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The list of travesties goes on.

I bow to your specialist knowledge.

Cyber cyber, shove it up yer Khyber.
Nano, nano, shove it up yer arse.

LEDs emit electromagnetic radiation. SEDs don't. Well, not for long.

> I'd like to hear your opinion on it. What is the crucial difference that makes one form of copyright violation okay, and the other not okay? Is it simply the word "profit"?

We believe in freedom of information. Most piracy promotes this--making works more available than they would otherwise be.

Pirating GPL'd software removes freedom, making works less available and making people less able to use it. This game can't be sold now, it seems likely that we won't get to see the source or any improvements to it, etc.

You may notice that there's no contradiction here. We believe in freedom, except for the false freedom of taking freedom away from others. Some people are "purists" who believe that's a "freedom" even though it makes people in aggregate less free. Not us. We care about the freedom of society as a whole more than that of any one individual. Incidentally, this is related to the principle of suboptimization.

According to Babylon,

Er, it's easy to make software that irreparably damages embedded systems. We're not talking about software that runs in nice safe wrap-you-in-bubblewrap PCs any more.

Send the wrong configuration down to a CPLD or FPGA device and you can configure the voltage inputs to be (say) 1.2 volts when a 5v signal is being applied. Kiss bye-bye to that oxide layer in minutes (or seconds). If the part that's now burnt out is only used during configuration, or even just rarely (say a low-power situation), it may not be obvious that you're SOL.

Along comes a new configuration (the Apple one) and Boom!(TM) - dead hardware.

I don't know if the iphone contains configurable parts with that sort of vulnerability (like FPGA's) - I do know it contains an embedded system for the baseband receiver which needed to be configured for that update.

Embedded processor systems like these are *much* more vulnerable to the halt-and-catch-fire because they're expected to be configured in a certain way, and the QA is rarely done to make them bulletproof, like traditional processors.

As far as I can see, Apple were only being reasonable: it's entirely possible for the hacked reconfiguration of the GSM baseband system to have completely screwed it up (because it probably didn't dot every 'i' and cross every 't' - it was a trial-and-error job after all), and the problem to only become apparent when a new "proper" configuration was attempted.

So, pretty *not* precisely, IMHO. For what it's worth, I've blown CPLDs up on one project and months later come back to use the same board on another project and found out it was no longer reconfigurable. It worked fine in the configuration it had, but as soon as I reconfigured, no dice.

Simon.

According to Israeli press (in Hebrew) it was indeed Babylon, and the journalist was Jacob Eichler of the insignificant Knesset channel (the Knesset is the Israeli parliament).

One correction, though, which is fairly relevant. It wasn't Babelfish that was used for the translation, it was Babylon. Babelfish doesn't even support Hebrew.

I think Babelfish is, in fact, smart enough to understand that the same word in different contexts can mean different things. One of the main problems with machine translating (and NLP) Hebrew is that the language is very compact as far as spelling goes. The "the" word is just a letter added to the beginning of the word, which compact similarly spelled words together. In this case, the word , which in this case was supposed to mean "Whether", was misidentified as "", meaning "The", and "", meaning "mother". The only way it could happen was if a word by word translation was done, which is known to be a horrible thing.

In other words, yes, it was a moronic act of blind reliance.

Shachar

The application in question is not AltaVista's Babelfish, but rather Babylon, which was originally created by Israelies, hence it has Hebrew-English translation capabilities.

The reporter in question did not know English well, so he used Babylon to translate his questions and didn't bother to proof. Due to many reasons, including the imperfect nature of translation engines and the fact that much of Hebrew is read by context (vowels are implicit half of the time), the translation turned out very badly.
For instance, if you take the sentence "Ha'im neheneta" which means "Did you enjoy", the fact that vowels are implicit means the sentence can be read "Ha'em nehenta", which means "The mother enjoyed."

(It was a banner loader for some software. C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CD_LOAD.EXE)

I noticed it too, when using NT, I am an ardent supporter of checking Task Manager a few timely daily, and killing *any* process that I can't figure out. Hasn't crashed the box yet, and it usually runs for two to four weeks before something crashes or freezes it, which is pretty good for NT.

Anyway, CD_LOAD.EXE, is by CyDoor (I think, I already deleted it and it's registry entries) as a snooper for banner advertisments. It my case it was installed by Babylon. Just checked, there's a list of downloads on the Cydoor website, so they probably all have it.