Slashback: Disputes, Clones, Audio

Slashback this fine 23:59 GMT brings you a response to MS GPL FUD, an update on Lessig's challenge, a followup question regarding domain disputes, a reminder that clone claims aren't new, and more. Read on for the details.

Needed: One referee. Quixotic1 writes "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"

I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.

Store in the ammunition box. leonbrooks writes "Recently, images from a presentation by Microsoft Belgium were published on the web. The presentation made some startling (for Microsoft) concessions to Open Source, then set about FUDding the GPL into the ground. I whacked together a point-by-point answer to the anti-GPL FUD. Happy linking ..."

Tithe 10 percent. Luke Francl writes "Inspired by Lawrence Lessig's OSCON remarks, Lessig's Challenge is a way for people concerned by the attempts by the entertainment industry to close off the net to fight back. The challenge is to spend more on those who fight for the open network than you do on its enemies. Since it appeared on Slashdot last month, 10 people have joined me and we've raised over $2300 for good causes (organizations like the EFF, the ACLU, the FSF, along with free software/open source programmers and online artists). And that's just the ones I know about! Cory Doctorow wrote to tell me that many people were inspired by the challenge to join the EFF. ... Check out the list of suggested recipients."

Like obsidian, and coal, and dirt ... salimfadhley writes "Today BBC Radio 4 began serialising Phillip Pullman's popular "Dark Materials" trilogy. The beeb will be broadcasting one episode per week, with a RA stream of the latest episode that can be found on the promotional site. You can find "The Golden Compass" (called "Northern Lights" in Europe) on the website now. This stream will be replaced with episode 2 next Saturday.

The Dark Materials series was originally intended as children's fiction, however owing to excellent storytelling and a significantly darker theme than Harry Potter, has done rather well in U.S. and UK adult market.

The central premise of the series is that God is evil, a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence. Unsurprisingly this theme has upset fundamentalist Christians."

Unfamiliar? Read the Slashdot review of the trilogy.

The clones I meet are mostly in pairs. PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that the Raelian clone claim echoes a hoax of 25 years ago. And while we have better technology now for testing the claim quickly, there is still room for deception, and some people don't trust the science (and pseudoscience) reporter the Raelians appointed to test their claim."

Comments

The more the entertainment industry fights this...

[intermodal]

the more obvious it will become to the courts that the Internet is what it is...a large TCP/IP network. Hopefully, this will happen before they pass so many anti-networking laws that there's no point in trying to preserve the present Internet anymore.

blizzard job

[skydude_20]

something else I figure is worth posting in Slaskback. But anyways, holy crap, who else saw the banner ad on slashdot for the opening of unix sys. admin. at Blizzard? I wonder who in their HR department gets a bonus for thinking of posting here, nearly guaranteeing getting the best possible applicant.

Gnostic Heresey

[Planesdragon]

The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey (where new age "gnosticism" comes from, actually.)

In the early days of Christianity, there were three major sects--the Christians, the Jews, and the Gnostics. The Jews were, well, jewish folk who lived as jews but thought that Jesus was the Messiah (sorta like "Jews for Jesus.") The Christians were the to-the-lions folks we all know and love, and the Gnostics--well, the gnostics are why the strong central church formed, and why the Inquisition was so harsh.

The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:

There was a God, and Jesus Christ was his living son--but God_the_Creator is not God-the-burning-bush-that-spoke-to-moses. Sometime after creation, a spirit called the Demiurge usurped control over creation, lied to the jews, and pretty much acted the way Christians might imagine "Satan" acting.

The Demiurge created flesh, and so flesh is flawed, and all of humanity is doomed to damnation, save for the accidental banishment from heaven of the goddess/archangel Sophia, who apparantly had no small part in Jesus Christ showing up and mascarading as a person for so many years.

The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized. It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.

Media a semi-willing participant in clone fraud

[GuyMannDude]

I'm not sure what frustrates me more: the fact that the media has been hyping the Raelians' claim of a human clone without any evidence whatsoever, or the fact that the media even seems to realize that they're being silly reporting this BUT DO IT ANYHOW! If the media had any self-respect, they would have learned from the previous hoax and not be covering this new Raelian claim so much. However, they seem perfectly content to give this UFO cult a world stage to prance around on. It's almost as though the media is a semi-willing participant in this (what I assume will be a) clone fraud. Oh sure, they claim they're just reporting "important news". But let's face it: it's really just a bunch of UFO nuts who have made an incredible claim without any evidence whatsoever. This is news? I think the media is just happy to cover this because they know they can milk this for awhile regardless of whether the story is true or not. So sad that our media is willing to whore themselves like this just to entertain the masses.

GMD

Re:Dark Materials

[geekoid]

So if the story advocates that there might be a God, thats bad.
If a story advocates that there is a powerfull being that is destroying peoples lives, thats good?

Here is an idea, treat them like fiction, and raise your daughter to think for herself.

Re:"Viral" GPL FUD.

[Planesdragon]

Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.

Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL.

Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.

Now, lets move to something else. Lets say that the government takes Nvidia to court for monopolizing the temporal card market with the amazing 4D standard library, SLIDE, which everyone uses for 4D images. Now, let's say that the FSF weighs in on this case, and gets SLIDE GPL'd. All of a sudden, anyone wanting to use SLIDE has no choice but to use the GPL, or an effectively identical license.

The GPL's "viral" nature propagates through the only way "code flesh" is ever exchanged--through re-use of components. The FSF has set up a "free or nothing" proposition with the GPL--which understandibly makes MS rather unfriendly towards them.

Here's a thought for you: The Open Gaming License is based on the GPL, but it has one important difference: you need to keep the actual derivations open and licensed, but not the rest of the game that wasn't derived from the OGL'd game at all.

Re:blizzard job - OT

[handsomepete]

I saw that too. I doubt that the ad guarantees much out of this crowd because:
a.) Probably half of the visitors here use ad blockers (or... subscribe).
b.) A decent portion of the other half are probably underage or don't have the experience asked for by the job requirements (they really aren't requiring *that* much).
c.) Everyone that's left likes working on BNETD too much or thinks Blizzard 'jumped the shark' or something like that... OR realizes that times are tough and quitting your already not terrible job to go work for a videogame company may not be the best decision you make this year.

But I dunno. It might be worth it to see what kind of wacky race they decide to include in Warcraft 4.

Relevant link

Interesting "news"

[M.C. Hampster]

I find it said that increasingly stories labelled as "news" are obviously editorialized descriptions of recent events. Take for a few quotes from the article about the Dark Materials triology:

With the sponsorship of the Bush administration, it has laid siege not only to American medicine, politics and academe - making Adam and Eve scientific fact in Kansas - it has also declared holy war on literature, targeting books written for young people.

and

Its messages militate against every branding iron that America's Christian right would forge on its anvil.

How can this kind of stuff even pretend to be "news"? Is it just because the story is talking about Christians that it gets away with this kind of writing around here?

The MUD of FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Moicro$oft is at an unfair advantage in the muddy arena of FUD. Everyone who attempts to counter their FUD feels that it is necessary to tell the truth, hoping that truth and moral integrity will prevail over lies, dishonesty, back-stabbing, stealing, and general all aroung a$$holeness for which M$ is famous. I do not believe this is the way to do it. Their outrageous lies should be countered with lies twice as outrageous. Their dishonesty should be fought with every dishonest means at our disposition. In other words, they should be kept on the defensive, busy defending themselves against attacks as unjustified as the attacks they proffer to the clueless. I personally have no moral rules whatsoever in fighting M$. The objective is to neutralize the beast, not with whimpers, but with every unjustified, dishonest, mythomanic, immoral means possible. Only then, will we be in an equal battlezone.

Re:"Viral" GPL FUD.

[cperciva]

If you want to use a scientific analogy I suggest "dominant": If a program combines GPL'd code with other code, then the entire program is GPL'd.

No; if I combine GPL code with (for example) Apache code, the result isn't GPL -- the result is undistributable.

I'd say that the most appropriate description of GPL is "deliberately incompatible".

Co-operation - it's a piece of cake.

[jazman]

And costs a lot less. Company A wants a website - www.widgets.com, so they get a hosting company just as they do now and publish.

Now Company B argues that they have a claim on www.widgets.com. Ok, now ICANN puts their foot down and states that a domain name is NOT a trademark, and offers to host www.widgets.com for both companies, with links to their main web pages, and possibly some descriptive text indicating what the different possibilities are. Company B's $1000 can go towards relocating company A's pages onto another server.

so www.mcdonalds.com could end up as:

_macdonalds_ the burger chain
_macdonalds_ the Scottish kilt maker
_macdonalds_ the cafe in Lower Aldershot.

Each pays a minimal hosting fee to ICANN (because they're not hosting a vast amount of stuff - just a stack of hyperlinks)) and hosts their pages off somewhere else. It's always struck me as daft that someone thinks up a perfectly good name for a website, then some company comes along and stamps all over them just because there's a name clash.

Re:Co-operation - it's a piece of cake.

[Phroggy]

Now Company B argues that they have a claim on www.widgets.com. Ok, now ICANN puts their foot down and states that a domain name is NOT a trademark, and offers to host www.widgets.com for both companies, with links to their main web pages, and possibly some descriptive text indicating what the different possibilities are. Company B's $1000 can go towards relocating company A's pages onto another server.

You're assuming that the only reason for having a domain name is just to use for a web page. That's just plain silly.

I work for what was a major national DSL ISP until a month ago. Their name used to be Telocity. Then they were bought out and renamed to DirecTV Broadband. Guess what domain names they currently use? telocity.com, telocity.net, tlct.net, directvdsl.com, directvinternet.com, directvbroadband.net, and a handful of others, each with a different purpose. Why didn't they simply stop using the first three? Because making sure nothing was using those domains anymore would cost a huge amount of time and money, and since they'd probably miss a few things here and there, a lot of things would break.

I don't really know how many things would break if they suddenly lost the tlct.net domain. I'm sure they could recover pretty quickly if they just made sure everything on the network was using their own DNS servers to resolve that domain. Sure, www.tlct.net is just a redirect that nobody uses, but there are plenty of other hostnames on that domain!

Re:Co-operation - it's a piece of cake.

[jazman]

So base stuff on unchangeable identifiers. We already have these - they're called IP addresses. Design with co-operation in mind, rather than lawsuits. Remember that a name is a shortcut to an IP address - your website is not telocity.com but 216.227.62.81 (according to "ping telocity.com"). Why is an ISP using a TLD that isn't .net? This kind of practice needs to be stamped out as it is part of the problem. You guys are *not* telocity.com - you are commercial, sure, but you are an ISP and you have your own TLD available, namely .net.

The namespace is limited so one of two things needs to happen. (1) the namespace is expanded until it is no longer limited (so you could be telocity.(state).net.us (assuming you're Yanks). Now you are protected by state laws that presumably exclude another ISP starting up in that state with the name Telocity, but wouldn't prevent a shoe shop called Telocity having a domain telocity.(same_state).co.us (again flawed, as the "co" MLD is limited but if the laws are taken into account the MLD (? medium level, as opposed to top level) can be split up accordingly.) (2) You have to share. Play nicely, etc. If you want to be known as telocity.com, that's fine until someone else wants to be known as telocity.com. You have no more (or less) right (or left (oops, too much Life of Brian)) to that name than the aforementioned shoeshop. You want to be phroggy@telocity.com? Fine, until someone at the shoeshop also wants that name. Then the options are (1) first come first served, which is a little unfair if the shoeshop can prove it predates you; (2) neither of you gets it (3) both of you get it, but for (3) to work you will need an expansion of the namespace. phroggy.shoes@telocity.com and phroggy.isp@telocity.com is one of many possibilities. phroggy@telocity.(state).us.net is another, and the other phroggy would be phroggy@telocity.(same_state).(MLD appropriate to shoe shops).us.

So you now argue that your business will break. But it was your decision to build your business on a flawed model, and when that flawed model is fixed, your business will also need fixing. I'm sure there were lots of corporate noses put out of joint when slavery was abolished, when cockfighting was banned etc; you can bet "what about the jobs that will be lost?" isn't a new argument. So build your business on an unbreakable model (no such thing, but some models are more sturdy models than others). Use globally unique identifiers. telocity.(state).us.net is one such ID if you must use names. IP addresses are others. Secondly allow for the name you choose to vary. If you want to be phroggy@telocity.com, be prepared for that to change when someone else wants to be known by the same ID. There is no way four billion people can comfortably share a namespace that is only 20 characters long, particularly if those names are meant to be meaningful.

What we need are two changes of mindset. First adherence to the rules needs enforcing one way or another. Why should an ISP known as Telocity be granted the name telocity.com, when telocity.net is perfectly ok, and uses a TLD directly intended for ISPs? This is ICANN's fault, really, just handing out domain names willy-nilly without any validation. Secondly the lawsuit mentality needs dropping in favour of the co-operation mentality. These problems can be solved if we work together. IMO all problems we have can be solved if we work together - poverty, famine, internet name clashes etc.

Re:Regarding the domain name

[Anonymous Coward]

"You have no moral claim to the domain name."

I agree 100%, and i'd go a step further. You have no right to attempt to bully this person out of their name. They reg'd it first.. it belongs to them. As long as the guy is not using it to impersonate your company then leave him alone.

What gives you the right to decide that because you like a name that nobody else in the world can share it?

I use the handle 'Phreakazoid' and while i thought the spelling of it was at least original, checking with sites like hotmail i've found that there are others that use the same. But, it doesnt matter. It does not detract from me in any way. I am not going to contact them and tell them that since it is my chosen name they must stop using it or i'll sick lawyers on them. (not that i'd have and legal grounds, but its the thought that counts here)

I'm not king of the world, and neither are you. SO maybe we should back off on the Cease and Desist letters and learn to share.

Phreakazoid

Re: "Viral" GPL FUD.

[Black Parrot]

> Neither of your suggestions work.

Sure they do.

> "Recursive" would mean that the GPL is explained in terms of the GPL.

"Recursive" has uses other than recursive definitions. In this case "recursive" describes the operation of the GPL. The base cases are software that is written from scratch but placed under the GPL anyway.

(OK, now that I think on it perhaps I should say "inductive" rather than "recursive", because the GPL, like induction, starts at some base case and goes on forever from there, whereas recursion starts at some arbitrary point and works toward a base case. nit = picked)

> Transitivity is a property of relations as in: "if a is related to b and b is related to c then a is related to c". Since the GPL is not a relation it cannot be transitive.

No, the GPL isn't a relation, but the transitive property is in fact a property of GPL'd code (barring license violations). Substitute "derived from" for your "related to" in your example, and you'll see why. (Notice that "derived from" is a relation.)

More to the point, "viral" is not a property of GPL'd code -- at least not by virtue of being GPL'd.

Re:I am going to get slammed, BUT...

[Black Parrot]

> The GPL has some serious issues. While Linux has been progressing nicely and people have been making money, who is paying the developer?

Why is that supposed to be a GPL issue? The GPL says nothing about who pays the producers.

> Basically Open Source promotes takers and not givers.

Then where are all those gigabytes of GPL'd code coming from?

> Without a base investment long term OSS will have issues.....

Then Microsoft seems to be unduly worried.

are they infringing your trademark?

[Dr. Awktagon]

A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute.

People like you worry me. You didn't say they had any kind of a web site, only that they registered the domain.

I hope you meant that "they had a web site up that might confuse our customers" or "we have a famous mark and they are diluting it" or something like that. Not just that your trademark is stored on some hard drive at the domain registrar database and you really would like it for yourself.

I have a couple domains with short non-word names that I registered many years ago. For a while I had a stupid "hello, here are links to my friends' home page" kind of thing, but decided I would just use them for email, which I do.

And I occasionally wonder if some low-life that wants the name is going sue me (or even worst, arbitrate me) just because he wants the domain, and not because I'm actually affecting his business. In court that would be easy to win, but in arbitration I would probably lose.

Heck, that low-life might be YOU (though I doubt it since my contact info is up-to-date and I haven't seen any messages about them).

Please, register your domain in .biz or something for now and don't sue this guy unless he is actually *infringing on your trademark* or he bought the domain *in bad faith*. I don't know how generic the term in question is, but if it's something generic like "ProComputers.com", I doubt it's bad faith.

Wrinkle In Time: shot by both sides...

[MsGeek]

Actually Madeleine L'Engle's most important work, "A Wrinkle In Time" has been under fire both from those who are uncomfortable with anything that smacks of Christianity and from the more fanatic fringe of Christianity.

Really, whatever Christianity there is in that book is of a more Unitarian-Universalist bent...not only Jesus is cited as a fighter against The Shadow, but Gandhi and Buddha too. Kindly old ladies who befriend Margaret and are identified as witches doesn't help matters either. And various alien creatures for good measure.

It was one of my favorite books in childhood. Space travel, mysticism, a big gross brain running a planet...cool stuff for someone whose parents wanted to cram Nancy Drew down her throat.

That book would make a great movie...I'd love to see one of the big Anime houses like Ghibli or Gainax or the people who did Escaflowne tackle it. Actually it wouldn't be a bad bit of material for Brad Bird (director of "Iron Giant") at Pixar. Imagine an animated Ixchel! That would be great!

Re:The more the entertainment industry fights this

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Ok, I'll summarize. We build a new global (ok, not quite that scale, but still could be big) network. We do things right, and we protect its users. We can get rid of some of the cruft, the things that should be gone from the net, but still hand around. We keep the things that work. How?

#1 We need wires, cables, fibers. Since these cost money, and even if they didn't, they're easy to trace, I propose another option. We use VPN tunnels. The flavor isn't so important, ipsec, ptpp, OpenVPN... even all of them together.

#2 Users don't want to be second class citizens. That means a static IP. That means no restrictions on what services they can offer, and none on the services they might want to use... they want to be true peers. The 10.x.x.x offers 16 million IPs, less some overhead. More than enough room for growth, especially if we start *real* planning for IPv6 migration(instead of paying lip service).

#3 Users want privacy, they want protection. This one was tough... and I can't honestly say I've solved it. But I've come damn close, and I continue to make progress. Since it is impossible to communicate with someone without knowing their identity, and thusly holding them vulnerable. In a routed enviroment though, this changes just *slightly*.

If you communicate with only 3 hosts directly, can you know the identity of other hosts? Well, you could force one of those 3 administrators (or the feds could, anyway) to reveal identities.

Unless, those 3 administrators were in foreign countries. And if they in turn, only knew the identities of 2 other individuals besides yourself? What if we trained all new "recruits" to never reveal the identity of their 3 partners, even to close buddies/family/lovers?

Encrypted packet tunnels, with endpoints outside of any single goverment's jurisdiction. Practical, if not perfect, anonymity.

Oh, and free domain names. A network where projects like bnetd wouldn't have any troubles. A way to weed out the AOLers, and all the riffraff. Email accounts where you wouldn't get any spam.

Guys, help me figure this out... it's worth doing.

The Laywers Destroyed The Clone Tests

[Cerlyn]

Pardon me for taking the side of the enemy, but the Florida lawyer who sued to have a state-appointted guardian watch the child completely destroyed any chance of us seeing if the child was a real clone, much less seeing if the *second* alleged clone child (remember that one?) in the Netherlands is real. If said lawyer does not take his argument to completion, and convinces the court to force CloneAid to identify the child and mother, there is no way in hell they will, as the bonds between child (even a clone) and mother are quite strong and not something to underestimate or toy with.

Granted, this was a predictable move, and gives the Raelians a perfectly good excuse not to have the child DNA tested unless the court forces them to. But we only saw that once in the media, and they'll be certain *never* to say that again </sarcasm>.

Before you shell out any money to EFF or ACLU...

[knorthern knight]

...go to their websites, and search on the keyword "Hamidi". Ken Hamidi is a former Intel employee who claims to have a grievance against Intel. If he put up an "Intel-sucks" website, and Intel tried to shut him down, I'd be on his side. That's not what's happening.

Hamidi claims some "electronic pamphleteering right" to spew his grievances to Intel's current employees via Intel's email system. He sent 6 spams, between 8,000 to 35,000 employees each time before Intel got an injunction against him.

EFF supports him and the ACLU supports him.

OK, so one nutcase gets to harass a "bigcorp" that you don't like, so what. Now imagine every political, religious, etc, nutcase in the country claiming the *RIGHT* to spam everybody at your ISP with their "important message".

It's about consent not content. I don't care if someone is spamming porn, or religion to save my soul, or a "sale" to save a few bucks, or a political party to save my country. If the nutcases get a "right" to bombard you with their garbage, you can kiss email as we know it goodbye.