I don't know where people have gotten the idea you can't rent copyrighted content. I mean, they have big-ass movie rental stores all over the place, and, yes, those place purchase perfectly normal videos, just like you or I. (Of course, they often purchase them before they go on sale to everyone else, and end up paying twice as much because of that...but to get old releases, they just order them from any reseller.) I can't really think of any logical difference between purchasing something and renting it...renting is basically the same thing as purchasing it for a bit and then selling it back at reduced price.
What you can't do is publically display movies. I.e., you cannot charge admission, you have certain seating limitations, etc. You can't buy a projector, build a big room, and run a fake movie theater with your DVDs.
But you can most certainly rent them to whoever you want at any time for any price, though. A fun gag to operate an unlicenced theater would be to learn the rules of how many are allowed before it becomes a public performance, and rent your movie and your theater for a few hours to group of people who are below that number. (Although, technically, if they violated the limitations they would be the one violating copyright...but it's frowned upon to knowingly let people violate copyright with your equipment.)
But - the 600mb ISO via FTP and the 600mb download via KaZaa use exactly the same network resources and the same network bandwidth once the traffic hits the school's gateway.
Yes, and my point was that they allow one and disallow the other. In fact, they disallow any use of a p2p network at all. That's not resource management, that is content filtering. They are blocking access to somewhere because of a perception of illegality surrounding it, which sounds good on paper, but not onces you realize they're the government and don't get to say 'You can't hang out with those people, they are probably criminals.'. Not only can the government not go around making peope out to be criminals without a trial, but it can't stop others from associating with actual criminals except under very limited circumstances.
One basic flaw in the argument you present is that you have the right to do whatever you want if you're granted access to a publicly-funded network. Anybody with even a rudimentary information assurance background will tell you that you block all ports on the firewall and then open only the ones you need. The onus is on the user to demonstrate the need - and since school networks have shared storage resources you might have a difficult time demonstrating that your need for KaZaa overrides the school's need for network security.
Network security? What the hell are you talking about? UoF is behind a NAT, and monitoring connections to a specific IP doesn't provide the least bit of security unless you presume KaZaa's servers goes around taking over people's computers. (And monitoring still doesn't make any sense. If they honestly are attacking you, you block them.)
Yes, you can demonstrate a need to share files with other folks on the school network. You'd have a pretty tough time demonstrating a need to share files off-network or that blocking KaZaa's default port prevents you from doing that since there are other methods on the school's network to share files - email, network drives, workgroups and so on.
And you don't need to be able to stand on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse protesting the government. The government still doesn't have a right to stop you.
Your library example is one of content filtering - and again, we're not filtering content here. Monitoring (or even blocking) a TCP port is not content filtering.
Read the article again. They aren't monitoring a port, they're monitoring connecting to an IP address. (Possibly you also have to connect to it on a certain port to trip the alarm, but that's not incredibly relevant.)
There is absolutely no way that can be construed as anything except 'Do not associate with this people, do not speak to these people, or we will punish you.'. It's an amazingly flagrant violation of the first amendment.
You mention "normal tools" - as a sysadmin on a government network a bandwidth cap is absolutely the last tool I'd use to prevent network abuse. I don't know anyone who's had to resort to something like that - after closing all the ports we need to we generally target offenders.
Offenders? Abusers? As in...what? People who use too much bandwidth? Why would you not want to cap these people?
If by offenders you mean people who do p2p file sharing, I just pointed out why the government cannot punish people for connecting to said networks.
I have an MSDN Universal subscription and a business need to download ISO images from Microsoft and a few other places - so a bandwidth cap doesn't work for me or for several of the people I work with.
And why do you have the right to use everyone else's bandwidth up?
Again, I agree that filtering content is illegal - but using best practices to secure a network doesn't require content filtering.
Of course not. But what they are doing is not best practices, it's trying to enforce some soft of non-existence law, one that would be unconstitutional if it actually existed.
Yes, and it's even more difficult to do software development basing your code on commercial software. In fact, it's almost completely impossible. (It has been done, for example, OS/2 included Windows emulator that was really a completely licensed version of Windows 3.1 (Possibly 3.0, I forget.), modified at a few key low-level places to use OS/2 memory calls. You could even use an existing copy of Windows 3.1 and OS/2 could patch it. But it's rare.)
Yet, interestingly enough, that's not 'anti-business'. Odd, isn't it?
And like someone else said, saying free software is anti-business is like saying free electricity is anti-business. It's conceivable free software will wreck the sell-software industry, just like free electrity would wreck the sell-electricity industry...but free electricity is something that would help every single other business. It's not anti-business at all.
If it was within the three year window, you would be able to sue yourself for not living up to the GPL, and collect damages.
Why you would do this I am not entirely sure.
Also, your customers could sue and get a refund on their software. Of course, as they didn't pay anything for it, I don't really see what that would accomplish either.
Yes, Bruce should just start randomly talking about what an employer he left years ago does, instead of staying on topic. That sounds like a good rule for a discussion forum.
No kidding. I'd like right now to alert everyone that not only will I provide source for anything I've written (an LGPL library no one's ever heard of) for 10 dollars a CD, but I'll provide pretty much any GPL software I can find on the internet for 10 dollars a CD, which includes S&H, and all sales tax. (One package a CD, please, although shipping may be reduced if you order more than one.) Software will be provided in original tarball and I'll even untar it and include it that way for no extra.
Please email me if you are interested in this amazingly stupid-to-accept offer. I'll accept paypal and checks and money orders.
Offer provided mainly as a joke, but, seriously, I'll do it just to prove I will, provided you pay me first. 40 cents for a CD and, what, at most 3 dollars shipping? (Possibly you can ship CDs through first class mail, for the price of a stamp?) The first might suck up more than 10 dollars of my time, but I doubt it.
'The GPL simply forces you to licence your work under the GPL' is technically true, although near nonsensical when compared to commercial licenses.
If it was commercial licenses, the line would go 'The commercial licences simply force you to take your work and flush it down the toilet, not only disallowing distribution of it but actually disallowing modification in the first place.'
Your line is rather akin to saying 'I don't own a car, cars can only travel 55 or so miles an hour, depending on the speed limit.' Well, yeah, but that's about 10 times as fast you can walk. Likewise, the GPL requires you to distribute your modifications under certain rules, but that's 10 times better than not allow you to distribute or even make said modifications.
That's assuming you want to make modifications, of course, but the whole thing becomes moot if you don't...you're just reselling someone else's software at that point.
Basically, you're being delibrately misleading. It doesn't matter if it's 'your work' or not...no license at all, even BSD ones, allows you to freely distribute works based on other people's work, even if 'your own' code is in it. (Although the BSD has very easy to follow rules...you just need to keep copyright notices'.) With most licenses, you have no ability whatsoever to distribute the combined work. If you go and beg the company, you *might* gain the ability to sell your combined work and pay them for every single copy you sell. But you can do the same damn thing with GPL software, so I don't see how that's a valid point.
Connecting to KaZaa is copyright infringement? Wow, you're just full of crazy claims today. I have to point out that not only is connecting to KaZaa not copyright infringement, but downloading copyrighted work from KaZaa is not actually copyright infringement on your part, either, it's copyright infringement on the part of the person sharing the files.
Not that UoF couldn't block illegal downloads if they wanted to, that would be stopping an illegal act from taking place, even though the illegal act wasn't their own student. But as UoF has no magical 'in violation of copyright' detector, though, that's a bit moot. And as UoF doesn't block anything, it's even more moot.
And if they wanted to manage their resources, they would use the normal tools used for that purposes, i.e., bandwidth caps. The fact you can download a, for example, six hundred meg ISO over FTP, and not even connect to KaZaa, which uses maybe.2/Ks for the connection, rather disproved that theory.
The reason you have to give it back is that it belongs to the owner, who it was stolen from.
But copies of copyrighted works, even illegal copies, do not originally belong to the copyright owner. You do not have to 'return' them, so as long as you purchased the copy in good faith, they can't charge you with anything or take your copy away. (Of course, the thief will have to pay the copyright holder for the copy they made and then sold. He might have to pay a good deal less if he could prove you didn't have your copy anymore...but you have no incentive to help him with this.)
Now, there are differing rules about patents, because you are violating their patent every time you use the device, so it may be possible to force you to stop using the software, which would be easiest to accomplish by taking it from you. But just because it's the 'easiest' doesn't mean the patent holder has the right to do it.
Of course, SCO doesn't have any patents, so that's a moot point.
Future prices can actually be trade secrets, but only if Best Buy would go around getting everyone who has access to them to sign an NDA first, and have the tiniest amount of physical security.
If you go around letting random people know what the prices are, you have no trade secret claims.
Other people have commented on the fact you are incorrect, but I just want to point out the fundemental stupidity of putting the pin on the card.
If someone stole your card, and had a way to verify a certain pin was correct, all they would have to do is to try all 10000 combinations, which wouldn't take more than about two seconds on a standard computer no matter what 'complicated' algorithm it required.
A 4 digit number is no security at all if it can be attacked outside the banking network. The only reason it's vaguely secure is that it takes about ten seconds to run it through the banking network from an ATM, and the ATM will lock you out if you do more than about five incorrectly, at which point you have to drive and find another ATM, which is a minimun five minutes. (At some point, if you keep failing, it's entirely possibly the network itself will lock you out, but I don't know about that.)
I said that because it was government property, no one can censor it, not that the government couldn't put restrictions on it in other ways. Government owned property would be fairly useless if they couldn't control what happened on it, that's pretty much the defination of 'ownership'.
People so far have come up with examples of the government restricting things besides speech, which it can obviously do on its own property, or examples where the speech itself was a violation of some law or another, and would have been illegal anywhere, not just government property. I would have thought that someone would have at least come up with an example of distruptive speech, which isn't as clear, but whatever. FWIW, that can be regulated also.
To recap for the people who are just dumb, the government can restrict access to its property in any way, for any legal reason. (There are illegal reasons for the government to restrict access, like on the basis of race, but that's not relevant here.) It can say certain areas are only accessable to the military, or employees of that part of the government, or Cabinet members whose names start with G.
Once it allows a certain person to access its property, it cannot then restrict what they have to say on it. In fact, it cannot restrict access based on what that person says or may say, to a certain extent.
The University of Florida is a public college, and hence run by the state of Florida, which is under the same rules as the Federal government. (In addition to being under state law, and even the laws of the Florida Department of Education, or whatever they call it.) It can choose to allow anyone to use their networks, or walk on their campus. Or they can choose to just let students on that campus, or even just students on who are in class. Hell, they can even do something as illogical as only let non-students on campus, although I think the paying students would rather quickly sue.
Likewise, they've probably choosen to only let dorm-students use their dorm network. That's a tautology, as no one else can use it, but it's probably explicitly written into the housing contract.
Those students, on the public property that is the University of Florida network, have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of associatation. Or, rather, the government has the inability to infringe on it, and it's hard to see how anyone not in the government could set rules you have to follow on government property.
There's a reason the Surpreme Court ruled that filters must be disabled at the request of any adult in libraries, you know. In fact, that ruling probably exactly applies here, and someone should use that process against the UoF.
Well, that's a useful fanwank, but it simply doesn't make any sense. For one thing, it does it at driveups. For another, if someone was going to blatantly steal things from in front of you, they'd probably just mug you and take everything.
The First Amendment says that Congress can't make a law restricting free speech. The government certainly can tell you what you can and can't do with its network. Try sending a threatening email to the President or a member of Congress and see if you don't get a world of pain for your efforts.
Sending threats to the President is illegal, not using the internet. And I have no idea why you're trying to pretend the internet is public property anyway, as it isn't.
Free speech isn't as free as some folks would think. People get arrested for trying to enter military installations to protest.
You get arrested for trying to enter military installations anyway. Protesting isn't the illegal thing.
You also get arrested if you break into banks in the middle of the night to protest.
Government networks *routinely* block P2P ports and I'm required by my higher headquarters to block NNTP at the firewall, which is a damn shame because not all the software companies I deal with have web interfaces to all their private newsgroups:(
And the government has the ability to stop its employees from goofing off. And if there is no P2P software that's supposed to be on government computers, then blocking the ports helps stop unauthorized software install.
The safest way to operate a gun is to not have a gun. (No, that's not some offhanded gun control comment.) The safest way to keep your vunerabilities from being exploited is to not have any vunerablities.
The concept is idiotic. Most vunerabilities that exist are pull vunerabilities. You go and download an email message or a web page, run it through MS software, and, bang, you're dead. Firewalls can't help that at all.
Yes, there is amazingly shitty software out there that is vunerable to push exploits, the only kind a firewall can protect again. You should not be running that software, period, or it should have no connection to the internet at all, because if it manages to have push vunerabilities, than you know it's got to have dozens of pull ones.
Firewalls are like taping fire-retardent insulation around a clothes dryer so it won't set the house on fire...it will interfere with the proper operation of a dryer, and you shouldn't be running such a dangerous dryer in the first place, it's just going to catch the house on fire eventually, no matter how much insulation you place.
This is an example of why firewalls Do. Not. Work.
Firewalls are an insanely stupid idea, or at least using them to protect shitty-ass computers that can be tricked into executing programs over a network is an insanely stupid idea.
You simply should not be running such machines in the first place. You cannot magically protect a network from worms that way.
In fact, I have problems thinking of any legit uses of firewalls that wouldn't be better served than just fixing the damn thing you're firewalling off. Maybe if someone is trying to DoS you, you can use it to reduce bandwidth on your internal network...but pretty much everyone has more bandwidth internally than externally, and if it's causing a problem internally you're basically completely off the net anyway, and might as well physically pull the plug. (And, yes, I was assuming you weren't using NAT in that example, mainly because NAT is an equally stupid idea.)
I understand some transactions have to go over the network, and it's not at all obvious when that happens...for example, your PIN is not confirmed when you type it in, it's sent with any tranaction you request, as you will discover if you mistype it. The machine will let you in and you can pretend to do things, and then it will talk to the bank and kick you out.
But there are things that cannot, under any circumstances, be explained by network delays.
I do a fast cash, okay? The ATM has to do several things...it sends the request over the network, confirming I am me. This happens in a reasonable amount of time, and I get a nice message on the screen.
Next the machine does three things: Print a reciept, eject my card, and kick out my money. How the fuck does that part take fifteen seconds? And it's not some poorly designed money sorter, as my money comes out first. Then a five second pause, then it ejects my card, and then a five second pause, and it starts printing.
It's completely absurd for a computer now. Hell, it would be absurd for a computer 30 years ago.
It should be starting all those operations at the same time, this is the year 2003, we have multitasking. It should take maybe four seconds total as your receipt prints and the money sorter does its work.
My point is that the government isn't allowed to censor speech on it. (Or, really, speech anywhere, but there's no one else in control of public property to censor speech there.)
The government can certainly restrict access to its property. But it can't say 'You can go there, but only if you don't talk bad about the president.'. Or, in this case, 'You can use it, but only if you don't associate with KaZaa.'.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, all those worms that attack anti-spamemrs must be a wacky coincidence.
But that guy should be arrested, not fined. He was commiting extortion, and last I checked that was a felony.
What you can't do is publically display movies. I.e., you cannot charge admission, you have certain seating limitations, etc. You can't buy a projector, build a big room, and run a fake movie theater with your DVDs.
But you can most certainly rent them to whoever you want at any time for any price, though. A fun gag to operate an unlicenced theater would be to learn the rules of how many are allowed before it becomes a public performance, and rent your movie and your theater for a few hours to group of people who are below that number. (Although, technically, if they violated the limitations they would be the one violating copyright...but it's frowned upon to knowingly let people violate copyright with your equipment.)
Yes, and my point was that they allow one and disallow the other. In fact, they disallow any use of a p2p network at all. That's not resource management, that is content filtering. They are blocking access to somewhere because of a perception of illegality surrounding it, which sounds good on paper, but not onces you realize they're the government and don't get to say 'You can't hang out with those people, they are probably criminals.'. Not only can the government not go around making peope out to be criminals without a trial, but it can't stop others from associating with actual criminals except under very limited circumstances.
One basic flaw in the argument you present is that you have the right to do whatever you want if you're granted access to a publicly-funded network. Anybody with even a rudimentary information assurance background will tell you that you block all ports on the firewall and then open only the ones you need. The onus is on the user to demonstrate the need - and since school networks have shared storage resources you might have a difficult time demonstrating that your need for KaZaa overrides the school's need for network security.
Network security? What the hell are you talking about? UoF is behind a NAT, and monitoring connections to a specific IP doesn't provide the least bit of security unless you presume KaZaa's servers goes around taking over people's computers. (And monitoring still doesn't make any sense. If they honestly are attacking you, you block them.)
Yes, you can demonstrate a need to share files with other folks on the school network. You'd have a pretty tough time demonstrating a need to share files off-network or that blocking KaZaa's default port prevents you from doing that since there are other methods on the school's network to share files - email, network drives, workgroups and so on.
And you don't need to be able to stand on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse protesting the government. The government still doesn't have a right to stop you.
Your library example is one of content filtering - and again, we're not filtering content here. Monitoring (or even blocking) a TCP port is not content filtering.
Read the article again. They aren't monitoring a port, they're monitoring connecting to an IP address. (Possibly you also have to connect to it on a certain port to trip the alarm, but that's not incredibly relevant.)
There is absolutely no way that can be construed as anything except 'Do not associate with this people, do not speak to these people, or we will punish you.'. It's an amazingly flagrant violation of the first amendment.
You mention "normal tools" - as a sysadmin on a government network a bandwidth cap is absolutely the last tool I'd use to prevent network abuse. I don't know anyone who's had to resort to something like that - after closing all the ports we need to we generally target offenders.
Offenders? Abusers? As in...what? People who use too much bandwidth? Why would you not want to cap these people?
If by offenders you mean people who do p2p file sharing, I just pointed out why the government cannot punish people for connecting to said networks.
I have an MSDN Universal subscription and a business need to download ISO images from Microsoft and a few other places - so a bandwidth cap doesn't work for me or for several of the people I work with.
And why do you have the right to use everyone else's bandwidth up?
Again, I agree that filtering content is illegal - but using best practices to secure a network doesn't require content filtering.
Of course not. But what they are doing is not best practices, it's trying to enforce some soft of non-existence law, one that would be unconstitutional if it actually existed.
Yet, interestingly enough, that's not 'anti-business'. Odd, isn't it?
And like someone else said, saying free software is anti-business is like saying free electricity is anti-business. It's conceivable free software will wreck the sell-software industry, just like free electrity would wreck the sell-electricity industry...but free electricity is something that would help every single other business. It's not anti-business at all.
Why you would do this I am not entirely sure.
Also, your customers could sue and get a refund on their software. Of course, as they didn't pay anything for it, I don't really see what that would accomplish either.
Whereas, with stealing commerical code, you just get hit with the rock and have to settle for damages.
Yes, Bruce should just start randomly talking about what an employer he left years ago does, instead of staying on topic. That sounds like a good rule for a discussion forum.
Please email me if you are interested in this amazingly stupid-to-accept offer. I'll accept paypal and checks and money orders.
Offer provided mainly as a joke, but, seriously, I'll do it just to prove I will, provided you pay me first. 40 cents for a CD and, what, at most 3 dollars shipping? (Possibly you can ship CDs through first class mail, for the price of a stamp?) The first might suck up more than 10 dollars of my time, but I doubt it.
Email is unmunged.
'The GPL simply forces you to licence your work under the GPL' is technically true, although near nonsensical when compared to commercial licenses.
If it was commercial licenses, the line would go 'The commercial licences simply force you to take your work and flush it down the toilet, not only disallowing distribution of it but actually disallowing modification in the first place.'
Your line is rather akin to saying 'I don't own a car, cars can only travel 55 or so miles an hour, depending on the speed limit.' Well, yeah, but that's about 10 times as fast you can walk. Likewise, the GPL requires you to distribute your modifications under certain rules, but that's 10 times better than not allow you to distribute or even make said modifications.
That's assuming you want to make modifications, of course, but the whole thing becomes moot if you don't...you're just reselling someone else's software at that point.
Basically, you're being delibrately misleading. It doesn't matter if it's 'your work' or not...no license at all, even BSD ones, allows you to freely distribute works based on other people's work, even if 'your own' code is in it. (Although the BSD has very easy to follow rules...you just need to keep copyright notices'.) With most licenses, you have no ability whatsoever to distribute the combined work. If you go and beg the company, you *might* gain the ability to sell your combined work and pay them for every single copy you sell. But you can do the same damn thing with GPL software, so I don't see how that's a valid point.
Not that UoF couldn't block illegal downloads if they wanted to, that would be stopping an illegal act from taking place, even though the illegal act wasn't their own student. But as UoF has no magical 'in violation of copyright' detector, though, that's a bit moot. And as UoF doesn't block anything, it's even more moot.
And if they wanted to manage their resources, they would use the normal tools used for that purposes, i.e., bandwidth caps. The fact you can download a, for example, six hundred meg ISO over FTP, and not even connect to KaZaa, which uses maybe .2/Ks for the connection, rather disproved that theory.
But copies of copyrighted works, even illegal copies, do not originally belong to the copyright owner. You do not have to 'return' them, so as long as you purchased the copy in good faith, they can't charge you with anything or take your copy away. (Of course, the thief will have to pay the copyright holder for the copy they made and then sold. He might have to pay a good deal less if he could prove you didn't have your copy anymore...but you have no incentive to help him with this.)
Now, there are differing rules about patents, because you are violating their patent every time you use the device, so it may be possible to force you to stop using the software, which would be easiest to accomplish by taking it from you. But just because it's the 'easiest' doesn't mean the patent holder has the right to do it.
Of course, SCO doesn't have any patents, so that's a moot point.
If you go around letting random people know what the prices are, you have no trade secret claims.
If someone stole your card, and had a way to verify a certain pin was correct, all they would have to do is to try all 10000 combinations, which wouldn't take more than about two seconds on a standard computer no matter what 'complicated' algorithm it required.
A 4 digit number is no security at all if it can be attacked outside the banking network. The only reason it's vaguely secure is that it takes about ten seconds to run it through the banking network from an ATM, and the ATM will lock you out if you do more than about five incorrectly, at which point you have to drive and find another ATM, which is a minimun five minutes. (At some point, if you keep failing, it's entirely possibly the network itself will lock you out, but I don't know about that.)
I said that because it was government property, no one can censor it, not that the government couldn't put restrictions on it in other ways. Government owned property would be fairly useless if they couldn't control what happened on it, that's pretty much the defination of 'ownership'.
People so far have come up with examples of the government restricting things besides speech, which it can obviously do on its own property, or examples where the speech itself was a violation of some law or another, and would have been illegal anywhere, not just government property. I would have thought that someone would have at least come up with an example of distruptive speech, which isn't as clear, but whatever. FWIW, that can be regulated also.
To recap for the people who are just dumb, the government can restrict access to its property in any way, for any legal reason. (There are illegal reasons for the government to restrict access, like on the basis of race, but that's not relevant here.) It can say certain areas are only accessable to the military, or employees of that part of the government, or Cabinet members whose names start with G.
Once it allows a certain person to access its property, it cannot then restrict what they have to say on it. In fact, it cannot restrict access based on what that person says or may say, to a certain extent.
The University of Florida is a public college, and hence run by the state of Florida, which is under the same rules as the Federal government. (In addition to being under state law, and even the laws of the Florida Department of Education, or whatever they call it.) It can choose to allow anyone to use their networks, or walk on their campus. Or they can choose to just let students on that campus, or even just students on who are in class. Hell, they can even do something as illogical as only let non-students on campus, although I think the paying students would rather quickly sue.
Likewise, they've probably choosen to only let dorm-students use their dorm network. That's a tautology, as no one else can use it, but it's probably explicitly written into the housing contract.
Those students, on the public property that is the University of Florida network, have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of associatation. Or, rather, the government has the inability to infringe on it, and it's hard to see how anyone not in the government could set rules you have to follow on government property.
There's a reason the Surpreme Court ruled that filters must be disabled at the request of any adult in libraries, you know. In fact, that ruling probably exactly applies here, and someone should use that process against the UoF.
Well, that's a useful fanwank, but it simply doesn't make any sense. For one thing, it does it at driveups. For another, if someone was going to blatantly steal things from in front of you, they'd probably just mug you and take everything.
Sending threats to the President is illegal, not using the internet. And I have no idea why you're trying to pretend the internet is public property anyway, as it isn't.
Free speech isn't as free as some folks would think. People get arrested for trying to enter military installations to protest.
You get arrested for trying to enter military installations anyway. Protesting isn't the illegal thing.
You also get arrested if you break into banks in the middle of the night to protest.
Government networks *routinely* block P2P ports and I'm required by my higher headquarters to block NNTP at the firewall, which is a damn shame because not all the software companies I deal with have web interfaces to all their private newsgroups :(
And the government has the ability to stop its employees from goofing off. And if there is no P2P software that's supposed to be on government computers, then blocking the ports helps stop unauthorized software install.
Oh yeah. Microsoft consists of complete morons who wouldn't know computer security if it walked up and asked to be put in their products.
The concept is idiotic. Most vunerabilities that exist are pull vunerabilities. You go and download an email message or a web page, run it through MS software, and, bang, you're dead. Firewalls can't help that at all.
Yes, there is amazingly shitty software out there that is vunerable to push exploits, the only kind a firewall can protect again. You should not be running that software, period, or it should have no connection to the internet at all, because if it manages to have push vunerabilities, than you know it's got to have dozens of pull ones.
Firewalls are like taping fire-retardent insulation around a clothes dryer so it won't set the house on fire...it will interfere with the proper operation of a dryer, and you shouldn't be running such a dangerous dryer in the first place, it's just going to catch the house on fire eventually, no matter how much insulation you place.
That's a great idea. Instead of locking my car, I'm from now on just going to leave bearer bonds on the front seat that are worth more than the car.
Firewalls are an insanely stupid idea, or at least using them to protect shitty-ass computers that can be tricked into executing programs over a network is an insanely stupid idea.
You simply should not be running such machines in the first place. You cannot magically protect a network from worms that way.
In fact, I have problems thinking of any legit uses of firewalls that wouldn't be better served than just fixing the damn thing you're firewalling off. Maybe if someone is trying to DoS you, you can use it to reduce bandwidth on your internal network...but pretty much everyone has more bandwidth internally than externally, and if it's causing a problem internally you're basically completely off the net anyway, and might as well physically pull the plug. (And, yes, I was assuming you weren't using NAT in that example, mainly because NAT is an equally stupid idea.)
I understand some transactions have to go over the network, and it's not at all obvious when that happens...for example, your PIN is not confirmed when you type it in, it's sent with any tranaction you request, as you will discover if you mistype it. The machine will let you in and you can pretend to do things, and then it will talk to the bank and kick you out.
But there are things that cannot, under any circumstances, be explained by network delays.
I do a fast cash, okay? The ATM has to do several things...it sends the request over the network, confirming I am me. This happens in a reasonable amount of time, and I get a nice message on the screen.
Next the machine does three things: Print a reciept, eject my card, and kick out my money. How the fuck does that part take fifteen seconds? And it's not some poorly designed money sorter, as my money comes out first. Then a five second pause, then it ejects my card, and then a five second pause, and it starts printing.
It's completely absurd for a computer now. Hell, it would be absurd for a computer 30 years ago.
It should be starting all those operations at the same time, this is the year 2003, we have multitasking. It should take maybe four seconds total as your receipt prints and the money sorter does its work.
Being is tensist, it implies you are currently existing, aka, 'being'. It doesn't include our rich heritage of people who do not currently exist.
What kind of idiot would outlaw stealing 'horses'? And who would be surprised when, quite rightly, people realize they can steal a single horse?
The government can certainly restrict access to its property. But it can't say 'You can go there, but only if you don't talk bad about the president.'. Or, in this case, 'You can use it, but only if you don't associate with KaZaa.'.