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I get why people are disturbed by assassinations and spying. What I don't get is why there is such a big deal made about the fact that it is being done by drones. What does it matter if the pilot is physically in the airplane or on the ground watching a video feed from a drone?

Drones are the most effective weapon the US has for reconnoitering al-Qaeda's operations and killing their members, and the fact that the aircraft are remotely controlled means that al-Qaeda cannot kill any Americans by shooting them down. This is what it's all about. The fearmongering about "drones" is an al-Qaeda psychological operation to discourage the use of weapons that work very well against them, following previous psyops like "every one of us was tortured" after several of them were, claiming the innocence of Aafia Siddiqui (who they have since claimed as one of their own) and Tarek Mehenna, claiming that bombers caught by the FBI were entrapped, claiming to be opposed to US imperialism and occupation rather than seeking to conquer the world, claiming that the fight against al-Qaeda is a war against Islam, and (way back in 1990) claiming that the Iraq war against Kuwait and other inter-Arab conflicts are due to the failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in a way that favours the Arabs, whose policy then as now was for no negotiations and no peace until all of the land is Arab and of the Jews are dead. The suckers for this propaganda generally fall into the categories of being so desperate to find peace that they would give their enemies anything that they claim to want at the moment, and being so opposed to their own government or society that they are gullible enough to believe anything that makes their government or society look bad.

Anybody who wishes to disagree should first come up with a valid reason to oppose the existence of human-operated remote-controlled aircraft that follow the exact same rules of engagement as piloted aircraft, in a world of cruise missiles and ballistic artillery.

Personally, I think video game modding is fine, but fanfiction should probably have its own special corner of Hell. The exception being Self Extraction, of course, which is funny as all hell.

Let's just hope that DreamMaker's Inc. never gets a hold of you...

http://indiemadnesse.sandwich.net/extract/extract. html

You'll get what I'm talking about if you read that.

My favourite computer nightmare happened as I was giving a one-on-one "Introduction to Computers" class at a local "Golden Agers Club", ie. a community centre where retired people go to hang out, play shuffleboard, etc. They had just invested in a computer and high-speed net access so they had me come in and give classes. One lady came in all keen, proud that she had prepared herself beforehand and gone out to buy a floppy disk on which to save all her data from the class. She took it out and I began to explain how to find the floppy drive from the desktop, etc. Suddenly I heard this deathly "SNAP". My gaze turned to the small strip of metal in her hand which had once been attached to the floppy disk. She had ripped off the floppy's sliding door, apparently thinking it was some sort of removable tab... Let's just say the lesson went downhill from there.

Dan
http://pizza.sandwich.net/

This reminds me of an anime I've been watching recently. Normally I'm not too big on anime, but my brother was nagging me to check out this new show called 'Planetes' that's currently being fansubbed, so I did, and was pleasantly surprised. It's set in the near future and revolves around a crew of debris collectors who live and work in orbit around Earth. The idea being that in the future, space industry and space resources are so important, and the spaceships needed so prevalent that any small ammount of debris has a very high probability of strking into one of the many vessels in orbit around Earth and cause immense damage. Episode #3 centers around a space casket sent off ~50 years ago that couldn't escape Earth's gravity and had returned.

If you're interested, ed2k links here (if you sing up for an account), bittorrent links here (no signup, probably faster). I'd recommend these guys as far as fansubs go.

My favorite part about sci-fi is when characters are presented in a semi-fantastic/futuristic world where it's just taken for granted that their universe is as such, without making a big deal about it. The focal point has thus far been on the characters, while the world they live in has been mostly taken for granted, so the character development has been quite nice. In addition to that, I like how the series has thus far avoided all of the horrible anime cliches I've become so desensitized to.

No kidding. I was nearly pulling my hair out when I was trying to get things working under both X11 and DirectX, and had all sorts of messy implementation layers and whatnot, and the ugliness of it all still makes me physically cringe.

Then I tried SDL out, and I think the first words out of my mouth were "SOMEONE GOT IT RIGHT!" Had the whole layer ported to SDL in about 30-40 minutes and it worked like a charm. My only qualms now really only deal with poor file i/o (no directory support) and lack of decent WM functions.

Rereading that makes it sound like a religious experience, or a really horrible advertisement. May have been. ;)

The main complaint I hear about a lack of a DirectX equivalent is that sound has quite some ways to go, and there are no rendering functions for SDL. Audio is looking more and more like OpenAL will be the way to go, and if I ever finish my current work I'll probably try to work on rectifying the renderlib. (Like I'll ever get around to that. Heh.)

I doubt Maelstrom was all that difficult. But porting any game really has more or less the same problems, and it also depends on how the game is written.

The main detail when porting any game is to make sure anything that is system specific; that is, input/output code, is heavily abstracted. If abstraction layers already exist, it is fairly easy to add in new code. If they don't, then it's still not all that difficult to split out the code and rewrite it.

Descent didn't have proper abstraction, mainly since the code was a mess. It is still not a terrible lot of work to go through abstraction, because most of it is just mad grepping and replacing.

Other problems include endianness (usually not hard to compensate for; just stuff some macros or defines to byteswap things on load), and word size. And let's not forget depending on large protocols, like D3D, that don't exist in other operating systems.

On the whole, though, no, it would not be more work to start over than it would have been to port. Writing a game is a LOT harder than rewriting graphics and interface code. I should know.

- aoiushi, #sdl

yes, i'm an E fanatic and all the time spent staring at raster's screenshots must have warped my mind, so i blame him ;)

here's my prompt:

PS1="\[\e[1;34m\]\332\304\304|\T|\304\304\277\n\ 30 0\304\304|hi \u|\304\304\331 \w \$ \[\e[1;37m\]"

btw, for a good ansi font, try smoothansi ('s what i'm using) and a nice tutorial on how to begin building incredibly interesting and not all that useful prompts, check out keebler's page on it:

http://knuckle.sandwich.net/ansi.html


-dk

One politician who deserves to be recognized is Russ Feingold, the idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin. Best known for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (and one of the few politicians to refuse PAC money in a campaign for national office), Feingold has also long been one of the few tech-savvy people in a notoriously over-age, anti-tech government body. His finest hour in this regard was the Leahy-Feingold bill to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which was left to the courts to litigate; but he's often spoken out on issues near and dear to the EFF, with support for encryption freedoms and online privacy.

The only Senator who really outstrips him in this area is Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who takes the lead on more tech issues (Feingold often being a co-sponsor), especially since Feingold has put so much effort into the campaign finance issue.

But especially in those early days around 1995, when hardly anyone really knew what the internet was, Feingold said on the Senate floor,

Guaranteeing the Internet is free of speech restrictions, other than the statutory restrictions on obscenity and pornography which already exist, should be of concern to all Americans who want to be able to freely discuss issues of importance to them regardless of whether others might view those statements as offensive or distasteful. Shifting political views about what types of speech are unsuitable should not be allowed to determine what is or is not an appropriate use of electronic communications. While the current target of our political climate is indecent speech (the so-called "seven dirty words"), a weakening of First Amendment protections could lead to the censorship of other crucial types of speech, including religious expression and political dissent. I believe the censorship of the Internet is a perilous road for the Congress to walk down. It sets a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections and it is unclear where that road will end.

Very impressive. Remember, this was nineteen-ninety-five, TIME magazine was running cover stories suggesting the internet was some sinister force creeping into our homes, and most people still had to have the word explained to them. In those days, it was difficult to find anyone who would stand up for the rights of internet users, who were seen as a fringe group of suspicious characters, hackers, pornographers, terrorists and worse -- rather than today's view that the internet is a basic utility to be enjoyed by all citizens. Fortunately, shortly after this I attended a Rotary Club meeting where he spoke (we are from the same home town), and in the Q&A time I stood up and let him know that a lot of people online considered him a hero.
----
lake effect weblog

It's a buffering layer with access to acceleration when necessary. There are other libraries that assist it for the actual, well, game stuff.

SDL pretty much does all this:

• Handles the video buffer, as well as GL contexts
• Image blitting, with alpha (this does not include loading/saving)
• Keyboard, mouse, and joystick input
• A threaded audio buffer ('pull' model)
• Limited CD access
• Timers
• File i/o handlers
• Accelerates any of the above when applicable.
• Probably a few I've forgotten.

This really isn't a game development library by itself: There are no image loaders, nor are there any image rotation/flip code, nor are there.. well, alot of things you'd need for a 2D game. There are other, supplemental libraries for this:

• SDL_image - A wide assortment of image loaders. Nothing to save with, though.
• SDL_mixer - Libmikmod, smpeg, ogg vorbis, and timidity. In other words, plays every sound file known to man, links into the audio buffer.
• SDL_net - Portable networking library (haven't tested it myself)

There are also a few rendering and UI libraries in the works. There may even be a few finished, I'm really not sure. But, if you're going to use SDL for game development, don't expect it to do _everything._

But if you're developing one, it's probably better to get your hands dirty and learn how to do the rendering stuff yourself anyway. It's not really all that hard: I've got a bunch in mine. Digging out Abrash's book, which was recently posted here, should help with some of the other renderers (polygonal, bresenham, etc.) that are fairly interesting.

He's still around a bit. I make it a habit of looking up old Renaissance folkses from time to time since I'm writing a Z66 clone that'll probably never get finished.

Anyway, Tran aka Thomas Pytel's been kind of staying away from the public eye as code goes. I suppose the slow death of the demo scene got to him... Heh. Last thing I managed to dig up was that he did art for a 1998 game that looks an awful lot like souped up Z66: (Still need to try it myself) Axia

Finding any more information is pretty difficult. Web searches tend to come up with bajillions of links to their pmode/w dos extender, along with "We use this!" from other demo groups or whatnot. Most likely thing was him listed as a runner in the cherry festival in '98. (Number 669, of course. I think that's just coincidence and probably isn't him.)

As far as the rest of Renaissance goes CC Catch is the only other one I managed to dig up something on. (Some of his old mods can be found on Mod Archive. One even has his email address in the comments!) There's been a track of his called 'Ephemeral Wanderer'(I think?) that's been floating around.

I have some very strong opinions about this. I used to sell Web hosting and UNIX shell accounts on my site, Sandwich.Net. We were doing very well for a while (we even ran some banner ads on Slashdot), but we shut down commercial operations after a very large loss brought on by credit card fraud.

Apparently, we were very popular with the "script kiddie" community. About 90% of credit card orders that we received turned out to be fraudulent (immediately or eventually) - not from credit cards that had been physically stolen, but from compromised credit card numbers and account information. For some reason, almost 75% of those fraudulent orders were either using Malaysian cards or came from Malaysian dial-up accounts.

For Internet ordering, most merchants use AVS, the Address Verification System, for fraud screening. I understand that there are some other systems available now. With AVS - and even with most new systems that I've seen hyped - if your personal information is compromised along with the card number (which is very common), the system is completely useless. AVS doesn't work with credit cards from outside the U.S. or Canada anyway.

If I had required that users fax me a copy of their credit card and picture ID, I suspect that I could have prevented very nearly all of the credit card fraud that happened. As it was, our merchant service provider terminated our merchant account for excessive chargebacks, and charged us a certain amount per chargeback, which added up to a large loss. It would have helped had the provider actually provided us with anything other than AVS for fraud screening, or with decent customer service or advice. A system like that suggested in the article, where assurance is traded among merchants, sounds good, but I agree that it raises some major privacy concerns.

Banks and merchant service providers don't seem to care very much about this. After I realized what was going on (far too late to stop most of the chargebacks), I ended up denying most international orders, and calling banks in North America to verify the charges. Most of them were very unhelpful - I now know which banks I never want to get a credit card from...

I could keep going on about this for several pages. :) Feel free to e-mail me if you're interested in more details. (I'd be happy to discuss the merchant service provider and credit card companies involved.) I hope this message made at least some amount of sense.

Also, regarding two other comments:

More financial penalties for high-chargeback merchants? That seems unhelpful, considering that in most cases (not all, admittedly), it isn't the merchant at fault. Additional fraud screening and actual help for confused merchants would probably more effectively prevent fraud. Penalties certainly encourage merchants to take action against fraud, but it's very difficult to find out how to do so.

The extra digits on the back of Visa/MC cards seem fairly useless to me, as if a Web site that asked for them is compromised, you're no better off than with a "normal" card.

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.

The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.

My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.

- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)

(begin rant)

I am not in a good mood right now.

I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.

The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.

Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).

Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.

Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.

In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.

To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.

This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.