computer -- or a large enough cluster of computers working together -- it can be cracked. The only thing Vanish protects against is someone stealing the encryption key from your PC.
</pedantic>

Any lawful device: 40 years after the Carterfone decision - Forty years ago today the Federal Communications Commission started a revolution by standing up to AT&T. Without it, we wouldn't get to buy our set-top boxes or a wireless broadband network where we will be able to attach any lawful device and use any lawful application.

One of the reasons for that is thought to be that it was hard to come up with a good interface for managing multiple open applications on a handheld device. The Pre seems to have a good idea there.

The other reason, and probably the bigger, is battery life. Ars Technica seems to agree with me.

I don't really find it to be a problem, it's been rare it annoyed me. Still, I'd rather have this limitation than the problem that Blackberry / WinMo / Palm users can face and have to constantly think about if I want to quit an application or switch out of it for battery life purposes.

It's a trade off, and right now I think Apple is on the right side of it.

Zer01 says it can offer unlimited cell calls (via VoIP) and cell data through a unique relationship with AT&T. AT&T isn't talking, and the particulars of the deal fly in the face of similar virtual mobile network operator deals past and present.

Not in Europe
see http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/06/windows-7-to-be-shipped-in-europe-sans-internet-explorer.ars
MS have also stopped Windows 7 upgrades in Europe. It's a clean install, or forget it.

No. You should read the article I linked. It's very long, but it's a good read.

There already was a copyright law, and it allowed 14 years - a term which was considered reasonable and which has been determined to be optimal. The law he was arguing against proposed the life of the author plus 25 years. It was modified to conform to his recommendation of a longer than 14 but finite and predictable length of 42 years from publication, no extensions, no consideration for the longevity of the author. It was made law in England, and then by treaty in most of the rest of the world, and remained the law until 1976 (over 130 years).

It was only until 1976, and more regrettably 1998 that the law he was arguing against was adopted in the US.

Under the current law works published in 1923 will not expire from copyright until 2019 at the earliest, or much later in others. It's reasonable to expect that copyright will be extended yet again before this date, and so on in perpetuity, rendering copyright essentially eternal. This so defeats the social contract of copyright, so defeats the stated purpose of the "promotion of progress" and is so obviously an unfair law that people simply will not comply with it. Since they're already getting in the habit of breaking the copyright law, the don't bother with subtle niceties like discriminating between ebooks of 1984 and a prerelease movie.

And so... the outcome he warned against was avoided in his lifetime. He did a good service to his nation and the world. Because we've ignored his warning we find ourselves in our current state. That's what make this thread "done in one".

There was an Ars Technica article that discusses font licensing issues and how they would pour ice water on the potential for @font-face:

The hazy future of Web typography

Until those issues are resolved, don't expect @font-face to make the Web more than bland.

The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent -> goatse.png

goatse.png->The.Black.Hole.1979.dvdrip.xvid.torrent

Well, that explains why in the UK piracy is down.

Dear misinformed,

Due to the advent of technological advancement and the internet, formerly scarce works have become common and easily downloaded due to the non scarce nature of information, this has got westerners and excessively pro corporate, pro business peoples panties in a twist from which they have never recovered. Capitalist philosophy only makes sense when an item a person wants to consume is scarce, otherwise the "evil" socialist economics can work (and piracy is a lesson in that it works FYI). Therefore copyright has become a highly charged issue because nature of information and political economic ideology of western capitalism are at odds.

According to neoclassical economics because of the non scarce nature of digital works, their worth should be driven down towards zero and many businesses should be going bankrupt, note that this has not happened and the Movie industry has recently broken box office records. Please refer to Dark Knight released in 2008 in the following list below of top grossing box office movies of all time.

http://www.movieweb.com/movies/boxoffice/alltime.php

The nature of copyright and software licensing has always been questionable from the outset, because the public was not informed enough to mount resistance to the idea of software licensing and EULA's. So many industries got their way by way of public ignorance. Industries later gathered together lobbying more as the internet rose to power and their response to non scarcity of information was in the form of the DMCA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

Which added to the already dubious practice of licensing software (individuals never own their software) which most nerds have always thought dubious at best (See: Linux)

The advent of the DMCA and licensing prevents legitimate owners of software from outright owning and modifying what they bought due to crazy EULA's and liscensing that weaseled it's way into "normalcy" due to public technological ignorance, which attempted to limit software owners rights to ownership and rights to develop their own software to work with the software they already own. This has pissed off the informed who understand these issues. See: Bnetd

http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

Corporations and the bad kinds of capitalists alike have been trying to wrest individual ownership from the people by infringing on their individual rights to own the products they buy. Software companies have always been one of the worst industries due to the idea of licensing software to individuals, rather then individuals being able to own software outright and do whatever they wish with it.

Enterprising individuals like John carmack who released open source doom, etc, and Volition Inc of Freespace 2 fame (see: http://scp.indiegames.us/ ) have been breaths of fresh air for the informed among us as they understand the deeper issues of software patents, copyright and software ownership by and large.

John carmack does not believe in software patents, and is tired of the stupid shit that such patents and overzealous and excessive copyright abuses, to see his frustrations and problems with such see here:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2004/07/4048.ars

The slashdot community has been getting pissed at the lack of reasoning power in hypercapitalist america, it seems in general that america has an excessive amount of brain dead people and anti-intellectualism, and the rise of super corporate indoctrinated nerd drones, this anti intellectualism and lack of intellectual depth increasingly found in certain americans or others so indoctrinated against intellectual understanding is epitomized in the following link

I would like to know how you know that World of Goo had a 90% rate of piracy.

Dude I put the reference at the end of my comment!
I'll repeat it here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

I bought the game and loved it, so I recommended it to my friends. Two of them downloaded it illegally online, both loved it, neither bought a real copy.

If someone wanted to test it out, they could just try the demo like you did. Piracy is inexcusable in this case.

I believe that if you have a 90% piracy rate, it is because your software sucks and no one who has tried it thinks it is worth any money.

World of Goo had a 90% rate of piracy... because it sucked?

We must have different definitions of the word "suck", please, enlighten me to yours.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

If it weren't for Mozilla's anti-patent zealotry and their wide market share, HTML 5 would have had a standardized video codec two years ago. It's not as if they can't afford licensing fees at this point.

When compiling a kernel driver for BSD or Windows, you will never, ever, ever see anything even remotely like "FATAL: modpost: GPL-incompatible module foo.ko uses GPL-only symbol 'usb_register_dev'".

There are countless other examples of the GPL stifling innovation, and it's the end-user that really loses out in the end. This would be perfectly fine if GPL advocates weren't influencing policy-makers, or using their market share in part to push their crusade.

"Do us all a favour, quit posting anything to the internet, spend a few years updating your knowledge to learn a worthwhile language like C++, Java or one of the .NET languages. Get a clue about security and understand why your applications are a far bigger security risk than anything you talk of and finally, stop threatening to sue anyone you disagree with." - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)

I have used C & C++ since 1992 (where I learned it during my education/college) & professionally in many assignments (MSVC++ and Borland C++ Builder) and .NET I used most all last year (VB.NET & ASP.NET via Visual Studio 2005) I seriously doubt you have ever used them yourself, so, so much for that.

----

"But wait, it appears you didn't stop there, I also found this:" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)

Thor SCHMUCK? LOL, the guy is a joke... what's he ever accomplished that's been noted in any publications in this field, and the Computer Associates (the joke the industry)? The last company I worked for used their "security suite" and had to take it out because it was screwing up the email system... I wrote an application for a fellow on the NTCompatible.com forums way back when who complained that Apache (old model he used) would not run invisibly on screen. It is trivial to use many function calls for spawning a process via their parameters possible to make an app launch invisibly so to help he, I wrote it up & when I wrote them about it? Greg Jensen (head of that suite) couldn't even get my emails and for the same reasons. By the way, I was outraged at that, because Thor SCHMUCK submitted that old program of mine to them under "Peter Kowalski" so I'd never find it if I googled for it etc. - he is a jack ass of the first order & so are the morons @ CA. I did their review to have it removed, 21 questions, and my application did not violate a SINGLE constraint. So much for them and Mr. Thor SCHMUCK. Others, like Dr. Mark Russinovich even, and Nir Sofer of Nirsoft have also been victimized by this type of thing happening, so I am not alone in that much.

----

"Er, a program built entirely around breaking the hosts file using it for purposes it is simply not intended? Again, do you have any idea about the subject you preach? Do you realise that your very own programs pose a security risk? Do you realise how trivial it would be for Malware to hide malicious redirects in hosts files of the size you are talking meaning yet another one of your programs is a vessel for anti-security?" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)

Do you even have a degree in this science, and have YOU ever written an application that did well (or any at all)? I'd like to see proof of either on your part. LOL, my program is for removing duplicated entries in HOSTS file, and to alphabetize entries in a HOSTS file, not to "bushwhack" it. Learn to read, or actually possess a degree around the science of programming (because after this statement, I am fairly certain you possess neither, nor any hands-on experience coding yourself, professionally).

----

"And there's more:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/51009562/m/3680937305

Threatening to sue again on online forums because people didn't like the fact you were using them to advertise your dodgy Delphi programs?" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)" - by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13, @05:00AM (#28673669)

When you get libelled & impersonated by someone? That's grounds for legal action, proof of that, by the dork @ "arstechnica" who did so? Ok, his own words quoted below (where

Holy crap! It's APK, the legend himself! He Who Shall Not Be Mentioned! http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/1810993821?r=2310969821 You're a legend in the Ars forums, man. Hats off to your amazing ability to troll. You don't see many who master the craft like you do anymore.

Haha ok let me break this down to you. First of all that "perfectly good" part is solely your opinion and believe it or not not everybody agrees. Secondly there are huge differences between unix like OSs. And last but not least, some people like to own whatever they've bought rather than lease it. That's why.

Haha, ok, let me break THIS down to [sic] you:

UNLIKE Linux, OS X is NOT, repeat NOT, a "Unix-LIKE OS". It IS a Unix OS.

Just because you Linux fanbois are jealous for being a TRUE Unix (instead of a WANNABE Unix), doesn't mean you have to diss OS X.

BTW nice keeping up with tech-news. OS X has been a certified Unix since 2007...

Is that my karma I smell burning?

So I've never heard of you before, but you seem to like throwing your initials round APK, or Alexander Peter Kowalski.

Your initial comments seemed idiotic, you were complaining about your 15mb+ hosts file being slow to load. Sorry, but what the fuck? You have a 15mb+ hosts file? are you really that clueless about IT?

But you try and justify it all by talking about security so I figured hey, I'll see what this guys credentials are. Well, a quick search turned this up:

http://www.ca.com/us/securityadvisor/pest/pest.aspx?id=51276

A piece of software that can arbitrarily run applications invisibly? Sorry what, did you really try and throw such a security threat onto consumer's PCs??

But wait, it appears you didn't stop there, I also found this:

http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/

So not only do you produce an app. that is a massive security risk, not only do you fail to see why it has been validly categorised as such, but you throw a hissy fit and threaten to sue? Not only that, but continue to spam the comments section of that site for over a month continuing to whine?

People make mistakes though so fair enough, I figured I'm sure there's more to this guy. I found this:

http://www.thenewtech.com/forums/chit-chat/today-4378/index32.html

Er, a program built entirely around breaking the hosts file using it for purposes it is simply not intended? Again, do you have any idea about the subject you preach? Do you realise that your very own programs pose a security risk? Do you realise how trivial it would be for Malware to hide malicious redirects in hosts files of the size you are talking meaning yet another one of your programs is a vessel for anti-security?

And there's more:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/51009562/m/3680937305

Threatening to sue again on online forums because people didn't like the fact you were using them to advertise your dodgy Delphi programs?

Other than that, all I could find was a couple of dead web pages of yours and mention of a couple of long obsolete Delphi programs.

Your complaint is about the performance of using the hosts file for something it's never meant to be used for and the resultant performance drops of reading such a large file.

The fact that using the hosts file so incorrectly inherently severely decreases performance of DNS lookups anyway seems lost on you.

You talk of security yet you produce applications that are security threats.

You threaten to sue anyone who points out that your applications are security threats, you threaten to sue people who do not like you using technical forums to advertise your programs.

You complain here about how people obviously aren't programmers because they disagree with you yet your language of choice is object pascal via Delphi, hardly the language of choice for an expert programmer and second only to pre-.NET Visual Basic for the horifically bad bloatware it results in.

Do us all a favour, quit posting anything to the internet, spend a few years updating your knowledge to learn a worthwhile language like C++, Java or one of the .NET languages. Get a clue about security and understand why your applications are a far bigger security risk than anything you talk of and finally, stop threatening to sue anyone you disagree with.

Here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/its-baack-french-3-strikes-law-gets-another-go-from-senate.ars

Perhaps the greatest benefit of this ruling is that it could be appealed up to the SCOTUS.

But the Supreme Court has already said that it will hear the Bilski appeal:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/scotus-to-hear-bilski-may-be-huge-for-software-patents.ars

Surely that's when the precedents will be set?

According to the Ars coverage:

Mozilla has explored the possibility of adopting a multiprocessing approach for Firefox in the past, but the idea didn't gain serious traction in the Firefox developer community until it was implemented by Google and Microsoft in their respective web browsers.

It was probably too large a project to consider doing without a pressing need. Chrome and IE8 supplied that pressure.

second of about 30,000 cases

Let's assume that's 20 songs per case on unrelated albums. According to section 504.c.1 each work can cost the defendent between $750 and $30,000. And if the first trial was any indication, $30,000 per song is actually the low end once you've gotten past lawyer fees. Ok so by the letter of the law the RIAA is looking to get anywhere from $450 million to $18 billion. I hope to god that Nesson stops upsetting the court and sets some better precedent than the first case. I don't care if he wants to post courtroom audio. That's a great idea and I appreciate where his heart is but that's not what this is about! I do care that he works to either reduce these unrealistic damage amounts or redefine copyright violation. So far he's just been really good at upsetting people--and not the right people!

He labeled as âoegobbledygookâ the felony privacy law that is punishable by up to five years in prison.

but has blatantly said that he's going to refuse to comply with what the law says. That's like acknowledging that your source of evidence for convictions gets its information illegally, but you still choose to use it. Not that I know anyone who'd do that, but just saying.

If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.

The "mandatory" part doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't force authors to write books for free. And although a lot of free textbooks do exist already (see my sig), you can't guarantee that for a particular subject, the best book will always be a free book rather than a non-free.

But other than that, what you're suggesting seems similar to something California is doing now. Motivated by the California state budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a Free Digital Textbook Initiative, which has gathered a list of free, online high school math and science textbooks that are aligned with state content standards. The intention is to have the books used in classrooms in fall 2009. This article has some useful background, but it mistakenly suggests that the arduous state adoption process will be an obstacle to the FDTI; statewide adoption only applies to K-8, but FDTI is doing high-school books. There was a previous, unsuccessful effort called COSTP, which tried to produce a history textbook using Wikibooks. Here is a BBC article about the present effort, and here is a newspaper opinion piece by the Governor. This is a transcript of a speech by the Governor, with some interesting Q&A at the end. Twenty books were submitted (press release, links). The four books from traditional publisher Pearson are consumable workbooks, not actual textbooks.

Before you read too far, realize that Nokia owns Qt. It is not surprising that Nokia products use Qt.

"Bing expands its piece of the search market pie in June": http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/07/bing-grabs-a-larger-piece-of-the-search-market-pie-in-june.ars

Take the iPhone for example. Its used by a lot of people but its nigh impossible to exploit simply because its locked down.

Bullshit. What exactly is all this about? And this?

What do you think jailbreaking is? Older firmware could even do it over the Web.

A while back, there was even a bug that let anyone bypass the lock screen (and the password).

But they've just launched a restriction free video streaming site as well.

I'm unsure if that is related to the buy-out or not, but if it is, it really is a statement of intent to go forward with the things that TPB stood for.

Plenty of people on both sides do communicate together. I remember on dark iron we had a faction-shared teamspeak for horde and alliance. Oftentimes spies would come up during pvp and pve events and try to ruin our moment, etc. It was a pvp server, so it was all in good fun.

Meanwhile, as the OP said is correct. This is blizzard trying to channel more money because they are losing people. Sadly, it's been working to a point but I hope they hit critical mass real soon. I'm guessing starcraft 2 will be that point considering there won't be lan support.

more info

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202429677896

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/court-your-myspace-page-isnt-private.ars

And the court summary..

http://fsnews.findlaw.com/cases/ca/caapp4th/slip/2009/f054138.html

Interesting, I did not know of this. In the UK I think she would of had more success with the courts.

In any case it is common sense to watch what you post online. Once you click that mouse its gone, and you can never be sure that you can retract or recover.