Slashdot Mirror

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

The iLoo (portable toilet with Internet access) thing that has been floating around the media for the last week (CNN, CNET, etc, all had articles) turns out to be a "April Fools joke" according to MS representatives (CNET). The only problem: they released it on May 2nd. Damn! They can't even release their jokes on time.

At least Intel has accepted that it's a real issue rather than a customer problem and providing a workaround and a fix to the processors. Anyway, the Itanium 2 is not a first-run chip, rather a re-work of the original Itanium (though a far amount of the design came from HP which was then tuned and produced by Intel).

Microsoft doesn't innovate. They don't have to. They can sit on their collective fat asses and rake in the money because, in many environments, consumers have no choice. It's only external pressures (Apple and Mac OS X, Linux, etc) that force Microsoft to "innovate" which really means ripping off what's already been done.

Wide-aspect ratio, flat panel display, one cable between it and the computer. Gee, where have I seen that before. Even the desktop image looks very similar to the default OS X desktop.

OK, they "innovated" to build-in a phone. Big deal.

According to Declan McCullagh the P2P endgame is now approaching and it will be down to congress to sort this out.

He argues convincingly that the law has been changed in the past by congress when copyrights have been seen to be under threat by a judical decision, so we should expect the same thing to happen here.

"Pay attention to the endgame. In the 1994 U.S. v. LaMacchia prosecution, a judge dismissed charges against a 21-year-old MIT student who ran a pirate Internet site, saying that it was not a criminal offense to do so under current federal law. Criminal penalties "should probably attach to willful, multiple infringements of copyrighted software, even absent a commercial motive on the part of the infringer," Judge Richard Stearns wrote. Stearns suggested that Congress step in.

Congress obliged. Three years later, President Clinton signed into law the No Electronic Theft Act, which makes--as I've written about before--copyright infringement a federal crime even if not done for commercial purposes. "

This is exactly what the judge in the Grokster case has suggested, so expect an RIAA/MPAA sponsored P2P bill in congress sometime soon...

Karma me!

No, I don't know how many users they have, nor do I know their support structure. But for some reason they've done the decission. Think about it.

No, I don't know how many users they have, nor do I know their support structure. But for some reason they've done the decission. Think about it.

Implementing an RFC 1149 network is the obvious solution for your co-op. Not only can you transmit data over rough terrains, but it's the only proven, tested networking option that is 100% organic!

Actually, the software was *not* designed to be used to publicly stream music. It *was* designed, however, to allow users to access *their* "personal music library from any room in your house or over the internet from work to home."

So if anyone's to be blamed, blame those who are mis-using this feature. Apple's just distributing and supporting "software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends" .

Basically, it is 2 XGA displays at 180dpi that doesn't require refresh, so can last a few months on 2 AA batteries. It reads contents stored on an SD card. The weight is only 500 gram. I like physical books compared to bulky PDAs with small screens, but something like this could become serious competition to them.

The current version (as reviewed is 2.8); but you can download "Libranet Essential Edition 2.0", dated July 2002, from LinuxISO.org, Download.com, etc. Probably could aptget that to something close to the latest version.

For example, the mere fact that I have an SSL certificate does not mean that you are safe submitting your credit card to my site, although it means you know who I am and can contact me or my company if something happens.

Yeah, no-one ever faked WHOIS information or got a certificate for someone else.

Dr. Dre boots users from Napster.

There's no way that the iLoo is a feasible product. There are major conceptual and physical problems with it as presented in the News.com iLoo article.

The physical problems are an easier target, so let's start with those.

There's a plasma screen on the inside. There are two problems with this.

1. The smallest size plasma screen is 32 inches. From the iLoo illustration, the inner screen is 36% of the width of the booth. No scale is given, but porta-potties are usually 48 inches wide. With these numbers, we can estimate that the screen shown is a 19" model. Very reasonable for a LCD, but not for a Plasma.
2. Plasma screens are very delicate. Chooisng such a fragile display technology for such a public place would be ludicrous. Have a look at the massively padded cases required to ship plasma screens.

Another problem is the "Wireless LAN ADSL Module". Stringing a bunch of buzzwords together makes something that sound good, but doesn't actually make sense.

The article mentions that "A Windows XP-powered computer resides under the sink". How does this single computer manage to run an external display and keyboard along with the one inside the potty?

Most of the conceptual problems are actually mentioned in the article itself. It dismisses them humourously but not logically. The lineups for porta-potties at festivals and events are no joke. Encouraging people to stay in them longer than necessary would be a disaster!

Who is Matthew Whittingham, the man quoted as the "MSN UK spokesman"? Google reveals only one page mentioning him in relation to MSN, apart from the numerous pages about the iLoo. In this page, dated January 26th of this year, he is quoted as the "group marketing manager for MSN UK". That's a very different role than spokesman. My guess is that the hoaxsters picked a MSN UK employee at random to use in their story. In fact, if you google for "MSN UK" spokesman -iLoo, this same page appears at the top of the third page, since it mentions "spokesman" elsewere.

Finally, who in their right mind would use a keyboard that you *knew* had last been used by someone on the toilet?

There's no way that the iLoo is a feasible product. There are major conceptual and physical problems with it as presented in the News.com iLoo article.

The physical problems are an easier target, so let's start with those.

There's a plasma screen on the inside. There are two problems with this.

1. The smallest size plasma screen is 32 inches. From the iLoo illustration, the inner screen is 36% of the width of the booth. No scale is given, but porta-potties are usually 48 inches wide. With these numbers, we can estimate that the screen shown is a 19" model. Very reasonable for a LCD, but not for a Plasma.
2. Plasma screens are very delicate. Chooisng such a fragile display technology for such a public place would be ludicrous. Have a look at the massively padded cases required to ship plasma screens.

Another problem is the "Wireless LAN ADSL Module". Stringing a bunch of buzzwords together makes something that sound good, but doesn't actually make sense.

The article mentions that "A Windows XP-powered computer resides under the sink". How does this single computer manage to run an external display and keyboard along with the one inside the potty?

Most of the conceptual problems are actually mentioned in the article itself. It dismisses them humourously but not logically. The lineups for porta-potties at festivals and events are no joke. Encouraging people to stay in them longer than necessary would be a disaster!

Who is Matthew Whittingham, the man quoted as the "MSN UK spokesman"? Google reveals only one page mentioning him in relation to MSN, apart from the numerous pages about the iLoo. In this page, dated January 26th of this year, he is quoted as the "group marketing manager for MSN UK". That's a very different role than spokesman. My guess is that the hoaxsters picked a MSN UK employee at random to use in their story. In fact, if you google for "MSN UK" spokesman -iLoo, this same page appears at the top of the third page, since it mentions "spokesman" elsewere.

Finally, who in their right mind would use a keyboard that you *knew* had last been used by someone on the toilet?

That Microsoft could have fixed many more bugs, is something that could be see as one possibility, but in only the past tense. It looks like things got out of hand a while ago and that the management could be just riding the company down - pump and dump

Don't forget that benefits have been cut way back and there's also been outsourcing like mad. Consultants and contractors don't show up as layoffs when you let them go.

AC with +4 Insightful = Moderators on crack.

MS was caught by the Slammer worm because some developers had installed SQL Server on their workstations and neglected to keep them patched.

Are you sure?:

Microsoft urged customers to fix a vulnerability in the SQL Server 2000 software, but it apparently hadn't taken its own advice. Moreover, despite its 1-year-old security push, the software giant still had critical servers vulnerable to Internet attacks.(emphasis added)

From Rick Devenuti, the chief information officer for Microsoft at the time of the slammer attack:

. "At any given point in time, it is hard to be 100 percent patched with any machine. We are working hard to make patch management easier. But 100 percent is a high bar and in this case we are not there."

I also remember reading an article stating the vulnerability had been patched 6 months before, then another patch was released which re-opened the hole, which was then re-patched - which means two things:

1) if you patched as you should, Microsoft left you vulnerable, and

2) if your machine was not affected, then you either did not apply the patch which broke your security (What, you didn't apply a patch!?) or you re-patched before slammer was released.

To quote an AC,

"Wrong", and

Bullshit
Bullshit
More bullshit
You are so full of shit

There really does seem to be no difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not. Those that can read wouldn't be caught using MS-Passport. Sadly, signal can be drowned out by noise coming from a colossal marketing blitz to last through september.

We'll see if they last that long. Windows2003 seems to be more of a push to get users over to OS X or Linux. Their other (2nd of 2) cash cow, the new MS-Office has already been postponed and seems to be more of an incentive to move to OpenOffice than to upgrade.

A Sega-Namco would consolidate into Japan's largest arcade operater and hold 30% of the arcade market. Their consolidated software sales would command 10% of the market (Sega is 9th, Namco is 8th) but they would have some of the most coveted longterm licences on the planet like Soul Calibor, Virtua Fighter, Sonic & Tekken between them. An older news.com article points out. The real hope for gamers is Sega independence from Microsoft and EA so gamers could truly get more platform independent games. It would suck to see another Bungie/Halo exclusive to happen. Here's for Namco's success and gamers being lucky enough to see a Virtua Fighter-Tekken Crossover

The multimillion-dollar deal is a milestone for the game industry, which traditionally has paid to use other companies' logos in their games.

Sony Corp., for example, has paid tens of thousands of dollars to car manufacturers such as Honda Motor Co. to use real-world race cars in its driving games

Real life product brands have been featured in video games increasingly since Pole Position, but this [inclusion of McDonald's and Intel logos in The Sims] is being hailed as the first time a company has paid to have its products placed in a game. It's also being hailed as the latest step the video game market has made towards the lucrative product-placement schemes that are common in the Hollywood film industry.

Until now, video game makers have taken it upon themselves to add corporate brands to their games to add authenticity. Believe it or not, video game makers say they have even paid outside companies for the use of recognizable logos inside their games.

...product placement is relatively new to games....

While video game companies traditionally have had major brand names in their games, usually those brands have been licensed for a fee by the publishers, rather than the brands paying to be placed in the game.

The main argument for using recognizable products is that they lend a realistic flavor to gameplay.

What gamers may not know, however, is that this kind of brand exposure doesn't necessarily bring developers rolls of cash. More likely, companies swap advertising, as with the "Super Monkey Ball" deal.

Most of the time that you see a product in a Sega game no money has changed hands.

But although commercial products have appeared in games in the past--mostly as "Easter egg" surprises buried in the games (such as the Coke cans that rolled out of a vending machine in the game Half Life), or as authentic touches (such as the Pennzoil ads on cars in NASCAR racing games)--there have been no cases of paid product placement, or at least none that a survey of game publishers can recall. And it's not that developers haven't tried.

Software Assurance Explained.

Actually Windows supports command line, DDE *and* OLE/COM. You also get the shared memory, named pipes etc. And if you don't want to struggle with DCOM, .NET has some very easy to use APIs for remoting.

Each has pros and cons, use what's best for your situation.

I hear a lot of sneers about COM in the Unix world, but it (and systems like it) are essential if you want to build sophisticated desktop applications. Mozilla (XPCOM) and Gnome (Bonobo) are examples of projects who rolled their own because Unix had nothing to offer them. Unfortunately, no one spent enough time *designing* Unix clones -- otherwise a XPCOM-like subsystem would be a standard part of every Unix distro.

An OS without a /standard/ component model today is like an OS without IPC in 1990.

Blue laser DVD burners will be readilly available and probably cost about the same amount as the current DVD burners. This gives you two options:

1) You could buy the standard DVD Burner for around a $100(??) and use something such as the All-in-Wonder (~4.7 gigs per disc)
or
2)You could buy the blue laser burner for around $350(??) and use the same capture device (~24 gigs per disc)

I particularly like this link that you posted:

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bengt/petition.pdf

It's a petition by 31 prominent european computer scientists outlining in clear and concise language why software patents are a bad idea. (Here's some news coverage)

Basically what it boils down to are two things:
- patents aren't needed because software is protected by copyright (unlike other patentable inventions, which can't be copyrighted)
- patents on software will affect emphemeral methods and thoughts, culture and society ... ... well I can't explain it well. Read the letter it's only one page in plain english.

simon

Remember this Gartner recommendation?

.:diatonic:.

Of course... HD-DVD is just around the corner. Check CNET or Blu-Ray.

Still, be good to have those movies on DVD. After all, "Nazis make the best bad guys."

Uncle Eazy

Now you're nitpicking. What if my head turns into a block of gouda?

The standards change. Look at what happened when Unisys did pull their stunt with LZW. PNG and JPG suddenly became the 'in' thing, and there was a big public backlash. Enough so that Unisys pretty much backed down. I don't use GIFs for my graphics and it doesn't bother me in the least.

For patents covering standards that are already in place (say someone patents hyperlinks?), then it's up to the standards body or some other organization to defend itself against the patent.

I had trouble with dns for that link but was able to find this one. Probably to the same ZDNet article about fooling biometric scanners with Jello.

If the software insdustry is dead, this would be quite odd [com.com].

If the software insdustry is dead, this would be quite odd. Perhaps certain portions of the industry are getting saturated, but there apparently still are some developing markets. Now if developing market out there is looking for a summer geek, I have a resume waiting for them...

I guess with presidential politics already starting it was inevitable that people would start putting forward ideas to combat spam in the political arena. My first question on this is why would I pay the government anything to send email, since neither state nor federal agencies have anything to do how I process email. They don't provide bandwidth, servers, or even oversight. The author's suggestion that this money could be used to "The proceeds could go to maintain and expand bandwidth." is patently ridiculous since the government doesn't provide bandwidth, private companies do. The next issue is just how would you even implment this? Most of the spam that our servers process comes from places that US can't tax, and I imagine that if this was implemented, then the remaining spam would quickly move to places that aren't known for cooperating with US courts & extradition. There is a reason that Sharman Networks (the folks who own Kazaa) are incorporated
in Vanuatu
The only thing that we can do that isn't a band aid or a un-enforcable law is look at how to rewrite the SMTP protocol, right now it is far too easy (by design) to send email from anywhere to anywhere without any accountability. We need a system that allows for servers to positively identified (something similar to a secure cert, not that I want to hand more money to Verisign but...) Then its up to the individual admin to decide what to do with email from a un-certified server; accept it, rate limit it, tag it, or deny it. Now no one _wants_ to rewrite all of the MTA's in the world, but at least this gives a way for non-compliant servers to get mail processed until everyone has gotten their's updated.

I'm not the AC that posted, but here's the article the AC referred to. McBride is quoted as saying that he won't specify which code was copied so the Linux community can't launder the code and somehow erase the evidence ?!?!?

Some Msft genie-ass simply plagurized This

See http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-999584.html".

Net attack crushes SCO website from news.com

SCO's refusal to divulge which code is tainted is part of their ploy. On CNet, SCO's CEO said that "the Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go." (story)

But this is silly. While the community could remove UnixWare code if it exists, old copies of the software would still contain it. The evidence would still exist for the case against IBM; it wouldn't disappear.

So SCO's goal is probably to secure a legal resolution as soon after the code is divulged as is possible. That way if SCO succeeds, though the community will remove and/or replace the tainted code, it won't happen quickly enough to avoid a few months of licensing hell for distributors like RedHat, SuSe and Fill-In-Your-Favorite-Distro-Here. As long as the old code exists, those companies won't be able to allow free downloads. And they won't even be able to put their old distros online for download - and never will, since the old distros will contain the tainted code.

If it comes to pass, this licensing will be very disruptive to the GNU/Linux community.

Of course, no one else is going to see SCO's code until at least the discovery phase of a lawsuit gets under way, so it'll be a while before we have any public facts about this.

but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?

On this planet the recording industry is pretty well known for being
greedy. I feel they have been ripping me off for years. When CD's came out they cost twice what an LP or Cassette did. They said that was because they had to build new plants to produce CD's and as soon as they were built and the quantities went up the prices would come down. Well maybe I blinked and missed it, but I never saw a major reduction and I think $18.99 for a single album is outrageous. I refuse to pay that much for a CD. I usually wait and try to find it in the cut-out or used bins.

A few years ago I was involved in a business that sold used CD's and we did some new CD's. From the distributor we could buy new releases for around $12 and super savers were around $10. I am guessing that the distributor only made a dollar or two so that means that the record company was getting $8-$10 per unit. From having checked into producing a CD I could have one made with quantites of 1000 for less than 2$. Therefore I would bet that they can produce the CD's for less than $1 for quantites > 10,000. So lets say they make $8 per cd. To me that's a pretty good profit margin.

I'm also under the impression that they rip the (non-superstar)
artists off.

Bottom Line: I'm not holding my breath waiting for a little savings on production costs to be passed back to me.

Actually SCO claims their code has been copied verbatim and used in Linux. See here.

That there is the SCO reply saying that they have hired consultants and found major code duplications between UnixWare and Linux, although they will not release the information about what parts of code they are talking about that has been duplicated. Article also quotes SCO's Darl McBride:

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting."

I hope they are bluffing, or IBM will just buy SCO out and be done with it.

Has anyone else seen the comments McBride has been making lately? Here's some choice quotes from news.com.com.com.com's unbiased and uninflammatory article, "Code Red for open source?":

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview.

Please note that he has refused to release examples of this.

In addition, he said, "We're finding code that looks likes it's been obfuscated to make it look like it wasn't UnixWare code--but it was."

Please note that he has also refused to release examples of this, too.

"The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."

Yeah, that's a great excuse to not actually give any evidence of the accusations you're making - tell people that 'the Linux community' will try and sanitize every existing copy of the source code to all the versions of the kernel containing this supposed SCO source - which, he says, has been in the kernel for 'several years'! Perhaps he missed the bit where his lawyers briefed him on the GPL and how it lets anybody have a copy of the source code - including SCO itself! Is he really suggesting that SCO lacks the ability to keep a copy of all currently extant versions of the Linux kernel to use as evidence? F'chrissakes, the md5 checksums of Linus's kernels are public knowledge - if anybody tried to 'sanitize' a particular version, it'd be ridiculously easy to prove that it'd been changed since its original release.

"This is not about 10 lines of code, it's about 20 years of extremely valuable intellectual property we're trying to protect...Am I supposed to lie down and not say anything about it?" McBride said. "There's a certain point here where you stand up for what's right and let the chips fall where they will."

Gotta love that last line... McBride wouldn't know "what's right" if it came up and bit his ass.

I can't even begin to express my disgust for a company that insults, intimidates and sues the very people who have made it possible for SCO to distribute their own version of Linux. Crawl away and disappear, McBride - you're a liar and you know it.

Here is another CNet article on what SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride thinks on this issue. From the article,

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview

Interesting... eh? :)

In fact, SCO alleges that "Lines from Unix's source code have been copied into the heart of Linux, sometimes exactly and sometimes in a modified form designed to disguise their origin". Link

McBride refused to detail which specific code had been copied but said there were several instances--"some of them go back several years, and others are recent"--and said the copying was "not minor." SCO, however, won't publish what it's found.

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting," McBride said. "The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go."

Though the article linked above states that there is not SCO code in the linux kernel, this article contains the following quote:"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code,"...So which is it?

The RIAA paid $18,000 for the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to travel to Taiwan and Thailand

Now you know what they needed those students' money for.

From the article:
"...said Howard Ende, a Drinker Biddle, and Reath attorney representing..."

How do legal firms wind up with names this stupid? There is the oft-mentioned Dewey, Cheatham and Howe but maybe in this case they should have gone for Bendham, Ohver and Quick.

Besides, in my book if your last name is "Biddle," you're automatically an asshole.

Link to Story

Uhhh... WRONG. WRONG WRONG