So let me get this straight. Because there are websites that are doing shady stuff with the text I select and such, you want me to install a Firefox Extension that theoretically won't do anything shady with my stuff, even though its license consists of
Source code license for Ghostery 2.0.2 Copyright Ghostery, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And there's no source available.
Why should we trust the people behind Ghostery any more than a random website out there? If you're writing software to protect privacy and prevent data snooping, why make people trust more closed-source software?
In the submit story page, your proposed headline would look...
Yeah, but one person looks at the headline on the Submit Story page. Then an editor pokes it with a stick. All the rest of Slashdot reads it on the front page.
I always figured that the editors ruthlessly edit the headlines, as is their Cowboy-Neal-granted right. Maybe they don't even bother to do that anymore...
Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
Many mainstream browsers are speedy, or at least speedy enough, but Firefox does offer a unique mix of features:
Ogg Theora/Vorbis: Currently supported by Firefox, Chrome, Opera FOSS: Firefox, Chrome (just Chromium?) Cross-Platform on Win, Mac, GNU/Linux: Firefox, Chrome (maybe just beta?), Opera
For me, both Firefox and Chrom{e|ium} look like good contenders. I've had good experiences with Mozilla products for quite some time, so I'll probably continue with Firefox.
But I noticed that your sig dedicates all of your posts to the public domain and that you are a lawyer (or at least claim to be, and on Slashdot no less, which I figure has got to be good enough for most purposes).
As a lawyer, what do you think of Creative Common's CC0? Would you consider putting your posts into the public domain by that vehicle instead of your current sig?
And just so this comment doesn't get modded to hell (one of the first 5 circles, as I think this post up to this point counts as "self-indulgent"), I can understand how your individual comments on Slashdot touch on a wide variety of different subjects and do not necessarily coalesce cleanly into a larger book or collection. As such, the potential for you to make profit off of your comments is very low. For a novelist or poet, however, there often is a large potential for commercial profit. Aside from things like documentation or technical specifications, when (if ever) would you suggest that authors release their material into the public domain?
Currently the Android can be rooted, however Google has sent Cease and Desist orders to people who not only root the phone, but include other Google apps on it. In other words, Google does not officially sanction rooting at this time. They tolerate it as long as you do not include other apps, but that is it.
To be fair, I think that Google has only gone after people who break the rules in a pretty clear and unambiguous fashion:
- Root your phone? Sure, no problem. Take your hardware + the Apache-licensed Android software on top and go to town. You can even distribute the software, as it's under a FOSS license that allows redistribution.
- Put the Google apps on top of that self-made hardware + software stack? AFAIK, that's okay too, as long as you do it yourself.
- Distribute a one-click installer for all of the above? Nope, not allowed to do that if you include Google's proprietary software products.
All in all, it seems like it's pretty obvious what's allowed and what's forbidden. Heck, it seems like you can even ask them if something is legit or not and they'll give you an honest, helpful answer instead of biting your head off like some other companies.
If you say 'Linux based' then geeks buy it and non-geeks have probably heard something positive about Linux, even if they can't tell you what it is.
So non-geeks are actually connecting stuff running "Linux" with a positive image, and geeks are happy to buy stuff that runs a Linux kernel. Sweet!
Any way you slice that, I'd call that progress.
I'm just hopeful that a lot of the people in the 'geek' category are buying the device because it runs a FaiF software stack, not just because they're all Ohhhhh, it runs Linux, Squeeeeee!.
Seriously, if you want an open phone then go look at Maemo and the n900. That's some slick shit right there -- two cameras! Crazy Sauce! -- and they even give you root. Hallelujah!
The iPhone? You actually had any aspersions at all that you weren't buying some slick Disney-fied locked-down hood-welded-shut art object? Are you missing a more than a few brain cells?
Me, I'd like an open phone, but the n900 is a little pricey so I'm trying to find a used HTC G1 for el cheapo that I can root and run Replicant on. Sure, you have to find a way to root the Android phones, but once you do I'm pretty sure that T-mobile isn't going to try to castrate the cojones of your phone by pushing an update to you. They're going to happily take your monthly, no-contract fee and then let you use your phone in relative peace.
I love it. All these iPeoples lining up to plunk down their cash for some pretty looking but pretty-much-guaranteed-to-restrict-your-ass piece of hardware. You know that they have a word for this kind of thing, right? It's called a Siren, and you need to get your crew or your mates or whoever you hang with to keep you off the special sauce that they're serving up, piping hot.
Let's just take a look at that complaint "locks US iPhone owners into using the mobile carrier." Well no shit, Sherlock, time to fire up Spotlight and search for n00b on your Mac.
How many times do us so-called "crazy Free Software folks" have to remind you that you don't get Freedom because BillyG or SteveyJ wants to give you a Christmas bonus. You get capital-F Freedom with your phone and your software when you jump down, turn around, and buy and use the phone that gives you that Freedom. You want source code? Sure, it's all here, including the build scripts so that you can verify that you're building what you want to build and running what you want to run on your phone. If you can't root that phone and hold onto root, then Just Say No.
Time and time again this happens, and every time I hope that people will get the message, but it just never seems to sink in. So hold on just a second, let me slip into these asbestos pants and then you can go ahead and overturn an Apple Cart of fanboi vitriol on me. One day...one day maybe you'll thank us.
Instead of just providing meta-commentary on the incident, it might be helpful to inject some more information about what really went down with the UN folks.
1. We were told that the banner had to be removed because of the reference to China. This was repeated on several occasions, in front of about two dozen witnesses and officials, including the UN Special Rapporteur For Human Rights, who asked that I send in a formal letter of complaint.
2. Earlier, the same officials asked us to stop circulating a small invite to the event because it contained a mention of Tibet. They even underlined it in showing it to me. Because the event was just about to start, we said that we would not be distributing any more of these invitations so it was a moot point.
3. We asked repeatedly to see any rules or regulations governing this act. They did not give us any, only referring to the "objections of a member state."
4. There were in fact many posters and banners in many of the rooms that I attended, including others in our own. The video itself shows us, at one point, taking one of the other posters we have and offering to cover up the original one. They objected to that and told us this banner must be removed.
On another matter of clarification:
The UN officials did not throw the banner on the ground. They asked us to remove it and one of our staff placed it on the ground for us to consider what to do. That's where we had the discussion. When we refused to remove it, their security guards bundled it up and took it away.
Doesn't anyone remember the oranges that had printed-on blue labels? I think that Sunkist used to do that.
I've looked all over, and found some fruit label sites like this, but haven't been able to find a picture of an orange with the printing.
I think that the ink could rub off, which is perhaps why the fruit industry abandoned that method. Interestingly, the printing looked nearly exactly like the laser imprinting, albeit in a different color and a little less crisp.
Grapefruit juice can...interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression.
and
[D]rugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis.
Before you start trying to figure out the multiplier so that you can make your pills last longer, Doctors say that
There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.
It's kind of a craps shoot:
"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice.
"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."
It's all moot anyhow: the Software Freedom Law Center never replied to my
request about the software patent thing. I suppose they still might; it's
only been a few days, but for some reason, I fully expect to never hear from
them.
Other people have covered other points, so I'm just going to talk about the SFLC. It sounds like you haven't communicated with them before, so please cut them some slack. Just yesterday Bradley Kuhn dented:
FLOSS ppls: !sflc is a charity w/ limited resources. It can take up to a week for us to answer general contact email. Pls give us a break!
Firefox will have a default same-origin restriction, so it will only load WOFF fonts from the same domain as the webpage being loaded—a restriction that puts type vendors at ease. The ability to load fonts from other domains can be enabled by a server using Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
A font in the.webfont format couldn't be trivially installed on a computer for use, so it offered some protection from casual copying.
Okay, so this mechanism allows for embedded fonts that are somewhat locked down. But what does this mean for some simple use cases?
For example, let's say that I navigate to a website on my laptop and save an html page to disk. Does that saved page include all embedded fonts?
What if I copy that page to someone else's computer -- does the page render properly on their system as well? Does it have to "phone home," so to speak, in order to render the page as correctly as possible? (I'm sensing another avenue for websites to track the distribution of documents)
Will there be pressure from type vendors to keep these fonts locked down? Is user freedom going to negatively be affected?
As others have stated in this thread, html documents should degrade gracefully, however this is very rarely put into practice. Hopefully these new embedded fonts will be used for good (or for awesome, as Strong Bad would say), and will not turn into one more easily-abused, headache-inducing web feature.
It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash...If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal...the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions
So it re-renders all of the text as a series of Flash movies. What a *great* idea.
The Wikimedia family of sites render equations as PNGs and use workarounds like the java cortado player to play Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora content in the browser, but only as a workaround until something better comes out. Now that several browsers have the tag working, you can bet that Wikipedia is going to (or already is) making that content directly accessible through standards-based methods. We gotta give Wikipedia credit for using standardized, non-proprietary methods of doing so.
I can just see the Australian patent lawyers revving their engines again. Thank goodness those MIT students did this before and have prior art so we won't see another stop-stealing-our-toy-designs lawsuit.
If they're not using an eInk display, then they should use one of those fancy new displays from Pixel Qi. From the various videos of Mary Lou Jepsen showing off their in-development screens it seems like they're really solved the problem of using displays in the sun. I mean, if you have to be out in the sun to charge it, you better be able to read books on it at the same time.
Re:The guys behind EXTJS are terrible
on
Learning Ext JS
·
· Score: 1
You don't need to assign copyright to contribute code you want to GPL.
Sure.
If I want to make some improvements to a GPLv3-licensed copy of ExtJS, then I could just make some patches, throw my name under the copyrights, and distribute them online, say on Gitorious.
What I was saying is that if you want the upstream developers (Ext, LLC.) to merge these patches into the main development trunk, I'd assume that they'd want copyright control so that they could distribute them in both the GPLv3'd version and their proprietary-licensed version. If they didn't require the copyright assignment, then they'd rapidly have a rift between the codebase of the proprietary and GPLv3 versions of the library, which would be a PITA for them.
Sure, you don't have to get your changes merged upstream, but if you don't get them merged, it's much less likely that other developers will take the time to pull down, merge-in and then test your patches after they pull down the main branch.
I assumed that this was standard practice for companies that dual-license their code GPL/proprietary. Is it common for such companies to accept GPL-only patches without copyright assignment?
Slashdot Mirror
France and Germany agree on something?
The IE threat must be greater than previously imagined. Or...something.
So let me get this straight. Because there are websites that are doing shady stuff with the text I select and such, you want me to install a Firefox Extension that theoretically won't do anything shady with my stuff, even though its license consists of
Source code license for Ghostery 2.0.2
Copyright Ghostery, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And there's no source available.
Why should we trust the people behind Ghostery any more than a random website out there? If you're writing software to protect privacy and prevent data snooping, why make people trust more closed-source software?
In the submit story page, your proposed headline would look...
Yeah, but one person looks at the headline on the Submit Story page. Then an editor pokes it with a stick. All the rest of Slashdot reads it on the front page.
I always figured that the editors ruthlessly edit the headlines, as is their Cowboy-Neal-granted right. Maybe they don't even bother to do that anymore...
Firm To Drop Database, Web Server 0-Days
The verb to drop has specific meaning w.r.t. databases. A few more words in the title would have been acceptable. How about:
Fed-up security firm to release Database & Web Server vulnerabilities publicly
Look at how much more information is conveyed in that second title. A work of beauty, it is.
On my iPhone I can set a password. If it's entered incorrectly 10 times, the device automatically wipes itself.
I take it you have no small children or friends with an impish sense of humor, do you?
Other browsers have already caught up to Firefox in speed, features, and standards support.
Many mainstream browsers are speedy, or at least speedy enough, but Firefox does offer a unique mix of features:
Ogg Theora/Vorbis: Currently supported by Firefox, Chrome, Opera
FOSS: Firefox, Chrome (just Chromium?)
Cross-Platform on Win, Mac, GNU/Linux: Firefox, Chrome (maybe just beta?), Opera
For me, both Firefox and Chrom{e|ium} look like good contenders. I've had good experiences with Mozilla products for quite some time, so I'll probably continue with Firefox.
But I noticed that your sig dedicates all of your posts to the public domain and that you are a lawyer (or at least claim to be, and on Slashdot no less, which I figure has got to be good enough for most purposes).
As a lawyer, what do you think of Creative Common's CC0? Would you consider putting your posts into the public domain by that vehicle instead of your current sig?
And just so this comment doesn't get modded to hell (one of the first 5 circles, as I think this post up to this point counts as "self-indulgent"), I can understand how your individual comments on Slashdot touch on a wide variety of different subjects and do not necessarily coalesce cleanly into a larger book or collection. As such, the potential for you to make profit off of your comments is very low. For a novelist or poet, however, there often is a large potential for commercial profit. Aside from things like documentation or technical specifications, when (if ever) would you suggest that authors release their material into the public domain?
Currently the Android can be rooted, however Google has sent Cease and Desist orders to people who not only root the phone, but include other Google apps on it. In other words, Google does not officially sanction rooting at this time. They tolerate it as long as you do not include other apps, but that is it.
To be fair, I think that Google has only gone after people who break the rules in a pretty clear and unambiguous fashion:
- Root your phone? Sure, no problem. Take your hardware + the Apache-licensed Android software on top and go to town. You can even distribute the software, as it's under a FOSS license that allows redistribution.
- Put the Google apps on top of that self-made hardware + software stack? AFAIK, that's okay too, as long as you do it yourself.
- Distribute a one-click installer for all of the above? Nope, not allowed to do that if you include Google's proprietary software products.
All in all, it seems like it's pretty obvious what's allowed and what's forbidden. Heck, it seems like you can even ask them if something is legit or not and they'll give you an honest, helpful answer instead of biting your head off like some other companies.
Yes, the latest version of the GPL (GPLv3) is compatible. You can now easily GPL your programs and then rock out, or whatever you want to do.
If you say 'Linux based' then geeks buy it and non-geeks have probably heard something positive about Linux, even if they can't tell you what it is.
So non-geeks are actually connecting stuff running "Linux" with a positive image, and geeks are happy to buy stuff that runs a Linux kernel. Sweet!
Any way you slice that, I'd call that progress.
I'm just hopeful that a lot of the people in the 'geek' category are buying the device because it runs a FaiF software stack, not just because they're all Ohhhhh, it runs Linux, Squeeeeee!.
Seriously, if you want an open phone then go look at Maemo and the n900. That's some slick shit right there -- two cameras! Crazy Sauce! -- and they even give you root. Hallelujah!
The iPhone? You actually had any aspersions at all that you weren't buying some slick Disney-fied locked-down hood-welded-shut art object? Are you missing a more than a few brain cells?
Me, I'd like an open phone, but the n900 is a little pricey so I'm trying to find a used HTC G1 for el cheapo that I can root and run Replicant on. Sure, you have to find a way to root the Android phones, but once you do I'm pretty sure that T-mobile isn't going to try to castrate the cojones of your phone by pushing an update to you. They're going to happily take your monthly, no-contract fee and then let you use your phone in relative peace.
I love it. All these iPeoples lining up to plunk down their cash for some pretty looking but pretty-much-guaranteed-to-restrict-your-ass piece of hardware. You know that they have a word for this kind of thing, right? It's called a Siren, and you need to get your crew or your mates or whoever you hang with to keep you off the special sauce that they're serving up, piping hot.
Let's just take a look at that complaint "locks US iPhone owners into using the mobile carrier." Well no shit, Sherlock, time to fire up Spotlight and search for n00b on your Mac.
How many times do us so-called "crazy Free Software folks" have to remind you that you don't get Freedom because BillyG or SteveyJ wants to give you a Christmas bonus. You get capital-F Freedom with your phone and your software when you jump down, turn around, and buy and use the phone that gives you that Freedom. You want source code? Sure, it's all here, including the build scripts so that you can verify that you're building what you want to build and running what you want to run on your phone. If you can't root that phone and hold onto root, then Just Say No.
Time and time again this happens, and every time I hope that people will get the message, but it just never seems to sink in. So hold on just a second, let me slip into these asbestos pants and then you can go ahead and overturn an Apple Cart of fanboi vitriol on me. One day...one day maybe you'll thank us.
Instead of just providing meta-commentary on the incident, it might be helpful to inject some more information about what really went down with the UN folks.
According to Deibert:
1. We were told that the banner had to be removed because of the reference to China. This was repeated on several occasions, in front of about two dozen witnesses and officials, including the UN Special Rapporteur For Human Rights, who asked that I send in a formal letter of complaint.
2. Earlier, the same officials asked us to stop circulating a small invite to the event because it contained a mention of Tibet. They even underlined it in showing it to me. Because the event was just about to start, we said that we would not be distributing any more of these invitations so it was a moot point.
3. We asked repeatedly to see any rules or regulations governing this act. They did not give us any, only referring to the "objections of a member state."
4. There were in fact many posters and banners in many of the rooms that I attended, including others in our own. The video itself shows us, at one point, taking one of the other posters we have and offering to cover up the original one. They objected to that and told us this banner must be removed.
On another matter of clarification:
The UN officials did not throw the banner on the ground. They asked us to remove it and one of our staff placed it on the ground for us to consider what to do. That's where we had the discussion. When we refused to remove it, their security guards bundled it up and took it away.
what kind of vulnerable kit is this anyways?
Government project....lowest bidder?
Did you happen to notice that the article title on that page was done using sIFR?
Probably not -- I'm running NoScript.
Meh, go ahead and let them. The price for the pomegranate is probably at least twice as much as the price for an apple. Their mistake, their loss.
Doesn't anyone remember the oranges that had printed-on blue labels? I think that Sunkist used to do that.
I've looked all over, and found some fruit label sites like this, but haven't been able to find a picture of an orange with the printing.
I think that the ink could rub off, which is perhaps why the fruit industry abandoned that method. Interestingly, the printing looked nearly exactly like the laser imprinting, albeit in a different color and a little less crisp.
The effect of various drugs can also be decreased or increased if you ingest grapefruit.
As the NYTimes reports,
Grapefruit juice can...interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression.
and
[D]rugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis.
Before you start trying to figure out the multiplier so that you can make your pills last longer, Doctors say that
There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.
It's kind of a craps shoot:
"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice.
"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."
It's all moot anyhow: the Software Freedom Law Center never replied to my
request about the software patent thing. I suppose they still might; it's
only been a few days, but for some reason, I fully expect to never hear from
them.
Other people have covered other points, so I'm just going to talk about the SFLC. It sounds like you haven't communicated with them before, so please cut them some slack. Just yesterday Bradley Kuhn dented:
FLOSS ppls: !sflc is a charity w/ limited resources. It can take up to a week for us to answer general contact email. Pls give us a break!
Firefox will have a default same-origin restriction, so it will only load WOFF fonts from the same domain as the webpage being loaded—a restriction that puts type vendors at ease. The ability to load fonts from other domains can be enabled by a server using Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
A font in the .webfont format couldn't be trivially installed on a computer for use, so it offered some protection from casual copying.
Okay, so this mechanism allows for embedded fonts that are somewhat locked down. But what does this mean for some simple use cases?
For example, let's say that I navigate to a website on my laptop and save an html page to disk. Does that saved page include all embedded fonts?
What if I copy that page to someone else's computer -- does the page render properly on their system as well? Does it have to "phone home," so to speak, in order to render the page as correctly as possible? (I'm sensing another avenue for websites to track the distribution of documents)
Will there be pressure from type vendors to keep these fonts locked down? Is user freedom going to negatively be affected?
As others have stated in this thread, html documents should degrade gracefully, however this is very rarely put into practice. Hopefully these new embedded fonts will be used for good (or for awesome, as Strong Bad would say), and will not turn into one more easily-abused, headache-inducing web feature.
From the article about sIFR:
It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash...If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal...the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions
So it re-renders all of the text as a series of Flash movies. What a *great* idea.
The Wikimedia family of sites render equations as PNGs and use workarounds like the java cortado player to play Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora content in the browser, but only as a workaround until something better comes out. Now that several browsers have the tag working, you can bet that Wikipedia is going to (or already is) making that content directly accessible through standards-based methods. We gotta give Wikipedia credit for using standardized, non-proprietary methods of doing so.
With all that money you've appropriated, what better way to waste^H^H^H^H^H spend it then on a tribute to Lamorisse.
I can just see the Australian patent lawyers revving their engines again. Thank goodness those MIT students did this before and have prior art so we won't see another stop-stealing-our-toy-designs lawsuit.
If they're not using an eInk display, then they should use one of those fancy new displays from Pixel Qi. From the various videos of Mary Lou Jepsen showing off their in-development screens it seems like they're really solved the problem of using displays in the sun. I mean, if you have to be out in the sun to charge it, you better be able to read books on it at the same time.
how u make that inverted p?
wait
nevermind
You don't need to assign copyright to contribute code you want to GPL.
Sure.
If I want to make some improvements to a GPLv3-licensed copy of ExtJS, then I could just make some patches, throw my name under the copyrights, and distribute them online, say on Gitorious.
What I was saying is that if you want the upstream developers (Ext, LLC.) to merge these patches into the main development trunk, I'd assume that they'd want copyright control so that they could distribute them in both the GPLv3'd version and their proprietary-licensed version. If they didn't require the copyright assignment, then they'd rapidly have a rift between the codebase of the proprietary and GPLv3 versions of the library, which would be a PITA for them.
Sure, you don't have to get your changes merged upstream, but if you don't get them merged, it's much less likely that other developers will take the time to pull down, merge-in and then test your patches after they pull down the main branch.
I assumed that this was standard practice for companies that dual-license their code GPL/proprietary. Is it common for such companies to accept GPL-only patches without copyright assignment?